Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected Ever wondered why no network exec has picked up on writers' pitches for Desperate Tech Bros? The reason is simple: the market is already saturated. Tune into any technology reviews channel on YouTube over the last month, and you'll see them sweat as they try to pad out the minutes with "Ten ESSENTIAL new features you NEED to …
So it's finally been said : Borkzilla can't make a new OS version worth a damn. Oh sure, Nadella can change version numbers all he wants, but's just wind, there's nothing substantial.
Now, maybe the notion that there will never be new hardware is pushing things a bit far, but it's certain that whatever may come out will not need a new OS version. A driver will suffice.
So yeah, let's stop degrading the user interface with useless widgets that offer clutter and not much more, and stop pretending that they need a new OS version. Make Windows more modular.
And hey, since the last update, you can now actually uninstall Cortana ! So, progress is being made, albeit at the rate of an asthmatic slug.
I'd be happy if they gave me the option to turn off all the telemetry for all time, let me log in with a local account instead of trying their damnedest to force users to login with a Microsoft account and support perfectly good hardware that isn't yet fit for the eWaste heap. What is it about paying for a windows licence when they keep turning the telemetry back on every time they force an update to your machine, either we are the product and it should be free with no way to turn off the telemetry or you pay for a licence and the telemetry is off by default.
Think I might switch to Linux once Windows 10 is out of support
The only progress MS can really do now with Windows is to provide a decent and easily customisable UI to replace the abortions they've nailed on since Win8. Themes are not a new thing and XP had an option to change to 'Classic mode' which reverted to a Win 2000 desktop, so why don't MS just offer a free 2000, XP, Win7, Vista (or Win8/8.1 if you really want to) theme that gives you a choice of a properly functioning desktop that is easy to use, intuitive and actually works? You should not need to run a search to find a locally installed application on your PC, it should be in the menu with everything else, arranged logically and easily accessible. Not the woeful mess you have to fight with today.
Yes I know someone will pop up now and say, "Use this app to fix it.", but that should not be necessary. MS, get your shit together and give your product customers a choice, they've paid for the bloody OS so give them a sensible option here.
Themes in Windows XP were an incredible bodge job of Microsoftian proportions:
1) Draw the window using the standard chrome
2) Draw over the top of this using the Windows XP theme.
It's also very important to ensure that as much as possible it's harder and harder to tell where one window stops and another starts
Now we have the abject stupidity of a new feature called "dark mode" which is another layer of dumb on top of the operating system. The same operating system that a few versions ago allowed users to change the damn system colours, including providing pre-packaged themed colours. Well behaved applications, respected these colours and rendered their interface appropriately. All the OS needed adding was a "user has picked a specific theme" to aid applications in swapping images out and that was it. OK, a "per application" dark mode would be very useful too. Instead we have yet another botched mess of applications doing things whatever way they feel like it and Microsoft partly implementing the same being touted as a massive new feature.
The new screensavers in Sonoma are only downloaded when selected (except I assume the default one, which is included).
They also automatically get removed when the disk getting full full. See the Ars Technica Sonoma review page 8 under the heading "macOS uses purgeable storage to “prevent” screen savers from eating up disk space".
What you say is true but the hacks that write the drivel that gets published here, HATE anything to do with Apple. It must be a condition of employment and IMHO, has gotten worse since this site went all American.
I wonder how many of these so called journo's own or use at least one bit of Apple kit? That should be a mandatory disclaimer whenever they write about El Fruity.
On an article explaining how Windows 11 is bollocks you're moaning about an anti apple bias.
You don't complain about the drivel hacks have written about MS, Google, IBM or any of the other tech giants.
What's so special about Apple? You think el Reg should take the piss out of everyone else but leave your favourite tech alone?
,,, has gotten worse since this site went all American."
As have you apparently.
British usage is to use the word got. A little clumsy sounding and does not roll of the tongue like gotten, but there it is.
The strange thing about got and gotten is that gotten was previously used in British English, and went over to America with the settlers. Here gotten fell out of use but continued in the US. There is a fossil usage still in British English in the form of "ill-gotten gains."
But IMO using "become" sounds too passive, as if the worsening was somehow accidental.
Surely they actively decided to reach out, and deliberately *got* some extra "worse", just so as to add it ... no? :-D
No, it’s not that simple.
In some English language variants spoken in England, “gotten” is indeed the past participle of “get”. It is clear that you do not speak one of these variants, but even in the South-eastern ones which really love to use "got", you will still hear "gotten" in stock phrases or older formations like “ill-gotten”.
The reason why Americans use “gotten” isn’t that they made it up; but rather that at some point after the US separated culturally from Britain, speakers of British English began to use the grammatically-incorrect, but shorter, “got” as the past participle of “get”*. The new usage stuck, and has become the norm in most parts of Britain and the colonies that took longer to leave its orbit; but within England itself, the older form still carries on - I believe it’s more common in the North of England.
The form “gotten” is evident from the beginnings of modern English in the 14th century. Bacon, Shakespeare and the King James Bible all prefer it, and today, verbs that were related to “get” such as beget and forget have kept the “gotten” form in their past participles.
__
* I don’t know why this happened, but I’d guess it was probably part of the then-popular, but idiotic, idea that English (a Germanic language that had been retrofitted with French vocabulary) should follow the grammatical rules of Latin - after all, this was the reason for all the other stupid grammar “rules” that bear no relation to how native speakers actually use English.
