Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.
Really needs to be studied.
It's like they started making structural decisions a decade ago that are now overwhelming their ability to deliver basic functionality.
I realize there were always problems like this, I live through Windows ME, but it does feel qualitatively different now with advertising being forced into the product, performance of no consideration at all, etc.
In summary because:
- They're beholden to Wall Street and stock price is the only relevant metric.
- They've been laying off staff even up to senior/principal engineering levels.
- Shifting towards vibe coding instead of engineering.
Gonna get a lot worse still and things will continue to deteriorate until Wall Street picks up on the issues and thinks it'll start hurting their next quarter results. (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)
There's not really not much more room for Microsoft's consumer software to grow, but the next quarterly report must show black numbers, so the only way to stay profitable is to produce software in a way that is cheaper than the previous month.
Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.
Growth mindset can be such a cancer. Many mature businesses don't need to grow and are perfectly fine as they are. You could continue running them forever, making steady cash. Or you could enshittify them, make slightly more money for 3 years, and get overtaken by competitors, all the while pissing everyone off and wasting billions of dollars.
Short term greed. Maximize immediate profits at the the cost of future profits.
They moved to a purely extractive mindset; the goal seems to be extract as much as possible out of the inertia they have built, while almost (but not quite) killing the brand.
Its not even an uncommon story; to the point where it seems like a signal; when shareholders bring in an Indian CEO, innovation is done, and its time to try to eat all the seedcorn.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon ...
It seems like that decline will continue until it affects their stock prices. There's effectively a bunch of perverse incentives at the decision making level in all major companies right now that disconnects them from customer/end users. Until that fundamental issue is fixed the enshittification will continue.
According to their latest annual report, Windows earns them less than half as much as Office and less than a quarter of what they make by selling server products.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.
That is true in the short term but most of the rest of their business rests on the fact that windows is the default OS.
If windows ever gets so bad that people actually do defect to macos/linux en masse that absolutely will affect their stock price, but so far it hasn't happened
Corporate users are the only users they even pretend they care about and they know they have pretty good lock in with Windows and office.
Also obviously this is someone else's problem some other quarter.. so.. like who cares?
It's definitely on a very long fuse, but if they lose control of the windows codebase to the point where bugs are regularly getting shipped to production that cause issues for corporate IT departments, and an increasing number of employees use MacOS or Linux at home and need training at work to learn how to use windows, it could change.
Short term no but long term these rotations do happen, otherwise we'd all still be using IBM
I don't disagree with you and in fact I hope there were quicker ramifications. Any company that forgets their customers and assumes such arrogant self serving stance should get a proverbial slap in face rather sooner than later. Unfortunately our mechanism for serving that said slap in the face are rather limited and as a single consumer (or even as a single enterprise) serving that slap only serves to slap ourselves in the face in the process by inconveniencing ourselves given the lack of viable/drop in alternatives. This is why we need regulation to get the corporate greed in check.
I think that transition, from OS/Desktop company to a Cloud Services Provider, is where the rot comes from.
The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
> Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years
Sort of matching the decline of Intel too.
Intel was resting on their laurels throughout most of the 2010s, while AMD floundered and couldn't catch up. By the time AMD got their shit together with Ryzen, Intel had all but been defeated by their own complacency.
All products seem to decline the moment the revenue model switches to monthly recurring. This is always contrary to the promise that they won't and that money will be invested in product improvements.
If you think it's bad now wait until they consolidate the rental PC market (Bezos and Nadella are all over that)
How do you patch something that was written by another colleague, using an LLM, that you also need an LLM to figure out?
How do you find the subtle bugs? Working with LLMs I noticed, they try to implement things from scratch. I asked it to output the md5 hash of some string in the api response, it went on to implement the md5 algo and then called it. I simply did not have the time to check correctness so asked it to import a library I know. Someone might just have gone with it, shipped to prod and then bugs.
It also introduced slight changes in the intended flow of your program, that if you aren’t fully aware, are unnoticeable until they compound and you’re too deep to go back because now 10 different weird behaviors are in prod, you’re not sure what the cause is or if they were actually intended. You just have no frame of reference because maybe you didn’t build all of it as part of a team. And those are the things you should have had tests for, but when you were writing the code yourself you were coding with intent, so you know when something was off.
Now you build at the speed of thought and no longer know all the intents, only that the end result satisfies loosely written requirements.
The bigger question is how the breakage made it through QA in the first place. Oh right, Microsoft fired all their QA a while back.
They're quite a bit late to the 'move fast and break things' party.
The start menu search is turning blank and shows a white screen whenever I search anything. Similar to how react apps break. It's been like this for 6 momths, across two laptops, fresh install of 25h2.
Search on Windows is completely pointless, it’s been broken for years at this point. I’ve installed PowerToys and use Command Palette now
It was never good when you compare to internet search.
On the internet I can search for "pictures of the eiffel tower". If I try the same on my own computer I expect to find photos from the time I took the family to paris... Yet I don't.
And yet Gnome and KDE have no troubles doing just that if you activate the corresponding plug-ins for the respective search engines (Tracker and Baloo). How you access them is a matter of taste, but both integrate into your runner dialog or launch menu, if you wish.
I still have my Windows 11 machine, but I haven't booted into it in a couple months now.
The "Windows is going to be an agentic OS" announcement was the last straw.
Linux and Mac it is.
