People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
windowscentral.com351 points by breve 6 hours ago
351 points by breve 6 hours ago
This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel for other products and services.
It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how enterprises ended up on Azure and are bringing big money.
I'm still a Windows power user, MacBook is a wonderful piece of hardware and I'm typing this on one, but I'm not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.
As someone with a sizeable background in Linux system engineering.. I prefer Windows to MacOS.
It's IMHO a better desktop now with the edge snap tile layout and etc. Excellent device compatibility. And I get my linux environment needs satisfied via WSL2 these days.
But damn if they don't get in their own way. I have my own Pro licenses, and even with Pro turning off ads and features is text book whack-a-mole:
* Frequent "Let's finish setting up your PC" after updates
* Killing OneDrive is a like night of the living dead
* Edge popping up "ads" asking you if you want to pin apps when it closes(a lot of windows apps wrap edge, like streaming apps, and show this too on close!)
* Scary Power Automate crap getting injected on updates(haven't seen this in a while)
* Internet search results in the "Home" search
* Random popups and product recommendations
* Registry disabled "features" randomly resurrecting after Windows update
Holy. Hell.
Edit: I recall now; Windows was installing a power automate extension into Chrome during Windows Update un-prompted last year. Caused a minor panic.
This might be obvious, but all of those things have a single common denominator: Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing. This is the biggest generalized danger in computing today: That OS (and device) manufacturers have gotten it in their heads that it's OK for them to have a strong say in what your computer runs. User doesn't want X, Y, or Z running on his computer? TOUGH. We are going to run it and make it really hard or impossible for user to turn it off. As a user, I no longer feel like I'm driving the car--I'm just a passenger. "Where do you want to go today?" has turned into "You're going here today, whether you want to or not!"
It's more: you want to go to location A? Sure, but we're going to make a quick stop at locations B, C and D first, and the only available car is a known-to-be-dangerous self-driving robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals.
I've had good luck with the winutil tool, which is wrapper for a bunch of powershell commands and registry edits in a .ps1 to remove bloat. After using it on a fresh install I can't recall the last time I've had any of the mentioned issues.
If you're (understandably) concerned about the security implications most of the changes can be done manually going off the docs.
Bloat will come back on every update. It's futile.
I’ve used this Powershell script on every Windows 11 machine in the last four years (5+ devices) and have never needed to re-run it after an update.
It’s the first thing I do on a fresh install, and with my selections I see fewer ads (0, more or less) than I do on my MacBook for iCloud products so I’d hardly say it’s “futile” in actual use and only takes like 5 minutes to run once.
I always hear people say nothing sticks after an update but have literally only encountered that with Microsoft Edge and the default search engine. Not any of the Windows features disabled or configured by the script.
Not sure if it’s just outdated or a meme being repeated by non-Windows users but in any case it is not at all what I’ve experienced exclusively running debloated Windows 11 installs for years.
I'm not sure if I'm lucky or it's because I have feature releases deferred or if the tool ripped enough things out but this hasn't been my experience so far. If it does you could save off the changes as a JSON template and re-apply after updates, or automatically with task scheduler.
Use LTSC and you get 10 year support period, so you can update whenever it's convenient for you.
I also think Windows' native window tiling is one of its best features, but there's a fantastic program called Swish that implements tiling for MacOS in a very native-feeling way. It supports keyboard shortcuts, but it's built around really elegant touchpad gestures. Highly recommend if that's all that's keeping you on Windows.
The other native Windows feature I really like is the clipboard manager, and I don't have a great replacement for that yet. I'm kind of shocked Apple hasn't built one. If anyone has a recommendation that feels native instead of like a ported Linux widget, please share.
I'm using Raycast on Mac, it has a bunch of stuff included but I use it only for its Clipboard History extension.
They mentioned Visual Studio, as in full-fat VS, not VS Code. That's only ever going to run on Windows.
It actually did run on MacOS until recently. Personally I like Rider over Studio, but yes, if that's a hard requirement they are stuck.
The only tolerable Windows 11 experience is a corporate PC with Active Directory login.
And an IT department vetting updates before they go out.
the same IT department that got blamed not allowed user changing wallpaper or installing crowstrike
Use LTSC. It'll fix all the issues you are mentioning here.
Second ltsc -look into it once you try you will never go back. Available from various resellers nowadays. It is, what windows should be sold as.
LTSC cannot be bought as a regular customer unfortunately. Legally, regular customers are only allowed to use the enshittified version.
Recently I'm finding MSN home opened in Chrome over night. Aparently it's connected to some "active probing" feature, and I do have scheduled nightly restarts in the home router. But come on... No one could convince me it's not intended to inflate MSN numbers.