As a person who went to a comprehensive school (unlike my mother who was grammar school educated) its a delight to be educated by the learned readers of the Register, not only in technical IT matters, but also the history of England and its grammar.
Embarrassingly I often feel that my multi lingual friends have a considerably better grasp of the subject (I fear I might be demonstrating my inadequacies in this written response)
That said I do know its “similar to” and “different from” …
Of course, you have to take such explanations with a grain of salt (not the ones upthread in particular, necessarily, but in general). There is a vast corpus of lore about English grammar, usage,1 diction, orthography, dialects, etymology, and so on, and much of it is at best weakly supported by the evidence, if not outright contradicted. Someone's already mentioned the efforts of Augustan writers to Latinize English, giving us such nonsense as the prohibition on split infinitives – a useful, if accidental, feature of English that should be welcomed by those interested in style.
Online debates about English often devolve into, if not start from, a series of jejune2 arguments appealing to such sources as dim memories of lessons learned from elementary-school teachers.
And, of course, there are many matters which are largely subjective, such as English punctuation. There pundits are primarily divided into the "scientific" school (punctuate according to grammatical structure3) and the "natural" school (punctuate so it feels right) – and the latter into the aural camp (punctuate to insert pauses where a speaker might) and visual (make it look pretty). Some reprobates will even suggest that the punctuation scheme might follow the dictates of style and change depending on purpose, tone, audience, and the like.
1When people refer offhand to English "grammar", they're more likely to be talking about usage or mechanics. Not always, of course, but more often than not.
2An English loan-word, a modification of the Latin ieiunus, "fasting", and meaning "thin", "wanting". Not, as commonly held, related to French jeune or anything like it, and has nothing to do with age. Kingsley Amis notes a reprehensible tendency among some authors to add accents to it.
3The readiness of English grammar to parse ambiguously apparently is not an obstacle.
A good comment overall, but the pedantic right-pondian in me feels the need to come in, push my glasses up my nose and "well-actually": I think you'll find it's "pinch of salt", not "grain of salt" in these here parts.
Seriously though, absolutely right: there's this persistent insistence on static, rule-based English, while at the same time everyone glories in English's ability to evolve and adapt and be a living language. Part of me wonders whether this tension is a part of _why_ English seems to thrive as a language?
It's interesting that we have retained so many of these Germanic past participles that often involve a vowel shift and end in "en" - ridden, trodden, sodden (which comes from "seethe" and originally meant "boiled"), etc.- and yet "gotten" has evolved. It possibly has something to do with frequency of use, given that "get" has become something of a factotum in the language.
One of my pet hates is the word "got". It is an ugly black weed that grows up through any cracks it can find in the English language, and should be avoided at all costs. Its only valid use is as the past tense of "to get", but it appears to have wormed its way into everyday usage. There are other examples of word misuse, but this is the worst.
Hate Apple? Not in the slightest.
Apple started it when they got all childish and refused to speak to El Reg just because they cast doubt on exactly how "magical" Apple devices were.
But when it comes to being childish, do you REALLY want to take on the publication that proudly boasts "Biting the hand that feeds IT"?
They weren't alone: as I recall (as an ex-practitioner of that particular craft on PC Magazine), every non-Apple mag had to practically get down on their hands and knees and pray obeisance to the great black-jumpered one (for it was he in those days) to get review kit, and even then you'd be lucky unless you promised favourable results. So we didn't...
You are correct, we've heard this before
"Windows 10 is the last version of Windows that will ever be released" - The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2015/07/31/rising_and_ongoing_cost_of_windows/
"Why Microsoft is calling Windows 10 'the last version of Windows'"- The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of-windows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions
It is of note that:
- There are two types of version numbers, being "standard" Windows, which includes Windows 3 and 95 etc., as well as the NT versions, including Windows 2000 and above.
- A lot of the "Major" Windows updates after Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) are actually considered minor version updates according to the system version (e.g. Vista (NT 6.0) is the same base version up to Windows 8.1 (NT 6.3)).
This sort of reflects the article's assertion that very little has changed under the hood for most releases.
Windows 95, 98 and M.E. were all 4.x
The reason there’s no Windows 9 is depressing. When XP arrived, some software would check the OS version to ensure that the user was not on too old an OS. One way to check was to substring-match the OS product name against "Windows 9", thus bailing out if it found "Windows 95" or "Windows 98". Of course, this was the wrong way to check the version, but we all know that developers regularly choose the wrong way if it's the quick way, and the chance of this kind of stupidity was high enough that Microsoft decided to jump to 10 and avoid the possibility altogether: after all, the people who are most likely to use old, crappy hard-coded software are corporate clients, and they buy a lot of Windows licences.
I still remember the mess installing a program on the preview versions of Win10 was, since MS decided to change to internal version number using by Windows Installer to 1000.
It was promptly reverted to the same number as the previous Windows version, since otherwise no MSI based installation could succeed if it was checking that number..
Your first entry was actually Windows 1 and Windows 2.0, and Windows 2 had the enhanced Windows/386 version. (Windows 2 also had a 286 mode, but apparently it didn't get a special name from Marketing.) There were various point releases. It took several releases to get to Windows 3.0. (And then there was 3.0, 3.1, 3.11 aka W4WG, and 3.2.)