I would enjoy hooking up Claude to KDE with voice control and audio feedback, but am
100% on board with that it should be 100% the user deciding to go for that folly.
I mean, that would be a fun experiment on a VM, but I would not trust it directly on my work station, not the least because of privacy. It might might do a mass-mass-rm-rf
They are doing fine. It affects users, not customers.
And this is why I'm still running Win10 LTSC. No bloat, super fast, still gets security updates.
I was doing that until Adobe decided to start using an API which is not present in 2021 LTSC. So I moved to macOS. Tahoe has its problems but it and the hardware makes a mockery of Windows 11 and PCs generally.
In theory, this was a security patch, so you're still at risk of MS pushing a problematic patch to Win10
You don't, you pirate it. If you paid perfectly working, non-vibecoded dollars for Windows 11 Pro which became utterly broken, pirating whatever you need from Microslop to actually having a working computer is morally right.
Look I have no idea if this is related, but I have noticed recently, talking to other developers, that the addiction / allure of the speed that coding with AI agents gives you is leading to a relaxation of their standard quality bar. This doesn't even feel like the evil overlords whipping them more, it is self-inflicted.
When you can get multiple different agents to all work on things and you are bouncing between them, careful review of their code becomes the bottleneck. So you start lowering your bar to "good enough", where "good enough" is not really good enough. It's a new good enough, which is like you squinting at the code and as long as the shape is vaguely ok, and the code works (where that means you click around a bit and it seems fine), it's ok.
Over time you lose your "theory"[1] of the software, and I would imagine that makes you effectively lower your bar even further, because you are less attached to what good should look like.
This is all anecdotal on my end, but it does feel like quality as a whole in the industry has tanked in the last maybe 12 months? It feels like there are more outages than normal. I couldn't find a good temporal outage graph, but if you trust this: https://www.catchpoint.com/internet-outages-timeline , the number of outages in 2025 is orders of magnitude up on 2024.
Maybe this is because there are way more, maybe this is because they are now tracking way more, I'm not sure. But it definitely _feels_ like we are in for a bumpy ride over the next few years.
Exactly, half of a system exists as code but the other half exists as a mental model in the minds of the devs. With AI the former will, now much more quickly, outrun or deviate from the latter and then the problems of long-term reliability, maintainability and confidence in validation and delivery are just beginning.
Exactly right and by the time you get that theory back could you have just it all yourself?
Do you get the impression the industry is caring about quality vs ‘good enough’ + cutting costs?
"The industry" is not that homogeneous. B2B Software firms keeping their products in maintenance for decades are very different from your B2C mobile gaming app creator.
I’m genuinely wondering if they’re using llms to code windows. Is that likely?
I think there is even an internet meme showing a headline where Microsoft brags about how AI is doing more more coding and right below that headline another one where a decline in quality is mentioned.
I mean, unless Windows is a special exception, almost certainly:
Last Thursday windows 11 forced an update on my Acer machine.It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device. It took me a reformat to solve the issue.
I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse.
Microsoft is an end stage software company that has exhausted natural growth in its desktop segment. When that happens to a company that is beholden to Wall Street the only ways are to start shitting on their "customers" and their employees. Cut costs and try engage in dark patterns and other shenanigans in order to keep getting the customer money and show growth. The relationship turns adverserial. I think this already happened way before but I speculate that the aggressive drive to slop and vibe coding while reducing head count is now coming around to start showing their effects in the software quality.
I further speculate that before they had some senior/principal engineers that were the backstop holding things together but they've been let go too now. So there's nothing to stop AI slop taking over.
Vibe patching
Is it only cloud storage files? I've noticed that in 2026 my windows 11 machine is slower than ever before, by a lot- barely able to render web pages.
I was hit by this. Could RDP into machines using the regular client, but could not access Dev Boxes via Windows App. Getting real sick of the low quality AI slop.
I for one am enjoying my last few months of Windows 10, stable, responsive, no surprise updates at last.
If you want stable, responsive, and old, use Debian, possibly with XFCE. Then, you have patches for security issues too.
Windows 10 is still supported until 2032 if you use LTSC
Even without MS' support it'll still work fine.
In fact, it's arguably better that way.
The old saying about known unknowns vs. unknown unknowns comes to mind.
The support you're paying for is security updates against 0-day attacks. Once you stop receiving those then your machine becomes open season for botnets
By definition no support protects you from a zero day attack, A one day attack? sure if the supporting org is on their toes. Most of the time it will be weeks to months. if it is patched at all.
That is pure FUD. Machines behind a firewall are not going to be affected at all.
As long as you don’t run that one file.
Microsoft security patches doesn’t protect you from doing that. Unsupported Win 10 behind firewall is perfectly fine, as long as you use an updated browser
Even that won't last forever. Notably, Edge is only guaranteeing updates until October 2028 [1], coinciding with the end of Windows 10's 3-year ESU period. Previously, Chromium ended support for Windows 7 at the end of its ESU period (which was also the end of support for Windows 8.1) [2]. However, Firefox continues to support Windows 7/8.1 by providing security updates for an older ESR version of Firefox 115; they appear to be re-evaluating whether to continue support every 6 months, currently set to end in March 2026.
I have patched Firefox 115 to run on XP, so no doubt it would be much easier to continue doing it for something as new as Win10.
