... which in the middle of the route decides to instead drive onto a container ship and bring you to a robotic island?

ah no wait, that's the announced next update.

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Not sure if it’s just outdated or a meme being repeated by non-Windows users but in any case it is not at all what I’ve experienced exclusively running debloated Windows 11 installs for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.

https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

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.

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.

Was it the 8 to 10 upgrade that MS slipped into Windows Update or a different one? Whichever it was, the IT department where I was at the time had apparently left Windows Update untouched and it wreaked havok.

the same IT department that got blamed not allowed user changing wallpaper or installing crowstrike

If memory serves, Windows 2000 was the last version where search worked reliably. It was a simple linear search through files which could take a while on larger folders, but was reliable and predictable since it did not rely on a background indexing service which seems to get stale or just plain wrong most of the time.

If I search for “foo”, I’d like to get all files containing “foo” please, without a shadow of a doubt that some files were skipped, including those that I have recently created. I still can’t get that as of Windows 11!

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).

>> would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted.

and even worse, in Edge!

"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.

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

And how many times this year have you seen a headline with some European country's government starting to migrate away from Microsoft?

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.

and then something like COVID happens and they change fast.

"Decline" in people's trust in a particular platform, in this case. Or the decline of the platform or company itself.

there's a lot of parts of Germany. the original versions were town at a time. now it's whole regions.

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.

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.

2% (linux, really 1% steamOS and 1% other linux) and 1% (macOS) makes it sound much less impressive than "2x".

The options for an average user, who does not use steam and is not in the steam hw survey, are just macOS and windows.

The options for a serious gamer who uses steam (a tiny fraction of PC users) is clearly just Windows or SteamOS at this point, or more likely Windows + a steam deck (which is half of the 2% there, SteamOS).

Or just gaming on iOS / android, like most gamers do these days. The steam hw survey isn't really representative of gamers since the vast majority of them game on consoles and phones.

> 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.

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.

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.

Many of those shortcuts already existed in macOS before they were added in Windows. Inversely, a lot of desktop Linux stuff was designed specifically to mimic the Windows behaviour.

So, really, it's Microsoft that decided "we're different".

Also, as somebody who sort of lives in the terminal, the lack of the Command/Ctrl distinction is one of the things that really bothers me about Windows. In default GUI applications, application shortcuts use Command, and Ctrl is used almost exclusively for headline-style shortcuts (ctrl-k for kill line, ctrl-a for home, ctrl-e for end, etc). Ctrl-a Ctrl-shift-e is kind of baked into my brain as "select whole line".

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.

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.