Get Windows LTSC instead and run Firefox ! Most problems solved.
is not mozilla advertising company, that heavilly pushes AI? How is their spying any different from microsoft?
Don't forget the search that doesn't work. You have app "X" installed? You type X and it doesn't find it, but gives you irrelevant results about X.
It's weird how it does seem to do something even though it doesn't do anything. You can see the search indexer running and it's pulling a varying amount of power towards some kind of goal but nobody seems to know what it is. Does it build an index that always corrupts? Is it in a loop of crashing and restarting itself? And it's been like this my whole life practically. It really shows how anything can be normalized if it goes on long enough.
Windows' search has been broken for multiple generations now. Some people inside Microsoft seemingly even know, that's why the PowerToys team created "PowerToys Run." A Windows Search that actually basically functions correctly.
People act like it sudden was broken in Windows 11 when in reality it never worked correctly in 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 either. Instead of fixing it, they've only made it worse. It seems like nobody in Microsoft works on core stuff anymore.
Yeah, I've never experienced Windows search ever working. Even on XP, it couldn't find commonly opened folders or programs for me. It always felt like some sort of joke feature just meant to fool me into wasting time.
As far as I remember it was working well in 7 and 8 (deterministic and shows programs that you expect it to show). From 10 it started behaving erratically (same time it got binged but maybe unrelated).
It had problems in 8. I would frequently type my search term, see it was the number one result. I would then attempt to arrow or tab down and hit enter to launch that result. Between arrowing down and hitting enter, the result list would update/reorder and suddenly I'm launching some unknown program. Happened all the time.
At one point (last year?) internet search results would load in first so quickly typing and pressing "enter" from muscle memory would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted..
Then also in the past year or two the internet search results were lagging the entire search UI causing type jank and stutters.
I disabled internet results in the registry but a recent update seems to have caused that setting to no longer apply ;(
>> would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted.
and even worse, in Edge!
One of the first things to do on a fresh install is to disable the Web search results in Start menu search. There's a setting in the registry to do it.
>I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore.
i agree with most of what you said, but this is borderline fantasy.
the majority of home market share is not guaranteed, sure. with how good gaming is on non-windows machines now, there isnt much for a home user to get locked-in with (except games that require windows-only malware i.e. anticheat)
but government, institution (hospitals, universities, etc.) and large non-tech enterprise? that will be windows for at least 20 more years even if they started to change everything now (which they arent). and the number of machines in those places absolutely dwarfs the number of home installs.
Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already happening as we speak.
>gradually and then suddenly.
governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines.
20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" today.
"Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow.
It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away.
To put it another way, the thresholds where people get annoyed enough to quit are highly correlated to each other. If individuals on HN are posting "I don't want to switch, I've been working this way for decades now, but Windows has crossed the line for me, I've switched to Linux, and it was easier than I thought it would be", then corporations and governments are having very similar deliberations internally.
This is probably a more accurate model for how "influencers" seem to work than the idea that some crazy guy in your organization falls in love with Product X and evangelizes it internally. I'm sure that happens and is a real force, but this correlation-of-experience effect is probably bigger on the whole. If Product X was good enough to make an evangelist internally, or more germane to this conversation, to make some a mortal enemy of it internally, it's usually because it was a good enough or bad enough product to be able to do that in the first place, and eventually everyone will figure it out in exactly the same way, just later.
20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. If Microsoft responds correctly that might be good, but if they just decide to rest on their laurels and extract whatever value they can out of Windows while they can, Windows would never last 20 years of that. Even the slowest organizations can move faster than that. After all, to cut Microsoft's revenues off at the knees, they don't need to remove every last Windows 2000 server in their backoffice they can't upgrade, they need to cut out just the majority of desktop licenses.
> lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it
Not sure about big enterprises, but I already see this happening in the mid-size, non tech company market.
I'm an IT manager and has been a sysadmin/ops for my entire career, and the past ~4 years I've been seeing a pretty consistent shift toward companies my company does business with deploying more and more macs. Windows is still dominant in my industry, but the cracks in the wall are widening. It's gotten to the point that I'm genuinely surprised now when I see Windows when someone screen shares.
Apple silicon is just too good and the generations coming into the workforce now don't have a "default" windows familiarity that we used to have. They're coming in needing to be trained on how to use a PC in general, windows or not, having used nothing but chromebooks and mobile OSes.
