I don't think Microsoft can pull this off, I think as mindshare is shifting it will continue to do so and its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back and right now its only talking about doing some minor things. Now Nvidia is developing the drivers on Linux seriously there is every chance this transition snowballs and nothing Microsoft does will be enough.

> Enhancing Search: [...] Clearer and more trustworthy results, with results from content on your device easy to understand and clearly distinct from web results

So yeah, you still get web results in your search bar, a feature absolutely zero people want and which is just there to fake Bing success, just with a little divider now next to the applications the search failed to find.

My next laptop will be a MacBook Pro.

My Surface Laptop 5 will be collecting dust in case I need it, but that’s highly unlikely.

Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc.

I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.

That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.

No automatic restarts! I understand that in our security patching world that patching and restarting automatically is the default, fine, but there absolutely should be a dead simple way of disabling auto restarts in settings. I'm fine if it pesters me to restart or whatever, perhaps with growing alarm the longer I wait, but it should always be optional in the end. There are just no words for how bad it can be for mission critical workloads when your computer restarts without your consent. Please make disabling this simple.

> all while reducing update noise with fewer automatic restarts and notifications.

Pause for longer.. why not just stop. And resume when wanted.

Fewer automatic restart. What about no automatic restart.

I couldn't read any further. Mind bended leadership to think this sort of wording after the obvious fiasco would make users hopeful.

I stopped using windows personally 15 years ago. My mental health improved right away. Forced to use Windows at work, I finally got liberated 4 years ago and my mental health got even better. I refuse since then employment forcing me to use this OS. It's a health hazard, always has been.

Sorry Microsoft, some people already transfer to a different train because you offered a crazy ride.

MMC snapins haven't been touched in years and still can't even sort those columns properly, search and filtering is terrible

Control panel is still not migrated over to settings after 12 years nor you can open two settings apps.

Error messages in modern apps are just the worst, how about printing valuable error messages than "something is wrong"?

Fixing dark patterns like taking over your screen with popups and taking over the application header so you can't close windows unless you go to the task manager. First time opening edge shows a really annoying splash screen + home page is filled with ads.

Also where are 5 second boot times on NVMe SSDs? Anything more is just sloppy.

Just to list a few pet peeves

But let's see if they can even fix things they've mentioned in the post, though that's like 1/4 of the issues that should be fixed.

Only a public statement of "deepest possible rethink in attitude" from Satya Nadella would mean a different future for Windows.

Whatever this is - which is mostly weasel words - will fizzle and fade.

Personal computing is a rare niche these days thanks to the majority who have chosen to give over the personal aspect to the privacy hostile duopoly of MS and Apple (while celebrating doing so) who hold the leash.

I think this is good, because they're talking about removing (hideously inappropriate) react and other web technologies from core OS components, and using proper native OS calls instead. But I'm not familiar with WinUI3. I only know Win32. Is WinUI3 a flash-in-the-pan system like their other UI attempts, or is it decent and stable?

The feedback/forum tool, has been a thing for years. Submited many bugs that I wanted fixed, and always been ignored.

Thanks, but Im not looking back.

I still don't know how to create a native app so inefficient that, it needs to take more than 500 milliseconds to open a directory

I am doing my part - I managed to get 6 people in my family and friend group off Windows onto Debian last year.

All positive feedback so far :).

Sure it's only a small victory - but a meaningful one to me.

I'd wish they did a more modular OS (explorer, browser, etc), keep it simple and streamline installing requirements as needed.

They may say they're backing off now, but it's hard to trust them. Will they just do the same thing with whatever the next tech trend is?

Switched to Linux on my personal devices 2 years ago and using Ubuntu and PopOS! on two different laptops. I've had very small number of issues. Can't understand people moving to Mac - it is the same messed half backed OS as both Windows and Linux (flavors). With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes.

With Linux at least I don't have to worry about privacy.

