Duh, it isn’t for you. It’s for advertising and advertisers. And their AI push to solve wages. Windows 11 isn’t for you.
Because people keep telling MS that they can keep the slop coming by using Windows. The answer is simple: stop using the slop OS. Everything else is just cope.
My view on the versions of Windows:
- 95 to 98: decent experiences because of a lack of competition back then, but bad at security and stability, but no one really bothered that much back then about such things
- ME: basically 98, just a low-effort cash grab
- 2000: promising new platform based on the superior NT kernel, but not mature yet for widespread consumer use
- XP: probably the first widely usable consumer OS, decent, but it took until SP2 to fix security and stability problems
- Vista: beta version of 7, sold as non-beta
- 7: the last decent Windows version. Windows dominance starts slowly dying after this one
- 8, 8.1: basically still 7 but with an UI experiment gone horribly wrong, plus the first beginnings of unwanted cloud integrations
- 10 (First Windows version with Nadella as CEO): okay so we just need to not do weird UI experiments and then we’re probably fine. Oh, by the way you can actually put spyware into everything with some opt-out options and not really get into trouble for it, and this will give us extra profit? Let’s fucking go!
- 11: okay so this spyware and cloud integration stuff went great overall, so let’s push even more! Also let’s add AI stuff which is also even more spyware and cloud integration stuff
- <next version>: will feature even more AI and cloud integrations and thus even more spyware that will be even harder to circumvent. It’s likely that at this point or the very next version afterwards, that your Windows will likely turn your once “Personal” Computer into a fully Microsoft-owned and operated one.
Microsoft is a public company, which means it is driven by investors. Investors demand the promise of constant growth in a finite market that they’ve already been dominating (for now), which forces Microsoft to resort to “innovation” in ways to be anti consumer and in flashy features that sound cool and futuristic in an investor presentation but that no user really wants.
When you dominate a market, you stop selling your product to the consumer and start selling it to investors. It is an unbelievably wasteful system if you think of it, wasting tons of resources into making a product worse.
They’ll go the same way Intel currently is at some point. Hopefully Linux development stays stable and we don’t wind up with an AMD equivalent picking up the pieces and continuing the enshittification
I completely skipped XP and ran Win2k past EOL until I was basically forced to update to 7 due to software incompatibility.
By that point, of course, my only PC still running Windows was my gaming rig.
Honestly—other than the multiple clipboards thing—it sounds like they just want KDE.
(And Pipewire)
Microsoft giving me something I don’t need is tolerable. Microsoft giving me something I don’t want… That’s what this is. This is bull shit!!!
Frankly, I’ve never got the touchscreen laptop thing. I got given one by my high school years ago. Used it for over a year. Fucking never used the touch screen functionality, I tried using it to draw with a couple times and it was just a worse experience than using the Wacom tablet I already had.
Like someone must like them, people keep asking other companies to include them in their laptop. But I’ve never seen a reason to want a touch screen in a laptop, and only ever been annoyed with it when I got one.
I actually like the touchscreen, but it’s best on a more tablet style like a surface than a traditional laptop. It gives me the option to use it as a touch movie or music player or better yet, a silent way to use audio recording software. Nothing sucks on a track like mouse clicks and keyboard keys.
I actually had a gen 1 surface in high school. I despised it. It had the worst keyboard I’ve ever used, like, it had to be flat on a hard surface. If I tried typing with it on my lap, the keyboard would flex and hit random keys or click the mouse, jumping me half way across a document or opening something.
I imagine they’ve gotten better about the keyboard since then, but still, it was a genuinely awful design.
As for recording, I usually just use key binds, and my keyboard is pretty silent so I don’t tend to get that picked up by the microphone (I have an external mic that’s somewhat directional so that helps also). I imagine it would be really bad with a mechanical keyboard, but, I don’t really care for them, so never been an issue.
I used tablet mode of my laptops a lot, but having e-inks books too, I find that’s a touchscreen could’ve been replaced with a couple of buttons they had for switching pages (and maybe a touchpad too?).
Like, the most I wanted from tablet mode is reading internet pages, scrolling them and tapping links. Rarely I needed any input from the virtual keyboard or random taps somewhere. Some simple controls could do the trick without pretending it can draw stuff like a real tablet.
They’re great when you’re busy ‘moving around’ your device, like when doing stuff around the house, and you need to return to the desktop and just click a simple thing but don’t know where the cursor is. Also good for circling and drawing on screenshots.
I just use my phone when I’m moving around a lot. and I don’t tend to mark up screenshots often enough for that to necessitate a major design feature of my computer.
Have you considered a calculator with spyware? Err, I mean AI calculator?
Same as it ever was.
And water is wet.
