So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...
2. "becoming more frequent and harder to solve" how much more frequent and harder? Things works pretty fine during Windows 10, but these days I run into a bug in Windows 11 every other day myself.
It would be a surprise if this has more to do with QA from 2014 than vibe coding.
For example: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-on-windows-10-annive...
These things have been keeping happening.
I doubt "studies" exist and proving every little assumption takes too much effort as per Brandolini's law.
They won't fix the fundamentals, the next API layer will just be built over the broken one.
The only major Windows version release that wasn't just a point upgrade that was stable in the last century was Window 7 and even then some people would argue this was just a point upgrade for Windows Vista.
I'm sure that Microsoft greatly reducing their dedicated QA engineers in 2014 had at least some lasting impact on quality, but I don't think we can blame it on bad releases or bungled Patch Tuesdays without better evidence. Windows 10 is not a good proof for, consider Vista had 10 times as many issues with fully staffed QA teams in the building.
Vista is different. Vista was _not_ bad. In fact, it was pretty good. The design decisions Microsoft made with Vista were the right thing to do.
Most of the brokenness that happened on Vista's release was broken/unsigned drivers (Vista required WHQL driver signing), and UAC issues. Vista also significantly changed the behavior of Session 0 (no interaction allowed), which broke a lot of older apps.
Vista SP2 and the launch version of 7 were nearly identical, except 7 got a facelift too.
Of course, the "Vista Capable" stickers on hardware that couldn't really run it didn't help either.
But all things considered - Vista was not bad. We remember it as bad for all the wrong reasons. But that was (mostly) not Microsoft's fault. Vista _did_ break a lot of software and drivers - but for very good reasons.
We're way past the "release issues" phase and into the "it's pure incompetence" phase.
Oh wow, I hadn't even paid any attention to that. To me Windows 11 was released on October 1, 2024, when the LTSC version came out, and is roughly when I upgraded my gaming PC to the said LTSC build from the previous Windows 10 LTSC build.
IIRC Windows 7 internally was 6.1, because drivers written for Vista were compatible with both.
As the tech person for the family, I upgraded no less than 6 PCs to Windows 7. Instant win.
EDIT: Downvote as much as you want, but it is the truth. Vista, ME, and 8.x are horrible Windows versions.
It's a very superficial "truth", in the "I don't really understand the problem" kind of way. This is visible when you compare to something like ME. Vista introduced a lot of things under the hood that have radically changed Windows and were essential for follow-up versions but perhaps too ambitious in one go. That came with a cost, teething issues, and user accommodation issues. ME introduced squat in the grand scheme of things. It was a coat of paint on a crappy dead-end framework, with nothing real to redeem it. If these are the same thing to you then your opinion is just a very wide brush.
Vista's real issue was that while foundational for what came after, people don't just need a strong foundation or a good engine, most barely understand any of the innards of a computer. They need a whole package and they understand "slow" or "needs faster computer" or "your old devices don't work anymore". But that's far from trash. The name Vista just didn't get to carry on like almost every other "trash" launch edition of Windows.
And something I need to point out to everyone who insists on walking on the nostalgia lane, Windows XP was considered trash at launch, from UI, to performance, to stability, to compatibility. And Windows 7 was Vista SP2 or 3. Windows 10 (or maybe Windows 8 SP2 or 3?) was also trash at launch and now people hang on to it for dear life.
Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”
Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.
Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
I think you're underestimating the QA burden for large parts of the company. When I worked in payments at MS, the ratio of QA to dev after the cuts was probably on the order of dozens to one, if not a hundred or more once you threw in Xbox/Windows/etc accessibility QA from across the organization and all the other people like lawyers involved in handling over a hundred jurisdictions. I was little more than a frontend line cook and even I had three QA people reporting directly to me; two of them helping write tests so they ostensibly should have been automating themselves out of a job.
