Microsoft is trying to actively kill their main software product, Windows 11. First it was “only” the ridiculous (and unneccessary) hardware requirements, then it was ignoring the right to privacy while at the same time leaving both all user actions and OS functionality to their “artificial intelligence” (which I do have to put in quotes, because the only thing we can agree on is that it’s artificial), but bit by bit it’s now basic functionality getting killed off.

First they came for my graphics…

Graphics have always been a bit of a problem for Windows, actually since the days of Windows NT 4.0, when they decided to run graphics in kernel space (or ring 0 as they called it back then) instead of the user space driver in NT 3.5. I know, because I went from 3.5 to 4.0, had absolutely no advantages from this move (though Microsoft tried to tell us it was for “performance”). It only meant that if my graphics driver crashed, as it did all the time back then, not that often anymore, it took the whole machine with it instead of “just restarting graphics” and all your programs just had to do a redraw (ie. move the window a bit) and you didn’t lose anything, which was the NT way until 3.5.

USB

USB was always in a bad state, as was plug&play. In the early 2000s I had a Linux laptop that was better at doing both than any Windows machine I encountered. And no, that was not because I as the user or administrator made bad choices, they came like that out of the box, with uninstallable drivers or USB devices that needed a manual driver install absolutely every time they were used.

Sound

But then it was sound (hehe, remember the time we joked about Linux sound? Hey, some people are still doing that). It’s not only Teams, all sound in Windows lives its own life, and I only recently got to restrict my sound problems to Teams because I finally was allowed to switch the OS on my work machine to Linux.

And now printing?

And now apparently Windows is removing printing from their OS. So-called IPP has become the standard for at least personal network printers over the years, I had two Lexmark laser printers doing it, and my current printer is a Brother laser printer, also doing IPP. But do you think my wife, with her totally new Windows 11 laptop, is able to even print to that thing? No, she has to send everything to me, either by mail or by telling me the link, and I have to print it. I don’t even have any driver installed locally, I just tell my web browser or my mailreader to “go fetch… eh, print!” and it does. I can look at the queue with “lpstat”, and if anything breaks I can look at the local printing system by just pointing my web browser at localhost:631. With her Windows machine all I get (if I’m lucky) is a window that is supposed to show me the queue but most of the time is empty, and if it shows any items, all it says is “Error”. Nothing about what the error is, no indication about what is wrong, and the queue item just disappears after a while.

It’s broken. Leave it. No, really. Leave it!

The only thing I can recommend people buying a new PC at this point is to ignore what OS is installed on it, get a Linux distro on a USB stick, install that instead and never look back. Hell, as of today I can even run the games in my Steam collection under Linux. Yes, even the ones clearly marked as Windows only (for some reason). I’d even go so far as to recommend every game company to write their game for Linux, natively. In many cases even the nvidia driver (which is another source for frustration, but I digress) has better performance than the one for Windows. And I know for a fact that the disk interface (for the more recent stuff, eg. nvme) under Linux has long been way faster than the same under Windows, because some idiot in the Windows design team thought “hey, why don’t we emulate SCSI on everything, even things that never had a SCSI interface”.