Well, I guess at one extreme we have the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism of the Culture and the other, at best, serfdom in the cobalt mines?
I do agree that on out current trajectory the latter does seem more likely.
What results? Overnight interbank loan rates, yes, immediately. The effect of those rates on the economy? It will take time to propagate. Heck, some important committees only meet like twice a year.
My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.
I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.
The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.
I think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while.
Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely that Microsoft mainly designed Windows 95 for compatibility. (The contemporary Windows NT on the other hand was a much cleaner design, though still questionable above its kernel layer).
Just not being able to use one application is better than your whole OS going up in smoke every couple weeks. Yes, Windows 95A on the wrong hardware (and how would you know?) did that.
I mean, sure, although the crashes could sometimes come with data loss as well.
You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were.
In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).
Oh, man. The "Active" Desktop. The only thing that it kept active was my CD drive when I was forced to reinstall Windows every time I tried to make it work on my PC and it broke everything.
I was all about some 98lite ‘Sleek’ on my hand-me-down 486DX/2-66 in the late '90s, Windows 98/98SE/Me with the original Windows 95 pre-OSR2.5 non-Active Explorer swapped in :)
Pretty much up until Windows 10. Not that every decision they made was great (it wasn't), but they very rarely shipped stuff which was straight up broken. They used to have a commitment to quality which they threw away around the time of Win10 when they fired the QA staff.
This was the era when I had replaced explorer.exe with litestep and had a reminder to reinstall Windows every six months to keep the computer running smoothly. It wasn't MS "shipping" stuff that broke it IIRC (though patches did have that effect), but rather a steady degradation in performance over the months. I tried to hold in abeyance with tools like defrag, but to no avail.
* Surfing the web
* Using Eudora lite for email
* Playing Quake1 and GLQuake, probably some Quake 2 and StarCraft around that time
* Using mIRC a ton to chat on undernet
* Using Xylinx to do my coursework for CS314
* Using MS Visual J++ do do more coursework (good riddance!)
* Writing papers in (I think) StarOffice, but it might have been just "Word" at that point.
This was right around the year I switched to Linux because of the issues. Though, I have to admit, it was a memory and DVD drive upgrade that drove me over the edge. I guess MS had a "point" system for each hardware component, and if enough points of components changed, they considered the machine a different computer, and would refuse to boot (since you didn't buy a license for that "different" computer). They told me I had to call them so I could boot my machine, at which point I table flipped, formatted my drive, and asked my buddy to burn a whole bunch of floppies so I could install Slackware.
They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.
What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.
This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
Random existing Windows bugs breaking things, third party software breaking things on install/uninstall, and bloat causing problems are very different from Microsoft forcing an update that introduces new flaws in windows and breaks Windows in ways that had been previously working.
Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For decades people would go online on Patch Tuesday to look to see if people were reporting problems with the newest round of Windows updates. Maybe there'd be a problem with an update and a specific network card, or a certain video driver, but Windows didn't usually break Windows.
Even if it did, you at least had the option to just not update. These days Microsoft doesn't care about problems with their updates. Even when they are warned ahead of time that there are problems they're happy to shove them down our throats, at any time of the day or night, and break Windows or even delete your personal files (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-d...) in the process.
Out of all the vague and unprovable things that never happened, that one never happened the most.
I'm sure you can find users on any OS complaining with "random" breakages but unless you can show any data that proves it was due to the OS and not your HW or third party apps or your own actions, this means nothing.
Very cool. Of course we both understand that this is the case - this is why it is in scare quotes. You are arguing about something I literally acknowledged in my original post. The issue is that it happened due to what is for all intents and purposes bitrot: It breaks during regular use due to small compounding errors that happen due to bad software design. In practical use this means what I wrote, even though to the most pedantic of nerds it means literally what happened. It can in fact mean both things
I just started using windows after being on macOS since Vista. I planned to go full Linux for a gaming pc, but there are still some kinks, so dual booting it is.
The shocking negative was the amount of ads and tracking I had to get rid of, like chinese budget phone tier of crap.
Once you get rid of that though, the experience is halfway decent. But there are absolute head scratchers for 2026: some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display, apps adding itself to self start at boot left and right, and so on.