I for one been enjoying Linux for years. No surprise updates or AI slop forced down my throat.
are they vibe coding?
Vibe coding with Github copilot, no less
They do as the slop king Satya guides (yes).
He wants more “diffusion”. Slopya says “diffusion” so you better “diffusion”. They need AI…
DIFFUSION
it is so annoying when Jonathan Blow says batshit unhinged shit about "the collapse of civilization" and he is kind of right.
I can't judge the severity but his basic point is absolutely correct
You know better than jblow to call him crazy? I definitely don’t.
Hyphens please.
Using React in core parts of the Windows Shell, Microsof's inability to design and release an application using non-web technologies, and the sluggishness and lagginess and bloat of Windows in general has finally pushed me to dual boot Fedora on a separate drive.
It is very nice having an Operating system that respects the Hardware I own and makes efficient use of it. My experience has been very good so far. Every device in my custom built desktop PC worked immediately. The only driver I had to build and install was for my XBOX Wireless dongle.
Gaming has been really damn good. I installed Steam and my games just worked. No fiddling around with configs or anything. Even installing a custom Proton version to try it out is very simple.
I've been on Fedora now for nearly a month and only boot into Windows for work. Eventually, I might get rid of Windows entirely. It'll take a massive U-turn from Microsoft on the philosophy for Windows for me to change my opinion now.
> I've been on Fedora now
I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
If you are not on KDE, I strongly recommend it.
Source: daily driving Linux for 25+ years.
KDE is useable now that I can use AI to deal with the thousand cuts.
TBH I was rather shocked at how bad Kubuntu is out of the box:
* Hibernate is flaky
* The OS freezes from time to time requiring a hard reset
* Snaps completely bork the system - better to just uninstall snap
* Keyring is flaky. Often you get stuck into an "enter your password" endless loop.
The list goes on - and this is on a desktop PC! But fortunately an AI can sift through the arcane workaround lore in the various forums.
The bugs are annoying, but a helluva lot better than using Gnome!
Do not underestimate the importance of the distribution. Debian 13 is great, fedora too. Ubuntu snaps are a plague.
> Ubuntu snaps are a plague.
I picked Linux Mint way back when, before snap was a thing, so I can't lay claim to foresight. But I was really glad when they announced that they were disabling snap by default (though of course allowing you to install it if you choose to). There days, Mint is what Ubuntu should be — and nearly all Ubuntu-based packages will run unmodified on Mint too, so if you want to run an Ubuntu version that's sane, then Mint is what I would recommend.
I agree. KDE is pretty good these days.
> I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
That is a disingenuous statement.
Gnome is just as open source as KDE is and there are several forks for those who don't like the direction on Gnome. At no point does Gnome force ads on you, changes default apps under your butt, or takes a nap before opening a menu.
Sure, Gnome is not for everybody and you may dislike the direction it is taking, but saying it is like MS Windows, or the community project is like Microsoft is dishonest and insulting. I expect better behaviour from a fellow FOSS enthusiast.
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My experience has been somewhat different. I've had a linux server for a long time so I'm not new to the OS but my main computer which I use for development and gaming and everything else has always been Windows. I recently added a dual-boot Ubuntu for some performance-heavy development where the better docker integration made sense for me to use.
I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.
The window manager crashed multiple times when I tried to unlock it.
Whenever I woke up my screen the whole system froze, apparently because of the USB hub in the monitor which registered. So far the only solution has been to disconnect the USB hub.
Fan control doesn't work properly because the chipset isn't supported.
I see rendering issues with window decorations all the time.
That's just after two weeks. I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors. Whenever I'm in the console or do IO heavy stuff I feel right at home but as a desktop OS it's still inferior to me. I don't have fewer problems on Linux, just different ones.
I stopped recommending Ubuntu years ago. I've daily driven fedora, pop_os! and a few arch derivatives with few or zero issues for years, switching it up when I get new hardware just out of curiosity.
> I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors.
This is my new daily life with Windows 11. I've got a client that requires some software that can't run under Linux (even with wine) and picked up a fairly spendy new laptop with windows on it. Not a day has gone by in the last three months I haven't regretted being forced to use it. Hangs and glitches every day for a minute or two, occasionally to the point that I give up and force restart it.
This is the result of letting “devs” that only use JavaScript, that think JavaScript is an good language, and now only use AI to code, to do anything at all.
Microsoft is a joke; all of the formerly glorious tech companies are.
Remember the times when Windows still had assembly language in its components?
I was just helping my dad with a brand new Lenovo laptop with Windows 11. It felt unbelievable slow and sluggish. Just opening file manager to create a new folder lagged so much it felt like this would have been a 15 years old computer.
While I personally use Ubuntu on my laptop for several years now, when I helped my relative with a brand new laptop (huawei) with Windows 11 I was suprised how fast it was despite being very cheap, I don't remember any version of Windows that had such a performance, at least visually.
Out of curiosity, what model does your father have?
It's a Lenovo Yoga 9i with an Intel EVO i5 CPU. Not sure how much memory it has.
There’s no way they’re using react in windows shell. Tell me they’re not.
I’d also recommend people try Arch. The install process has been made waaaay easier in the latest versions. Mostly select what you want et voila you’re good to go. I installed it on a mini pc I took with me over the holidays to game on and it was great. The only thing I’d seriously suggest against is installing a bunch of packages from the installer itself.
