This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My reply won’t be culture war focused BUT it is truly insane how poorly Microsoft has handled windows.
Consider that Apple has undergone a major architecture change and is a year out from fully phasing out Intel processors. This came with HUGE performance enhancements that make everything feel much snappier, not to mention battery life on mobile. One of the major notes on M1 was that it is ready the moment your MacBook lid opens. I’m sure a ton of work went into rearchitecting and rethinking core components to get there.
It’s shocking how performant and smooth macOS is. The beach ball is rarely, if ever, seen. They’ve had 2 major redesigns, which never feel half baked. They had enough sway over their developer community to get most of them to make Rosetta versions of apps that run better on ARM. But even fully emulated software runs better than it did on intel.
Meanwhile Windows 11 is like lipstick on a pig. They keep painting over the cruft that’s built up since windows vista, but have never actually rethought how the system works. They literally can’t because so many customers rely on old components they maintain compatibility for. Control panel is still kicking around, window scaling is still broken, etc etc etc. They have no pull over their developer community at all, so they can’t make hard choices that better the OS. Sure, they’re doing cool stuff like WSL and the terminal app. But everything is fundamentally just reskinned aero from 2007 and there’s no sense of vision.
It’s also janky as hell. Windows flash and resize when you click edit mode in Excel, a Microsoft first party app. If you have a filetype you want to open in a program that’s not in the default list, you get sent to file explorer to find the right exe file in program files (still have to see if it’s in x86). Every application install has a wizard and uninstalling an app probably needs a wizard too. No wonder Satya Nadella hates windows.
That’s why these ai features feel so dumb. They’re stuck maintaining support for old enterprise apps and everything is frozen in time as a result. I loath using my windows 11 ai enabled laptop with solid specs. It dies in like 2 hours and can never keep up with me. I wish they’d have made the right choices 10 years ago so I might instead be working with a modern and fluid OS.
If you're not using a Unix based system in 2025 what are you even doing?
Getting stuff actually done instead of fighting with UI that is even worse than Windows.
Ubuntu UI is very good these days, and MacOS is known for its UI. You hardly ever have to use the Terminal these days unless you want to (which you should, writing commands to do a simple task is faster than the multiple clicks normally needed to do the same thing via GUI).
You still have to use crappy Linux-equivalent software designed by the kind of people who are convinced that Office 97 was the best Office.
...but it was? This ribbon nonsense makes it so much harder to do things.
More options
Context Copy link
These days I just use Google Docs which is browser based. Exactly the same product on Windows vs Unix. Microsoft Office is basically dead (plus if you really like Office there's an online version which works on Linux).
It depends on what you're using it for. For basic shit, Google Docs is okay. When using it for work, it's impossible. I had a job a few years ago where they wanted us to do everything in Docs so a current edition of our work was always available on the cloud. I flat out refused to do this and just did it in Office and uploaded everything, much to my bosses' consternation. It was a 1099 job so they technically couldn't tell me how to do my work, and now I use Office at work. But my early attempts to comply with Google Docs led to me slamming my head on the desk.
I know some attorneys in private practice who use Google Docs for everything, including appellate briefing. No idea how they do it. That would drive me insane.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've got an old Fuchsia prototype laying around in my office somewhere. And IIRC some Nest devices are running it.
More options
Context Copy link
Using Windows systems for business at work and at my third places, with minimal downtime and zero tinkering. That’s what I’m doing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Once upon a time the hardware diversity of the PC ecosystem would have been considered its strength. But nowadays it's clear that the absolute zoo of hardware that Windows has to run on its holding it back.
Spend any time in PC BIOS settings to get a glimpse of the horror. MacOS simply does not have to deal with this shit. Apple can dictate whatever it wants from the hardware and it's there in the next year, with drivers all written by Apple.
Microsoft meanwhile takes decades to whip hardware vendors into shape enough to get (e.g.) a Secure Boot infrastructure in place and it's widely considered a joke because of how bad each manufacturer is at implementing it.
To be fair to Microsoft, they have been bitten several times by governments accusing them of anti-competitive practices for doing things that (which I would agree are anti-competitive) Apple gets away with on the regular because "they are a minor player" (so they can have the only default storefront for installing Mac OS software) or "the phone market is different" (so they can completely lock out other ways to install software on a major platform). Apple has had its share of cases, but "use USB" doesn't seem as onerous as that Microsoft has been required to do for browser selection and such.
Although most PCs these days use EFI rather than BIOS, and at least a few years back, and Device Tree on ARM is, comparatively, a recent addition over the previous state I hear was even worse. Microsoft isn't in a place to make major bets to try to displace x86 OEMs without huge legal battles, whereas Apple only needs to support it's own hardware designs, and so we're all stuck in a world of long-term backwards compatibility, although IMO it's worth most of the complexity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IDK, I don't disagree with a single criticism in your post, and I'd generally agree that the overall decline of Windows as a platform has certainly been dramatic. That said, I think it's clear that given Microsoft's high profile failures at expanding Windows into the smartphone space and, with the exception of the Surface Pro, into the tablet space as well, managing the decline of Windows is a completely rational decision, strategy-wise. It seems to me that M$ properly understood that their platform was burning and largely succeeded in moving the crown jewels of their business into the cloud with 365/Entra/etc., and as long as they don't fuck up legacy Windows and Office badly enough to cause a mass exodus, they'll be as secure as anyone else can be in our glorious, cloud-based future.
