When Nadella took over from Ballmer, he steered Microsoft in a better direction for a while. But by now he's become a lot worse. The biggest software company can no longer produce good software and its products are actively hostile to users. Nadella cares only about one thing, which is shoving AI everywhere and to everyone, at any cost. The irony is that he knows nothing about AI, how to build capable models or how to build useful AI products, nor does he have people who do. AI is his Metaverse: something he's singularity focused on, to the point of neglecting everything else, without any idea what to actually do with it.
Thank you, Microsoft, for accelerating the advent of The Year of The Linux Desktop
I switched my parents onto Linux a couple months ago, after my mom kept getting confused between edge and chrome - not being to uninstall edge was the last straw, but the massive amount of adware slowing down her capable-but-old laptop was a close second.
So far so good! Some smaller hiccups, like chrome won’t use dolphin, but I installed rustdesk so I can help them through whatever.
Over Christmas the in-laws were asking about Linux because of windows issues, which was surprising since they’re technologically literate but in a layman sense. I didn’t try to switch them over since the parent experiment is still ongoing but a couple more months of seamless use and I’ll consider it a success.
All this to say I’m very glad for Microsoft leadership!
My non-technical friend installed linux on her 10yo old laptop by herself after a windows update slowed down her device and rendered it unusable. She said she said she read about it somewhere and that the Ubuntu installation was pretty intuitive.
I was both amazed and proud. She's daily driving Linux now
(to be fair, it's just tv shows and web apps like chatgpt or docs, but still, Linux is now a good-enough alternative, at least anegdotally)
My late grandfather (passed in 2022 at the age of 104) showed us all how it could be done. In 2014! During one of my infrequent visits to his house; he was complaining about the state of the latest Windows installation on his new laptop, and saw me driving Debian+KDE and asked about switching.
I told him that Ubuntu was probably the best fit for someone changing/doing one's own install. And that was pretty much the extent of the conversation, we went on to talk more about raising beef on land without petrochemical fertilizers, and how he missed the flavor from his youth, circa 1930's vs what he could get in the store today.
A few years later, the next time I was in his living room, his somewhat older - the same - laptop was on his kitchen table with OpenOffice spreadsheets and something he was working on, running the latest Kubuntu flavor. I asked who he had asked to install it; he has a number of technically proficient descendants who live much closer and who visit far more frequently than I did, so I presumed one of my cousins had helped.
He acted a little gruff, told me he had switched to Ubuntu+gnome by reading and following the instructions, and had then decided he tried out the K Desktop and preferred it enough to just make the switch without reinstalling.
Had a bit of fun hearing him explain how he "hadn't been fond of some of the Ubuntu decisions with window managers but liked having both environments installed as somethings were better in K, and other things were better from Gnome."
In thinking about how ready he was, in his 90's, to fully read and follow instructions reminds me that he was from a generation whose automobile user manual came with instructions for adjusting the piston timing as well as how to bleed and adjust brake pressure.
Why does everyone act like switching to Linux from Windows is just too hard for "Kathy and Wayne"? The fact of the matter seems to be we have lost either the _ability_, or the _willingness_, to read-and-follow-directions in the general population. The end result of either is the same.
#3 is surprising, I don't remember the last time I saw a distro installer without a "just wipe the disk and set up the recommended partitions" option, and most machines usually just have 1 drive.
There's some funky things like drivers etc but on the whole switching to Linux is probably even easier for Kathy and Wayne (sorry, Alice and Bob) because the updates won't randomly break like MS's do
My Dad, who's well into his 60s, managed to install linux himself on his computer. His kept the windows partition in a dual boot setup just in case, but spends just about all the time in Linux, he loves it.
anecdotally?
Interesting, I can see how it would sound the same, with a different accent.
I thought they were making fun of my new jersey accent.
AFAICT the only thing that should be keeping people from Linux nowadays is gaming (especially VR) and systemd doing dumb shit device naming so that changing the physical location of an unrelated GPU renames your NIC and breaks your internet.
For casual use I use lightroom web and it's good enough for me, if you haven't tried it, I highly recommend.
I'm sure for some workflows it isn't sufficient but for basic edits and raw development it works quite well.
Not really equivalent to Lightroom, and not remotely a replacement, but there's Corel AfterShot Pro [1] (source: about 15 years ago, I was one of the (1?) proud Linux users of Bibble 5, its predecessor)
I was under the impression that the systemd device naming schemes were created specifically to solve the problem you describe[1].
Are there cases where the old scheme worked well that none of the systemd schemes properly address?
Is the scheme Windows uses to bind configuration to physical network interfaces even documented?
ALVR has been working really well for me on my Quest 3.
there are a lot of other things stopping people from migrating besides gaming though. sure, there are alternatives for professional audio/photo/video editing/producing, but they all mean losing some functionality if you migrate.
It is clearly a problem for them. Just because you do something different doesn't invalidate their pain point
This is an ignorant response. It is 2026. The OS shouldn't be storing network configuration by nondeterministic device name when I ask the OS's default network management tool to join a wifi network.
Sometime around 2012, Windows XP started having issues on my parent's PC, so I installed Xubuntu on it (my preferred distro at the time). I told them that "it works like Windows", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner they had worked great! I went back home 2 states away, and expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. Normies care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs. The interface is paramount for non-technical users.
A family friend recently called me for advice on her old decrepit laptop. I told her about my work "laptop": a Surface Pro tablet with Linux. I just sold one to her (I work in e-waste recycling), partially on the security and privacy advantages of Linux. Lets see how that works out.
My elderly parents asked me to install Linux on their laptops this Christmas after finally getting sick of the adware on Windows. If Microsoft can make them switch, anyone can.
Cool. I used to install it on all my family and friends computer when I was a teenager but as I grew older and had less and less time, being the constant tech support guy for everyone I introduced to Linux got very hard so I stopped recommended/installing it. Which distro did you choose for your parents?
After my mom's Chromebook died I switched her to Ubuntu + Firefox on a Thinkpad x201 and it's been her daily driver for years. I keep asking to buy her a newer laptop with a bigger screen (800p is pretty painful these days) but she won't let me.
I switched my mum to Unix(-like).
Her router is running Linux. I can tell because of the speed of the WLAN alone.
Her STB runs Linux, specifically Android TV (Nvidia Shield TV). Thanks for adding the fantastic ads in the newest Android TV, Google! /s
Her vacuum cleaner runs Linux, I know because I slapped Valetudo on it.
Her NAS runs Linux (DSM), Synology.
Her printer runs Linux (Brother).
Her Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant runs Linux (DietPi).
Her tablet runs macOS variant, iPadOS.