At work, I'm switching to Mac for the first time in my life. At home, I'm already gaming on Linux. Windows is dead to me.

Great!

Just this past January I implemented something on my workstation I should've done a long time ago: outbound filtering all network traffic via so-called 'Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security'. I've also skipped more Insider builds in the past two months than I have in the past 11 years.

The only thing keeping me around at this point is the migration overhead and (at least I tell myself) window 'snapping'.

How about, turn it off by default?

Microsoft Copilot 365 Operating System App is just trash, plain and simple.

  - MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating...

  - Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.

I can use my computer as a tool to do my craft and I’m not constantly sucked in ai features, news, or external search results, if I don’t want it.

OS stands for operating system, Microsoft is not that for me.

I wouldn’t know how to ever go back. I really hope I’m not forced to for some reason.

I did not know you can't move the taskbar in windows 11... I literally lol'd. That type of shit is why I dumped gnome 3 a long time ago.

I gave up a long time ago hoping Windows would get better. At this point, I just hope it does not get worse.

That said, it's completely rudderless. How important is an operating system anymore anyway when most applications are just an Electron app anyway? What does consumer Windows provide Microsoft anymore besides a gateway to Office 365 and other actually profitable services?

They also clearly fell asleep at the wheel on things like gaming. The future is clearly Linux-based.

And on the hardware front, Microsoft seemed to have given up on their own consumer gear, and their partners have left them out to dry yet again.

It could be turned into a great OS if they simply remove some things. Get rid of the ads, make copilot an optional component, stop trying to sell 365, let me turn off telemetry, etc.

I wonder if this will include being able to put it on the non-primary display once again. It's not mentioned, but that was one of the biggest frustrations with Windows 11. It seems their focus is exclusively on single display devices.

It also ruined my flow for my flight sim until I found a workaround. The fullscreen window wishes to launch to the primary display, which means losing the useful bits of the taskbar.

I love what they're saying, but my faith in them is very, very is low.

Spoken like a true AI.

The fix is upside down UI?

On one hand, Windows has pressure to be something that "just works" like an iPad used to be - users can't screw it up. This is what enterprises want for the daily drivers of their massive user populations.

OTOH, Windows has pressure to be this highly customizable tool for savvy high-agency individuals. This is what we all want.

I can empathize with both needs, for sure, but it is a constant war. They're doing alright, considering.

Their commitments here seem to try to bring windows back to what it was when they still had their QA teams.

I press snooze and get on with my day

What finally pushed me to linux was because specifically in my narrow usecases it's just plain better, but if we were to completely ignore that, even if linux was worse, I just don't want to support evil companies anymore.

Now I'll admit that this is what AI would say, but it's not always about what is better, it's about sending a message, a message that microsoft appears to have heard loud and clear, however, we will have to see if this is just PR or not.

Someone in the comments here said nobody loves Windows. I probably did love Windows 7. I felt that it was the best of all worlds, huge support for hardware, basically rock solid on good hardware, gaming performance was fantastic.

In my opinion, Windows has spiraled downwards ever since 7. So much so that I finally switched to Linux permanently. Windows 11 and the forced AI integration was the absolute last straw for me.

The only thing that had really kept me on Windows lately was the gaming side of it. As I've gotten older, the games became less important. Now Proton pretty much gets me compatibility on 172 of 173 games in my steam library. Sure I had to search and find and compile my own controller driver, but it wasn't super painful, probably beyond the realms of an average user still.

Guess not.

It's a shame, I'd appreciate more than a single 9 of uptime from GitHub (luckily I don't need to interact with anything else Microsoft related)

fire most of your leads & new programmers.

hire back anyone willing to come back with competence.

return to the Windows 10 LTSC codebase.

try again.

More in the topic. Good that Windows Update will suck less. Did the Discover-something-or-other-imply less start-memu ads, I couldn't tell..

I have zero windows machines now and no promises will change that.

There's only one complaint that practically everyone has regarding what's required "during device setup," and it's not updates. I can't say I'm shocked that it's being ignored.