Now, Office OTOH is more entrenched than windows. Even the macshops I interact with are all on M365. Macs are managed with Intune, users & SSO with Entra, Defender for EDR, and of course the office apps. And that's why Microsoft probably isn't as afraid as it seems when it comes to Windows. Even without Windows lock-in, there is very real M365 lockin that is far more entrenched than the endpoint OS.
>20 years is way too large a minimum estimate.
i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software, etc. and every company is willing to retrain 95% of their employees on a new operating system, have increased support requirements for a few years at least, etc.
not even touching the capital required for such a transition that in many cases has questionable benefits (from a business perspective).
time will tell! i have first-hand experience with how fast banks move, so i will stick by my 20 year minimum. happy to see otherwise, though.
in any case. what i replied to was a claim that windows is in "significant danger" today. it is not.
> unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks
They already have. You can't buy QuickBooks for desktop anymore unless you want Enterprise, the expensive $4k+/year subscription. They dumped the Pro/Pro Plus and moved all those users to QuickBooks online.
And now they've launched Intuit Enterprise Suite in an effort to move the QBE customers into Online. The writing is on the wall there, desktop is going away.
It's also happening in more specialized areas too. I work in waste management/recycling, and this industry was traditionally windows heavy with thick clients on desktops. Even the truck scale software is moving to web interfaces, as are the dispatching and asset management.
OS increasingly doesn't matter for most knowledge work.
Yeah, there are going to be industries that will probably never move, certainly not within a 20 year timeline, but there are a ton that are moving or have moved entirely to SaaS and web apps.
In 20 years I expect basically all of these to move to web-based interfaces and away from thick clients. You're already seeing graphics heavy use cases like CAD do this (Onshape has been hugely popular and is cloud native on Linux). Even behemoths like SAP are increasingly web enabled through fiori.
> i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software
Up front they won't need to do a full rewrite. They'll only need to make it work well enough under Wine.
At a source level, tools like Avalonia's xpf make porting WPF apps to other platforms easier:
of the stupid enterprise-y software like quickbooks, solidworks and other proprietary stuff that i have used, they barely work well enough under native windows. not to mention, even sticking them in a windows VM voids any support contracts.
It's an interesting case to me. The company I work for has been shipping systems on windows since the 90's despite pretty consistent requests from customers to ship hardware on Linux. 2 years ago we started creating our own Linux distribution and this year started shipping products on it. We still ship a lot of stuff on Windows 11, but that market share is starting to shift now. 10 years from now I could see us completely moved to our Linux distro. Now, what's actually interesting is that it wasn't customer requests or efficient capital allocation that drove this. Microsoft effectively forced us to do this against our will by a combination discontinued products and handling of Windows 11 and now that we've spent the capital we won't be going back.
You can't abandon Windows because of software X, Y, Z. Over the years vendors move to multiplatform as more and more customers ask for it. These changes are slow but steady. And one day you find out that the last "must have" software is not limited to Windows anymore. That's when the dam breaks.
It doesn't take all the specialized Windows-only line-of-business software being rewritten to have massive defections to Linux happen.
The market you're describing is real, and very significant—but I don't think it's even a majority of Windows users. If so, it's a small one.
And imagine what even 30-40% of all Windows sales disappearing over the course of 2-3 years would do to Microsoft. To Windows as a platform.
Then imagine what would happen if it was 50-70%.
The former, I would describe as "a disaster".
The latter, I would describe as "apocalyptic". (Y'know. For Microsoft as a company. Not in general.)
Still, a lot of those woke up from a profound sleep about digital sovereignty and are now contemplating leaving the American software ecosystem.
It won't be sudden, until it is
You can't suddenly replace them, but in a lot of cases you can find that over an extended period more and more people choose the MacBook option from IT rather than the Windows one.
most people are not willing to learn an entire new operating system for no reason, though. this might happen in tech-based companies, sure, but banks? accounting firms? ive never seen them offer macbooks.
this is also ignoring all of the critical software that is windows-only (e.g. quickbooks, solidworks, bespoke programs in banks and government).
point is: microsoft is not in "significant danger" today.
Most people dont even use the operating system. They look for the apps menu, then click what they want to run. Most people can switch between OSes easier than you think because there really isn't that much difference in how they work on the surface.
users are one component, but you are still ignoring/forgetting the rest.
user management, file management, security, windows-specific software, auditing requirements, required capital investment, lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on.
An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine, or only occasionally having done so when it was absolutely necessary.