Her smartphone runs macOS variant, iOS.
Her smartwatch will run macOS variant, watchOS.
OK, fair enough. Her laptop! Her laptop still runs Win... wait a sec, she hasn't had a laptop for more than a decade. She's been using that super expensive hardware keyboard for iPad. My mum never even used Windows 10 or 11. Her laptop came with Windows Vista back in the days, it was terribly sluggish.
I don't know which year it is, but it isn't the year of the Windows OS.
And yes, I am super happy with Microsoft using thumb screws like these. Squeeze them tight. The more computers will slip through your fingers, grand moff Nadella.
> Her tablet runs macOS variant, iPadOS.
> Her smartphone runs macOS variant, iOS.
> Her smartwatch will run macOS variant, watchOS.
None of these platforms run a variant of macOS, rather a variant of Darwin.
I have no particular insight into whether the wikipedia article is correct, but it says "iOS is based on macOS."
They're pulling out all the stops. If you told me that whoever was in charge of the consumer versions of Windows was trying to drive it into the ground, I'd believe you.
They're working on Xbox too!
At this point probably there's no room for another Playstation-style video game console. My friend who plays only console-style video games, the sort of person who owned Wii-U and an Xbox One as well as that generation of Playstation, bought a gaming PC last year. He will undoubtedly buy a Switch 2 at some point, to play a Zelda or something, but why would you buy another Xbox?
So I think Xbox becomes a brand for video games with Windows and then gradually it loses relevance until one day the question is "Why isn't Minecraft on Steam like a proper video game?"
The desire for controller + TV obviously also affected my console-gaming friend. So, the gaming PC is hooked up to a wireless controller and to his gaming display + audio setup, which was historically a ceiling mounted projector and surround speakers (he moved since I last spent hours playing games with him)
The PC means there's a wireless keyboard and some sort of pointing device, but they're just for launching games & basic admin.
Edited to add: Also WTF for refreshing the Xbox. Who is the audience for this product? What is your lead title? Another Halo? But there's going to be an excellent Halo for the PS5 and for PCs, right? A GTA? But people want the newer GTA which won't fit. Maybe I just don't understand the vision here.
To be fair, Microsoft did deliberately drive Nokia into the ground.
Nokia was driving pretty close to the ground before Microsoft ever got involved.
Well, many consider Elop to be a Microsoft asset.
Maybe the Finns got their mole in to extract revenge. Don't forget Linux is Finnish as well ;-)
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
Look at the Nokia sales volume, revenue and the date of Burning Platform memo - and don't repeat this bullshit ever again.
I've been using Linux since the 90s, however I was never super awesome with it. I can do the basic stuff, and with a bit of documentation/guidance, a bit more. I was able to install Arch Linux at least 3X, for example. I also managed to build a kernel like twice...although I didn't do a great job of configuration.
I think my crowning achievement came early on when I managed to follow Linux From Scratch all the way through.
I say all of this to say that I am finally off Windows for good. It has become my daily driver. I've no obstacles. Not in gaming, software dev, personal work, media consumption (beyond streaming services degrading streams for a non-supported OS), or anything else. I've found open source apps to be quite a bit better than their closed source equivalents.
Things have really shifted in the past 5-10 years, and I dig it. KDE + CachyOS is great! Although I hear Bazzite is better for new users (I have some decent experience using Arch so I prefer Cachy)
I don't foresee ever moving back to Windows. The AI and constant push to Microsoft Edge, Second OOB experience, and other nonsense (including Diablo 2: resurrected, a [now] Microsoft owned product that still gets a few updates, hard locking my system), I decided to take my ball and go home...to Linux. A few people I know who aren't even remotely computer literate at all have done the same, and they've been surprised at how much better everything is, particularly on somewhat older hardware.
I suspect that Microsoft doesn't even care anymore.
Windows is not at the core of their strategy anymore. With Azure, they are as much of a Linux company as they are a Windows company now, and most of their software runs in a browser now. Windows is just a gateway to their services.
If it was easy for them to have their users run Linux instead of Windows and sell Office 365 subscriptions, they would prefer that instead of having to maintain a full OS.
The only thing holding millions, possibly in the 100s, from switching to Desktop Linux from Windows is Apple's iPhone support.
As a Mac user I might be missing something obvious - why do they need iPhone support on their computer?
Backups. Copying photos. Sharing files. As a Mac User, you're probably well served with backups integration in Finder, as well as iCloud, AirDrop, iMessage, and friends without realising it.
Eh? I don't have an iPhone, but my mum does and she uses it fine without a Mac. Everything just syncs to iCloud, if there is some benefit to connecting it to a Mac then I'm genuinely unaware of it.
Even if it was still a thing (and it really isn’t, imo), libimobiledevice does a decent job already, and given a little funding it shouldn’t be super hard to close the gaps and build a nice UI on top of it. But that’s not happening because very few people care about it at all.
Now, AirDrop support is a completely different beast. But it requires hardware support (promiscuous mode, iirc) that many common chipsets simply lack.
No.
Nadella is The Linux Hitman
every discussion like this has at least one of these comments. The year of the Linux Desktop must be nearly here. They've been predicting it for years already!
As the old saying goes, it happens slowly and then all at once. The things tethering people to Windows have largely disappeared for many/most people.
One of my sons has a desktop that is quite powerful and overwhelmingly adequate for what he does. As Windows 10 hit the end of support we were considering how to move forward as Windows 11 refuses to work on his device. We realized there is absolutely nothing keeping him on Windows, and perhaps we just replace his PC with a Mac Mini. But in the meantime he's rolling with Ubuntu and has lost absolutely nothing and gained plenty.
For me, after 35 years of Windows, 2025 was the year of the Linux desktop. Finally. Linux has become a lot better, and my skills with Linux have too. And Microsoft screwed me over a few times too many. I had bought a "lifetime license" for Outlook, which cost me over $100 a couple of years ago. So then I wanted to upgrade the CPU on the machine running the VM where I had Outlook running, and suddenly that "lifetime license" ended due to the CPU being different. That was really the last straw for me. I moved to Linux Mint and Firebird for email, and it's been great. Now all of my VMs are running Linux, all the locally hosted services I had running have Linux binaries. The switch was a lot easier than I anticipated.
If Microsoft is alienating people like me, using Windows for 35 years, they can alienate anyone.
The forced buying of new hardware just to run Windows 11 is going to be the last straw for a lot of people. And Apple is really no better, their existing x86 machines have the same problem. We could no longer update a MBP, and other software stopped working due to the inability to update (and sorry, no we're not going to use hacky solutions to force it to update).