There is a lot of manual testing when you have a complex system like that where not everything can be properly stubbed out, emulated, or replaced with a test API key. They also have to be kept around to help with painful bursty periods (for us it was supporting PSD2, SCA, or 3DS2, forgot which). Payments is obviously an outlier because there is a lot of legal compliance, but the people I knew in Cloud/Windows also had lots of QA per dev.
I wouldn't be surprised if the degradation in feature parity of newer Windows software was a result of this loss of QA. Without the QA, the developers have to be less ambitious in what they implement in order to meet release schedules, and since they don't have experienced QA they can't modify the older codebases at all to extend them.
* Stories like this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250610-00/?p=11...
MS had the dominant operating system in the world, and keeping its userbase and its ~monopoly dividend would have been more profitable as a business than doing... everything it's done in the past twenty years. Selling software that all the people use all the time just has a lot less opportunity for growth than making new software, according to Investor Brain.
Similar in automotive safety related systems like brake, steering or powertrain.
Few is writing function code to how much is requirement engineering, FMEA and writing tests and testing.
I have a few pretty awesome teams stuck managing windows. They find bugs all of the time. The process of fixing them now practically requires a detachment of druids and Stonehenge to track where in the windows/lunar/solar cycles we are and how to deal with the bullshit & roadblocks the support and product teams throw up. If you fall for their tricks, you’ll miss the feature window… no fix for 18 months.
It used to be much easier as a customer in ye olden times, and I never felt that the counterparty at Microsoft was miserable or getting punished for doing their jobs. We feel that now as customers. You didn’t establish relationships with engineers like with other vendors, but there was a different vibe.
The focus of the company moved in to Azure, service ops, etc.
It was a partnership. I miss it.
Instead, if the QA role was the dominant and better paid title, you'd immediately see an improvement in that partnership. I don't think that you need subordinate staff in the QA role at all.
And for what its worth, I'm that guy. I am a strong technical software developer, but I would much rather test and poke at code bases, finding problems, working with a "lead" developer, and showing them all their quality mistakes. If I could have that role at my pay grade, I'd be there.
Quality testers are so extremely valuable.
Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.
When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.
QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy.
* Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.
QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.
I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
The classical joke is: (this variant from Brenan Keller[0])
A QA engineer walks into a bar.
- Orders a beer.
- Orders 0 beers.
- Orders 99999999999 beers.
- Orders a lizard.
- Orders -1 beers.
- Orders a ueicbksjdhd.
First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is.
The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.
[0] https://xcancel.com/brenankeller/status/1068615953989087232?...
If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.
Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.
I don't have time to deal with phone issues-it should just work so I can get on with my day.
Hearing that Apple were dedicating time to stop features and go after stability is exactly what I want to hear.
1. SDETs (software design engineer in test) - same pay scale and hiring requirements as SDEs, they did mostly automated testing and wrote automated test harnesses.
2. STEs (software test engineer) - lower pay scale, manual testing, often vendors. MS used to have lots of STE ftes but they fired most of them in the early 2000s (before I joined in 2007).
An ideal ratio of SDETs to SDEs was 1 to 1, but then SDET teams would have STE vendors doing grunt work.
UI/UX quality in MS products dipped noticeably after the STE role was eliminated.
1. Deep user/product expertise. QA (and support) almost always knows more about how users (including expert users) actually use the product than dev.
2. Isolation of quality from dev leadership politics. It should be unsurprising that asking an org to measure and report the quality of its own work is fraught with peril. Even assuming good intentions, having the same person who has been developing and staring at a feature for months test it risks incomplete testing: devs have no way to forget all the insider things they know about a feature.
Going backwards in stability is out of character.
The only person I heard was writing perfect code was Donald Knuth. And even he had bugs in its code.
A move no doubt encouraged by c-suites to demonstrate how effective LLMs are in the budget tally.
I think more competition is better than less
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsof...