Doing so caused me headaches because it installed Gnome (again my fault for selecting a bunch of packages) alongside KDE and I didn’t realize it. Causing me a bunch of “issues” until I selected KDE as the desktop environment on login.
I’ll probably move to Arch on my primary workstation sometime in the next few weeks (from PopOS which has treated me well for the last five years but Cosmic has been frustrating). My biggest reason is Arch has much more up to date packages than what I’ve had access to via Pop and it’s what SteamOS is based on so imagine it’ll be easier to keep up to date (along with little tweaks that Valve incorporates). Not to mention the Arch docs are great, I’ve had them help me even on PopOS for years now.
Addendum: Gnome + Wayland has more or less jumped the shark for me, with its highly opinionated design. KDE has thus far been plenty acceptable. For folks wanting to try both it’s easy enough to just install, pretty much all login managers (screens) let you choose which one you want. My only regret about KDE is losing Kinto.sh for MacOS style keybindings but I lost those with the move to Wayland anyway (still trying alternatives but they’ve been slow or quirky by comparison).
If only people knew how much of Microsoft Windows has been secretly powered by HTML pages for 20 years…
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
Windows XP/2000 still had Internet Explorer as a core component. Web tech was involved every time you opened a folder.
Windows Shell using web tech is as on-brand Microsoft as it gets.
There's a HUGE difference between "you can use HTML" and "JS all the things, because we can".
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
"Active desktop"? Most people turned that off, and the explorer was pure native code otherwise.
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98. Windows 95 would let you do this if you installed Internet Explorer 4.0 but there was no HTML anywhere in the OS in vanilla Win95.
Non-technical home users in my circles are fed up with Windows 11's changes from Windows 10 without a suitable transition that eases them into the changes. They are nowhere near good candidates to migrate to any flavor of Linux, though. There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
More interesting to me however, are the macOS technical friends in my circles. A trickle of them are switching to various Linux desktop distributions. This was inconceivable to me a mere 10 years ago. But I have to admit the quality of the Apple ecosystem has slid an astounding amount, which is driving the more advanced technical users into the arms of Linux. There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS, system-wide kinetic/momentum scrolling, iCloud sync, system-comprehensive battery management that includes working sleep and suspend, advanced trackpad gestures, uneven Unicode support, uneven human interface guideline adherence, limited laptop LLM inference, etc. So I'm not expecting this trickle to turn into a flood soon, but the solid lock Apple used to have on developer mindshare is not as solid any longer.
> There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
I wouldn't be so assertive about that. No OS is perfect, and as we see here, windows is no exception. It's mostly a matter of being used to living with those imperfections. At least on Linux, nobody is making those worse for you for "fun" (actually for their own profit at the detriment of yours), and many more nontechnical users sense that just fine (just the way copilot was forced is baffling).
> There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS
KDE Connect solved that, and much more, many many years ago. I don't know the situation in the Apple walled garden, only that any hurdle there is the result of Apple abusive, user-hostile and anticompetitive practices that should (and will eventually) be illegal outside of the US.
CachyOS has been smooth sailing for me! It is an arch derivative and it is blazing fast and stable.
Please don’t blame react for this, and not because I like react. The real problem is bad development caused by processes, procedures and most likely pressures to cut corners.
Microsoft code is bad. This is not a react issue, and is probably not caused by lead developers. But the problem is now that things have regressed to 98 era technology, it’s going to take a long time for the problem to get better.
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Slop Tuesday
Microslop producing slop by using github slopilot, now supported by claude slopus 4.5
Copilot Tuesday
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Source?
This sounds like a racist take even if there would be a modicum of truth to it.
Nah, I wouldn't call it outsourcing. They have AI usage KPIs. [1]
> "We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication..."
> "We need to make deliberate choices on how we diffuse this technology in the world as a solution to the challenges of people and planet," Nadella says. "For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact."
The Indian outsourcing long predated Nadella. Now it's outsourcing to AI.
Microsoft was on a downward trajectory long before Satya Nadella's tenure.
I actually credit Nadella with restoring some amount of Microsoft's reputation. It was Nadella who, on his first year after taking over from Ballmer, stood on the stage in front of a big "MS (heart) Linux" banner and talked about how Microsoft was going to be doing more in the Linux world (I don't recall details). That was also when Microsoft started publishing more things as open-source: VS Code, almost everything related to C# and dotnet... None of which, I believe, would have happened with Ballmer and his mindset at the helm. That was the point at which I stopped saying "Oh, it came from MS, it's going to be low-quality code". Some of their code is halfway decent. Of course, none of the code I consider to be halfway decent is part of Windows...
EDIT to add: I agree that they've been going downhill the past few years, though. And I don't think it's a coincidence that that corresponds with the tendency for some devs (not all, thankfully, but too many) offloading too much of their thinking to LLMs and uncritically pushing insufficiently-reviewed slop into the code review process. I suspect MS has the same problems as other companies with that, perhaps more because of internal pressure (I assume, I have no insider knowledge) to use Copilot.
#winning
People are blaming vibe coding but the real culprit was hiring leetcoders in the first place. I genuinely believe the stark decrease in quality of most products across the industry has been driven by that.
Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.
Really needs to be studied.
It's like they started making structural decisions a decade ago that are now overwhelming their ability to deliver basic functionality.
