Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account.

Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password because it was tied to the Microsoft account and you can't change the password locally.

I don't need Copilot managing my inbox through AI, nor do I need a more exciting widget experience.

I just want an OS where if something like the above happens there's a way to fix it without having to reinstall. It doesn't seem like much to ask.

Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)

What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.

What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is.

Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user base.

The incentives are alomost perpendicularly misaligned.

Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. People are looking for the exit, finding there is indeed a door, and stopping them will take far more than just some reassurance from the DJ boot.

I’m most excited for the scheduler and memory footprint improvements. As bad as I hear Windows 11 is, I’ve rarely had issues with it. For the most part it just works and stays out of my way. My only gripes are the occasional forced updates and a rare hard crash that happened once in a span of a year of using it as my daily driver.

Well that and I have to be mindful of running too many resource starving processes at the same time including WSL. Otherwise performance will quickly degrade. But that’s not much different than my 2015 ASUS zenbook running Linux off of 8gb of ram. In comparison my work laptop runs on 32gb of ram with much more powerful cpu cores.

WSL is my favorite and most used feature of Windows 11. So I’ll be happy as long as they don’t screw that up.

It fascinates me to speculate about who this is for. At least among people I've talked to, the ones who still want windows (instead of the obvious alternatives) cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job" or similar. I personally don't think these preferences reflect the reality of how much effort using e.g. a linux distro is in this day and age, to be clear, but these are the beliefs I encounter. Are there really people who want to deal with providing feedback and stress testing an operating system and its various software components and features, but doing this for a corporation that sets the terms of their transparency efforts and ultimately does this for profit and will still grab the reins and exert control against their users' will when they feel like it?

I literraly can’t name one feature since Windows 7 what was worth it, even on the contrary: every update made the system worse.

I had to restore Notepad, Calculator and Paint from Windows 7. What the hell Microsoft?

> We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.

Great! We've progressed back to Windows XP 22 years ago.

At first they ridicule people with general disrespect, privacy violations and ads in Start Menu, then they expect the same people to treat them seriously. That's a cognitive dissonance right there, and now they have to live with it. Psychotherapy may help.

> You want to see what we’re doing, understand our decisions, and see progress through shipping. Second, a shared sense of pride.

So basically: - recent changes are all crap - so why did you make them?

They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles.

Installing Tiny11 and then running a debloat over its corpse results in a much faster and less memory hungry default clean install.

> The theme is simple: fewer disruptions, more clarity, more control. This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates, and gives you more flexibility to time updates around your schedule. We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.

Finally, like seriously, so many times I have to "shutdown" (aka restart) for an update before going to bed. I don't want to have to babysit my desktop computer when I want to finish up for the night.

> Second, a shared sense of pride. We want to be proud of what we build...

Yep, that's marketing. You don't care about your users.

There are two mentions of "reliab[ility]" (I searched for the first five letters to be sure I got other morphological forms of the word). It appears twice: once near the top, as a general goal, and once at the bottom, as part of the general goal. Nothing in between, like saying "we'll be using {less AI | more AI debugging | more human screening | magic wands | secret sauce} in an effort to improve reliability". So at least as far as this post goes, hardly even lip service. Given the number of botched updates reported earlier this year, that's astonishing.

Disclaimer: I switched to Linux last year.

Migrating off windows, win server and exchange saved us a lot of money and was suprisingly not as challenging as we had feared.

>We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.

Multiple times I've wanted to shutdown my laptop so I can go home and Windows says no, sit here for 5 minutes.

I don't trust sleep mode to not keep running and overheat, so I wait.

Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day. Music production on Linux isn't really practical. A lot of this stuff barely runs on Windows/OSX.

Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.

I consider myself an advanced Linux user, and it still took me an hour this morning to figure out how to get a VPN to work on Open Suse.

It's fascinating that one of the top features insiders are interested in is making File Explorer more dependable.

Not a Windows user, have never been (since Windows 3.11). But if I were, I would think this is just PR unless they changed some fundamentals, like bringing back local user support without jumping through five hoops.

Too little too late. I've already fully migrated to Fedora 43.

The same people who made Windows that bad are now tasked with making it slightly better.

Yeah, I wouldn't bet on this.

The Windows we want:

The SAME as Windows 2000 in terms of what is installed. NO TPM REQUIREMENT.