For now, I am so bitter about windows, that I just want it to stop being a thing

I used Windows since Windows 95 (back in '96, I was 5 years old).

But still having regular blue screens come back with Windows 11..

I am better off selling my 64GB of RAM, than Windows Defender eating a third of it at random times

So they threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall, and this is the bit where some of it falls off.

>Today, I’m sharing what we are doing in response.

Just these words are already off putting. The extremely careful wording to avoid anything minimally resembling recognizing an issue.

It's ok to say we fucked up. It's empowering. Not being able to do it is a huge red flag.

What a list of bangers!

The last performant Windows version was Windows 8, despite its UX flaws. It actually made old computers faster and it started going downhill with the very first Windows 10 Technical Preview. I doubt that MS will reach that level of performance and stability again.

Welcome to the 90s?

They are so far off track. I'm basically never leaving Windows 10.

Nothing

This would be great. It's still easy to freeze up File Explorer when moving thousands of files. The same operation from the command line works fine.

> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:

Pfft. Still slow, react-based, and ad-riddled

> reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.

Must have failed to meet the metrics goals

> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates

You can bet they will still flash the screen take-over riddled with all the dark patterns in the world to get you to upload all your files to their cloud "for backup"

> Faster and more dependable File Explorer [..] quicker launch experience:

Oh, the preloading of explorer into ram before it's launched? Lmao. Entirely embarassed by File Pilot https://filepilot.tech

gtfo.

Frankly, the things they've listed as action items for the future are things that they should have been doing FROM THE BEGINNING.

Like, how on earth was

> Faster and more responsive Windows experiences

NOT a part of just the general release cycle of a major windows update? How was it they didn't notice that the file explorer experience in 11 was noticeably worse than windows 10 and the same hardware?

We all know the answer, it's because the highest priority wasn't a good UX, it was to make sure copilot was integrated into everything.

So long as microsoft management doesn't prioritize performance (and they clearly do not) this is just a natural endstate of any software. If you aren't focusing and paying your developers to make things faster and smoother, you'll get this sort of high memory consumption and janky applications. Making things not janky requires someone in management to care about that.

In this case it's the MacBook Neo that's causing them to get off their butts and reinvest in the quality of their software after letting it stagnate for years, but the pattern is the same: rest on their monopolistic laurels until competition makes them feel threatened, then magically start caring about their users again all of a sudden.

[1] https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/183701230/gates-of...

Glad they're putting taskbar back into whatever sides. I despise my work Mac's single location at the bottom, wasteful waste of space. I've had icons on the left since Windows 95 and I like them there.

No, you mean reintroducing a capability that was standard in Windows for 20+ years? Stop acting like this is some new innovation being introduced in Windows 11.

Just a handful of things that all were taken for granted in Windows previously, doesn't even scratch the surface of issues with Windows 10/11, which removed tons of useful stuff and added garbage nobody wants.

Forced to use Windows 11 at work (well, or a Mac, but Windows 11 is just barely the lesser of two evils) and I hate it. I continue to use Windows 7 at home, which remains the best workstation OS and likely will forever.

When did they get rid of that?

Microsoft has proven itself the undisputed king of enshittification and a blog post will not change my mind on that.

Maybe my grandkids will give it a shot.

Windows is a fabulous operating system. I encourage people to see it as a tool and as an engineering marvel, rather than as an enemy or target of ridicule. I’ve been tremendously productive on Windows, and I have run every desktop OS , including Gentoo (when it used to take 2+ days to compile), BeOS, OS2 , Redhat on Power PC, FreeBSD and loads of niche operating systems.

If you like Operating systems, and hate Windows, I encourage you to read Show Stoppers about Dave Cutler making NT. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and will probably convert you from a Windows hater to an NT Kernel appreciator.