I wrote commercial software for Windows 2.0 et seq. back in the day. It was a job. I wasn't sad to switch to UNIX. (Or even to OS/400, which was ergodic — it was hard to get the machine to do anything, but when something wasn't allowed by the strict access controls you got this nice little report queued up for you to read, as a reward for your efforts.)
Work recently proposed "upgrading" me from 10 to 11. I declined. 10 works fine, all my applications software is running fine, why should I court disaster?
Truth be told, I was happy with 7, and 10 seems pretty much the same. I'm sure (hah!) there's much new and improved behind the curtain, but what I have works fine, so I'm in no hurry to tempt the fates.
Besides, I think I'm 1.5 years into a 3 year hardware upgrade cycle...
A lot of people are disliking the idea of Windows 11, with most people citing one or more of the three reasons:
01) Everything Windows 11 does, Windows 10 can do if desired, though it may need to be configured/switched on.
02) A lot of Vendors still don't support Windows 11 and use it as an 'out' to not provide support.
03) It is a lot closer to a Mac interface, one of which they would have purchased ... if they had wanted a Mac in the first place.
There are other reasons of course, but those are the three I normally hear. Underlying all of that is the requirement for new hardware (supposedly) to basically get something you consider that you don't really want or need. The "required" hardware requirement can be largely bypassed, so you cannot even justify a minimum hardware spec as a reason to have Windows 11.
Unfortunately, the biggest push to upgrade is merely going to be MS stopping support for Windows 10, same as always. Most companies are having to comply with a framework of some sort that includes "Only Vendor supported hardware and software is allowed", meaning once MS say no more support, they HAVE to upgrade (whatever that takes) or be out of compliance, which can have a prohibitive effect on insurance premiums for unwarranted exposure etc.
04) You use RemoteApp, which when combined with the Toolbars* functionality works fairly seemlessly with the task bar... but MS binned off Toolbars in Windows 11, ignoring complaints in testing about its ommission, thus making RemoteApp far more of a faff to use than it was before.
* for those unaware, with RemoteApp you can't pin the shortcuts to the task bar (or the desktop or elsewhere) because they get regularly refreshed/recreated, but you can create a Toolbar that links to the folder containing the shortcuts, and then add that to the taskbar, allowing you to fire up a remote app connection from the task bar just like you would with a local app.
Our last 3 washing machines were made by the same Scandinavian company >>===========>
The first one was good, and we liked it. Its spin speed 1400RPM and lasted >13 years. We replaced it with a similar model, spin speed 1800RPM, the user interface was now mostly electronic - It threw a bearing and lost a counterweight after 7 years. Both models were labelled 'Made in Scandinavia". The latest model has an entirely electronic controller, which when switched on displays "Inspired by Scandinavia" (Presumably made in China?), spin speed back to 1400RPM. The start button (Presumably inspired by U+23EF) worked for me about 95% of the time. Mrs Tim99 could successfully start it about 50% of the time. We called the service agent. They sent a child who waved his phone around near it and "did something" (Short range RF communication?). He suggested that if it did it again we should reset the firmware - I have, twice. Mrs Tim99 can now successfully start the washer about 90% of the time.
I am not optimistic about the machines reliability or longevity...
"There is no user benefit to any of this any more, just bloat, annoyance, and tedious reviews."
On a personal level, if MS offered to cut all the garbage including telemetry, since Windows 7, keep security, kernel and filesystems updated to latest, and stop threatening to kill my old Dell Windows 10 lappy dead, I'd happily pay a modest subscription.
I'm guessing that would apply to most small to medium business users.
But that makes far too much sense for MS.
The problem is that the stock market wants blingy new functionality every couple of years. What users (well, this one at least) would like is for them to focus on fixing bugs that have been in the OS for years. I could rant and bore you with my list for MacOS and I'm sure there are equivalent lists for Windows, but a if Tim Cook stood in front of a 20m screen with an audience of thousands and his big announcements were that they'd fixed the bug where iCloud synch gets stuck at 99% and you could now paste UK street addresses straight into Contacts then the share price would plummet.
Same should and MUST be said of Linux and the myriads of absolutely worthless and useless distributions that exist. I mean why does "the world" need 5 flavors of the same distro's release so that people can have any desktop manager they want under the sun???
Do people go to distrowatch and simply flip a coin and take their pick for today's install?
This point has come to Linux wayyy before it even hit Windows. If you want to speak about bloated, then you must always start with the Linux ecosystem for the past 20 or so years.
The world needs STABILITY!!! commitment and longevity. Yes, we do not need (not sure about want) another version of ANYTHING!!!!!
Yes, Linux has lots of options. Was about to write a case for the defence, but then I remembered this little gem:
"The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users."
The BIG difference with Linux is you are not compelled to use any distro. If you have the patience and a reasonable intelligence you can build your own specific version. Linux from Scratch is your friend (sort of). I did do that once very many moons ago. It was a educational, albeit exhausting experience - that I won't be repeating!
Devuan for me these days.
Trabant? Either this new standard OS is what the US corporate lobbyists agreed to, so it’s of no consequence to their sales, or Linux really must have gone downhill since 1999 when Neal Stephenson likened Linux to a tank.
[https://www.globalnerdy.com/2013/02/11/the-apple-icar-and-those-if-operating-systems-were-cars-jokes/ ]
You're complaining about Linux being bloated, on a Windows article? Seriously? I'm running up-to-date Linux on 3 machines, all of which are incapable of running Win11. Two of the three run MODERN Linux much better than they ever ran BACK-THEN Windows. (The third has never been infected with Microsoft bloatware.)
This beer's for you, peteC7x, for being willing to stick your dick in the hornet's nest. I agree with you that there's no such thing as a mature Linux desktop distro for the reasons you state. There are endless fiddly choices available, but it's very difficult to find a Linux desktop GUI that Just Works, and every Linux GUI development team needs to put their own imprimatur on the UI in the same way and for the same reason that a dog needs to piss on a fire hydrant.
"but it's very difficult to find a Linux desktop GUI that Just Works"
Oddly enough, IME the difficulty of a desktop that Just Works lies with Windows.
You need to realise that there are several Linux distros that are good for production - they get name-checked here often enough.
There are a lot of others which, I think, exist for various reason (such as Neon which exists to showcase the current KDE desktop) of because someone has there own idea of what an OS should be with Linux providing a good base on which to do that and the GPL providing encouragement. Unless one of these latter chimes with your own idea of what an OS should be like you can ignore them.
we don't need Windows 12, businesses and OEMs don't need Windows 12.
BUT YOU ARE GOING TO GET IT ANYWAY... and BTW, there will be no way to stop the download and upgrade short of disconnecting from the internet. WE OWN YOU Sucker!
MS in the 3rd decade of the 21st century. What a [redacted]
It’s funny how todays A4 ruled pad and Biro are uncannily similar to the A4 ruled pads and Biros I used 40+ years back, and the stuff I wrote on them(well the sheets I kept) are still readable without special tools…
Perhaps there is a lesson there for MS et al…
>” a historian about medieval scribal handwriting. It's a whole other world.”
Being able to read medieval scribal handwriting is probably an asset when faced with pre 1941 German fonts (the banning of which was probably the only good thing that can be said about the Nazis - although to save face etc. they said the German fonts that had previously been used were Jewish fonts and thus not German, naturally there is no evidence of this).
God, there's always one who insists in sticking with some ancient technology or other isn't there? I'm personally loving the new Bic365 subscription model. OK, sure, the pen's the thickness of a rolling pin, takes 3 minutes to boot up before I can write anything with it, and the latest update that means it supports left handed operation only is taking some time to get used to, but I'm sure it's better because everybody else is using them too and at only $10 a month you have to say it's a bargain!
Cheapskate, you really should have got the Hic365 connected one - it comes complete with tethered cable and dock(*) and refil subscription. The really nice thing about it is the website and app where it gives you real time feedback on your pen usage and alerts for low usage - which are really useful as if you don’t regularly use your pen the nozzle blocks and you then have to waste time going through the cleaning routine by scribbling on spare sheets of paper.
(*) ( https://www.temu.com/uk/1pc-office-desk-pen-business-advertising-gift-pen-hotel-front-desk-ball-pen-chain-metal-pen-g-601099520207400.html )
Microsoft has, I feel, had some kind of input into the design of the A4 ruled pad. When you want to remove a page, the glue in the binding is often so strong that it tears the page, sometimes to the extent that, if you want to file it in a ring binder, new holes need to be punched. /grumble
The article is completely wrong. Because it's not that innovation is not happening in the tech space, even in OSes, or that it would be less in absolute terms, than before. It's just that our tech and OSes are already so complex and can do so much, that adding the same amount of new stuff to them will bring less and less change in absolute terms, because of the already existing huge base you compare it to.
Another thing is that just because you have so much and so many things in an OS, and they have to work with so many stuff, and support all kinds of apps and hardware, any change introduced in them would affect a lot of other things, which would also need rework, or would change to the worse. This makes it harder to introduce changes that are fundamentally different, and innovation usually happens in smaller areas and at the endpoints, where there's less stuff depending on them.
And finally, in today's connected world, what the OS itself can do will be less and less relevant, and the things it does it does not alone, but coupled with other services, devices and entities - be it a cloud service from the same manufacturer, or a social media site from a competitor. Sometimes this is inevitable because of how stuff works, like generative AI not able to effectively run on a local computer or the model weighs used in them being trade secrets. This, again, makes changes to existing stuff harder, but also makes it less important what the OS itself does, because the available functions can be extended also through the connected services.
All in all innovation is not slowing, but it will be less and less evident that it's happening, because of the factors laid out above, and also because as we get more and more intelligent services and implementations the advances will be less apparent to the end users, because they won't result in front end complexity (and actually might make things there even simpler), and because it's only the front end / UI and the results that the user is seeing, not how all this works behind the scenes.
While I don't agree that the article is "completely wrong", you make a point about the existing abundance of features that make new ones less significant to compare with. I place the burden for that on Microsoft for insisting on being all things to all people over the years, rather than satisfied with just being an operating system. I understand the reason for it, because owning all the money in the world is The Only Thing Worth Living For. But I think in essence that's how we got here.
>” And finally, in today's connected world, what the OS itself can do will be less and less relevant”
And that is why MS are doing so much UI in-your-face change, it’s not needed or necessary, just that MS need to be in people’s faces to justify their prices and financial market valuation. Some in MS recognised this was going to happen circa 2 decades back, hence the gradual migration to subscription since then.
Who the fuck cares? Seriously. Is your life really so devoid of meaning that you are reduced to complaining about whether someone said Windows 10 would be the "last" one? What the fuck does it matter? It's just a name. Does the name have any influence over the product itself? No? Great, so there's no point constantly bringing it up!
I don't give a flying fuck if they call the next version Windows Final and then they decide to call the next one Final For Reals, and then Final We Really Mean It This Time. All I give a shit about is whether there's anything compelling in the new version for what I use my computer for. The "last version" joke stopped being funny pretty much as soon as people started making it, because it was never really that funny at all. It's not even clever by nerd humor standards. It's like if someone who knows nothing about computers tried to make what they thought was a computer nerd joke, and everyone just cringes because it's so bad.
...and most likely, given away free, with a 3 month trial period.
After which, Clippy will make a re-appearance and remind you, via a countdown clock, that unless you buy a subscription, your PC will stop working and all your work will be inaccessible (due to built-in encryption used on all your saved work).
We *do* need a Windows 12.
- One that fixes all the broken crap introduced after Windows 2000!
- One that re-removes all the telemetry and spyware introduced mid Windows XP!
- One that re-adds an effective GUI which was lost when Windows Vista was introduced.
Those still limiting themselves to Windows, need these corrections more than they think. It is painful to watch a Windows users struggle along these days.
This came up a few months ago in a completely different thread, essentially MS's marketing is triumphing over the tech side, plus OEMs want to shift boxes with the promise of something new as well.
Vista (Windows 6) was a huge change from XP, and not a successful one at the time. Windows 7 came along (actually Windows 6.1 as it was a "fixed" version of Vista) but it had to be marketed as a big change due to the Vista stigma. Windows 8 was 6.2, Windows 8.1 (a "fixed" version of 8) was 6.3 and 10 was briefly given a similar version number until it was changed to 10. The changes have been incremental for 16 years, but marketing demands new and shiny. PC makers want to put "Windows Vista ready" or similar stickers on things.
...and yet really that too was invisible to the user. The OS looks/feels the same, the hardware design was just a refresh in some cases and in others, the new tech put in old chassis. The tangible benefits of course are battery life and performance per watt but most of that is marketing verbiage.
It's incredible that such a huge thing, is actually such a small thing from another perspective. Revolutionary decision, evolutionary appearance.
And agreed, I remember how exciting it was to play a video on a computer, or then stream a video over the internet (potato quality RealVideo but still video). Now this stuff just exists and nothing particularly exciting happens for the end user.
Google has just announced that the Pixel 8 will get 7 years of security patches, so there's no way people will want to buy a laptop with a defined 5 year lifespan. Sure, most laptops don't even last 5 years but customers want to think their shiny new device might last more than that. And if it does last that long, they'll keep using it whether or not it gets updates, leading to bigger botnets and more security breaches and all the big players on the internet being unhappy about fraud, DDoS attacks etc.
Current system works fine - perpetual updates of Windows editions with the OS just being a fixed cost at purchase and then a platform for everything that makes real money. Yes, the occasional forced retirement of hardware when new security standards come along.
Enterprise buys MS licencing with everything they need, including OS, so nothing needs to change there.
Also, MS already tried to drop the version number. Remember that Windows 10 was going to be the last Windows edition with a new number in the name. But they realised that people want a higher number because then it feels like their new thing is better than the old thing even if its not.
They charge things, twiddle about with look and feel, and always, always make things worse. The windows 2000 interface was clean and simple, XP was ok, even 7 was useable. And now look at it.
Yesterday, I was asked to set up a new Windows 11 laptop for someone. Haven't done one for a while, but ok, why not. I trundled through the setup wizard until it gets to the point of asking for a PIN. Nowhere immediately apparent does it describe what a PIN is, so it's reasonable to assume that it's a number. It's certainly a number on my Windows 11 laptop.
Under the text box where you're supposed to input the PIN, there is a check box (unchecked) with an option to include letters and symbols. I left that unchecked, extracted a number from the elderly soon-to-be user and clicked next.
No. Sequences of numbers are not permitted. It didn't look like any obvious sequence of numbers, say 123456, that I could recognise, but I extracted another number from the user and tried again. No.
At this point I checked the box for letters and symbols. Upon doing so, a handy link magically appeared under the check box, telling you what a PIN needs to contain.
Letters were added, Next clicked and all was good.
If you're going to call something a PIN, which just about anyone who's ever used a bank card will think of as a Number, but not permit numeric only input, why, for fucks sake, would you hide that information behind a link which only becomes visible when you check a box which is unchecked by default?? Beware of the leopard springs to mind.
Of course, I may have overlooked something blatantly obvious, but if so it needs to be made rather more obvious than it is right now.
I'm Church of the True Believers in Linux the Divine will be along to downvote me and anyone else who dares no immediately dump all over Windows. But, they're already living in a hell of their own making where they need the validation of others to reassure them that their choice is the correct one. If it were the correct choice, they'd simply be content that it works for them and not have to worry about what anyone else says. So, I forgive them, for they know not what they do. Anyway, on with the blasphemy.
This is the sort of article I'd expect from the likes of CNet or ZDNet, but far less so El Reg.
So what if Windows Whatever looks the same as Windows Whateverelse? People whinge endlessly if Microsoft moves something by a single pixel or changes the name of something. Seriously, just look at all the complaints about WinME. They all centered around the fact that it was sort of a preview to the rearranging of the control panel that we'd see in XP a little later. Sure, it's annoying to have to try to locate something when you used to know where it was, but honestly, unless you've got some kind of serious brain damage, it shouldn't be that much effort to learn a new location/icon/name.
Just because any given version of Windows looks basically the same doesn't mean Microsoft hasn't been busy improving things under the hood. They've been quietly plugging away at improving security for one. Windows 10 introduced a number of new security features like ASRL and encrypting the contents of memory. In Windows 10 most of these were switched off by default, but Windows 11 turned them on by default. Ever since Vista, Microsoft has been working diligently at improving the security of the driver model with each subsequent release. It involved some pain during the first few years when all of a sudden hardware makers had to rewrite their drivers to work with Vista, and all that cheap ghost-shift electronics from China suddenly stopped working, but we're in a much better place having come out the other side. Sort of like the transition to USB-C. It's not fun to live through the transition period, but once pretty much everything is using a common cable type, it makes a lot of the pain worth it. Same could be said of the policy for forcing people to install OS updates. Like everyone else, it annoys me when I have to stop what I'm doing to reboot, but if you stop to look around, you may notice that the number of issues related to unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows has all but disappeared since Windows 10 rolled around.
As far as the next big thing in computing goes, I blame the open source community for that one. Apple, Microsoft, and Google all have shareholders to answer to. The open source community has absolutely no one to answer to. So, the open source community is in the perfect position to try out all kinds of crazy ideas to see what works, but instead they just spend their days doing poor imitations of whatever Apple and Microsoft are doing. There's just no way to get all the fractious groups in the open source world to coordinate on a single goal the way Apple and Microsoft can by way of the power of the paycheck, but that doesn't mean they can't try out different ideas for UI design. Instead, all we get are a bunch of smug assholes who copy everything Windows and Apple does, poorly, and then claim how they're superior because they aren't charging for their inferior product. Go ahead, try charging for it, see how well that goes for you. KDE and GNOME are usable, sure, but they still lack the polish and refinement of Windows and macOS because they're developed by a disparate collection of people who all have their own pockets of interest, and usually bug fixing and polishing are not as "sexy" as adding new features.
Just one idea off the top of my head, is to create a UI that isn't just capable of being navigated using only a keyboard, but one that is designed from the ground up to use only the keyboard. I'm sure out there, there's someone else who has a great idea that could revolutionize the way we do things, if they could just get people to stop aping Microsoft and Apple long enough to try it. Sure, maybe a lot of the ideas will flop, but the great thing about open source is the source is out there, floating around. Maybe the first person who tries fails, but then a year later someone else comes along and succeeds. Or that second person takes part of what the first person was doing and runs with it in a different direction, which ushers in the next big thing in UI design. But no, anyone who tries this is immediately threatened with excommunication from the Church of the True Believers in Linux the Divine. Everything has to be just like Windows or macOS, but "free" or it won't be accepted. Even though the whole point of using Linux instead of Windows/macOS should be to experience something different, not just a badly done imitation.
Another idea would be to expand on Microsoft's old live tiles idea. Instead of stupid little icons that sit on the screen and do nothing besides launch the app, how about replace them with widgets that can do double duty? They can do things like show you the first couple messages in your email inbox, or rotate between monitoring different aspects of the system without you having to run the full app.
How about someone try tackling different window focus ideas? Focus-follows-mind is probably still a ways off, but maybe someone could create a hybrid of sloppy and click-to-focus that marries the best elements of both.
Someone could take the idea of Microsoft's old Active Desktop from the IE4 days, and implement it in a sane and secure way. Provide an API that makes sure people can't just run whatever random crap they want, but makes it easy to customize some elements of the UI.
Just because something isn't broken doesn't mean it couldn't be done better. If that were true, we'd still be wandering tribes of hunter-gatherers because who needs this silly farming thing when you can just kill and eat some wild animal and pick berries off bushes? Without farming, there's no need to create permanent dwellings, and without permanent dwellings there's no reason for large numbers of people to gather into villages, towns, and cities. Fixing something that isn't broken is called progress.
My experience is that it's exactly the opposite of what you wrote - the new versions look different (so take getting used to), for no apparent reason and no improvement in functionality due to the new look, while the background bugs rarely get fixed.
Contrast with the FOSS world, where the interfaces often don't change for years (LibreOffice, for instance, still looks like MS Office 97), but have greatly increased capabilities and patched bugs.
As for "Just because something isn't broken doesn't mean it couldn't be done better", I'm still waiting for Microsoft to create something better. XP was pretty good, but every "upgrade" since has removed features I actually use and added eye-candy that is distracting rather than useful.
Everyone has their "favorite" version of whatever. Usually it's the first one they used, so they "imprinted" on it. Because for the first two years of XP, everyone just absolutely fucking HATED it. Sure, some of it might be the biggest security nightmare the world has ever seen when all those shortcuts MS took to squeeze out the competition like Netscape and Corel, finally had the bill come due. Literally, and if anything I'm underselling it, almost every week for that first two years there was at least one RCE CVE for Windows and/or IE, most of which didn't even require any user interaction beyond going to a boobytrapped website.
MS just ended up biting off a bit more than they could chew with their initial plans for Vista, such as rewriting the entire OS in .NET, so XP ended up sticking around a lot longer and people got comfortable. It was still a shitty OS that was a security nightmare. I wish they would have kept at the whole rewriting the OS in .NET thing. If they needed to push it back to Win 7 or 8, no problem. It would have been like all the shit people are gushing about with regards to being able to write kernel code for Linux or Windows in Rust, only like 20-years earlier. Plus, it being based on a common bytecode language, so people could write things in almost any other language, so long as there was a means of converting it down to that common bytecode.
Still, I'll give you partial credit. Of the three people who've downvoted my comment so far, you're the only one who even attempted to mount a counterargument, weak as it was, and posted as an anonymous coward. The rest were just plain cowards.
When XP came out, I immediately configured it to the "Windows Classic" interface (Windows 2000). It was a lot less "shouty".
I set up a customer's peer networked 6-user SQL "server" with it and noted that with its monochrome desktop background the PC used less resources. Lessoned learned, I still use it on a no-internet Parallels VM on an iMac for my old software.
"But, they're already living in a hell of their own making where they need the validation of others to reassure them that their choice is the correct one."
Validation?
Let me tell you a little story. Some years ago I bought an ex-display W10 laptop, created a Windows reinstall image on a USB* stick and blew it away to install Linux. After a few years I decided I really needed a bigger screen so bought a new laptop. As the old Linux installation was now redundant I decided to reinstall W10 & then add Linux as dual boot.
A number of attempts at reinstalling failed. Eventually I discovered it would work if I switched off secure boot. Not very impressive given that it's MS who is so in favour of this. Ho hum.
The reinstalled image would complain about a mis-matched dll for OneDrive or words to that effect. No amount of updating cleared it. Not that I wanted OneDirve, it was just an annoying pop-up. In the meantime I marvelled at Windows Updates: how could it be so slow? Why did it trip over its own feet so often? Why did it need so many reboots? And why did it seem to want to keep installing what appeared to be the same update for an Intel display driver? Eventually, BTW, the OneDrive message went away. Nevertheless it gave the impression of being a lumbering system written by a corporation that doesn't understand the difference between Just Works** and Only Just Works***. I am amazed that anyone thinks that this crud is a viable operating system to do real work.
I have to admit that a few updates did go smoothly. But I made a post on the thread referring to this month's Patch Tuesday saying I'd checked the speed for a fairly large batch of Devuan updates against that of W10. I failed to do that. The Devuan went smoothly, of course, although unusually it said "update at your inconvenience", not just because of a new kernel but also because of a new daemon. This is unusual because most services are simply stopped and restarted if there's a new version of the daemon but the DBus daemon obviously needs starting before a lot of other. No problem. But the reason I failed is because the W10 update has completely crapped itself. I've had it run long disk-checks and all manner of other stuff but it's still firmly wedged with an error code that's not the one that's widely cited. I've tried the RestoreHealth trick to no avail so it looks like a complete reset is going to be needed.
So validation? I need no validation to tell me why I run Linux. I have a direct comparison between that, a completely reliable OS, and a hell of Microsoft's making.
* If the H/W proves faulty it would be preferable to take it back to the shop running an OS the shop understands - providing it's not so faulty the OS is invisible.
** Debian or, these days, Devuan
*** Windows 10 - some of the time.
Cool story, bro. What does it have to do with anything I said? Besides proving one of my points that is. The fact that you were compelled to regale all of us with this pointless diversion just proves my point. If Linux truly were the "perfect" solution for you, you wouldn't feel the need to post these diatribes. You'd just be happy that it works for you, and that's all the more you need to know. No need to proselytize or anything else. Maybe if you were directly asked by someone, but then it would just be a simple, "<shrug> It's what works best for what I want to do."
For me, at this particular point in time, and based on what I'm looking to do, Windows works best, but I don't feel the need to go out trying to tell everyone why Windows is so much better than anything else. If people want to use Linux, or macOS, or *BSD, WTF do I care? Just use it and STFU about it already. We're all very happy that you like your shiny new toy, but we don't need you turning every single conversation around to being about how great your new toy is. A year from now, who knows where life may take you and maybe Linux or macOS stop being such a great OS for you. If/When that day comes, please just do us all a huge favor and make the change QUIETLY. You don't need to run to every apartment in a complex, knock on the door, and breathlessly regale anyone stupid enough to open the door with your harrowing exploits of moving from one OS to another.
Depends on the distro. With some it's a walk in the park, with others it's a bit tedious, and the obligatory last group it's simpler to reinstall.
However, with all versions, if you've sensibly put your home directory on a separate partition (separate disc would be even better) nothing of value would be lost with a nuke and reinstall.
I tried win11 for a couple weeks and it offered me nothing, nada, zilch reasons to use it over win10. And since the rollback "feature" didn't work - surprise, surprise - I had to again download the win10 ISO and wipe the HDD to install it. Thank heavens for my NAS and Aomei. Over the past years it seems every week there's a new problem, bug, security flaw, image that needs to be "fixed" which make me glad I dumped win11. The reality for me is win7 worked perfectly well for me. I never had any security or operational problems with it. IT just worked. And it took up less space on my drive. The only reason I installed win10 is because mictosoft forced its sycophants to rewrite their software to be incompatible with win7, HP being one of the biggest offenders.