1. Subscriptions instead of discrete paid versions removes the incentive to put out a good product. In the past, if the new version was bad it was a direct financial hit. But now there's no direct financial feedback loop, as long as it's not so terrible that you leave the subscription entirely
2. I think Windows 11 is the first time there's no other version of Windows still in support you can use to "ride it out"
Well there is the violations of Fitts law with the movement of the start button to the centre of the bar?
But it does make it look slightly more Mac! They should make sure the next upgrade moves the corner to grab away from the actual corner, and that the cursor change for grabbing it doesn't always trigger if they want to really rip it off.
thank god microsoft is the only entity on the planet that uses telemetry or violates privacy. get rid of them and we're in a new age!
I will never ever understand this. Development and QA are two different mindsets. You _can_ do both, but you* can't be great at both.
* There's always exceptions, yes, yes.
I don’t think this is just Microsoft. Few engineers and visionaries that started these big companies are still at the helm.
It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.
This is a feeling commonly shared here.
I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market, almost 70 years after it invented it, despite continuous mismanagement for probably 40 years.
Microsoft dominates the PC market 40 years after taking it over with MS-DOS, and despite multiple debacles (Windows Millennium, Windows Vista, now Win 11, probably others I'm forgetting).
Microsoft dominates the office suite market 30+ years after taking it over with MS Office, despite some huge controversies (the Ribbon still annoys nerds, to this day). More than that, Microsoft has leverage MS Office to become the close second cloud provider after AWS despite starting far behind it.
Google and Apple will probably dominate the smartphone and tablet markets for a long time, after taking over those markets 10+ years ago.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and a company with a massive moat can outlive most of us. I'd actually turn this on its head by saying that assuming a new comer will topple the incumbent "any day now" is the irrational approach to a market.
Companies continue to pay the IBM tax, but the way IBM writes support contracts incentivizes customers to work very hard at moving workloads to Windows/UNIX. IBM is choosing "Better to reign in [mainframe], then serve in [commodity compute]."
(All apologies to John Milton)
It’s rare for MS to do just the embrace and extend part of EEE, unless Copilot is the latent implementation of ‘extinguish’.
Although. These companies don't "die" - it's more the consumers end up being abandoned in favour of B2B?
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.
Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages.
Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry
I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch.
That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.
It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
Here is a whole movement that I think believes otherwise:
https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-recl...
On the other hand, I've heard conflicting takes from attorneys in the corporate world.
It’s a cultural problem really, where too many people who study business and economics have been taught this idea that it’s a moral necessity that businesses maximise profit for shareholders (to the point where plenty of people even wrongly believe that’s a legal requirement!), but it’s an ideological position that has only caused once great companies to fail and huge damage to our economies.
Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
Datadog is. And snowflake. Even Google is. But MS does not like it's centered around data/metrics.
Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics.
If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.
So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.
Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.
Either that or a mix of tablets with detachable keyboards or Chromebooks, none of them GNU/Linux powered.
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
Also: do you have a reference for “a couple years ago Microsoft [made] LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production”?
I know they started investing, mentioning future benefits, but don’t remember them saying their Windows development team (heavily) relying on it.
"The bear case for AI is that bringing 10x or 100x or 1000x more intelligence to America will not change anything because U.S. institutions are already designed to ignore or waste intelligence and have no idea what to do with any more of it."
so yeah we're being sold a bag of air
Windows 2000 may have been bearable but windows has always been shitty.
wouldn't a for-profit company just balance the workforce for the productivity gained to increase overall profit?
some person is 10x 'more productive' (whatever that means) , let's cut 9 jobs.
Although to your grander point, employment during the LLM-embrace period seems fairly stable.[0]
(2) LLMs are a force multiplier. If you start with a negative number, then your coefficient makes things worse.
(3) Microsoft has never been a place of quality. It's not organized for that, it doesn't have that as its philosophy, and so you should never be surprised that it doesn't deliver that.
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
I'm not sure what your take is, but this reads like goalpost shifting.
If one of the biggest orgs that practically mandates some amount of LLM use cannot surface productivity gains from them after using them for several years, then that speaks volumes.