>An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine
i would love to see your numbers for this. what does "increasing percentage" mean? 1% -> 2%? 10% -> 20%?
i teach at a college level, in tech, and would estimate ~5% of incoming students have any experience with something other than windows on a pc, at best. outside of tech, i would estimate ~2%.
and then something like COVID happens and they change fast.
expanding your vpn to support more employees working from home is much easier than replacing hundreds of thousands of machines, all of the windows-only software that runs on those machines, training all of your employees on a new operating system, cancelling all of your existing contracts... you get the point.
well, it happened with Teams meetings replacing fancy CISCO equipments.
It happened with all the vpn+shared drives buried to just use SPO.
different experience,I guess.
Did your employees got trained? or just sent the link to 3 'online trainings'?
Managers manage to switch to Mac seamlessly. I am sure the rest will follow with cheaper macs now available. And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian)
>And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian)
office is a tiny, almost negligible, piece of the puzzle. quickbooks, solidworks and other cad software, bespoke software, security software, user management, permissions management (replacing active directory), contractual obligations, the millions of dollars required in implementation, the millions more dollars required for increased user support, and so on...
but, again, just to reiterate: i am disputing that windows is in "significant danger" today.
Wait, I'm confused, are you calling moving from Windows to Linux a "decline"? Because I can agree with that ;)
"Decline" in people's trust in a particular platform, in this case. Or the decline of the platform or company itself.
Large parts of one german state switched to open source. First they laughed at them and now they are envious.
The switch to Linux is happening this year. Until the end of the year they want all workers on Linux instead of Windows.
It is possible, and fast if you want it.
> Large parts of one german state switched to open source.
Haven't they been doing this every 5 - 8 years since 2004?
kudos to them!
out of curiosity, "large parts" of "one german state" is how many machines roughly?
i am suspecting that it is probably nowhere near enough to put windows in "significant danger". however, i am rooting for their success and hope that they thoroughly document (and publish) the process. i have never seen a transition like that go smoothly, let alone when it is in government.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
That was the situation at the end of December.
Note that projects like these often fail not for technical reasons, not even cost, but political pressure from other parties, pressure from people that worked for ages in the administration and, well, have some problems to adjust to new software.
There is also a push from the German state to switch to open source or at least European solutions. There is the Deutschland-Stack, for which the IT planning council made open source mandatory: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Deutschland-Stack-IT-Planning-C...
And so on. At my day job more and more customers are reconsidering cloud adoption, especially M365 and such.
thanks for the link! it is unfortunate that they do not provide numbers, just percentages. i would love to know exactly (or roughly) how many machines "80%" is.
and the "80%" seems slightly misleading, because it is 80%, not including the tax administration. i have no idea what overall % of machines are inside or outside of the tax administration.
it also appears like this is mostly about software like office, rather than operating systems?
>"outside the tax administration, almost 80 percent of workplaces in the state administration have already been switched to the open-source office software LibreOffice."
switching away from office is significantly more realistic than migrating away from windows altogether, and something that every business can and should absolutely consider doing soon.
anyways, seriously, good for them. as i mentioned elsewhere, i hope that they are thoroughly documenting their experiences and are willing to share them after completion.
Migrating to linux will be started this year. I think a big step is also replacing sharepoint with Nextcloud.
Iirc they have 30k workstations.
This alone obviously doesn’t put Windows in danger, but if it does go over well then it’ll mark a turning point; A large non-techy institution getting away from Microsoft’s castle and being better off for it would signal to the world that it’s not only doable, but could even be worth it. It’ll take a while, but this could be the start of the end for Windows.
>This alone obviously doesn’t put Windows in danger,
so, the quote i specifically replied to said that today windows is in "significant danger", and i said it isnt. we seem to be in agreement.
as for what the future holds, i think it will be much slower than other people. but maybe i am wrong! which would be fine with me.
but, today, windows is not in "significant danger".
That "significant danger" was a bit of dramatization on my part. I don't expect anything to significantly change in the short term. I was more referring to long-term tidal-like change, which would be very hard to stop once momentum builds up.
This exact same thing (literally another german state i think) almost happened about 20 years ago and Microsoft freaked the fuck out. Thats where all the TCO nonsense came from - just one german state trying to de-microsoft.
I think Microsoft won, too.
I think theyre terrified of positive examples. Especially ones with FAR lower TCO and lower geopolitical risks.
> with how good gaming is on non-windows machines now, there isn't much for a home user to get locked-in with
The options for the average user are not linux or windows, but only macOS or Windows. Gaming is abysmal on macOS on any of the current hardware.
That said, I agree with you that there's less-and-less gaming lock-in on windows, but that's because the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android.