I realize there were always problems like this, I live through Windows ME, but it does feel qualitatively different now with advertising being forced into the product, performance of no consideration at all, etc.
In summary because:
Gonna get a lot worse still and things will continue to deteriorate until Wall Street picks up on the issues and thinks it'll start hurting their next quarter results. (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)There's not really not much more room for Microsoft's consumer software to grow, but the next quarterly report must show black numbers, so the only way to stay profitable is to produce software in a way that is cheaper than the previous month.
Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.
Growth mindset can be such a cancer. Many mature businesses don't need to grow and are perfectly fine as they are. You could continue running them forever, making steady cash. Or you could enshittify them, make slightly more money for 3 years, and get overtaken by competitors, all the while pissing everyone off and wasting billions of dollars.
Short term greed. Maximize immediate profits at the the cost of future profits.
They moved to a purely extractive mindset; the goal seems to be extract as much as possible out of the inertia they have built, while almost (but not quite) killing the brand.
Its not even an uncommon story; to the point where it seems like a signal; when shareholders bring in an Indian CEO, innovation is done, and its time to try to eat all the seedcorn.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon ...
It seems like that decline will continue until it affects their stock prices. There's effectively a bunch of perverse incentives at the decision making level in all major companies right now that disconnects them from customer/end users. Until that fundamental issue is fixed the enshittification will continue.
According to their latest annual report, Windows earns them less than half as much as Office and less than a quarter of what they make by selling server products.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.
That is true in the short term but most of the rest of their business rests on the fact that windows is the default OS.
If windows ever gets so bad that people actually do defect to macos/linux en masse that absolutely will affect their stock price, but so far it hasn't happened
Corporate users are the only users they even pretend they care about and they know they have pretty good lock in with Windows and office.
Also obviously this is someone else's problem some other quarter.. so.. like who cares?
It's definitely on a very long fuse, but if they lose control of the windows codebase to the point where bugs are regularly getting shipped to production that cause issues for corporate IT departments, and an increasing number of employees use MacOS or Linux at home and need training at work to learn how to use windows, it could change.
Short term no but long term these rotations do happen, otherwise we'd all still be using IBM
I don't disagree with you and in fact I hope there were quicker ramifications. Any company that forgets their customers and assumes such arrogant self serving stance should get a proverbial slap in face rather sooner than later. Unfortunately our mechanism for serving that said slap in the face are rather limited and as a single consumer (or even as a single enterprise) serving that slap only serves to slap ourselves in the face in the process by inconveniencing ourselves given the lack of viable/drop in alternatives. This is why we need regulation to get the corporate greed in check.
I think that transition, from OS/Desktop company to a Cloud Services Provider, is where the rot comes from.
The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
> Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years
Sort of matching the decline of Intel too.
Intel was resting on their laurels throughout most of the 2010s, while AMD floundered and couldn't catch up. By the time AMD got their shit together with Ryzen, Intel had all but been defeated by their own complacency.
All products seem to decline the moment the revenue model switches to monthly recurring. This is always contrary to the promise that they won't and that money will be invested in product improvements.
If you think it's bad now wait until they consolidate the rental PC market (Bezos and Nadella are all over that)
How do you patch something that was written by another colleague, using an LLM, that you also need an LLM to figure out?
How do you find the subtle bugs? Working with LLMs I noticed, they try to implement things from scratch. I asked it to output the md5 hash of some string in the api response, it went on to implement the md5 algo and then called it. I simply did not have the time to check correctness so asked it to import a library I know. Someone might just have gone with it, shipped to prod and then bugs.
It also introduced slight changes in the intended flow of your program, that if you aren’t fully aware, are unnoticeable until they compound and you’re too deep to go back because now 10 different weird behaviors are in prod, you’re not sure what the cause is or if they were actually intended. You just have no frame of reference because maybe you didn’t build all of it as part of a team. And those are the things you should have had tests for, but when you were writing the code yourself you were coding with intent, so you know when something was off.
Now you build at the speed of thought and no longer know all the intents, only that the end result satisfies loosely written requirements.
The bigger question is how the breakage made it through QA in the first place. Oh right, Microsoft fired all their QA a while back.
They're quite a bit late to the 'move fast and break things' party.
The start menu search is turning blank and shows a white screen whenever I search anything. Similar to how react apps break. It's been like this for 6 momths, across two laptops, fresh install of 25h2.
Search on Windows is completely pointless, it’s been broken for years at this point. I’ve installed PowerToys and use Command Palette now
It was never good when you compare to internet search.
On the internet I can search for "pictures of the eiffel tower". If I try the same on my own computer I expect to find photos from the time I took the family to paris... Yet I don't.
And yet Gnome and KDE have no troubles doing just that if you activate the corresponding plug-ins for the respective search engines (Tracker and Baloo). How you access them is a matter of taste, but both integrate into your runner dialog or launch menu, if you wish.
I still have my Windows 11 machine, but I haven't booted into it in a couple months now.
The "Windows is going to be an agentic OS" announcement was the last straw.
Linux and Mac it is.
I would enjoy hooking up Claude to KDE with voice control and audio feedback, but am 100% on board with that it should be 100% the user deciding to go for that folly.
I mean, that would be a fun experiment on a VM, but I would not trust it directly on my work station, not the least because of privacy. It might might do a mass-mass-rm-rf
https://x.com/tskulbru/status/2015148189897101622
How's that AI tools doing for you Microslop ?
