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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2669 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I installed Linux Mint around Jan 2024, and I don't think I've booted into my windows partition in about a year. So I finally deleted it entirely and repurposed the space as a dedicated /home/ directory because steam games take up a lot of space.

Good riddance.

I have to use Windows 11 at work, and the little things that are bafflingly worse astound me. I tried to set an alarm, but the fucking alarm app refused to start without an update off the app store which it couldn't get because closed network. When I type in directories directly into the location bar of file explorer, the fucking autocomplete suggestion popups never go away after I hit enter. When I try to right click on a file, different menus pop up depending on whether it's the first or second time I've tried it, and they show different options entirely!

I just... what the fucking fuck is going on with Windows?

Would you say it's as much as 30% worse?

AI's a fun excuse, and there have been some code wtfs, but a lot of the Win11 stuff is just an absolutely bizarre set of UI decisions that have been progressively escalating for longer than LLMs could finish a trivial function. The Start Search Menu has been fucked up since before COVID. Same for OneCloud. The inconsistent and awkward right-click menus in File Explorer are a human interface problem; the code's fine.

Something just went badly rotten in Microsoft.

The tipping point was around 2012. As you'll recall, that was when MS decided it'd be a great idea to trash the desktop UX in favor of a tablet UX everywhere, no matter whether or not it made sense on that device.

And they actually did have a bit of a point there- if you made it optional, you'd just end up with another Windows Media Center that nobody used, and what better way to force people to develop applications in WinRT? There were significant benefits to doing so, too- mainly around sandboxing, though the problem there was that it made interacting with the rest of the computer an absurd hassle. The original cheaper Surface RT tablet was made to push this too, and while an interesting piece of kit, it was also basically worthless beyond the fact it had an ARM-compiled version of Office on it.

They judged, correctly, that doing so wouldn't affect sales. And sure, the iPad wasn't as destructive to them as they had feared (which indeed was a reasonable fear at the time- that people buying iPads would then proceed to eschew real computers entirely), but they've also never had an incentive to go back and properly fix what they broke. And every version of Windows since has gone on to expose more of the rotten/unfinished foundation (and will likely continue along that path until Explorer is 100% React, takes 0.5s to respond to any button presses, require 16GB of RAM, and has to restart at least once a day because it gets overloaded like Firefox does when you watch too many YouTube videos).

The other problem is that there's no real need for MS to write a new OS any more. Windows NT remains the gold standard for an OS (Unix was 20 years out of date in 1995, and the only reason it's still around is because you would be provided the source to build whatever you wanted) but after everything that made it the way it is has migrated to Azure and everyone just accesses your code through some flavor of web browser, what's the point of rebuilding it?

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