> 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.

Sure, but Microsoft have to strike a balance, too. If they push too hard in this direction, they'll lose their users to Macs on one side (probably the majority) and Linux on the other (a minority in number, but perhaps significant in expertise and clout). Once an exodus begins, it's much harder to stop. So where we are in that balance, and the state of user mindshare migration, is still interesting to discuss.

All true, and yet: Windows accessibility actually works. I use a screen reader daily. Linux a11y is complete dogshit — AT-SPI2 is unreliable, Orca is barely maintained, Wayland broke what little existed.

I need something that actually works. When Linux goes off and decides it'll rewrite its working desktop stack and it's still, ten years later, not useable?

ADHD-Driven development might be fine if you can see your system. When you can't, being at the whims of some teenager chasing the new shiny is just frustrating.

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.

Bloat will come back on every update. It's futile.

They mentioned Visual Studio, as in full-fat VS, not VS Code. That's only ever going to run on Windows.

I'm using Raycast on Mac, it has a bunch of stuff included but I use it only for its Clipboard History extension.

Apple did introduce one this past fall as part of Spotlight

And an IT department vetting updates before they go out.

AFAIK Office isn't supported on LTSC fka. LTSB.

Installed LTSB for a conservative superior. He just wanted to work, without changes. I supported that happily. Until we had to start using Office 365.

Or did they revert that restriction?

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.

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.

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.

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 ;(

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.

Same problem on MacOS.

...where we get to one of the best things about Windows: there is a free (and probably open source) tool for everything: https://www.voidtools.com/

is not mozilla advertising company, that heavilly pushes AI? How is their spying any different from microsoft?