They are doing fine. It affects users, not customers.
And this is why I'm still running Win10 LTSC. No bloat, super fast, still gets security updates.
I was doing that until Adobe decided to start using an API which is not present in 2021 LTSC. So I moved to macOS. Tahoe has its problems but it and the hardware makes a mockery of Windows 11 and PCs generally.
In theory, this was a security patch, so you're still at risk of MS pushing a problematic patch to Win10
How do you get a valid license?
This is the current method of choice
https://massgrave.dev/
You don't, you pirate it. If you paid perfectly working, non-vibecoded dollars for Windows 11 Pro which became utterly broken, pirating whatever you need from Microslop to actually having a working computer is morally right.
Look I have no idea if this is related, but I have noticed recently, talking to other developers, that the addiction / allure of the speed that coding with AI agents gives you is leading to a relaxation of their standard quality bar. This doesn't even feel like the evil overlords whipping them more, it is self-inflicted.
When you can get multiple different agents to all work on things and you are bouncing between them, careful review of their code becomes the bottleneck. So you start lowering your bar to "good enough", where "good enough" is not really good enough. It's a new good enough, which is like you squinting at the code and as long as the shape is vaguely ok, and the code works (where that means you click around a bit and it seems fine), it's ok.
Over time you lose your "theory"[1] of the software, and I would imagine that makes you effectively lower your bar even further, because you are less attached to what good should look like.
This is all anecdotal on my end, but it does feel like quality as a whole in the industry has tanked in the last maybe 12 months? It feels like there are more outages than normal. I couldn't find a good temporal outage graph, but if you trust this: https://www.catchpoint.com/internet-outages-timeline , the number of outages in 2025 is orders of magnitude up on 2024.
Maybe this is because there are way more, maybe this is because they are now tracking way more, I'm not sure. But it definitely _feels_ like we are in for a bumpy ride over the next few years.
[1] in the Programming as Theory Building sense: https://gareth.nz/ai-programming-as-theory-building.html
Exactly, half of a system exists as code but the other half exists as a mental model in the minds of the devs. With AI the former will, now much more quickly, outrun or deviate from the latter and then the problems of long-term reliability, maintainability and confidence in validation and delivery are just beginning.
Exactly right and by the time you get that theory back could you have just it all yourself?
Do you get the impression the industry is caring about quality vs ‘good enough’ + cutting costs?
"The industry" is not that homogeneous. B2B Software firms keeping their products in maintenance for decades are very different from your B2C mobile gaming app creator.
I’m genuinely wondering if they’re using llms to code windows. Is that likely?
I think there is even an internet meme showing a headline where Microsoft brags about how AI is doing more more coding and right below that headline another one where a decline in quality is mentioned.
I mean, unless Windows is a special exception, almost certainly:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
10,000%.
Last Thursday windows 11 forced an update on my Acer machine.It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device. It took me a reformat to solve the issue.
I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse.
Microsoft is an end stage software company that has exhausted natural growth in its desktop segment. When that happens to a company that is beholden to Wall Street the only ways are to start shitting on their "customers" and their employees. Cut costs and try engage in dark patterns and other shenanigans in order to keep getting the customer money and show growth. The relationship turns adverserial. I think this already happened way before but I speculate that the aggressive drive to slop and vibe coding while reducing head count is now coming around to start showing their effects in the software quality.
I further speculate that before they had some senior/principal engineers that were the backstop holding things together but they've been let go too now. So there's nothing to stop AI slop taking over.
Vibe patching
Is it only cloud storage files? I've noticed that in 2026 my windows 11 machine is slower than ever before, by a lot- barely able to render web pages.
I was hit by this. Could RDP into machines using the regular client, but could not access Dev Boxes via Windows App. Getting real sick of the low quality AI slop.
I for one am enjoying my last few months of Windows 10, stable, responsive, no surprise updates at last.
If you want stable, responsive, and old, use Debian, possibly with XFCE. Then, you have patches for security issues too.
Windows 10 is still supported until 2032 if you use LTSC
Even without MS' support it'll still work fine.
In fact, it's arguably better that way.
The old saying about known unknowns vs. unknown unknowns comes to mind.
The support you're paying for is security updates against 0-day attacks. Once you stop receiving those then your machine becomes open season for botnets
By definition no support protects you from a zero day attack, A one day attack? sure if the supporting org is on their toes. Most of the time it will be weeks to months. if it is patched at all.
That is pure FUD. Machines behind a firewall are not going to be affected at all.
As long as you don’t run that one file.
Microsoft security patches doesn’t protect you from doing that. Unsupported Win 10 behind firewall is perfectly fine, as long as you use an updated browser
Even that won't last forever. Notably, Edge is only guaranteeing updates until October 2028 [1], coinciding with the end of Windows 10's 3-year ESU period. Previously, Chromium ended support for Windows 7 at the end of its ESU period (which was also the end of support for Windows 8.1) [2]. However, Firefox continues to support Windows 7/8.1 by providing security updates for an older ESR version of Firefox 115; they appear to be re-evaluating whether to continue support every 6 months, currently set to end in March 2026.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-...
[2]: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/185534985/sunsettin...
[3]: https://whattrainisitnow.com/release/?version=esr
I have patched Firefox 115 to run on XP, so no doubt it would be much easier to continue doing it for something as new as Win10.