That’s a fair assessment. It used to be their bread and butter, but they smartly repositioned. I still contend it doesn’t look good for them to have lost this generation’s console war, the smartphone OS war, and seem to be resting on their laurels with Windows. It shows a lack of vision and inability to execute. There are still a billion some odd Windows users.
Personally I was hopeful that the TPM gating for Windows 11 was the start of more forceful control over hardware so they could do a massive change for Windows 12 that would move on from legacy components. But I understand that’s not what their customers want. It’s just too bad that Windows is in such a bad state.
I still really feel like the lack of developer interest in windows is a major problem. Apple may not have the sway to enforce a 30% commission on apps like they do on iOS, but their guidance for making macOS apps is generally followed. Their developer community cares enough to follow their design guidelines and put polish into their apps. I don’t see the same for windows apps - there’s no vision or optimism about where the platform is going. Compatibility with old hardware means you’re going to see a lot of apps with windows XP/vista UI if developers aren’t passionate about the platform.
How I wish they would have just rested on their laurels. Windows 7 was fine. Windows 10 was fine. They could have just kept shipping security patches indefinitely, and people would have kept buying their real cash cows. If you absolutely need to have an entire pyramid of managers scrambling for bonuses, they could have shipped incremental updates for Windows 7, unified the UI a bit more and slowly brought in new security features - optionally, as user hardware allows. It never was going to be good anyway, so they might as well have kept it cheap and consistent.
But no. They needed to fuck with it heavily. Managers needed to leave their mark, and so we got Windows 8 and 11...
More options
Context Copy link
There's very little developer energy for desktop applications for any desktop platform. Mobile apps and their promise of easy monetization has sucked up most commercial interest, and cloud-backed client apps get most of the rest. Even open source dev energy seems most interested in services, not desktop apps.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Since Vista? I swear they have so much legacy tech some menus are an archaeological expedition into the deep past of XP and even earlier
Try doing anything with cab files. A few years ago I managed to open a menu from windows 3.11
More options
Context Copy link
When I set up a screensaver on my Win10 PC, first of all, the same screensaver from Win9X still ran flawlessly, and second, I think the config panel for it might have even been identical too?!
But random split between Settings and Control Panel, Win9X/XP style panels and... whatever they call Win8/10 style panels is jarring to say the least. It's like they couldn't, at any point, have had someone go through all that shit and just make sure it's all in one place? Go through all the built in OS panels and make sure they are the same style? It's just bizarre, and feels like there are entire teams who's jobs this should be just... not doing it.
They can and have been doing that over the last decade. It's just a nontrivial amount of work and not a high priority.
In addition to WhiningCoil's complaints, I'd point out how badly what they've done as updates and upgrades has gone, where they have done any work.
If you have access to a Win11 machine, compare the old network configuration interface with the new one. There's an absolute ton of space for improvements and better usability, here! And they've skipped almost all of it; even ignoring uncommon (but not exactly rare!) things like handling multiple IP addresses on a given physical interface: why does it only accept IPv4 subnet masks in (bastardized) CIDR notation (without a combobox wtf?). Worse, if you used dotted decimal notation, why does it just give "Can't save IP settings. Check one or more settings and try again." without explaining what error or even highlighting the 'wrong' entry?
More options
Context Copy link
That's a bad excuse, and you should feel bad for making it.
Almost everything worth doing is a "nontrivial amount of work". If your excuse to not to do something is "it's a nontrivial amount of work", I'd question how you make it out of bed in the morning, and how often you shower.
Second, it's self evident it's not a high priority, because they haven't done that "nontrivial amount of work" in ten fucking years. The point I, and everyone else is making, is that it should be a high fucking priority.
I'm pretty sure if someone like Steve Jobs was anywhere near that team, he'd have had the least productive member of that team ritually castrated and blood eagled in front of the rest of the team after the first year where it hadn't been done. After the second year he'd have taken all their fraudulent timesheets, used a hydraulic press to form them into the shape of a cyclopean dildo that would make a bad dragon enthusiast swoon, and spitted the next person on that monstrosity.
This is work than any sane person understands needed to have been done, and done over 10 years ago before Windows 8 came out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's absurd, the split between "settings" and "control panel" is one of the stupidest things I've ever experienced from a company that prints money and has infinite resources
In windows 11 right click a file, get one style, click more options, get a second older style is bizzare.
In some menus you can go 3 generations deep from a win11 menu to an win 7(ish) menu to a ~win 95(ish) menu in successive layers. So ridiculous.
More options
Context Copy link
Microsoft's focus is on corporate users with remotely managed machines. They don't put much energy into the home user who goes into Control Panel on his own.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is a huge difference. MacOS is built to handle a few types of hardware that performs a limited set of tasks. Windows is supposed to be completely backward compatible to the start while catering for servers, industrial robots, laptops, gaming and every other use case. Windows is supposed to work on every hardware.
MacOS has a massive advantage within its supported use cases and windows will never be able to compete in terms of performance. Linux solves the same issue by fragmeting into many distributions that allow for optimizations for specific target audiences. Windows tries to please everyone but pleases no one.
Unless you lack a TPM2.0 chip, of course
(Your point is valid, I'm just still salty about this)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link