>The options for the average user are not linux or windows, but only macOS or Windows.
i dont think this is true. steam surveys also do not agree: linux gamers are about 2x the number of OSX
>That said, I agree with you that there's less-and-less gaming lock-in on windows, but that's because the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android.
I don't think you are aware of how much the landscape has changed regarding gaming and Linux.
The weird thing about this is old Microsoft understood that ordinary users are not cash cows, companies are.
Microsoft built its empire because of SMB and Active Directory, and other enterprise features, where actually these things are important.
Ironically orgs hate MS Accounts just as much, as they have to give up a degree of autonomy, control and security compared to how Windows used to be.
> far more political than technological
I don't know. A company worth trillions of dollars does a pretty fine job of making Windows incrementally worse in new and interesting ways, each release.
There's some truth; the bloated company structure has contributed to these unforced errors, but just at an engineering level, people are releasing this tripe without the skill or training or backbone to know what is bad, and push back on toxic management decisions.
Engineers collaborating with oppressive management is a technical failure. Google is riddled with the same problem. I'm sure all the FAANG-a-likes do. Paying billions in salaries to sycophant devs. They have the market share to keep failing upwards. They don't deserve it.
Who says the engineers have any leverage they can push with? I sure didn't, when I worked there.
Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem that's played out in construction, automotive and software engineering dozens of times over.
The penalty for Microsoft ignoring their devs might just be a slow decline into irrelevance, not a bridge collapsing, or an autonomous vehicle hitting the lane barrier because the boss refuses to use LiDAR, but it's all bad management causing an engineering problem.
> Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem.
No, that's the very archetype of a political problem. It is a political problem that impacts the engineering output, yes, but still a political problem.
FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...
I've used macOS for years and still don't understand their windows minimize/restore logic. I'm always hunting for my minimized window. Yes, the fault probably lies with me.
OTOH the Windows UI is far better well designed and intuitive. But yeah... I'd rather fumble around in macOS: Windows is always trying to upsell a service that I don't need. If I say no it will helpfully keep reminding me (my answer is never going to change). I have 32GB ram and a recent processor being fed tons of wattage -- it feels so bog slow.
Windows needs to fix itself fast.
reading all these comments about windows having better shortcuts and window management features makes me feel like i'm taking crazy pills. windows for me was hands down the worst experience in ux. the shortcuts in macos are so well thought out and consistent.
now i'm using kde in linux land and it's the best and most customizable experience. I can't imagine going back to windows ever and would be missing a lot from linux if i went back to macos(though it would be fine).
getting macos keybinding in linux land is a game changer to me: https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy and this just makes me feel at home.
I give you a well thought out macos shortcut for example. Ok, it is for a niche feature people rarely use... Screenshots, put straight to the clipboard.
On windows you have 2 options, bot pretty unintuitive:
1. You can either press PrintScreen button... (OK boomer, who uses a full size keyboard? My RGB clicky-keys 57% keyboard doesn't even have backspace, return, escape or delete, I don't even know when I saw a keyboard with Printscreen. My Neofetch-fork does save the screen, and otherwise no need for screenshots...)
2. Or you may press Win+Shift+S. Ok it is hard to memorize, how does S even relate to Screenshot?
Meanwhile on the intuitive MacOs to do this you only have to press Command+Option+Shift+4. So intuitive and easy!!! Also way easier to press, just try it! Only 4 keys to press at the same time, in a very convenient layout, way better than that illogical windows shortcut.
Sarcasm aside: It is clear why Microsoft is well known for the fact that in the 1990s they put a lot of effort to usability research, and why Apple is famous about Steve Jobs being the BDFL, and things had to fit his personal taste.
Overall it does sound like KDE is possibly the experience that you desire - did you try it before?
You want to look into HyperSwitch and SizeUp. These two solve pretty much all headaches relating to window management on macOS.
macOS does not and never has had a good strategy for handling minimizing windows. Keep in mind that prior to Mac OS X, you couldn't minimize windows at all, you could only roll them up. When OS X added the dock, they made minimized windows go there. Except, the Dock is an icon grid, so there's no way to see window titles, and the windows themselves are so small that it is difficult to identify them at a glance. Making things worse, the Dock is also a place you put app icons, so now you have an icon to show all your non-minimized app icons, right next to all your minimized window icons.
Meanwhile, Windows had minimize since version 2[0], except for whatever reason windows minimized to desktop icons, and there was no desktop folder. They'd known they'd invented a worse version of Mac OS, and in Windows 95 they made sure that there was not only a real desktop, but also a list of all open windows. This design was so successful that the only major tweak that stuck was merging the taskbar and Quick Launch[1] into something that superficially resembles the OSX dock, but is just plain better[2] because clicking an app icon actually shows you all the open windows.