Reality has a way of showing itself eventually.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
Double-click folder name, wait 5 seconds, douhle click next folder name, wait another 5 seconds. As such, I've moved my working directories out of the bubble in which OneDrive is (corporately) configured to operate.
This is 2026. All this processing power, storage and memory capacity and speed, network bandwidth, and we're regressing thirty years of performance gains. Bang up job Microsoft. I'm glad I managed to personally extricate myself from that particular squirrel grip a while back.
A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.
I'm not saying that people should be sacked for just one mistake, unless it is a pretty large one (criminal e.g.). But I'd say system programmers should be allowed to make the same mistake three times maximum. I think that's pretty generous. If the culture does not allow enough time for reflection and education, then that's a different story.
The other programmers do not need to hold the same standards simply because their code (presumably) impact less.
Web dev can leak shitton of valuable data
Maybe this will allow you to change it from a OneDrive folder to somewhere else?
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.
So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
You can't just pay for it like the Home or Pro edition because Microsoft is not interested in actually selling an OS as a product to users, but https://massgrave.dev/ is your friend.
At some point there might be compatibility issues with Windows 10 (especially with it now being EOL) so if your a gamer 11 LTSC might be the better choice.
*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
ATM windows still has enough of a moat that they can comfortably do the former.
Their moat, for now, makes this possible.
https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...
Combined with some digital independence movements outside the US, I have some hopes that Windows monopoly starts to crumble.
Apple doubled their marketshare since the M1 chip came out.
You can just go out and buy laptops from multiple OEMs with Linux preinstalled, and it’ll run all your business apps (Slack, Google Workspaces, Zoom, Spotify, etc, everything works). That would have been unheard of in 2010.
You can even play a huge number of Windows games on Linux, and the most popular PC “console” is a Linux system from Valve (with another releasing this year). Microsoft has no control over the PC gaming market like it did back in the heyday of DirectX.
I think Microsoft should be all-hands-on-deck trying to build reasons for customers to use Windows.
I personally think Windows 11 is pretty good and is the most “going in the right direction” version we’ve seen in a long time, but it could be better. Yeah there have been missteps but the windows team does seem more free to just add stuff they wish had been in Windows for years but never got approval to go for.
OEM laptops with Linux distributions pre-installed are only available on online shops known to HN/Reddit demographics.
edit: if it doesn't translate well, I'm just fucking with you
Apple has close to 20% of new PC marketshare globally which is too much to represent only the high end of the market.
Lenovo and Dell are not some fly by night unknown PC manufacturers.
The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
Those people won't fuss with installing linux and getting rid of Microsoft even though Windows is doing nothing for them that Linux cannot do just as easily.
If there are people in your life that do not use computers to make money or play video games or edit photos and videos but they do use computers, swap them to linux and let them get on with their lives.
Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.
You run your Windows Server as a DHCP server? That's $5/mo for the clients to get a DHCP lease.
Of course, one CAL covers all services for the entire client, but it's still funny to me.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.
Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.
I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.
But what about physical machines? Exactly how many repeatable update tests on physical machines are done? You get a combinatorial explosion if you need to test on 100 different configurations for hardware and you have 100 different starting points in your pre-update OS image. But something like that (10k tests on physical machines, millions for VM's) is what I would _expect_ they are doing.
> Repeat steps 1 and 2 multiple times to trigger the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).
What exactly was wrong with pressing f8?
If your device is working, after an update there are only two options, either it keeps working or it doesn't. Why roll the dice?
I think the more realistic danger is that software eventually stops supporting Win10, but I'm still playing XP and Vista games here, so even that seems far fetched.
Boot loop: Can't system restore. Can't roll back updates. Can't reset PC. Can't even enter safe mode.
All options ran into unexpected errors and cancelled out. Only option left was to shut down or "restart".
Had to clean install and attach the old virtual drive to a new installation to copy files across then copy the new installation's disk back to the old system as a replacement to ensure it was able to activate.
