Based on some Mastodon posts from the other day, and some complaints on Cohost yesterday. Written while sleep deprived.
It has been about a month since our work machine was forcibly upgraded to Windows 11.
Some thoughts have mellowed; eventually, even our neurospicy brain gets used to some aspects of the cheese being moved.
Some have become more aggravating than I thought; it isn't just that the right click menu now makes use of mystery meat navigation, it's that the location of the icons to click on changes.
Snipping Tool is aggravatingly slow compared to how it used to be under Windows 10 - the CPU in work laptop might not be great, but it was good enough before.
Muscle memory is still struggling with the taskbar being forcibly locked to the bottom of the screen, when we've had it on the side since before we first bought an ultra-wide monitor.
Are all of these things fixable with shady patchers, registry tweaks, or other third party software? Yes - but work machine makes them a non-option (beyond maybe some tweaks in HKEY_CURRENT_USER). And all of these options require more maintenance if they were to be used on a personal machine. When Windows 11 first launched, there were registry tweaks to put the taskbar back on the side. Now there aren't. If you have one of the patchers installed, all it takes is one surprise update and suddenly your computer doesn't boot.
And this is an enterprise install - meaning that it's at least slightly protected from Microsoft's worst excesses, in terms of preinstalled Candy Crush, or displaying an ad popup for Bing when you launch Chrome, or now, random ads in the Start Menu. At least right now, there's an option to switch most Copilot things off (or at least hide them).
I do genuinely wonder where the breaking point is for most people - the point where learning something new is less frustrating than dealing with Microsoft's death by a thousand cuts. Because we would rather deal with the issues of something we've chosen than something new MS have imposed - at least outside of work; cases where we get to make that choice.
We started the work of moving from Windows to Mac for daily use years ago. 1 . Part of that was the massive jump in the quality of Apple's hardware with the move to their own CPUs - but mostly, it was that we no longer trusted the direction for Windows as a personal OS. That distrust has only grown with the announcement of Copilot worming its way into every aspect of the OS and future hardware; I do not, for example, need a button blinking in the taskbar to let me know that MS can slurp this file up to write a summary, or ever want to use MSPaint Credits to generate a stolen image based on it.
We're still dependent on MS for other things - our email is still hosted on Exchange Online. For better or worse, PowerShell is still the scripting language we're most comfortable with. We're trying out Nova, but we're still finding some cases where VSCode is the better option (more on Nova at some point).
But I don't think there's much MS could do to bring our trust in Windows back, not with their current direction. We still love the Surface Pro form factor (used one as our main machine for years) - but even if the SnapDragon X Elite AI Chip for Copilot with Copilot key version smoked every single Macbook, we wouldn't be interested.
There are already gaming handhelds more powerful than the Steam Deck - but Windows is an albatross around their necks.
Trust is a complex thing; hard to gain, easy to lose.
Maybe someone who doesn't get it is right now asking Copilot what it'd take to win people back.
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(For everything except gaming, which - outside of VR - has been served well by the Steam Deck. VR is the only reason why gaming laptop still has Windows 10; Linux VR performance isn't where we'd like it when we last checked)