[0] I don't have a Windows 1 install to check with.
[1] Strictly speaking you could put anything in Quick Launch, but only apps go in the Win7 taskbar
[2] Oldschool NeXT users will point out that in NeXTSTEP, minimized windows had an actual title on them, and the app icon instead of a screenshot of the window at tiny scale.
This may be the first time that sentiment's ever been expressed.
Why do you say that?
A lot of shortcuts are shared between windows and linux and fairly consistent across applications. Mac is the one that takes a decided "we're different" approach to shortcuts. I.e., Alt+L for address bar instead of Alt+D, Command swapping with Control, Q instead of W for closing tabs, Command+Control+Q for locking a computer instead of Super+L, etc
They didn't mention cross-OS shortcuts, though. I interpreted "across the operating systems" as meaning "across the various versions of Windows". Yes, Windows is more consistent with their own common shortcuts. But Macs have exceedingly consistent shortcuts across Mac applications, compared to my experience with Windows and especially Linux.
I might also point out that Mac had keyboard shortcuts before Windows existed, so it's not really fair to describe them as the "different" one when MS chose their own, different shortcuts for Windows.
Apple also invented their own key “Apple” now “CMD” for operation like copy / paste to explicitly not have the issue to overload the already know escape sequences. Windows being on a system without a normalized keyboard had to reuse keys that are common to keyboards used back then. Vertical integration played into apples cards even back then.
The location of the command key is also a lot more comfortable. Thumb vs pinky.
I setup my Linux system to use it because it's more consistent for copy pasting in a terminal.
The big one for me on Mac was refreshing a web page being CMD+R rather than F5.
Not to mention the muscle memory for pressing CTRL in the corner of the keyboard rather than CMD where Alt is.
Though I will say that having "Copy" (cmd-c) being different from ^C (ctrl-c) was kind of nice. Though Terminal has done a nice thing of making it so if you highlight text, Ctrl-C copies the first time you press it, and sends ^C the second time.
Conversely, when I use a PC, I have to stop and wonder why alt-R doesn't reload the web page like it's supposed to, and alt-C doesn't copy, and I have to stretch my pinky all the way over to use that shortcut. And what's the mnemonic for "F5 means reload"?
Which is to say that neither Windows nor Mac shortcuts are inherently better. It's just what we're used to. IME, the main difference is that once you learn the Mac shortcuts in a handful of apps, they'll pretty much work on the other apps you encounter, too.
A big issue with the macOS style I'd that there isn't a modifier key free for the user to build their own shortcuts around. The Win/Super key is a very good place to hang custom shortcuts off of on Windows and Linux.
Ctrl-R reloads the page in every browser that I have used, so perhaps that's what you're looking for.
> The big one for me on Mac was refreshing a web page being CMD+R rather than F5.
It's not like you can't change it.
System Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts > add your browser > remap the Reload menu item to F5
Along with Karabiner you can pretty much make Mac OS work however you want it to when it comes to keyboard shortcuts.
If you want a little more consistency for muscle memory, ctrl+L goes to the address bar on Windows the same way cmd+L goes to it on Mac. Same for ctrl+W and cmd+W to close tabs.
I've always found the opposite, do you have any examples where macOS falls short compared to Windows in shortcut consistency?
The year is 2050. Desktop operating systems are a relic of the past.
Windows collapsed inwards on itself in 2031 when MS realized telemetry data was 10X as profitable when sold directly to nosy exes, neighbors, priests, and so on instead of advertising agencies. This practice was highly illegal, but the MS legal team unanimously ruled that SCOTUS's ruling on it was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, society barely survived.
Windows XP lives on quietly powering ATMs. We also still have Surface Tablets. They don't function anymore, but they hide the paunch of aging sports commentators well and NFL players and coaches greatly enjoy using them to bludgeon each other on the sidelines.
And then there's me, hoping they don't realize that Windows is in danger. The world needs less Microslop.
go freely on Linux. did that switch myself few years back. Double Commander is an exact copy with the same (and configurable) shortcuts.
Isn't part of this Microsoft preparing for the requirement to do age verification in the OS?
It has more to do with Microsoft deciding to emulate Google and Facebook's surveillance capitalism business model.
If you combine mandatory online user accounts with telemetry and Windows Recall, you have a system for building out advertising profiles linked to known individuals.
I get that. But it's also the case that they can justify this by claiming that they have to do it for each verification.
