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Are you out of your damned mind? My experience with every Microsoft product I use has gotten worse to the point where I'm planning on quitting Windows after support for Windows 10 finally ends in only a year.
I mean, lets start with Windows 10. They keep randomly pushing ads into my default experience. Windows updates will constantly start shoving ads into my start menu, lock screen, etc, that I then I have to look up how to turn off. Basic fucking shit like "Solitaire" has been turned into some Games as a Service crap they expect me to pay a monthly fee for in order to skip ads. On solitaire!! Windows 10 was the start of Microsoft pushing updates that, oops, brick your fucking computer. Our bad.
And good god, when it comes to my work, where I'm also locked into a Microsoft ecosystem, to this day nobody knows the correct settings for IIS to keep a web application running instead of going to sleep. I have to keep an instance of Docker running on Windows Server, but every time there is a Windows Update it somehow manages to fucking break "Boot Docker on Startup" and I have to run around figuring out some new goofy script or workaround to make it happen.
It is unfathomable to me that anybody can claim Microsoft's products have gotten better for the user since Satya took over. It's been downhill in a truly unprecedented manner, with unreliable software that is constantly shoving ads into every visible surface. It's enough that I'd rather go back to Win9X, rebooting my computer every day because it was so unstable, versus dealing with the cavalcade of forced advertising and things breaking out from under me that modern Windows represents.
I've decided to ditch Windows at home rather than move to Win11. What's your preferred OS?
I wish I knew. I'm still fence sitting myself. Unless a compelling argument presents itself, I'm likely to default to Ubuntu.
That's where I am. Though I made it as far as downloading the Mint iso a couple weeks ago.
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One part of the old user experience you seem to be forgetting is the part where you plunk down the equivalent of between $250 and $450 in today's money every few years just to have an updated system. And pay $100 for web browsing software. And pay, pay, pay for every little thing that didn't come preinstalled on your $5,000 computer. The days when giving away something for free was enough to prompt an antitrust lawsuit.
That was because computer hardware was improving at a rapid pace in the days of the Internet Explorer anti-trust suit. Nowadays, there's more freeware (free as in speech and beer!), most PC games worth playing can still be run on hardware from a decade-plus ago, and some of the code monkeys competing with the H1Bs being discussed in this thread sometimes pop out a very useful piece of open-source programming that might solve some need you have.
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Wait, how do you get all this stuff? I lobotomized my copy of 10 with powershell when I first got it, and set it up to look just like XP. I'd go fucking nuclear if I ever saw an ad in my operating system.
I don't recall every one, but the latest was they added "Weather and More" as a widget to my pristine lock screen. The "and more" is ads. Nonstop obnoxious ass ads. I had to find just the right submenu in Settings to remove it. Which brings me to another gripe. I can't fucking believe how the settings are still scattered across a Windows 8/10/11 style "Settings" menu and a Win9x/2k/xp "Control Panel" menu.
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