If nobody cared about windows there wouldn't be any posts like this one everyday on HN. The problem is people do care and need to use windows which makes all these stupidity by Microsoft the recent years frustrating.

I am personally just a lurker. Windows used to be my only OS for a -very- long time (DOS 2.x, yes 2, was my first MS OS). Now I click on these just to see how far it has fallen. It is like that friend you drifted away from and now you look at their FB posts now and again to watch as they get crazier and crazier.

I think the point is that they don't care about Windows in particular as much as the my care about having something that works out of the box for them, and for years that was Windows. Not many people really want Windows to iterate with new features, and in practice it seems that they aren't really able to push those features without breaking the stability, which is the one feature people do actually want, and that leads to backlash like this. The best Windows is the one that gets out of the way and lets users not care about it.

It's more like "nobody cares about Windows" as in: no one is impressed that you added Copilot into Notepad, no one wants you to move the cheese, they just want to get on with their actual work without being interrupted by "good things coming your way" which is inevitably just more annoyance, more bugs, more Copilot buttons.

Most people would probably have preferred if Windows had zero feature updates* since Windows 7, just security patches.

* Well, OK, fine. Task Manager is better now, I'll grant them that one.

We need something that just works. I guess Microsoft made me care because their products are unpredictable.

I'm not certain what point you are attempting to make, The size of Windows install has not smaller and therefore improving install time, but rather the hardware has gotten so much faster. Installing from a USB 3 key is so much faster than floppy or optical media, as well as NVMe drives are receiving the data vs old spinning rust drives.

Ah my point is that Widows hasn't gotten worse. You can probably still find old forum posts complaining about Vista...

It was always bad. It is now easier to fix it. We are making progress lol.

You can find complaints about Windows Vista, but then find praise around Windows 7. Being better than a single point in the past doesn't imply a trend. The perceived quality varies between releases, and it's clear that Windows 11 has dipped in that regard.

Even windows 7 had complaints when released but it kept improving, on the other hand windows 11 is deteriorating in both stability and anything new added is either half baked or unnecessary borderline user hostile.

That's a ridiculous comparison...

If for example you take a bus to work, and starting this month, the bus shows up only every hour (last year it was every 10 minutes), would you be frustrated?

But if you complained about this and someone said "Well in the 90's this bus showed up only every 4 hours!"...

I've never once installed macOS in 20 years of using the platform

I'm typing this on one right now. I honestly thought the same but I got used to it within a day or two of use. Its muscle memory at this point.

My muscle memory is for vim and not for eating a cactus without getting punctured.

its the same as banning knives because they can be used to hurt people. we shouldn't ban tools.

with that analogy, OP's solution is akin to banning the use of knives to harm people, as opposed to banning the knife itself

If I undestood correctly he's unsharpening knives.

Or making knives that turn into overcooked noodles if you try to use them on anything except vegetables and acceptable meats

and who decides if I want to use a knife to cut mushrooms instead? see where I am going, there are (or could exist) legit cases when you need to use it in a non-standard way, one that the model authors didn't anticipate.

But we do ban tools sometimes: you can't bring a knife to a concert, for good reason.

Not really, its like banning chemistry sets cause they may be used to create chemical weapons.

Not sure the comparison works when it does all the work for you

I've had very little success mumbling "you are an expert chemist..." to test tubes and raw materials.

In this case, image generation and editing AI is a tool which we managed just fine with until three years ago, and where the economic value of that tool remains extremely questionable despite it being a remarkable improvement in the state of the art.

As a propaganda tool it seems quite effective, but for that it's gone from "woo free-speech" to "oh no epistemic collapse".

Too bad it's over. Great show.

This is a US or local problem primarily. At least where I live there is a law in place requiring public ev chargers to be available with credit card payments and are forbidden from needing users to subscribe.

I never had problems with them, just avoid having lose cables. Mine works pretty much unattended in a 110sqm flat, just need to fill the water tank and empty the waste water every 4-5 days.

HN does target similar minded people world wide though.

same.. I'm on Windows.. clicked download only to realize its mac only.

The chip is not smaller than 3.5nm; but a component on the chip is that small.

The difference I believe was that past failed windows versions were not intentionally bad, they were well intentioned but failed to achieve the goals, with windows 11 it's like they are deliberately making it worse.