Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change
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heated
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negative
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tech
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Windows 11
Microsoft
Operating Systems
Microsoft is making significant changes to Windows 11, sparking massive backlash from users.
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11/13/2025, 6:01:52 PM
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Embedded into the operating system? Will they be helpful there?
IMO there are better ways
Integrated AI solves so many real problems, not the least of which is that it’s sanctioned by IT.
This is the big thing that Microsoft understands. For a non-tech company, it's going to be pretty hard to get buy in to pay for ChatGPT enterprise, and then pay for/spend dev or IT resources to integrate it (and develop those integrations) with their already existing Microsoft/SharePoint/Teams stack to make it useful. And then you still don't get the convenient Office app add-ins.
Microsoft bundles this all, integrates it for you, and provides a GUI for governance controls. It's very click-ops focused, which enterprise IT likes, and the bundling means you don't have to sell those with the wallets on buying extra third party tools. Nobody every got fired for buying s/IBM/Microsoft
We do have all the News and Weather and other "Suggestions" turned off.
Adding features isn't inherently a bad thing, but we don't believe Microsoft can do it without making the existing features worse.
alas my new work laptop is still on win 10.
For the normie/general office worker, even Copilot (the Microsoft 365 for Business version) has been wildly popular where I work. "Copilot, help me prepare for this meeting coming up" and the worker gets a nice little package of all the emails, word docs, spreadsheets, teams/sharepoint convos, etc. related to the meeting.
Imagine: User accidentally deletes file. Instead of opening a help desk ticket, they can ask Copilot "Hey Copilot, I accidentally deleted this excel file, can you get it back?" and the OS integrated AI restores it from volume shadow copy, or from %appdata%
or "Hey copilot, I have a meeting starting. Can you turn on do not disturb, and open my xyz presentation for screen sharing"
Yeah, those things can be done pretty fast manually, or even scripted, but the average office worker doesn't have the computer knowledge to do so. A real functioning version of (to use their buzzword) "agentic" AI integrated in the OS means they don't need the knowledge, just ask the computer to do it for them.
It could be huge, but I have my doubts it'll actually work as well as Microsoft wishes it would.
Developers building things like web apps can use macOS.
Developers developing for Windows, or who need Windows-only toolchains cannot.
CAD/CAM systems. GIS applications. Automatic teller machine software. Public safety dispatch systems. Automotive diagnostic tools. Point of sale systems. List goes on.
Yes you can build a POS system using Windows tech, but you don't really gain much by doing so, other than a whole host of headaches when it comes to deployment and administration.
If you’re in the business of shipping software that needs to run alongside other people’s software on the same machine, it’s a disaster.
Linux userspace backwards compatibility is extremely poor, the “solutions” to this issue (Flatpak, Snap et al) generally create more management problems than they solve. Desktop Linux is already an absolute monster to manage.
Try securely deploying hardware-backed PKI certificates for 802.1x to a fleet of Linux workstations. Takes a couple of minutes on Windows and macOS, but it’s a massive engineering effort on Linux.
There's software that exists beyond the web and SaaS.
Windows is still used widely in all sorts of places you'd never expect to see it. POS systems, ATMs, industrial controllers, digital signage/interactive kiosks, SCADA is largely Windows still. You need software for all of that, and it ain't gonna be web apps.
Windows is also still widespread in finance. The backend systems may be Linux or custom FGPA hardware but the front end finance world is ran on Windows (and Excel on Windows). Plenty of trading software is Windows only.
Heck, MS SQL Server is still in the #2 or #3 spot for database marketshare behind Oracle. Granted, it can run on Linux now but I don't many who are yet.
None of it is "sexy" like HN startups and SaaS so it doesn't get the coverage or discussion, but Windows is everywhere and so are Windows developers. You could argue whether or not Windows is/was the right choice for a lot of those (it's probably not), but it's there nonetheless and probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Sure. Except once upon a time ago, Microsoft was really big on dogfooding and it definitively was not ok for Microsoft's developers to not use Windows.
Seeing their employees using macs on stage at conferences sends a very clear message "don't bother with Windows. It isn't even good enough for our own staff to use."
What happened to "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"? Ballmer was not a good CEO, but he understood at least that dev & enthusiast mindshare = your product being chosen and recommended elsewhere.
A few months ago, I switched my aunt (70+ as well) to Linux Mint after repeated issues with Windows 10 and now 11. The last straw was the printer stopped working one day out of the blue. Tired to re-install it for over an hour, impossible! When I installed Mint and looked to add the printer, it was already there and ready to work. And for the user experience, I just sat her in front of the computer and asker her to do various tasks that she would normally do on Windows without any explanation, and she just did them intuitively. She even sent me a message a few days ago to thank me for installing Linux on her machine!
Microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot with Windows, it's like they don't even care about consumer operating systems anymore. Most popular Linux distros are stable and easy to use, for an average computer user it's perfect. I also daily drive Linux (Bazzite, based on Fedora Silverblue) and it does everything I need - coding, browsing, games, it's all there. I'm never going back to Windows.