Yeah, except there has been a steady increase in Linux (~5% "confirmed") and a steady decline of Windows. I bet a large percentage of those "unknown" are also linux machines.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
URLCheck flags that host as adware/malware for some reason. Anyway, I assume you mean 5 percentage points? 5% increase probably wouldn't keep pace with desktop users growth.
i wondered why it is they can't tell which os is being used. i guess most browsers return some text in the user agent
Linux on desktop = the fusion energy of computing.
Is it The Year of the Linux Desktop again?
Haha. Been seeing this comment for at least 20 years now. Some things never change...
Being repeated since Windows XP days, and yet without Proton there is no Linux gaming.
There is a chicken/egg problem.
We should be happy it has a solution.
I would not call being dependent on Windows games a solution.
Not when it is a castle on Microsoft's kingdom.
So there is Linux gaming, you’re saying.
No there isn't.
What is there are Linux users playing Windows games.
There used to be one, sadly the likes of Loki Entertainment are now gone.
a) The vast, overwhelming majority of regular gamers who could potentially be convinced to try gaming on Linux truly do not give a shit about whatever line you're trying to draw here.
b) Driving widespread adoption of gaming on Linux is a chicken and egg problem---without a significant market of Linux gamers, developers and publishers have no reason to publish native versions of their games on Linux, and without games to play, nobody is going to install Linux on their gaming system. Proton directly solves the latter problem, and may indirectly solve the former when Linux sees widespread adoption by gamers.
And what game would that be? OpenTTD?
Except those games don't run on GNU/Linux without Proton, providing an Windows implementation.
Amiga games running on UAE on GNU/Linux are still Amiga games.
I don’t really see what the difference is. If they run well, what does it matter?
Sure but not everyone is using desktop for gaming.
And yet, without the software for Linux gaming, there is no Linux gaming.
Very hard to falsify such a statement.
Software written for Windows, running with a translation layer on GNU/Linux.
It certainly does, because it allows game studios to keep ignoring GNU/Linux, even when they happen to have Android/Linux games written with the NDK, it is a Valve's problem.
Maybe in rare cases with few compatible games.
In some cases.
Not the parent or grandparent poster and not a gamer.
The echo in my mind from the statement was along the following lines:
I can do everything at work remotely from my Linux laptop as they use Microsoft365/Sharepoint/Teams/Outlook and all. I can just log in via Chromium and noone knows any different with one exception: the finance portal. I have to be on an employer owned Windows PC to do that one thing as it is the last 'native program' needed. Moral: enterprise-ish stuff is happening via the Web browser.
Steam et al financing WINE/Proton and generally hammering all the sharp edges out of the compatibility layer for running Windows software on Linux. Moral: Complex Windows native software can be run under Linux.
So, at some point in the future, does Microsoft just phase out Windows? Replace it with a really well engineered Linux with compatibility environment for legacy software?
A reality slap.
I have a little AMD AliExpress PC where the Windows installer recognizes neither the wifi card nor the Ethernet port. I guess there's a way to download the drivers on another computer and load them during installation, but instead of figuring out how to do that or what the latest option for circumventing the online requirement is, it now runs Pop OS.
Nothing wrong with Pop OS, but I assume you could still install Windows without activating it, install the drivers, then activate online.
The trouble is you need network access to end up at the desktop to install the network drivers in the expected manner. Both of the ways I am aware of resolving the issue involve dropping to a command prompt. One method is to run the device driver installer from the command prompt. The other method is to run the bypassnro script from the OOBE directory, to get to the desktop to install the driver. There are probably other ways, but given that most search results talk about non-official ways (which I place less faith in, frequently don't work, and are more complex anyhow) I don't see how most people would get around the problem.
In contrast, most desktop oriented Linux distributions have a simpler installer and provide at least enough hardware support to leave you at a functional desktop. (There may be issues with more esoteric hardware, but chances are that hardware wouldn't work under Windows until vendor supplied drivers are installed anyhow.)
That won't work. Windows won't let you finish the installation process unless you connect to the internet so you can't get the PC to a point where you could install the drivers.
The official solution[1] is to slipstream network drivers onto the Windows image before installation.
The official solution for non-technical users is to buy a PC with Windows preinstalled.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
No need to slipstream. Just copy the drivers to install media (hopefully a writable media such as an USB pen) Latest Windows 11 has an option to select the folder with the drivers of it can't detect a WiFi device and there is no ethernet card.
That being said, I installed Windows 10 on Framework 12 by mistake and SHIFT+F10, "explorer", right-click on INF and "Install" also worked.
But on latest Windows 11 installer such witchery is not needed.
Really?
When did this come up?
I know tons of people who run Windows unactivated. The key difference is there's a watermark. Otherwise, it seems to work fine.
The problem is not activation, it's the login requirement.
Unless they have fixed it you used to be able to change stuff really quickly after install before it locked it down due to activation.
Without unofficial bypasses of MS online account requirements you would not come to a point where activation is a concern. No internet access is not enough of a reason for MS let you use your device.
A few years back I bought win 11 pro retail on usb flash drive.
I just install and type in the key. no network.
I use it for VMs no network necessary.
Just go find the PCI IDs (lspci) and download the appropriate cabs from the Software Update Catalog. Extract them and throw them on a USB stick. Really effing simple.
With both Windows 11 and macOS Tahoe now being non-starters for many, it's clear that we're going to continue to see impressive growth in the Linux desktop in 2026. Last year I migrated my Windows gaming machine to Ubuntu, and it's been a great success. I don't play games that require kernel level anti-cheats, so for me, Proton has worked great. I'm playing new games like Anno 117 on my 2019 vintage RX 5700xt and am having a blast. I'm about to wipe my Windows 10 partition and not look back.
I still have an M1 laptop with a broken screen that is going strong in clam shell mode, but once it dies or I can no longer run Sequoia for whatever reason, I'll be tempted to abandon macOS if Apple can't move beyond the mess they've made with Tahoe.
I’m still on Sequoia; I have high hopes that Tahoe is an aberration that will be fixed with the departure of Alan Dye. But let’s keep things into perspective here. The subtle enshitifications of macOS are mild compared to the train wreck of Windows 8 onwards. I daily drove Windows 7 until 2015; IMHO it’s the greatest version of Windows ever.
My wife works for a large corporation that is 100% Windows. I first used Windows 11 a few weeks ago when I was troubleshooting a connectivity problem on her laptop. To some extent my lack of experience with Windows 11 was a factor, but configuring network settings shouldn’t be so obtuse and fragmented. It didn’t feel serious. It felt like a parody of an operating system.
