> Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.

To me that's because thats a capital E "Engineering" driven task that Product can't get their grubby little mitts on and ruin.

It has posix shell, all is forgiven, can't complain about UI patterns that I never interact with.

There are two major problems with modern Windows.

The first is coercion. Installing without a Microsoft (Outlook) account is more and more difficult. An attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic. And there would be an easy control to disable all Copilot integration. Microsoft is coercive towards their customers with these and other actions.

The second is incompetence. The Windows update process is intrusive, lengthy, and prone to repeatedly bricking unlucky PCs. Linux updates are far more pleasant.

These are big problems, and I agree, it will take great institutional change to curb these abusive tendencies. I don't know if they can.

If you have two candidate ui designs you pick the best of the two. If you have an established ui and a candidate the new design needs to be dramatically better. It has to scream superiority. If it isn't that you are just ruining ux.

I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.

With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user

The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???

I would say the primary reason that windows still is acceptable is familiarity and games. Nothing else.

Non tech people don't care about control panel etc. they just go through the pain of entering the WiFi password. Done.

- gamers. Double click install - go on. I know very few gamers that have moved to Linux.

And corporate. Most normies that I know DON'T have own computers. Everything can be done via smartphone these days.

> 1) the massive backwards compatibility

Greatest strength. Greatest papercut.

Windows compatibility is pretty overrated at this point. There are a bevy of programs we use commercially that are quite old that just don’t work on 11, and not well on 10. Compatibility mode only gets you do far.

Perhaps AI is taking off because it is the only thing actually listening to customer problems.

Someone called it a number of years ago once each kind of brand new apple device couldn't plug into each other without a dongle.

It's like...like a game...of thrones...

Even this cannot adjust volume levels independently for multiple tabs in the same browser, which I have always been able to do on linux with pulseaudio/pipewire. People on windows use browser extensions for this, with full access to all tabs/sites...

What makes that nicer than the built in volume mixer?

had to stop using eartrumpet cos it kept randomly pulling the cpu to near 100%. updating didnt help