Just works.
the CEO has been conned into the bullshit, and now has "AI" Chiefs of Staff telling him what to do
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...
"Excellent question!" "Great idea!" "You're so smart!"
you can see how someone can fall into this trap, but normally they're not the one at the top so it's somewhat harmless
if you get someone at the top though... they can enforce their will downwards via KPIs and OKRs
> At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots.
The race to what, pursue more of what users don't want so as to lose even more of them?
But I try to keep abreast of whats happening on the other side of the fence and I am often recoiling in horror and wondering why the fuck Windows users tolerate any of this.
It’s performant, easy to manage at scale, a lot of the UX weirdness from Windows 8-10 has been cleaned up, and tools like WSL are well integrated.
Folks could have used those services even if Windows itself wasn't getting clanked, right?
Does that answer your question
Not the case for Azure or Office
In reality, it's Microsoft. Click this popup now to get 12 months free of 1TB OneDrive, and Copilot 365!
MS is going all-in on something the users don't want... surprise! Your OS is going to be involuntarily made all-AI all-the-time. And somehow, this fundamental change isn't even worthy of a rev; it's still "Windows 11" - FWIW.
My favorite part of the article is when they refer to it (apparently accidentally) as MS Widows.
The shortened title has an unnecessary "enormous", but mangles actual meaning.
Will AI spare the children as well?
But this is balanced by the fact that we live in a world where all our software is effectively user hostile -- look for whatever means possible to extract more value from us. This is the society that we live in now.
Folks don't seem to have these problems on macs or their phones.
Then you're a real optimist. I'm afraid this whole AI technology once settles down will be nothing more than a corporate tool to manipulate populations economic behavior and perception of the world. An antithesis to what for example was seen in Star Trek, and something even worse than HAL9000.
Yes
The good thing about AI is it offers assistance with old, tractable, problems
When it is everywhere it is an unhelpful annoyance
That doesn't sound very good. I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or a typo. If the problem is old and tractable, you don't need AI for it. You could use a simpler, more efficient, and more reliable technology.
"old, tractable" and hard problems.
Routine things.
My mother mid pandemic placed an order for a hearing aid which is partially supported with money from our healthcare system. Unlike 10-15 years ago nowadays everything is digitalized and done by the Internet - clients are no longer running around the city with paper forms. Sadly that means every personal information, data is exposed to Windows and with W11 it's even less possible to avoid being harvested. Not mention always online browser software used for hearing tests that surely collects on its own.
This just seems like a semantic disagreement - I'm using "capitalism" by its common colloquial definition: As a loose shorthand for "the way we run things here", i.e. as a superset of the thing you've said.
These are not words that usually leads to user shouting "Yay, finally, what a pleasure this is to use now!". Why even use the word "pervasive" and the term "look at your screen", almost sounds like it's intentional to turn a specific segment of users away.
I feel like we're still discovering how security, privacy and LLMs connect together. Add in a OS-available MCP that has access to your computer and applications, and I feel like it's way too early to integrate it on that level, especially when they at the same time say "security is our top priority".
I don't think that's true anymore, and this proves it.
They did the security song and dance for a while because they were under pressure. Now AI is the number one priority over everything else, security be damned.
I don't think it ever ended, nor that it ever started. But they've been saying this for a while not, for at least two CEOs.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2024/01/25/mid...
Midnight Blizzard was the turning point after a decade of neglect, that saw a lot of amazing work done by some very talented people during the Trustworthy Computing era (following the Gates memo) being unwound.
Gates in 2002: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Gates-makes-security... (which mentioned Gates also said to focus on security in 1995 as internet became a new vector)
Gates in 2016: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/gates-security-is-to...
Just two examples. I think saying "Security is the most important!" is part of the job description of a Microsoft CEO, since they keep repeating it, yet security keeps being a low priority.
Windows XP SP3 was all about security. Vista introduced massive improvements with things like UAC, ASLR, Bitlocker, secure boot and add-ons like EMET that eventually got rolled into Windows itself. At the same time, there were massive changes in the engineering culture in terms of the secure development lifecycle.
A lot of other, arguably sexier feature work took a back seat to get all of these things across the line.
So yeah, for a while at least, Microsoft did prioritize security and did a lot of work to harden windows (or rather, provide the features for corporate IT departments to harden it). The problem is much of it is off by default, or even not available at all, to home users.
Given Microsoft’s attitude and locking this stuff behind enterprise licenses, it’s clear they don’t even view windows as a consumer OS but one that’s designed to be managed at scale by someone else.
Pretty much the only things I miss out on are Microsoft Office and Photoshop. Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days with Steam+Proton.
This alone is the last frontier IMO. It's the only reason I still run Win11 on a gaming PC with a big Nvidia. Take that away and their marketshare will tank.
I am, however, obligated to keep a Windows partition around because I do music production. If there are good DAWs that run natively on Linux, almost all plugins won't run on Linux. Everything plugin that runs as standalone or anything similar is guaranteed to not work on Linux.