I agree that Tahoe is considerably less enshitified than Windows, but they are slowly turning the screws on us. With every release, it becomes harder and harder to run unsigned macOS binaries, and I can't shake the feeling that their ultimate goal is turn the Mac into more of a "trusted appliance" and less of a general-purpose computer.
Gatekeeper & notarization, System Integrity Protection, hardware level security enforcement, all of these shifts reek of security paternalism, platform convergence, and ultimately ... control. This frog is starting to feel the water boil, and to mix metaphors, can see the walls of the garden getting higher.
I agree there’s a lot of security paternalism, but the "trusted appliance" model is also the objectively correct choice for 99 percent of users. The real frog-in-warming-water problem, in my view, isn’t control being taken away — it’s the exponential growth of operating system complexity and connectivity. Computers are becoming more of a window into our souls every year, and with that the terrible opportunities for bad actors grows too.
Ultimately, choosing macOS is choosing to trust Apple. So the real question is: what do I get in return for that trust? As a "1 percenter" you’d think I’d resent ceding control. But when I look at Gatekeeper, notarization, Signed System Volume, and the rest, my reaction is: thank you, Apple, for doing your fucking job — for doing what I pay YOU to do for ME. I don't want to think about kernel extensions or rootkits, just keep my computer secure. Even as a 1 percenter, I still treat my main desktop as an appliance. Any time I want to go deeper into a computer, I'm in an ssh terminal to Linux machines under my control.
For me the logic is simple. If I don’t trust Apple to manage the security of my computer, then I shouldn’t be running macOS, period. Personally, I do trust Apple as much as I can trust anyone, including the presumptively honourable neckbeards who oversee your favourite Linux distro.
I'm a bit out of the loop, what are people's issues with Tahoe?
The new Liquid Glass UI has a lot of detractors, both on iOS and on macOS, but it seems like the clamor is even louder on macOS. Beyond the looks, it's created a lot of usability issues for folks. Buttons and controls can overlap awkwardly, navigation can be more difficult when it's hard to identify different UI elements on the screen, all the eye candy like transparency and rounded corners can create accessibility problems for folks less than perfect vision. It's a bit of a mess.
What does this mean for using Windows in air gapped environments? I would have assumed this was common enough to make Microsoft want to support it.
Is it possible to activate via a web browser on a separate computer, similar to the flow for phone activation?
Microsoft is the US military's biggest supplier. There is definitely a solution for this. And that solution is probably not available to regular users.
There are several solutions, and while most are limited to volume licensing, which, depending on your definition, may exclude "regular users", at least one is not:
1. Supply the code given by the "slmgr /dti" command to Microsoft over the phone or online from a non-air gapped machine.
2. Apply the resulting activation code with the "slmgr /atp" command.
The phone option just went away per TFA, which is why I was wondering if there's still an online (but on a different device) way to do this.
Yeah this. The common man rules don't apply there.
Even in Enterprise by the way. No way we pay the amounts listed on the MS website.
I would guess (no idea) that military computers log into the cloud, maybe it is a special (expensive) ms military cloud.
That then is explicitly not an "air gapped" computer, which there definitely is need for in the military and government.
Regular users buy a PC with Windows pre-activated.
You take it to Base Ops and they imaage it or they come to you and image it.
[flagged]
As per the article:
Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"
By logging in with your account, it will not associate the account to the licenses.
Key management services or Active Directory activation.
This is a small roadbump to home/smb free activations.
air gapped
AD and KMS work in an air gapped network just fine.
I don't think regular Windows 11 is that useful in those cases. You probably either want an intranet connected Windows client, that gets activated and updated via a local server. Probably also a LTSC release, that doesn't get feature updates all the time.
Or a Windows 11 IoT image, that only enables some specific features, and is stripped down for a specific purpose.
For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.
>For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.
That's simply not good enough for some purposes. Once a computer is connected to the internet, at all for any amount of time, the system could be considered to be less secure.
Sure, but why do you need to use Windows for such a specific setup?
Because someone somewhere wrote some software that only runs on Windows. That isn't the important detail here.
VAMT proxy activation, or full fledged volume licensing with KMS
These acronyms are not super helpful, and just wildly guessing at what "VAMT" means it probably is nowhere near qualifying as airgapped.
Do you have access to Google?
VAMT proxy activation is airgapped in the exact same way the “old” telephone way was; VAMT acts as the server that you used to call on the phone. It trades one token for another. You side channel the tokens across to and from the airgapped machine.
you probably need to stand up a key management server (KMS)
That is not air gapped
The original post said "air gapped environments", not "air gapped computers". Running several computers on a network which has no connections to the outside qualifies as an air gapped environment, and will let you use a key server just fine.
My assumption is that the system is on an air-gapped network, as individual systems that are completely isolated are typically not very useful as a full user environment, and are more likely to be fully embedded systems instead.
Internal key activation can be done through a KMS host , which can be activated by phone (or some other dedicated mean if you're big enough for MS to care)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
Just don't activate. It's not necessary.
Can't remember what, but there will be functional limitations if you don't activate, even with a verified key.
If you're a home user, I agree. But if you're a business, wouldn't this be a liability?
Liability would be to not purchase a license, not failing to activate it.
Only risk would be to not have suppport available.
You rarely get useful support from Microsoft anyway.
That's my point. The question is which fraction of users/businesses actually ever ask for support? And as long as error can be replicated on an activated install, I guess they could still get support.
I knew a number of companies who were using a handful of RedHat servers and many more running CentOS and whenever they encountered issues on a CentOS system they would just replicate it on a RedHat one before asking for support and sending logs. Morally dubious but contractually OK.
I bought the darn thing, I want the full package
The closest solution is using IoT LTSC
Last time I tried to use it for an appliance, we weren't able to buy licenses. Microsoft gave us the contact to the only reseller in our country, and they couldn't find anyone in the company who knew how to sell Windows IoT licenses.
Edit: We only wanted to buy around 20 licenses, so their motivation was also not that big to figure it out.
You should still be able to activate windows offline by using the "ZeroCID" or "KMS4k" methods with https://massgrave.dev/chart#basics
those do not appear to be, er... legitimate ways of activation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471081 already posted
If/when support for Linux gaming becomes widespread and easy to navigate with few configuration hurdles, Windows will die very quickly. As for MacOS, I genuinely can't wrap my head around why anyone who is technically competent would prefer that OS.
Fewer and fewer people own home computers anymore. I would not be surprised if ChromeOS laptops outpace home Windows install at some point.