Seriously considering if I even need Windows anymore.
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
(part of me actually wishes it would happen, ngl).
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
I dunno what the fuck they're smoking at M$ HQ, it's truly baffling.
Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
It's particularly great Monday morning on your phone if you require 2FA to sign in to work.
Why is windows literally worse than Fedora? I'm not exaggerating, I just can't understand.
Despite news to the contrary, the majority of Windows updates don't break anything for the majority of users. You only hear about the breakage
No option to say "don't show again". If anyone knows how to permanently disable this intrusive Windows 11 propaganda screen, please share. I tried searching for a solution but the one I found - a registry change, didn't work.
Anyways, it is possible!
But no, they have to go out of their way to accelerate the enshittification of Windows.
I think I might know...
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
I will say it for you -- they're moving too fast with AI.
I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].
Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.
Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.
Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.
For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1649940/microsoft-reca...
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-receive-an-eve... and https://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-yanks-windows-updat... and https://www.404techsupport.com/2015/03/12/kb3033929-may-caus... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...
(FWIW, Crowdstrike has also crashed Linux systems: https://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2024/04/msg00202.html)
I, for some inexplicable reason, totally forgot that the whole Crowdstrike debacle was so bad because they could directly distribute faulty code to running systems, bypassing MSFT, staggered roll outs, etc.
I, again total mistake on my part, somehow had the mistaken memory that the changes were distributed via Windows Update, when the opposite being the case was what made that so bad.
Basically, mea culpa, honestly simple error and thanks for calling it out.
IMO, it's all traceable to their decision to lay off their dedicated QA teams in 2014
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
A fresh install of a later Service Pack Windows XP or Vista did, again purely in my recollection, behaved a lot more stably on the same system to a fresh install of an earlier instance.
8.1 also is of particular note (unpopular UX not withstanding), it worked incredibly solidly on a Netbook with a big colourful sticker proudly proclaiming an entire Gigabyte of memory back in the day, even when using it for image editing via GIMP, for what it's worth.
Gets?
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
I'm a longtime Microsoft fanboy, but even I wait a couple of weeks before updating anything, unless there's an actual problem I need the fix for.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
There have also been great updates to PowerToys recently that I wish were easily available on other systems, but that's not a W11 specific thing.
Finally, I really like the UI (but that's obviously subjective! and if you really care about customization, Linux clearly is the best pick for you).
My Lenovo dock ethernet has gone from not working on Linux and being fine on windows to the other way around.
I do not share your enthusiasm. And since dumped windows entirely after the latest update. Last time I installed windows it took me longer to disable all adds and spyware than to actually install it, another reason for switching.
In the taskbar I only have the most used icons. And the opened program instances are separated from the icons. That was doable on Win 10 and I think Win 7 too, using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, which is now dysfunct. But the same author has created Windhawk, which does the same plus some other cool things.
The Explorer is useless as ever. I am still using Total Commander with its filter-as-you-type, rename tool and button bars.
What I still miss is a tool like Timeshift on Linux Mint.
If I can get all these on Windows 10, that would be wonderful.
That's exactly it. I don't want to install third party software whenever possible. If I need to do more complex formatting, I open VSCode (already installed) and start to write in Markdown. In rare cases where I need a fully capable rich text editor, I use Google Docs.
Otherwise off the top of my head I don’t find Win11 much better or worse than Win10.
I can't point to a single thing that Windows 11 does particularly well.
With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. It needs an annoying turn-off-turn-on workaround for it to even output to the second monitor. The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable.
Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so.
So here I am using Windows 11, and thanks to the more powerful hardware, it's pretty fast and smooth, outputting at 240 Hz.
The Xbox app is bad and I don't like the Microsoft store, but other than that I have no major complaints.
Except maybe when I was trying to use the XMP profile of my memory. It works now, maybe a BIOS update improved that.
I understood the complaint to be a need to restart it during use because of bugs.