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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2670 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?

So it's being hit by a few things.

  • UI work is low status in tech.
  • Microsoft wants to use it's UI frameworks to tie people to Windows, but it burned a lot of developers and companies with Silverlight.
  • HR departments don't believe in transferable skills. They only hire for the same stack.

So Microsoft has tech like XAML, which is perfectly fine. But their own developers don't want to learn it because it's career suicide. 5 years as a XAML wizard at MS means that every other tech company will view you as less than a fresh grad.

So the developers working at MS have been trying to avoid UI work or shoehorn React into the OS UI to preserve their ability to get other jobs.

Additionally there are some structural problems at MS. The main customer from the sales point of view is the corporate IT department. The tools for managing Windows Domains are excellent. However the IT departments view the desktop OS as an overly complicated launcher for Microsoft Office. They have no interest in things like moving the launch bar, and would probably like an option to ban that.

Also Microsoft has been getting increasingly culturally Indian. It used to have a bit of a barbarian flavour where it was OK to get in fights over tech decisions. I don't have enough information about the details and consequences of this to do a good write up, but I'm sure it has effects.

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