It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500.

The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.

> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge.

Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.

Regularly being presented with a "Set up Windows" after boot forcing you to click "no thanks" on a bunch of Microsoft services is exactly the kind of thing that irritates me. I've politely declined their services about 10 times already, make it stop!

When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work either directly on Linux or at least via things like Proton (courtesy Valve Software).

> What people realy want: as little OS as possible

I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.

I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.

Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.

What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.

Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.

Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.

Windows has been “this bad” for a long time.

You had Windows ME which was a terrible, buggy OS. I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose all their data on Windows ME.

Shifting personal windows to the Windows NT foundation provided a massive relative boost, but even that took until XP SP2 to reallt settle in, which was followed by the disaster that was Vista.

Then Windows 7 came along and it was genuinely really good. Probably peak Windows.

And then you came to an actual straitjacketing of windows in Windows 8, where the entire desktop Windows ecosystem was relegated to being a single app no better than calculator in the mobile first, completely undeveloped Windows 8 interface.

Windows 10 got us back to sanity, and barring a few minor UI mishaps Windows 11 was originally a nice refinement. This was the longest stretch of Windows being decent as a personal computer. The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop.

That was nearly a decade of enjoyable and productive Windows. Unfortunately, now we have AI, and Windows is once again being destroyed to serve the its AI master.

But I really wonder, is wanting a "little OS" just a hacker thing? For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS. I don't have a solid take on this yet.

been on linux for a month now, i found the exit and stepped through it. the pain points change from getting shafted by m$ to doing research and learning how to make the system work. at least the second option gives me some agency, and now its all set up i wish i had of switched sooner! ive got to say valve is doing the lords work, along with all the other linux enthusiasts.

This has been Microsoft’s playbook since the 90s. You talk about this as if it’s something new and people should have trusted them before.

The problem is that "to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run" changes when they want it to run something new. They don't care about cloud backup for their data? One hard drive failure, and suddenly they do. And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later.

But there needs to be a way to turn something off that you don't want, and to not get nagged about it repeatedly thereafter. But for that to work, there has to be a clear, easily findable way to turn it back on later.

> perpendicularly misaligned

Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point.

Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy.

Of course, for most people things that are “parallel” would seem to be in close agreement.

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

Citation needed. “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc.

Even interpreting that as “all the functionality, but limit applications to utilities for managing the hardware”, I think there people who want that, but I doubt that’s what people, in general, want. Having to choose (and, likely, pay for) a photo manager, a simple word processor, etc. is just too much of a hassle for many.

Also, why would any commercial entity develop such an OS? The margin is in the

Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows.