<story><title>Windows needs a change in priorities</title><url>https://den.dev/blog/windows-priority-shuffle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>segphault</author><text>Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user&amp;#x27;s Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn&amp;#x27;t be prevented. I had to completely uninstall it, which didn&amp;#x27;t really help, because they still kept bringing it back after every update. I assume that they&amp;#x27;re going to do this with Teams now.&lt;p&gt;For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company&amp;#x27;s reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.&lt;p&gt;Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It&amp;#x27;s disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.&lt;p&gt;It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I&amp;#x27;m reluctant to even try them because I don&amp;#x27;t trust their intentions. It&amp;#x27;s like being in an abusive relationship.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spaniard89277</author><text>From my POV it has come to a time where the tradeoffs you make switching to Linux (xubuntu in my case) are worth it.&lt;p&gt;A few days ago I had to do some helpdesk for a friend with windows 10. We suspected that one of his three drives failed, and windows just refused to start up, so I wanted to jump into recovery&amp;#x2F;safe mode and take a look.&lt;p&gt;But for doing so you need to go through a ridiculous lenght rebooting the PC multiple times and go through a bunch of sub menus. I tried but it didn&amp;#x27;t work, so we unplugged the hd we suspected it was failing and used my linux laptop with an external hd case to diagnose it.&lt;p&gt;I have a w10 corporate version in a pc, and it works kid of fine. I had to install windows 10 home to a laptop recebtly and everything feels like an abuse.&lt;p&gt;If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it&amp;#x27;s drivers issues and the problems that I can&amp;#x27;t fix without googling as I&amp;#x27;m not intimate with the SO, what&amp;#x27;s the point?&lt;p&gt;Its just too much effort.</text></comment>
<story><title>Windows needs a change in priorities</title><url>https://den.dev/blog/windows-priority-shuffle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>segphault</author><text>Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user&amp;#x27;s Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn&amp;#x27;t be prevented. I had to completely uninstall it, which didn&amp;#x27;t really help, because they still kept bringing it back after every update. I assume that they&amp;#x27;re going to do this with Teams now.&lt;p&gt;For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company&amp;#x27;s reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.&lt;p&gt;Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It&amp;#x27;s disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.&lt;p&gt;It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I&amp;#x27;m reluctant to even try them because I don&amp;#x27;t trust their intentions. It&amp;#x27;s like being in an abusive relationship.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Silhouette</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That&amp;#x27;s a much harder thing to do.&lt;p&gt;Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them.&lt;p&gt;Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop&amp;#x2F;laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren&amp;#x27;t in large organisations running &amp;quot;enterprise&amp;quot; software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.</text></comment>