RHEL is mostly what you will see @ Corpo, with some occasional SUSE for Europeans. Given that Fedora is the upstream for RHEL (and no snapd), it is quite well supported. AFAIK, it's also what Linus Torvalds has ran for a long while now.

“Windows has lost its way! Move the task bar!”

Tell us why it was removed in the first place, why it takes years to put it back and it's still future promises as of March 2026. That's just a clown show.

We’re not first time users, we don’t want Microsoft BOB as our UI, we don’t want ads and internet search “functionality” in our Start menu, we don’t want AI everywhere and we don’t want things hidden from us.

Make Windows 11 Pro for real pro users and 11 Home for new users. I hope a few people from MS are reading this, especially Mr Engineer.

I’m going to get downvoted for this, but I don’t care.

P.S. Yeah yeah guys, I know about Linux ;-)

Really? it took "user feedback" for one of the world's best software companies to realize one of the most fundamental parts of the OS was broken?

I have been long on $MSFT for a while now, but my faith as an investor stands shook.

- native quick launch bar

- killing telemetry

- killing UI kludge

- permitting non-MS apps again

This can not possibly be true, in several dimensions/metrics. I understand that this is mostly marketing bluster, but holy cow are they delusional here.

> Windows is as much yours as it is ours.

Microsoft has been inflicting unwanted crap on me for years now, and they keep expanding with more unwanted crap (even to the point of wanting to force people to have Microsoft accounts) as time goes on. Reading this line actually made me laugh out loud. No, Microsoft, you don't believe this even a little.

These people don’t even know their own product.

They aren’t trying to add Copilot in useful ways for their users. They’re forcing it into Notepad when they know it doesn’t fit there, because it might be your “entry” into their slop generator.

User experience be damned, these shareholders must have their value.

""" ok copilot, implement these changes, make no mistakes """

Having learned absolutely nothing from their existing sins.

Even for gaming, the only reason why I would stick with windows is not an issue anymore. Thanks to Steam gaming just works on Linux. I'm using Omarchy and it's very easy.

I can't see ever going back to windows personally.

Thankfully Ballmer failed and this isn’t even close to true. I, like a lot of highly technical professionals, have been Windows sober for many years now.

Seems more like FUD.

I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very frankly I prefer the developer experience on Windows, where you can write a (relatively) high-quality native desktop application with purely first-party tooling and release a single, tiny (~10^4 bytes) executable that quite literally runs anywhere. The Windows API surface area is huge and developers can write entire multi-domain programs without ever looking for a third-party library.

This probably sounds like a lot of copium, but I feel like recent events like the rising costs of memory and competition like the MacBook Neo will light a fire under Microsoft's arse. I really hope some of the AI overboard in Windows 11 is rolled back over the near future. They should migrate core Windows applications back to native and CLI technologies, actually support and maintain these without chasing the next big thing, and release frameworks for safer compiled languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin, and allocate more resources to F#.

I can't remember when Update became so intrusive and aggressive - Vista? - but it was the top annoyance for me personally.

The pushback which you are only now starting to perceive is being caused by an entire generation of Microsoft intentionally and actively positioning itself in conflict with its customers.

I understand that once you have a million customers, you can't really treat them right anymore. But Microsoft has not given a single shit about customer feedback, even in aggregate for decades now.

As I read this, all I can think is "too little, too late." I have watched in my workplace Windows go from being a product that we are happy to purchase to yet another piece of technology that we would simply replace were we not yoked to it.

I guess even now they probably still don't care. Microsoft will continue printing money until the sun burns out.

This is how goodwill works. Easy to burn, hard to earn back. I’m not touching any products by Meta, Google or Microsoft, and none of them are getting me back on board with a cute blog post.

LMAO

On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.

> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus

Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.

> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions

This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.

> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates

Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.

> Faster and more dependable File Explorer

See comment on task bar above.

> More control over widgets and feed experiences

Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.

On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:

- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.

- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.

- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.

- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.

- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.

- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps

- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.

- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.

- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.