The bastion of Windows installations will still be the corporate market. Outside of developer circles, Macs are only used by executives - the drones still get underspecced Windows laptops.
not only corporate but also many small shops still running some dedicated software for PoS. Maybe wine will work but it's a lot of hassle still and too risky for trying something that critical to work for such PoS scenarios. Also not sure if situation changed but at least 5 years ago most ATMs in asia were running windows based on talk with my friend working in this field.
Yeah I think my original comment was a bit overstated. I think it would have been more accurate to say Windows would die for the consumer desktop market.
Unfortunately sim racing requires Windows (that's my last holdout).
As far as macOS goes, Linux is so good but I also like my peripherals to work for my job where I don't have time to tinker all day.
> As for MacOS, I genuinely can't wrap my head around why anyone who is technically competent would prefer that OS.
Even technical users can succumb to Apple's Reality Distortion Field.
MacOS is like the best of both worlds between Linux and Windows. It's commercial software, and a major platform target for devs, and can do all the unix-y things too.
That's the pitch, yeah. If you're happy to use the OS in the specific way Apple thinks you should, it's okay.
Doubtful this will ever happen for the most lucrative part of desk/lap-top gaming: multiplayer and micro transaction games. They require anti-cheat to keep the money flowing. And IIUC, Linux fundamentally grants too much user control for effective anti-cheat.
I have not used windows in a while but thinking of building a PC. Is there a way to install way older version of windows 10 without Microsoft's AI nonsense and the online account requirement?
I just did it today with the current ISO you can download from Microsoft themselves. Then installed all the Windows updates, graphics drivers and even enrolled in the free extended security support. Then I just uninstalled Cortana and Copilot manually. Ezpz
Be warned that they employ extreme amounts of dark patterns to try and trick you into converting the offline account into an online one.
Online activation of the Windows license is separate from an online user account.
Were you able to enable extended security updates without logging in?
I've held out for literal years, but that was the thing that finally made me log into an online user account (and start figuring out how to finally cut the last bit of Windows out of my life)
Just pirate the updates with Massgrave.
Were you able to use the online activation system without a Microsoft account? I wasn't able to - though as you say, that account doesn't have to be tied to the license or an account on the machine being activated.
> Be warned that they employ extreme amounts of dark patterns to try and trick you into converting the offline account into an online one.
Just get Windows 10 LTSC from the pirate bay and install IOT version. It's an actually good version of Windows MS dont sell to normal people.
It's based on 20H2, so there's software that doesn't support it like Starfield.
I thought it worked just fine on LTSC 2021 (21H2)
I played starfield just fine on LTSC 2021.
If you're willing go through a little bit of trouble -- and it sounds like you are -- it's pretty easy to configure Windows 11 to look and act pretty much like Windows 7. You'd be hard pressed to tell what version of Windows I'm running if you gave it a cursory glance.
The main tool for me is https://www.startallback.com/
O2O Shutup ( https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 ) is also pretty useful for disabling anything you don't like all in one place -- it doesn't even install.
I also found Winscript and Windhawk useful.
https://github.com/flick9000/winscript https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk
Only Aero, Classic theme not really.
Look into LTSC, and the resources at https://massgrave.dev/ .
Disclaimer: I have no personal knowledge of that site, but it is commonly recommended when this subject comes up.
I've heard that it is a way to reliably but potentially illegally activate MSFT products. Stay away.
Nah, it's been hosted by Microsoft for years, on Github for a decade, without as much as a takedown notice, 161k stars now, they don't mind.
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
If they wanted it removed from GitHub they would have done so.
I'd feel bad only if there were a legitimate way to acquire the LTSC for home use
If you're a midsize business with revenue, theoretically one of their enforcement partners may take a run at you, but this is not a thing with home users (or even most small business abuse).
Hot take but legality is completely irrelevant for home use
It's possible, but it won't get security updates anymore.
Windows 10 is outdated, not recommended at all. Just install Win11 Enterprise and get your favorite LLM to give you instructions to remove the stuff you don't want, after like 15 minutes it will be totally cleaned for perpetuity.
Not recommended by whom? Win10 still works perfectly fine, has less bloatware, will be supported for a while, and probably won't get updates that just add useless AI and advertisements.
If someone wants/needs Windows, I would absolutely recommend windows 10 right now, it's probably the best time for using that version.
I do have to say that telephone process was terribly tedious. You had to enter 50 digits or so and it would repeat them all to confirm, ugh.
You could do so by keypad, and I was done in either 3 or 4 minutes (I forget which).
Yes it just felt really really awkward and drawn out. I really hated it. I had some sequestered VMs at work which were not allowed internet access so I got this a lot. Was a security lab.
The way this is going, I'm probably going Linux only next time I upgrade.
When I recently installed Windows 11 on my new rig, it didn't recognize the built-in motherboard wifi and I could only connect after installation of Windows + mobo drivers. How would that work now?
Just like you used to be able to provide storage drivers on a floppy disk, you can now provide NIC drivers on a USB stick. (IIRC, there's a button for it on the Microsoft account sign-in page of the OOBE.)
Server 2022 > Windows 11 for desktop OS. No bloatware, less garbage, almost identical driver and application support.
Why Windows Server 2022, not 2025? Can't the latter be used as desktop OS?
An expensive solution.
Well, only if you pay for it
It EOLs in October this year, however.
Server 2025, then?
Though admittedly $1,176/16 cores is a bit steep for a desktop OS, and don't forget the CALs if you plan to use file sharing or Remote Desktop (or third party alternatives like Steam Remote Play).
Security updates through 2031. I'd rather not worry about added "features" introducing yet more bugs.
Only with Extended Support, which you get for free.
Is this the last way that was vaguely easy to access? Can you still run the OOBE command or use the XML unattended install method?
Would like to know this as well.
If you think Windows is bad, imagine there are people paying real money to use it.
I understand why this is bad, but I personally would sign up for a Microsoft account anyway. Mainly, I don't want all my stuff in "C:\Users\micha". Is there a way to set your username?
Unless you prepare a custom image for installation, a non-local account is created, but you can replace it by a local account later.
Windows becoming less and less relevant every day and then they do this. 2026 is gonna be true Year of the Linux Desktop.
awaiting what massgrave dev do about this. if nothing, then there's nothing to worry about
I'll never install Windows on another machine.
The internet recognizes obstacles as damage and hacks around it. ;)
There are activation cracks right?
„just like the gypsy woman said“
The only official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet is to insert a linux installation USB stick. Got it.
what about that mass grave site … asking for a friedn
I read their handheld Xbox is a version of Windows with none of the bloat nor slop. I'm sure they'll never sell that as a version of Windows but I wonder if it's possible to make it into an installable by third parties like other custom ISOs that float around the internet.
Next up: Anything running or playing on Windows can be solely distributed, installed and updated through the Microsoft Store.