+1 for Total Commander mention, its bizarre how many otherwise smart folks completely ignore this productivity enhancer. I keep showing it to colleagues but they all anyway revert back to basic clunky File explorer and variants.
Doesn't matter if I show them that I can be easily 10x faster, do stuff simply impossible otherwise, has tons of plugins etc. its just ignored.
The only negative side of Total Commander is I'm extremly used to it - been using it since mid 90s. When I compare alternatives on Mac I'm searching for exact keyboard commands, navigation patterns, etc. I'm using Crax Commander, but it's not the same.
TC is probably one of the reasons I don't care that much about problems in newer versions of Windows, I don't use Explorer, I don't use windows search, text is viewed with Lister and not Notepad...
I don't know about Total Commander because that appears to be Windows-only, but twin-pane "Commanders" (named after NC) do seem more popular in certain circles. They're still in wide use in Eastern Europe. Commanders have also influenced Dolphin, which has a built in twin-pane view (but it's not a commander because it lacks the typical keybinds) and there's a commander called Krusader that is a better fit.
I’ve got three monitors on my MacBook plus its screen; I know all the keyboard shortcuts and then have automation with various other things. It was hard at first back in 2010 when I moved from Windows. It became second nature within a year and I’ve never looked back. Windows is fucking awful.
> I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.
I realize you probably are referencing visual studio, but at the OS level KDE plasma seems to have copped Windows hot keys wholesale. I was giving it a go recently and was delighted that even meta+arrow keys for monitor switching fullscreen apps works. My only gripe, and what got me booting back into windows, was that even the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky to reliably play multiplayer online games.
> the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky
A GL.iNet travel router in WiFi to ethernet bridge mode is an excellent stopgap until Linux support arrives. It also has the benefits of (a) taking with you on trips for safer/easier internet use (use your home SSID, even auto-VPN traffic if you want) and (b) letting you plug in other wired-only devices adjacent to the computer.
Here are their travel routers filtered to just those that support WiFi 6 and 7: https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filt...
For the AI frontier, I find my windows PC just about useless unfortunately. Too much tooling and package doesn't adapt to WSL+windows host well. I've shifted my entire dev experience to my mbp which used to be my backup. Can't imagine the new generation of vibe coder will even consider a windows box.
> Too much tooling and package doesn't adapt to WSL+windows host well
Curious about this, what specifically?
I've been using MacBook at work for years and I still perceive UX as fundamentally broken - I'm incapable of doing basic operations in Finder or changing basic system settings, and random shit I didn't want to press pops up when I'm doing other things. I feel like my grandpa trying to adjust to new phone. I will never ever recommend anything Apple to anyone.
Having said the above, I think that KDE is almost there to have a functional UX that can replace Windows. Not there yet because of random bugs, but almost almost.
Once gamers actually switch to Linux, which is a viable thing, they'll teach their family members. Home users will switch to Linux, and Windows will become an exclusively enterprise and government thing. But once average person is comfortable with Linux because they have it at home, those institutions will start switching to Linux too. And that's how Microsoft will fall. Just like most other corporations - through their own greed.
> I'm still a Windows power user
I used to be, but in 2004 I switched to Linux.
I still use windows as a secondary operating system on another computer, though only Win10. I decided I will not transition to anything after Win10 as Microslop declared war on the users with Win11. Which was the case already before Win11, of course, but I feel the qualitative difference is too much now.
That would improve things.
Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine.
When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only. And OneDrive was also affected by the Teams bug.
Spent a good part of the day cursing in the direction of Redmond.
This happened on my work machine. One day I noticed tons of important files had been deleted without my permission after being migrated to OneDrive online only. At no point did I authorize anything like this and it took some time to copy them all back and disable everything I could access related to this.
Utter insanity that this can happen in a major OS. I switched to Linux for personal use years ago and have only gotten more grateful for that decision over time. My head would explode if a Linux distro tried any number of things that Windows regularly does to abuse their users, it's unfathomable.
> OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only
Holy shit that's nuts!
Makes it easier for them to mine your files for personal data they can use to push ads I guess.
That must be the free version of OneDrive that forces cloud only.
It doesn't force cloud only. It defaults to cloud only. This is for both free and paid versions.
It has been this way for 3 years.
> saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only
This is why local backups should always have the highest priority.
Storing online can be useful, but people should never forget that local backups are the best.
Fully agree.
The problem is that on a fresh system with a free MS account, OneDrive shows up as the first choice as “$User - Personal files”. No notice that this actually only stores it online and offers only a fraction of the 1TB local drive.
Truly deceptive and my mistake for not noticing when I helped to set up that laptop.