I for one been enjoying Linux for years. No surprise updates or AI slop forced down my throat.
are they vibe coding?
Vibe coding with Github copilot, no less
They do as the slop king Satya guides (yes).
He wants more “diffusion”. Slopya says “diffusion” so you better “diffusion”. They need AI…
DIFFUSION
it is so annoying when Jonathan Blow says batshit unhinged shit about "the collapse of civilization" and he is kind of right.
I can't judge the severity but his basic point is absolutely correct
You know better than jblow to call him crazy? I definitely don’t.
Hyphens please.
Using React in core parts of the Windows Shell, Microsof's inability to design and release an application using non-web technologies, and the sluggishness and lagginess and bloat of Windows in general has finally pushed me to dual boot Fedora on a separate drive.
It is very nice having an Operating system that respects the Hardware I own and makes efficient use of it. My experience has been very good so far. Every device in my custom built desktop PC worked immediately. The only driver I had to build and install was for my XBOX Wireless dongle.
Gaming has been really damn good. I installed Steam and my games just worked. No fiddling around with configs or anything. Even installing a custom Proton version to try it out is very simple.
I've been on Fedora now for nearly a month and only boot into Windows for work. Eventually, I might get rid of Windows entirely. It'll take a massive U-turn from Microsoft on the philosophy for Windows for me to change my opinion now.
> I've been on Fedora now
I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
If you are not on KDE, I strongly recommend it.
Source: daily driving Linux for 25+ years.
KDE is useable now that I can use AI to deal with the thousand cuts.
TBH I was rather shocked at how bad Kubuntu is out of the box:
* Hibernate is flaky
* The OS freezes from time to time requiring a hard reset
* Snaps completely bork the system - better to just uninstall snap
* Keyring is flaky. Often you get stuck into an "enter your password" endless loop.
The list goes on - and this is on a desktop PC! But fortunately an AI can sift through the arcane workaround lore in the various forums.
The bugs are annoying, but a helluva lot better than using Gnome!
Do not underestimate the importance of the distribution. Debian 13 is great, fedora too. Ubuntu snaps are a plague.
> Ubuntu snaps are a plague.
I picked Linux Mint way back when, before snap was a thing, so I can't lay claim to foresight. But I was really glad when they announced that they were disabling snap by default (though of course allowing you to install it if you choose to). There days, Mint is what Ubuntu should be — and nearly all Ubuntu-based packages will run unmodified on Mint too, so if you want to run an Ubuntu version that's sane, then Mint is what I would recommend.
I agree. KDE is pretty good these days.
> I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
That is a disingenuous statement.
Gnome is just as open source as KDE is and there are several forks for those who don't like the direction on Gnome. At no point does Gnome force ads on you, changes default apps under your butt, or takes a nap before opening a menu.
Sure, Gnome is not for everybody and you may dislike the direction it is taking, but saying it is like MS Windows, or the community project is like Microsoft is dishonest and insulting. I expect better behaviour from a fellow FOSS enthusiast.
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My experience has been somewhat different. I've had a linux server for a long time so I'm not new to the OS but my main computer which I use for development and gaming and everything else has always been Windows. I recently added a dual-boot Ubuntu for some performance-heavy development where the better docker integration made sense for me to use.
I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.
The window manager crashed multiple times when I tried to unlock it.
Whenever I woke up my screen the whole system froze, apparently because of the USB hub in the monitor which registered. So far the only solution has been to disconnect the USB hub.
Fan control doesn't work properly because the chipset isn't supported.
I see rendering issues with window decorations all the time.
That's just after two weeks. I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors. Whenever I'm in the console or do IO heavy stuff I feel right at home but as a desktop OS it's still inferior to me. I don't have fewer problems on Linux, just different ones.
I stopped recommending Ubuntu years ago. I've daily driven fedora, pop_os! and a few arch derivatives with few or zero issues for years, switching it up when I get new hardware just out of curiosity.
> I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors.
This is my new daily life with Windows 11. I've got a client that requires some software that can't run under Linux (even with wine) and picked up a fairly spendy new laptop with windows on it. Not a day has gone by in the last three months I haven't regretted being forced to use it. Hangs and glitches every day for a minute or two, occasionally to the point that I give up and force restart it.
This is the result of letting “devs” that only use JavaScript, that think JavaScript is an good language, and now only use AI to code, to do anything at all.
Microsoft is a joke; all of the formerly glorious tech companies are.
Remember the times when Windows still had assembly language in its components?
I was just helping my dad with a brand new Lenovo laptop with Windows 11. It felt unbelievable slow and sluggish. Just opening file manager to create a new folder lagged so much it felt like this would have been a 15 years old computer.
While I personally use Ubuntu on my laptop for several years now, when I helped my relative with a brand new laptop (huawei) with Windows 11 I was suprised how fast it was despite being very cheap, I don't remember any version of Windows that had such a performance, at least visually. Out of curiosity, what model does your father have?
It's a Lenovo Yoga 9i with an Intel EVO i5 CPU. Not sure how much memory it has.
There’s no way they’re using react in windows shell. Tell me they’re not.
I’d also recommend people try Arch. The install process has been made waaaay easier in the latest versions. Mostly select what you want et voila you’re good to go. I installed it on a mini pc I took with me over the holidays to game on and it was great. The only thing I’d seriously suggest against is installing a bunch of packages from the installer itself.