Actually, I should place a bet on Polymarket for that.
It's all going downhill from here. Jesus.
Microsoft? Nah, it's called Microslop now.
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The responses here baffle me. This IS GOOD NEWS. HN more than anyone should understand this. Every mistake Microsoft makes with Windows is a free win for Linux. We should celebrate this and encourage Nadella to make Windows as hostile as possible. Add that nasty recall ai spyware, put ads everywhere.
People here hating on Nadella and loving Ballmer are missing the point. This is not a partisan issue. Windows stopped being good a long time ago. Arguably XP was the last good version of Windows.
Windows becoming an OS mostly for corporate types is beneficial for the world. Let us celebrate!
A decent amount of people actually like Windows as graphical user interface, and some of the related tech. That's a loss that Linux can't replace in a comparable fashion. Unless https://loss32.org/ becomes a viable reality, that is.
The flaw in this logic is they are a monopoly. They continue to profit off of the bad user experience, that’s been their business model since day one, and they keep posting growth numbers. I hope they do die, but in the meantime the bad decisions still negatively impact users, and many of them didn’t have a choice.
The other flaw in your logic is assuming that markets are free. A free market is one that is both informed and consents. In this market, there is both misinformation and a lack of consent.
Nadella was the one who fired Microsoft's QA team for Windows. It took a while but those chickens finally came home to roost.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626871/microsoft-to-b...
This one youtuber, I forget his name, was fired as part of that layoff. He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.
> He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.
This really sucks for him. Through should Microsoft _not_ layoff specific people due to health conditions? Is that something we require from companies?
How about you nationalize your healthcare, so people like that are not depended on their work to get the care they need?
> The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.
Or make employer paid health insurance count as income and therefore not tax-deductible.
Or lower the age for Medicare every year until everyone is covered.
Wouldn’t that leave out the set of people who have no income? For example, long term unemployed, adults switching careers and needing to take a long time off for education, etc? While the solution gets close, I don’t think it’s strictly the same thing. Add on top of that our unnecessarily complicated tax system and this sounds even less equivalent.
I don’t see how this addresses the comment you replied to.
This is not my experience in Canada. It is not the experience of anyone I know. There are often long wait times in ERs for things that are non urgent. I waited 5 or 6 hours my last visit after initial assessment. I’ve known a few people that had life threatening cancers here: they were treated quickly, and compassionately by the health care system. There are bad wait times for some things: a hearing assessment took 6 months (there are private options for this but many people would rather wait - they trust the system more). There is a shortage of family doctors. Medications are not fully covered. But I promise you we have no death pods in our hospitals. If you get hit by a car, diagnosed with cancer, need an X-ray, a breathing test, etc. You get that care. It’s nowhere near perfect, but I’m thankful for it and most people I know feel similarly.
Can you cite the sources you researched? I’ve known people from all over the world and none of them found that to be true: the American healthcare system was commented on in disbelief over both the cost and difficulty of getting treatment compared to where they had previously lived.
I did: Greece, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Japan and now Norway.
Never paid a single dime out of pocket as a diabetic.
> so wonderful death pods in Canada?
propaganda at it's height.
Yeah, but those systems won’t hide breaking research like checks notes antioxidants and high-dose Vitamin D from cancer patients, so…
What does 'usually' mean? In my experience 'usually' has never worked in my favor. Say it does, does it kick in immediately? What do they have to do to switch over providers? Does all currently being coveraged treatment just move over to being covered by Medicaid automatically or will they need re-approvals?
If you are saying they are covered either way, why not just have consistent healthcare coverage for them and for everyone, all the time?
In the UK, it's operated as trusts separate from day to day government. In Canada it's provincially administered. In Australia, Medicare is a national, tax-funded system with independent statutory authorities overseeing parts of it. Germany, France, Japan have social insurance systems.
I would imagine individual states would manage their own health services, with the federal government acting as more of a coordinating and standard setting body. At least that's how it works in UK, Spain etc.
There's probably no federal agency less related to the issue of nationalized healthcare than the DHHS.
Maybe not that person above, but I’ve continually voted in support of it and initiatives to expand it
Legally, Microsoft, or any company, cannot use any personal factors in determining who to lay off. If they do, they risk a very real lawsuit. All one needs to do is show some evidence of discrimination, and the EEOC doesn't charge a dime, the worst they will do is deny to pursue. If that happens, most private lawyers will take the case on contingency.
This is the reason you see sweeping cuts without regard to age, sex, etc.
There have also been lawsuits in the past that have settled out of court where a company's layoffs appear to overly inflict damage on one class vs. another, even if the intent was not to do that.
I am not defending these companies at ALL btw. I just have a bit of experience in this area due to the legalities, and I wanted to share it.
I am also not saying that companies don't do this, but the smart ones don't, and the smart ones at least try to at least avoid making it look obvious.
> the EEOC
Which—for the folks not following along aghast at everything—has been sabotaged by recent federal political changes.
https://www.epi.org/blog/trump-is-making-it-easier-for-emplo...
> Is that something we require from companies?
In Germany, yes. For mass layoffs, this absolutely has to be considered. In general, the older the employee is, or if the employee has dependents, the more difficult it gets to both fire them or lay them off.
It looks like Germany's GDP has increased every year in recent memory except 2009 and 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany#Data
"The Stupidity of GDP per Capita"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiymTzsZfoA
How much of this years GDP growth in the USA went to average citizens? What does GDP growth matter if your citizens have zero access to healthcare, can't improve their conditions, can't innovate, can't try new ideas because they are tied to healthcare via their current job?
How much of American GDP growth goes to Billionaires and isn't a useful health metric?
See: Billionaires added record $2.2tn in wealth in 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/dec/31/billionaires-ad...
I would 100% chose to live in Germany than the USA. GDP is one consideration, but QOL more important.
It is, but more generally. In many other countries, it is not so easy to lay off employees as it is in the US. It is also not necessary that your access to healthcare be contingent to your employer's whims.
Not at all - it's legal, but it doesn't garner goodwill either.
Yes
Companies don’t have agency. People do. Compassion is a cross cultural value. Including amongst those that run companies.
For the most part none of us has any “required” obligation to anyone else.
Is it something we require of companies? No. But being a responsible, compassionate human being that considers the totality of circumstance is something I expect of that company’s leaders. Especially a company that has the money and need for technical skills elsewhere in the org.
The golden rule does not stop being true just because you are at work.
Preemptively: duty to shareholders is broader than short term profit maximizing. Avoiding bad PR like this is also in the service of MS shareholders.
