alt Hacker NewsToo little, too late, and too specific in scope. Windows 11 is awful not merely because of the AI bullshit being shoehorned into everything, everywhere (CoPilot in Notepad? In Paint? Are you serious, Microsoft?!), but also because of all the other completely unnecessary changes made to the OS. A curated selection of real-world examples from my recent gig making a hardened Windows 11 image for a physical product line:
* Kiosk Mode via the shell launcher delays logon times from <5s to 30-180s - just by turning it on, even if it doesn’t actually enable kiosk mode!
* Local changes via registry keys don’t “stick” consistently, even when the machine is entirely offline
* Offline activations using hardware keys fail across vendors without anyone knowing why (other than Microsoft, for the cost of a support call)
* Existing Windows 10 powercfg scripts and config files do not work with Win11. Our workaround was manually calling the exact same command twice, back-to-back, to force-apply a change.
* Installing language packs via the command line by any means available (Powershell’s add-windowscapability, DISM’s package installer, lpksetup, etc) do not actually populate the GUI with those packs as an option until we reinstall them from the GUI again.
* Adverts are everywhere, even on IoT LTSC Enterprise
Honestly, Microsoft completely lost the plot as to what an operating system is supposed to do in favor of turning it into an advertising and user surveillance machine masquerading as a useful OS.
I hate it.
Replies
It's like this _offline_ OS is now somehow doing things in async mode and sometimes they just don't work. That's how it feels.
Besides the general awfulness of Windows that you describe, have you looked at C:\Windows recently? It is an unorganised mess with multiple different case styling all over the place. I get this is not that important but I can't help feel it illustrates just how little care is taken behind the scenes. The whole thing seems like a nightmare to deal with.
I had a fresh install of Windows on a new computer which refused to install updates until I ran a bunch of commands in the "terminal". The whole thing is beyond fixing at this point.