The most laughable event happened after I installed windows home when my license was for windows profesional. The official way to solve this was... to turn down wifi and write a hardcoded switch-to-professional key as a fake activation. That was the most amateur workaround I've seen in decades.
> some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display
Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.
Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.
The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.
At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.
That lack of care is the part that's annoying to me, combined with them being one of the largest corporations that has the resources to throw at those issues if they chose to do so. Quality issues aside, there's lots of similar aspects like the long drawn out migration of the control panel (i.e. their own control panel applets, putting aside third party) since win8 in 2012, if they wanted they could have completed that in the last 14 years and however many major releases you count since then.
It may not be the bean counting optimal, but it is a long term image they project of the company.
I think the general issue they have is that pretty much nobody who cares chooses Windows actively. It's mostly gamers, which seem to be on the way out, corporations who don't care about this, and creatives who, for whatever reason, don't want to buy a mac.
I'm in the latter category. As a Sunday photographer who daily drives Linux for work, I can't justify investing in Apple hardware. I used to daily drive macs, so I'm not against Apple on principle, but for my current needs it's just too expensive, since for my actual work Linux works better for me and the hardware is free (through work). Since I don't spend 8 hours a day using Windows and my income doesn't depend on it, I just put up with the shoddy quality. I can do what I need with my photos and it's good enough.
I've recently switched to a Mac after years on Linux, basically due to my frustration with the way the Linux desktop is being developed and the lack of quality all around for that platform.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
Meta-topic: I've seen this comment many times over the years, and it never results in a discussion where folks can agree. My reaction reading it is "You must be holding it wrong!" because I daily-drive Linux in many more ways than one (servers, laptops, desktops, handhelds (Hackberry Pi), SBCs, and, Valve-willing, VR headsets), and adore the Linux desktop. I use Pop!_OS almost everywhere, but Debian/Ubuntu/Arch with IceWM or Fluxbox (or the like) works great.
Anyway, this is not a call for you to start listing all the stuff that's broken (though feel free!), I'm just amazed that, with years of power and freedom on Linux, you truly enjoy Mac more. Just goes to show each of us has our own workflow and tastes!
Same for me and I don't use MacOS for the same reason some people don't use Linux, I find the UI lacking and confusing.
And more importantly, MacOS (like Windows) are still poorly translated compared to your average Linux desktop with some leftover always in English. It's okay for me as a software engineer but it's not acceptable enough to give to my parents.
It's a bit deeper than just a series of bugs. For all of Linux's power and freedom, its modern desktop architecture is extremely restrictive.
* There is only one systemd --user session per user with one D-Bus instance. So you can only have one desktop instance active at a time.
* There is no way for privileged apps/scripts to generically control the desktop or other apps in Wayland. (so no accessibility, AI computer use or even general scripting)
* There is no differentiation between configuration that should be active on (user, machine) tuple, and configuration that should be active on (user, *) tuple. (even Windows gets this right!)
* Desktop apps do not report rich activity information so they cannot be smartly memory managed.
* Desktop apps cannot generally be restored after getting killed/system shutdown.
* No application identity, PIDs voluntarily take on application identities in Wayland and on D-Bus, but PIDs that don't can easily escape observability, and if they consume resources but not enough to show up high in top, good luck knowing about them.
As technical as I am, none of those items really matter to me at all. So it's a great illustration of how the long tail of user needs is what ends up differentiating us in these discussions. It's very rare to get deep enough to actually identify that. I've always treated the desktop like a second-class citizen on Linux with the command line being my primary interface, and that has adapted so well to agentic usage that it never even occurred to me that desktop tool use was missing.
Which is an interesting assertion by itself, since I have a local deep-seek model that routinely uses scripting to fire up servers, browsers, take screenshots, and assess how it's converging on a solution. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had about how all of that is just a dirty hack, but for my purposes, it's been working excellently.
As a kid I vaguely remember our family had a stack of Dr. Dobb’s Journals with one particular article actually warning about the dangers of doublespace, and since it was completely optional (despite being touted as a flagship feature) we kind of dodged a bullet and had a pretty reasonable experience with DOS 6.