I am thinking about getting a Mac mini for music production only, seems it's probably the lesser of 2 evils
I'm still on macOS for the foreseeable future as long as there's no Lightroom (Classic) or Photoshop on Linux. I'd even settle for CaptureOne or Exposure. DarkTable still isn't there, nor is the UI as easy to work with.
Not to mention other business uses and different fields whose apps are exclusively Windows, not even mac and Windows.
Windows has a captive audience. Yeah, Linux can and will take some, but it'll still be a small piece of the pie, unfortunately. Everyone else has no choice but to put up with the abuse.
They have certainly made a lot of progress, but there are many of us that will be stuck unless all the new AAA titles are supported. Battlefield 6 is a notable recent example of a wildly popular game that you can't play on a Steam Deck.
Seems like it's really just the anti-cheat that is holding things up. I wish every game studio out there didn't have to come up with their own anti-cheat system. Is this something Valve could solve once and for all with their OS & platform? That seems like something that would make the 30% tax a lot more appealing to game studios.
Design, sound production and cad are all lacking strong alternatives on Linux.
I've tried Kdenlive, but honestly, shotcut met my needs, so I didn't explore it too much: https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive
DaVinci Resolve is also available for linux. I've never used it though.
Gamers are only one case that's currently being solved. Devs are already solved (except for iOS). Creatives are a different story entirely.
If anything, Microsoft's decisions are more likely to boost mac sales than they are to create any kind of meaningful normie migration to Linux. Especially if Apple goes through with the rumored low-cost macbook. That thing will sell like hotcakes, and macOS share is already growing as is.
We are many times more likely to see the "Year of the macOS desktop" than we are the "Year of the Linux desktop"
Proton is a betting on the wrong horse, until Microsoft decides to put an end to it, in whatever way they feel like it. They own Windows, and are one of the biggest publishers in the industry, when grouping all studios they own.
Apple margins are too much for economies not on the same level as USA.
I do agree with devices being returned, this happened quite often with netbooks.
Lets hope they all buy a Mac.
But I prefer Debian Stable, for reasons both pragmatic and on-principle:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/d...
(Or people can go to a confusing download page: https://www.debian.org/distrib/ )
However Canonical apologised, and removed it.
Microsoft doubled down, adding more adverts.
The nice thing about Linux is that you have max choice. That can pose problems for new users who might be a bit overwhelmed but we shouldn't pretend that Canonical "owns" Linux or that everyone is necessarily going to land there. I recommend Mint when people tell me they're thinking of giving Linux a try. Haven't given Ubuntu a second thought in years.
Ubuntu is completely off my radar too. So many dumb things that often lasted a few releases. Like ads for their cloud services, Unity for a while, window controls on the left for a while...
My biggest problem with Mint was that upgrading the OS became a hassle if I put it off for too long (which I started doing after a not-so-smooth upgrade experience, one release).
Same for Fedora that I don't like also. I prefer to use RockyLinux or AlmaLinux if you really need a RHEL compatible system.
There are other options, most of them based on Debian or Ubuntu.
My desktop choice is ArchLinux with Plasma or XFCE4. No snaps, no crap.
My servers choice is RockyLinux 8 or 10.
I think it's horrible that they've taken extreme measures to overtly circumvent their users' desire to run the Firefox distributed through Mozilla's repo.
The following link describes how to overcome the latest version of Canonical's extreme insistence on the snap version of Firefox. It's almost laughable when you see how far they've gone to try to lock you in.
https://gist.github.com/jfeilbach/78d0ef94190fb07dee9ebfc340...
The only device I’ve found more sluggish after this recent OS upgrade is my Apple Watch Ultra (gen 1).
Animations when navigating the OS are noticeably sluggish where the previous version was smooth as butter. This degradation has persisted through multiple minor version updates since, so it seems to be permanent.
Disappointing for what is marketed as the most powerful watch in their lineup.
Yes, I know that AppImage and Flatpak are a thing. No, they are not the answer, because they, too, all come with their own issues.
And you know what? Tbh, I don't see a problem with that. If it keeps improving and eventually expands beyond gaming and can start running some of the stuff that can't currently (modern office, adobe stuff, etc.) then why not? There's decades of windows-only apps that there's just not enough time or talent in the world to re-create for Linux, so might as well put effort into Windows compatibility and just start running Windows apps.
Fast, a slight learning curve(took me a weekend), and I'm back gaming and coding regularly.
Really the question is who are they selling windows to and what do they put in it to try and make it an attractive offering. "Selling" might as well be figurative or literal seeing as they've now completely trained retail customers that they don't have to buy an OS even when before piracy was overlooked, and they'd need to be a significantly better offering than linux which is $0 and only getting better at undermining the core offering of 'running windows applications'.
Why do I feel like Neowin is using AI to write its articles?
The AI models that everyone wants to use are cloud based. What is the purpose of AI hardware on users' machine?
I love using my PC, but in the past couple of years it’s become my Steam and emulation box, and for tinkering.
They need to step up.
But damn, they seem to be doing everything they can to drive users away.
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