Even better: when installing Windows, there should be a "install minimal" option, and if you select it then it should be so fucking minimal - so little on there, that all you get is control panel and a way to install new software - NOTHING more.

That's your win, Microsoft. I'm 2000% certain nothing even slightly close to that will be delivered.

By changing two settings in Windows, you can fix the worst of it.

Using a local group policy, you can change when "Preview builds and Feature updates" and "Quality Updates" become available in Windows Update.

By delaying those with 30 or 60 days, you will never have preview updates applied to your system, and feature and quality updates will have at least 1 or 2 months' worth of fixes before you get them.

start > run > gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Manage updates offered from Windows Update >

1) Enable "Select when preview builds and feature updates are received". Set days to 60

2) Enable "Select when quality updates are received". Set days to 30 (max value)

Microsoft is trying to sell things like extended servicing agreements. They purposefully make Windows worse so they can sell you solutions to fix it. They purposefully keep it insecure so you need their updates. It’s about taking the customers hostage.

Anyone have a good guide to (re)install Windows without any of the bloat? Preferably using Group Policy vs registry changes.

I've seen Tiny11 referenced but haven't seen a good guide for it.

Just switch to Linux people!

valve is on the brink of replacing windows with steam for many people

it's probably not a big dent in market share, but it's probably a good tipping point

the post shared here is clearly written with AI.

Windows won’t be able to run Doom soon.

> This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates

I just can't, gotta ask - what about c++ updates? What about integral os components that were migrated to the store and if you disable it, you won't get updates? What about defender updates (not definitions but app update) that won't get applied if you have another anti malware?

The thing I hate about windows updates is that microsoft can't even update all their own stuff with a single button.

edit: almost forgot - why is office not in windows update, and what the hell is wrong with teams and why it is seperate from office updates

Just updating windows is a complete and utter mess and every single Linux distro is 100x better

Sweet Jesus, when are these guys going to understand that I want to be able to turn off automatic updates completely and forever. I'm fine if my computer melts and explodes if I didn't get the update, but let me do it on my own schedule permanently!

Microsoft degrading user experience plus lower price on Mac computers it maybe their downfall. E.g., removing local accounts, unwanted advertising, arbitrary decisions (forced TPM requirement), etc.

Windows can ensure its quality quite easily: restore support for Windows 7.

For 2 months now the „put in admin credentials“ dialog is so fundamentally broken - ui-wise, it is unbelievable (in the sense that I do not believe it actually made it to production even though I see it with my own eyes). There are so many anecdotes about slop by now, the working parts become the anecdotes.

By now Windows, for me is more like a reality TV show than an OS.

I have a feeling that my fat ass switching over to Linux is going to outrun their attempt to roll back decades of accumulated tech debt, institutional incompetence and burned bridges.

I really like Windows. I just wish Copilot could be made fully optional.

Honestly, I can live with Windows 11 being a little slow, and I can deal with File Explorer issues. I can write my own tools to manage some of that, and PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks. Those parts do not bother me that much.

What bothers me is Copilot being pushed into the operating system experience itself. I wish it could simply be treated as an optional feature.

Windows is an operating system. An operating system is the foundational layer that governs the user’s work. Because of that, AI should be an opt-out assistant, not a premise that changes the default behavior of the system.

When I move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Copilot feels like something that damages the user experience itself.

If Copilot were at the level of GPT or Claude, I probably would not complain as much. But I do not understand why the quality gap feels so large.

This reads... Weird? As in, I know it's marketing speech but expressions seem misused and ideas don't follow from each other:

>You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.

Not... the other way around? Updates decide when I happen?

>Last month we said we would reduce where Copilot shows up across Windows, focusing on bringing AI where it’s most valuable. [...] in Notepad, we’ve replaced the generic Copilot icon with a clearer “Writing Tools” label that better describes what it does.

We've reduced AI by renaming the button?

Windows is scamware.

Man, Microsoft still struggling with shit macOS solved decades ago.

On the other hand, Apple still refusing to fix shit in macOS people have been asking for decades.

Will I still have the urge to stab myself in the hand repeatedly?

> We know there’s a lot of excitement for Taskbar customization – and that’s coming soon.

This will never not be funny to me. These clowns really did remove something that existed for decades and then spend more than a decade trying to edge their users to the fact that they were gonna bring it back. In 500 years when somebody looks up enshittification on Wikipedia, this should be the first example.

"trust me bro"

[dead]

[dead]