> I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on.
For me it's worse: I grew up on stuff like the C64 and then the Amiga. Switching to DOS was a serious step backwards.
> I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?
Never: they've always been mediocre.
> As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back.
I switched to Linux in the early Slackware days (then Debian 1.1). Most of the world followed and now tens of billions of devices are running Linux, not Windows.
Games I cant play on Linux are kernel level anti-cheat shooters. Anti cheat should be handled on the server anyway, no one should be installing that on their machines. Everything else works great!
I don't remember them being so bad. Windows 7, 8 were great. Visual Studio 6 was good. Excel was top quality for a long time. What used to be annoying to me was that Microsoft ignored the common Unix conventions for no good reason and tended to reinvent stuff. It was like smart nerds were tasked to come up with stuff without any awareness of prior art, or as if Bill G snd Steve B were trying to lock in customers into incompatible stuff. Obviously not great but working. What we get now is pure slop and negligence.
The internet revolted against 8 and stuck on 7 until it was EOL’ed and went straight to 10. I don’t recall 10 being positively received, but the hate has moved to windows 11. I’m happy to be corrected though.
The problem with 8 was that the UI was designed for a touch screen without a thought given to the fact that most users were going to be driving it with a mouse. Reliability-wise, it was perfectly fine.
The problem with 10 was that it was pushed as a "security update" on Windows Update. It was force-fed to unwitting/unwilling Windows 7 users like caged geese at a foie-gras farm.
That betrayal was arguably the first step towards the near-total enshittification of Windows that we see today, if you don't count the introduction of product activation with Windows XP.
Especially when the following years once again confirmed that none of the big enterprise customers care enough to cancel any contracts over QA problems.
I can. I could've told you decades ago, that this was the late stage of not just Microsoft, but any software company whose bread and butter was vendor lock-in. Microsoft was just the worst at the time because they were the biggest. Eventually the vendor lock-in becomes so great that the marginal cost, in terms of customers lost, from not fixing/improving your software, or at least not not letting it get worse, becomes much smaller than the cost of improving it/maintaining it. Any resources the company has to spare go into solidifying the lock-in, rather than making the software worth staying on in the first place. Even Apple seems to be in the early-mid stages of this transformation.
That's false. Please stop spreading Russian propaganda. Not only Ukraine was able to control and maintaining them, in fact, Ukrainian companies manufactured nuke ICBMs, and then serviced them in Russia long after the collapse of the USSR. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KB_Pivdenne
> At this point, it seems like doing a Google Workspace paid account may be the best solution for continuity of experience, but you break all the commingling and integration. Also, your you@x.com account is a separate window from your you@gmail.com account.
I am not a Google Workspace user but I hear that its features actually lag behind the personal accounts?
Google Workspace accounts do indeed have less facilities in some areas. For example, a Google Workspace account can't manage a Family Link setup, or be used with Fitbit.
I have seen the rationale that Workspace is intended as a workplace solution, the accounts would be managed/controlled by the Workspace administrators, and allowing this features could allow Workspace administrators access to potentially sensitive data. (For example, see https://support.google.com/a/thread/221999832/can-t-join-fam...) And indeed, I wouldn't necessarily want an employer or its IT department to have these by using an employer-provided Workspace account for them.
But this also means someone who is using Workspace for an individual or a family to get other Workspace features (custom domain email, storage, etc.) is blocked from using the same account for those features - so ends up needing a consumer-level Gmail account as well.
> Moonshot AI, one of the Chinese startups included in the study, recently unveiled Kimi K3—one of the strongest open models to date—and publicly released its model weights through Hugging Face today.
...today? (emphasis is mine) And the author was so excited that decided to write up a paper and submit it to Science all in one day? Yeah, right. That's all you need to know who is moonshooting behind this paper.
I also do not believe that this is primarily aimed at ptotecting children. I think the goal is to counteract the bot-farms that spread disinformation, instigate violence, and so on. Which Russia, by the way, pioneered and scaled up to make a material difference in elections in the West. It is a real problem for which no effective solution has been found.
reply