As a side note: Nadella moved his home to Canada, while working at MS, so his special needs kid could go to a specialist school. That is absolutely the right choice. The argument that MS should not consider the health of their employees children is horseshit when they allow the CEO to set up house hours away in a different country for that exact reason.
At the end of the day, a kid suffered unnecessarily through no fault of his parents or his own.
Yes I’d say that such people should get extra protections
And that's why people think 5 times before hiring such. It's already super hard to fire people unless they make gross mistakes. It's nearly impossible to fire someone like that. It's stupid.
In the US at least, there are needs-based high-risk insurance programs run by states that do just that.
Even so, while it's not a good argument against layoffs, the fact that it's even considered as such is in itself a reasonable argument against health care being tied to specific employment.
There's a long-circulating mind virus that makes executives believe top-tier engineers don't need their software tested.
Google's QA is pitiful too.
In case of some recent Windows parts, that would need to be compounded by the mistaken belief to have top-tier engineers working for them.
It's always the departments that are closest to the customer that pay the price in my experience. At one company, after killing QA, the support team created their own internal QA process. They were going to deal with the issues anyways, so they wanted to catch as many as they could first.
They have long adopted the mindset to get users as free beta testers. Long gone the tradition that quality matters.
Jerry Berg is the person you're probably thinking of. His YouTube channel is Barnacules Nerdgasm.
He's a super smart programmer, but seems to be suffering from depression since Microsoft laid him off. He often talks about his issues when he livestreams Tech Talk on Saturdays.
> Jerry Berg is the person you're probably thinking of. His YouTube channel is Barnacules Nerdgasm.
Ty, that is him.
Well, you have two distinct problems here.
One is Microsoft releasing shitty software.
The other is a deeper societal problem with healthcare and loyalty between companies and their employees.
For me, they are unrelated problems. In a welfare state, the QA team may have been reaffected to some other tasks within the company and have the health benefits provided by the state, but it wouldn't have made the software less shitty.
Was he the reason shift-left hit mainstream? Recently, smaller non-faang companies followed suit and fired all the qa people. DevOps/SRE people are likely next.
COBRA enables one to continue with the employer's insurance for up to 18 months after a layoff.
Yes, because it’s easy to afford $2000 or $3000 a month when you just got laid off.
> Microsoft pays well. The prudent move is to not increase spending until saving up at a bare minimum 6 months of "runway".
> I live in Washington. My accountant told me stories, one of which was a Microsoftian who got the big job, and promptly bought the most expensive house he could swing. He soon ran into trouble because he didn't have enough left to pay the property tax, and was forced to sell it.
> Never, ever, EVER assume that a high paying job is a guarantee for life.
I do not know why you wrote this. This wasn't a guy who blew all his money on a big house and was forced to sell it when he lost his job.
The guy's kid was born with a low functioning level of Autism that required expensive therapy to treat. You do not choose that. He had savings, but he may be taking care of the kid for the rest of his life. What is he suppose to do? Eat ramen to save up 40 years of out of pocket therapy treatment when he was fired from a position that Microsoft should have kept? No, that is ridiculous.
People have forgotten this, but he did the same with Windows Phone for a while at the very start of his time as CEO. His motto was "cloud first, mobile first" where cloud meant Azure and mobile meant Windows Phone. After some time he gave up and they pivoted into the direction he is now well known for, which was to focus on good developer tooling regardless of OS.
GitHub and VSCode were smart ways to quickly recapture developer mindshare. They felt distinctly un-Microsoft with how open and multiplatform they were.
The Azure Linux friendliness play was essential and smart. Again, Microsoft felt like they were opening up to the world.
But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.
Microsoft spent a lot of energy making Windows more consumer friendly, only to piss it away with Windows 11.
One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.
They'll continue to win in enterprise, but they're losing consumer, gamer, and developer/IC support and mindshare. I've never seen so many people bitch about GitHub as in the last year. You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.
>One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.
No kidding, the totally threw it all away. It used to be that Windows was already the place for gaming. And the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation. But that was a long time ago. Has any Microsoft gaming release exceeded expectations lately? Call of Duty will always sell like hotcakes, but the latest Black Ops is a hot expensive mess that underperformed last year's title.
> the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation
Maybe it won some battles in your part of the world, presumably North America. But the PS3 outsold it globally as its contemporary, and even the PS5 passed the 360 in global lifetime sales as of November 2025: https://www.vgchartz.com/article/466599/ps5-outsells-xbox-36...
Microsoft seems to have decided that they can't make all that much money with gaming. But they are underestimating the mindshare they are losing with that.
Slightly related, they also discontinued most of their PC peripherals in 2023, many of which were quite good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748645
Do you think they'll continue to win in enterprise? As a casual office user, who's had to do some PowerPoint and word docs recently, I found the experience of using office 365 truly miserable. All of them are laggy and horrible to use.
I think by moving onto the cloud they've left themselves open to being disrupted, and when it comes it'll be like Lotus Notes, an extremely quick downfall.
They have enterprise users locked in mainly due to Active Directory, for which there is no good replacement, and to a some extent SharePoint. There's also Office, of course, and you are right that the migration to web tech isn't well taken. I'm thinking of "New Outlook" in particular. They probably plan to EOL classic Outlook when Office 2024 EOLs in 2029. The last stronghold will be Excel. If native Excel ever gets discontinued, then everything Microsoft will have been webshittified™.
Trust me, I really want that to happen, but who has the billions to burn (and the will to use them at that) to build a solid alternative? Most probably, the EU will have a misguided shot at it, out of desperation from the USA, and will subsidise some inadequate local actors. I'm not sure whether it will be good, timely nor sufficient.
Microsoft has never been an end-user-focused company. Almost every successful product they've ever made was to sell to a business for their employees to use. Everything else they seem to either half ass or screw up or lose their passion for at some point.
I think I first came to that realization with windows phone 7/8? The UI was cool looking, but functionality was half-baked and third party app availability was dismal. HOWEVER! You could sign a windows phone into an active directory/365 account and manage the bloody daylights out of it via group policy and the tools to do that were SUPER WELL MADE.
Same is/was true of Microsoft Teams - an utter abomination of a chat client, the search is garbage, the emoji and sticker variety sometimes weird, the client itself randomly uses up 100% CPU for no reason and is just generally buggy... but gosh darnit, MS made sure sysadmins could ban memes and use of certain emoji via policy and gave insane amounts of detail to auditing and record keeping. So sure it's a pile of shit to use, but awesome if you wanna spy on your employees and restrict their every move.
Windows is fun because with the enterprise version, they give all that control to the employers, but with the consumer version they give all that control to advertisers, developers, and themselves.