Doing so caused me headaches because it installed Gnome (again my fault for selecting a bunch of packages) alongside KDE and I didn’t realize it. Causing me a bunch of “issues” until I selected KDE as the desktop environment on login.
I’ll probably move to Arch on my primary workstation sometime in the next few weeks (from PopOS which has treated me well for the last five years but Cosmic has been frustrating). My biggest reason is Arch has much more up to date packages than what I’ve had access to via Pop and it’s what SteamOS is based on so imagine it’ll be easier to keep up to date (along with little tweaks that Valve incorporates). Not to mention the Arch docs are great, I’ve had them help me even on PopOS for years now.
Addendum: Gnome + Wayland has more or less jumped the shark for me, with its highly opinionated design. KDE has thus far been plenty acceptable. For folks wanting to try both it’s easy enough to just install, pretty much all login managers (screens) let you choose which one you want. My only regret about KDE is losing Kinto.sh for MacOS style keybindings but I lost those with the move to Wayland anyway (still trying alternatives but they’ve been slow or quirky by comparison).
If only people knew how much of Microsoft Windows has been secretly powered by HTML pages for 20 years…
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
Windows XP/2000 still had Internet Explorer as a core component. Web tech was involved every time you opened a folder.
Windows Shell using web tech is as on-brand Microsoft as it gets.
There's a HUGE difference between "you can use HTML" and "JS all the things, because we can".
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
"Active desktop"? Most people turned that off, and the explorer was pure native code otherwise.
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98. Windows 95 would let you do this if you installed Internet Explorer 4.0 but there was no HTML anywhere in the OS in vanilla Win95.
Non-technical home users in my circles are fed up with Windows 11's changes from Windows 10 without a suitable transition that eases them into the changes. They are nowhere near good candidates to migrate to any flavor of Linux, though. There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
More interesting to me however, are the macOS technical friends in my circles. A trickle of them are switching to various Linux desktop distributions. This was inconceivable to me a mere 10 years ago. But I have to admit the quality of the Apple ecosystem has slid an astounding amount, which is driving the more advanced technical users into the arms of Linux. There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS, system-wide kinetic/momentum scrolling, iCloud sync, system-comprehensive battery management that includes working sleep and suspend, advanced trackpad gestures, uneven Unicode support, uneven human interface guideline adherence, limited laptop LLM inference, etc. So I'm not expecting this trickle to turn into a flood soon, but the solid lock Apple used to have on developer mindshare is not as solid any longer.
> There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
I wouldn't be so assertive about that. No OS is perfect, and as we see here, windows is no exception. It's mostly a matter of being used to living with those imperfections. At least on Linux, nobody is making those worse for you for "fun" (actually for their own profit at the detriment of yours), and many more nontechnical users sense that just fine (just the way copilot was forced is baffling).
> There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS
KDE Connect solved that, and much more, many many years ago. I don't know the situation in the Apple walled garden, only that any hurdle there is the result of Apple abusive, user-hostile and anticompetitive practices that should (and will eventually) be illegal outside of the US.
CachyOS has been smooth sailing for me! It is an arch derivative and it is blazing fast and stable.
Please don’t blame react for this, and not because I like react. The real problem is bad development caused by processes, procedures and most likely pressures to cut corners.
Microsoft code is bad. This is not a react issue, and is probably not caused by lead developers. But the problem is now that things have regressed to 98 era technology, it’s going to take a long time for the problem to get better.
Slop Tuesday
Microslop producing slop by using github slopilot, now supported by claude slopus 4.5
Copilot Tuesday
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Source? This sounds like a racist take even if there would be a modicum of truth to it.
Nah, I wouldn't call it outsourcing. They have AI usage KPIs. [1]
> "We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication..."
> "We need to make deliberate choices on how we diffuse this technology in the world as a solution to the challenges of people and planet," Nadella says. "For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact."
> https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-ceo-satya...
[1] https://adoption.microsoft.com/files/copilot/Unlocking-AIs-I...
The Indian outsourcing long predated Nadella. Now it's outsourcing to AI.
Microsoft was on a downward trajectory long before Satya Nadella's tenure.
I actually credit Nadella with restoring some amount of Microsoft's reputation. It was Nadella who, on his first year after taking over from Ballmer, stood on the stage in front of a big "MS (heart) Linux" banner and talked about how Microsoft was going to be doing more in the Linux world (I don't recall details). That was also when Microsoft started publishing more things as open-source: VS Code, almost everything related to C# and dotnet... None of which, I believe, would have happened with Ballmer and his mindset at the helm. That was the point at which I stopped saying "Oh, it came from MS, it's going to be low-quality code". Some of their code is halfway decent. Of course, none of the code I consider to be halfway decent is part of Windows...
EDIT to add: I agree that they've been going downhill the past few years, though. And I don't think it's a coincidence that that corresponds with the tendency for some devs (not all, thankfully, but too many) offloading too much of their thinking to LLMs and uncritically pushing insufficiently-reviewed slop into the code review process. I suspect MS has the same problems as other companies with that, perhaps more because of internal pressure (I assume, I have no insider knowledge) to use Copilot.
#winning
People are blaming vibe coding but the real culprit was hiring leetcoders in the first place. I genuinely believe the stark decrease in quality of most products across the industry has been driven by that.