The one thing I don't understand is why I have to load umpteen dozen foreign language DLLs and drivers for non-existent hardware. Is it so hard to include in the install script a simple "what language do you want" option or a "let's check your connected devices to load only their drivers etc" query? You know, just as 99% of applications do.
With most commercial application software you pay a 'maintenance' charge every year to get security and feature updates, with the first year bundled with the sale.
Let that lapse and you'll often end up paying the full price of the package.
Maybe Microsoft should adopt that model.
Of course, it is expensive to continue to support older hardware. That is why W11 is forcing us to buy new.
They already tried that, from Windows 1.0 all the way through 8.1. It resulted in millions of computers being left exposed to security vulnerabilities and being slaved to various botnet CiC systems. You ever notice that things like spam has been quite a bit less the last few years? It's not just that spam filters have gotten better, a lot of that was pumped out by SMTP servers installed on compromised systems. You also don't see DDoSaaS much anymore because it's a lot harder to get enough systems to be effective.
By giving away the upgrades to Win 10 and 11 for free, bringing in a lot of people from the cold, so to speak, they've been able to really cut down on that shit. Also by making it a requirement that people install their patch tuesday updates. As annoying as it may be, the alternative is worse.
I wouldn't mind them creating a paid SKU that removes some of the ads, though frankly they're generally so minor and require you to go out of your way to see them, I may not consider it worth the money personally. But, maybe you get like 10GB of OneDrive storage, and some of the more obvious ads can be turned off, for a one-time fee.
“Linux is a year-round festival of take it or leave it on the desktop, and the kernel tracking genuinely important developments in the ecosystem that the IT clan needs to know about. Users, though? They see nothing and know nothing, and that's exactly right.”
I don't understand this bit :o
When was the last time we saw anything revolutionary in this business? iPod/iPhone/iPad? That was a couple decades ago. Everything since then has been evolutionary.
The OS world is even longer. A GUI over a CLI interface was the last revolution. Heck, with the increased uselessness of the Windows UI, one could even argue it is moving in a de-evolutionary direction.
I think machine learning (AI) could be a good reason to want a new OS. Currently AI is not ready for prime time... we're seeing OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub Copilot etc try out marketability and financial feasibility... but these are early days and clearly nobody knows what they're doing (word is ChatGPT will go bankrupt if serious changes don't happen soon). We'll see what sticks. When AI tech matures it will be natural to have a good ML-centric OS.
I didn't bother to read all 161 offered comments because once you've skimmed about a quarter of any forum on ElReg you can be pretty much assured you've sampled all the opinions in the rest... and oh, boy, do we have a bunch of diehard conservatives here. Not [i]quite[/i] Luddites, it must be said, but the resistance to change is [b]strong[/i] with these ones, eh?
OK, having said that, let me hasten to add I'm pretty much in the same camp. I do find the constant change-for-change's-sake "improvements" extremely tedious and the way Windows has bloated way out of all proportion is absolutely [i]staggering[/i]. Not even mentioned in the main article: how much slower everything runs since even the first version of Win10 was released. I remember clearly as it was only 7 years ago - and it was - that a Core i7 with 8 GB RAM and a hybrid SSHD was plenty fast to run Office and switch between apps with alacrity... yeah, now, not so much, and that's even if you have stuck with 10. If by some miracle your PC with those specs from that time accepted the "upgrade" to 11 it's going to be - er - sluggish as an ashthmatic sloth, yes. Or was that slothful as an ashthmatic slug.
[b][i]But[/i][/b] (und ziss is a bick butt) there are some aspects of the UI that have definitely improved, and features added that have definitely added functionality. Have you tried opening a PC with say a 2 versions old Windows and tried to do anything? Apart from trying to remember where to find the controls, because of course Nadella has to move them around, there are many things you might like to change that simply can't be done in the older OS. Yah, sure, go ahead and edit the registry... ha ha ha no thanks, even if that's an option.
And also But: Apple is no better, and in fact I'd argue that MacOS hasn't really had any meaningful improvements since it was OSX. And while MS haven't really forced a wholesale hardware change since WIndows 7, Apple's "closed ecosystem" periodically renders all existing hardware redundant and they tell you hey, tough titties. Plus, in their relentless Tech Bros fever they have been selling un-upgradeable hardware for a decade now, because obviously since places like MacWorld have been able to add memory and replace HDDs with SSDs and that is seen as taking upgrade business out of Tim Cook's pocket, yes? But not to be mistaken for a Company That Doesn't Innovate, Apple changed the MacOS numbering scheme so that whereas previous huge changes in technology were mere "dot-one" updates, since 2019 they are making tiny incremental changes and giving them whole-number upgrades. Meh. You're going to have to work a bit harder than that to convince me.
This is 6 months late to the discussion, yet something that needs to be put on the working table is rapport between the OS and the operator.
The technology that Elon's Neuro-link is playing with needs to be tweaked for that more simple functionality that was obvious in the earlier versions of the pong game with the primates.
With all the hacker distractions I can imagine that it has dramatically slowed a lot of progressive efforts. Why can't someone, or everyone take up the authority power to stop malevolent hackers from ever getting on the internet ever again! And put their faces, addresses etc. on a wall of shame? Oh yea, because they would put everyone else on there first? Is there no way to require all pc's to register for permission to get online in the future and stop the malevolent goobers? Can AI lay in wait for the hints of the malevolent actors?
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