I think this is also why every consumer-focused product they make either fails instantly, or ends up rotting on the vine and failing after whoever evangelized that product leaves the company (possibly being forced out for not being a "culture fit"). Do I have to go on about zune/windows phone/xbox? Or surface? Or the way they randomly dumped their peripherals product line on another company? lol.
> largely due to enterprise.
And government bribes, and piracy, and giving Windows for free to some Universities in exchange for being included in curriculum.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become IBM
That and Teams is free with an Office 365 subscription (sorry, Microsoft 365 Copilot -- geez).
Same reason why Google Chat and Meet are super popular now despite Slack and Zoom being infinitely better (free with Google Workspace)
Windows 7 was about the best Windows ever got, like 2K and XP. Vista and 8 (and now 11) are the bad ones.
Every other Windows is bad. 95 bad, 98 okayish, ME bad, etc. Win 10 was good and now we have the 11.
Yes, I use Win7 every day!
> You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.
Do you mean Windows Vista instead? Because Windows 7 was probably the last (half-)decent windows (no UI though for tablet, no ads in the OS, no ubiquitous telemetry, no account BS).
Yeah, my mistake. I spent the post-XP era on Linux and specially Ubuntu.
I've been using all three major OS families recently and I'm not enjoying my time on Windows. It's so full of ads, and the Linux / Unix bits feel bolted on.
Windows 7 was the last Windows version to still support the Classic theme: https://betawiki.net/images/d/da/Windows_7_classic_theme.png
> But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.
Forget being “friendly”. GitHub has enormous mindshare and has frankly quite reasonably pricing (far cheaper than GitLab, for example), but the product just sucks lately. The website, while quite capable (impressively so at times) is so slow and buggy that it’s hard to benefit from any of its capabilities.
It’s gotten to the point where, every time I try a newish capability, I ask myself “how bad can this possibly be,” and it invariably exceeds expectations.
GitHub needs to take a step back and focus on fixing things. Existing features should work, be coherent, and be fast. If it takes longer to load a diff in the web viewer than it takes to pull the entire branch and view the diff locally, something is wrong.
If a coworker reviews my code, I should not sitting right next to them, literally looking at the same website they’re on, and wondering why they see the correct context for their review comment but I don’t.
> "focus on good developer tooling"
So "developers, developers, developers"?
The ability to know that giving up might be the right path forwards, is very useful.
People don't understand that this is MS culture. It doesn't mater the CEO. They'll always move to lock customers into the useless products they create.
So the clunky user interface and experience and the jumbled and meaningless features locks you in somehow? Or what's the spiel here?
I actually just had to independently tag him on LinkedIn after my son had an issue with his Minecraft account. Their account recovery flow directs you to call on the phone and then when you call on the phone, it directs you to use the account recovery flow. When we went to their Support page we received a stack trace from asp.net. After wasting several hours, we screenshot of the error and tagged him on LinkedIn and filed a credit card dispute.
In my LinkedIn post I questioned if they can’t be trusted with a $30 game license how can we trust them with a multi million dollar copilot rollout? I pointed out that it seems like this is more than just a lack of human support. It is a company that: does not care about their own brand, the up-time of their own systems, their own employees, or their customers.
I question if their goal is to simply extract money under unethical conditions. I question whether they expect the customer to just repeatedly purchased the game every time the company fails to deliver it. I also questioned to him why he has hiring managers bragging on LinkedIn that they expect people to output 1 million lines of code per month, so they can rewrite the operating system in rust, while their systems are off-line.
I noticed an immediate dip in quality of the products when Nadella came into power. Even Windows 8, for all the faults of the Metro UX, felt like a complete product.
I feel the same, but in hindsight it makes a ton of sense once you consider that Microsoft customers have not, and for a very long time, been its end users. Instead, it's been those (mostly technically incompetent) FortuneXXX middle/top-managers and IT support department managers that they hooked on to Azure & al. via obscene service agreements (for no better cause than "everyone else is doing it anyway" and "nobody ever gets fired for placating MS stuff everywhere").
Microsoft is just profiteering off of their defacto monopoly, selling more is their only metric, the "what" is secondary.
True, its insane how bad MS teams performs and is built and this is coming from a company that have written their own OS, Programming languages, frameworks etc.
Today Microsoft didn’t write any OS and had only partial participation in programming language or framework. They open sourced .NET and in Windows 10 you can still see same behavior and internal as XP.
I wonder how many real top-tier engineers are there at Microsoft and how hard they have to work to prevent it from failing. It’s not uncommon in any bigger than probably 200 people company - the belief of having a lot of talents while having maybe 1% of the company capable of doing anything working.
Nadella had it easy when he took over. Stock soared before he did anything. The only improvements seemed to be made by others using the CEO change to try & push a few better agendas.
Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.
I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.
I miss Balmer in what concerns Windows development culture.
As someone who lived through a small portion of the internal mess that was Vista, I DO NOT miss him at all. I worked there 6 months and his bizarre management directives were obvious. Behind every single developer push was a lock-in push, too. Every "open" product had to have some form of lock in or vendor-only advantage. None of it was driving customer success, it was all about enforcement and lock-in from top down.
Meanwhile nowadays everyone at Windows is a Web developer.
He seemed to me like such a total d**k, sorry to say but the energy I got from him and the things he did (throwing chairs etc), brrr. Also his public shows were so hard and pushy. This is not ok even for a CEO. A toxic work environment is never acceptable.
If I had worked for MS I would have hated him and the company he forged. I don't like Nadella much (note, there's very few 'leaders' I like) but at least he seems to be a nice person.
At least Windows development wasn't done with Chrome.
Potato potato, it is still part of Chrome.
That's a good point. The new electron apps like teams and "new" outlook are terrible.
Developers, developers, developers, developers[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fcSviC7cRM
Not aiming at you specifically, but I am tired of seeing shitty behaviour that is dismissed as best as incompetence. I do not want to believe someone becomes the CEO of one of the strongest organization on earth without a strategy sixth sense. So, why would he be shoving AI everywhere ? What does he know that we don't about it ? Is it just plan surveillance ?
I think Hanlon‘s razor becomes a lot weaker the more the offender has to gain from their action.
Nadella is doing his job of shareholder value maximization quite well.
Concerning AI he is also cluless about how to use it well - or at all - for their non-AI product portfolio.
For the big companies, you are no longer a customer - you are a source of training data. Windows feels like a data extraction platform at this point. Well, I am Steaming on Linux now. Have fun with your AI.
It's definitely not ignorance of AI that is the problem. It's entirely enshittification and number goes up.
It's just exceedingly bizarre watching this AI stuff and not except that global capitalism is deranged dick measuring.
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