Don't feel bad. Even if you noticed, It is likely that during the next "security" update, one drive would be re-enabled, as the default - and possibly everything moved there.
I was a MS-DOS 2.0 user as a child. I have always preferred windows to OSX. I used WSL for years at companies where every other engineer had a MacBook.
Last weekend I finally started dual-booting Arch Linux as a trial. Yesterday I deleted my windows partition.
Too late, Microsoft.
I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in).
Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch.
If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks.
Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.
The Neo costs $200 more than a comparable Windows laptop, but with half the RAM and storage as said comparable Windows laptop.
They're fighting to seize the very specific market segment of "I don't like Windows and don't want to use Linux or a Chromebook, and I'm also poor, but still want to pay a premium price for an underpowered tablet with keyboard glued to it."
Please, by all means do post a link to a comparable new Windows laptop for $400, including a fast GPU, reasonable amount of fast storage (and not counting an SD card or such), a high-DPI monitor, and non-embarassing build quality. I'd love to see this.
The GPU in the Neo isn't particularly fast...nor is the storage. Neo makes loads of compromises to hit $600 with some of it's features. Even for $400 you can get Windows PCs with TWO whole USB 3.0 ports. $400 quickly hits diminishing returns territory.
Like here's a $500 PC:
https://www.amazon.com/Aspire-Copilot-WUXGA-Display-Processo... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-14-AI-review-Basic...
Twice the storage, twice the RAM, comparable GPU. CPU is a slower in single core, but comparable in multi-core. Faster storage. USB 4, HDMI, multiple USB A ports. Supports more than 1 external monitor. Yep, chassis and screen are worse but it's better in many other ways.
So for $100 less, you get a markedly lower-DPI screen that's 40% dimmer, a slower CPU, hotter running, and a worse chassis. Almost no one's going to be slapping multiple external monitors on either of these. If they did, they might run into the problem where the Acer is often limited to 640x480: https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/733442/have-a-new-a...
That is not remotely in the same category as the Neo.
You get twice as much RAM, twice as much storage. 4x faster storage too. You get a full sized HDMI port. You can do multiple monitors if you need to. It has a fan for better sustained performance. You can plug in a flash drive, mouse, monitor or other external peripheral without a dongle. Oh, and it's actually COOLER running than the Neo.
The Neo costs a $100 more, needs a $30 dongle to connect to 90% of the stuff people have, has half the RAM, half the storage, slower storage. Has considerably worse I/O. But has a better screen and build quality comparable to a MacBook Pro from 2007.
It's different compromises. Personally I'd rather have more RAM, storage and IO than a prettier case and better screen.
You don’t need to buy Apple adapters. You can buy a $10 usbc to hdmi adapter off Amazon and it’ll work just fine.
Same thing with the USB A ports. Not really selling point imo.
Or just use a Thunderbolt cable to send video, power, and USB to a newer monitor with a single cord. That’s my work setup and I’d never go back.
And yeah, USB A? I got a cheapo C-to-A hub for my dwindling number of legacy devices. There’s no remaining upside to A.
On the Neo that doesn't support Thunderbolt? Or on the Acer that supports USB4 and might actually work with the hub?
It's a weird choice to pair with a budget laptop since monitors that support that are usually several dollars extra...
You're proving the point. The computer you found wins on the specs page for sure. But the proof is in the pudding; Apple makes money hand over fist because they focus on reasonable specs, and quality. The thing that kills a modern laptop is not a slow CPU or RAM on the chip; it's a cheap chassis that breaks. That's what makes people change their computer.
Apple wins on the perception of being a luxury brand. That's it.
It’s not just about perception. Apple doesn’t load your computer up with crapware and ads from the five different companies in the supply chain.
They got away with it forever because at $600 there was no competition.
I would say it’s more that Microsoft will make your $600 feel cheap, Apple will make it feel respectable.
> Apple doesn’t load your computer up with crapware and ads from the five different companies in the supply chain.
No apple prefers to have a monopoly on ads and crapware but they're still there. The internet is filled with annoyed apple customers who want to debloat their systems:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254337272
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/414682/how-can-i-r...
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/5gb-pure-bloatware-apple-...
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-debloating-thread...
I have thirty years worth of old laptops in a closet. The macs all have hinges that still work.
It’s nice to own things designed to not fall apart after a few years.
That, and having a machine at this price point that people aren’t horrified to use.
What makes it horrifying? Plastic? Is the only thing that's important the material it's made out of? I think there's many use cases where the Acer would be less horrifying to use than the Neo. Which device would be better for running a Linux VM for CS class homework for example?