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- Hacker News
- There is not a single component in Windows that is not riddled with bugs, its infuriating.
I wonder what exactly the "quality czar" is doing, maybe he needs a good PIP?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/05/satya-nadell...
by yukIttEft - The culture of QA sailed off like 10-15 years ago I think.by markus_zhang
- That's why I had to enable the "pause updates for four weeks" setting on Windows. Otherwise every second update would break something somewhere and disrupt workflows regularly. With the one-month update delay you'd get the updates that fixed the previous update.by nairboon
- I was on 24H2 and recently went to 25H2 for app compat reasons. I havent even been updating my Nvidia drivers for months, stuck in the 5xx releases because whenever I update to the latest studio drivers which are supposed to be stable, the computer fails to wake up from sleep and hibernation.by tacomagick
- Let's pour more AIby mococa
- Windows 11 has been broken since launch. If you have more than 20 files of mixed types (especially media files) in a folder, the new file explorer takes 10 seconds to load the folder. In Windows 10, the same operation took less than a second.
Windows 11 is so comically slow that I sometimes feel the warm nostalgia of using the Intel Pentium desktop shared by the entire family when I was a kid -- click, wait 3 seconds, click, wait 3 seconds, click...
by z_rho_one - Will the last competent employee being laid off please turn out the light.
- Microsoft has constantly been bragging about AI writing all their code. And they push out more bugs than features these days.by yoyohello13
- I don’t know if that’s strictly true. But one thing I’ve seen since AI coding has taken over is that the additional features that do get built are all the lower-value ideas that would previously been left on the cutting room floor.
I’m not convinced that’s a positive. Users don’t necessarily even perceive those lower-value changes as features, so much as unnecessary bloat.
by bunderbunder - For me, it was about the time of the early announcements for the TPM2.0 reqs for windows 11 that I started to seriously consider alternatives (though I consciously accepted many pain points even then).
The initial debacle that was the Recall recall and announcing the level of AI stuffing of win 11 that made me actively try out Linux mint (which has been quite nice and smooth). LLMs help to diagnose and fix items if you aren’t familiar with Linux. You no longer have to scour message boards for up-front answers (only use them as a “confirmation backstop”).
For work I now use macOS which feels like a toy but is ok overall (probably still some personal habit-based things).
If it weren’t for the fact I still develop plugins for a single, very specific windows-only app in my spare time, I would completely ditch windows, with contempt. Outside of Windows I am continually stubbing my toe on every single use of every single MSFT product with which I interact; primarily outlook, teams, and some azure stuff. Their products feel highly “feature optimized” with absolutely zero (perhaps negative) cross-feature cohesion. e.g. it’s as if the various outlook panes and the boxes of content were designed so modularly and independently that they don’t re-size or scale themselves cooperatively.
I perpetually experience stark jamais vu using their products, i.e. I am forced to use them every day and each time feels as unfamiliar, clunky, and unintuitive as the first time I ever touched them.
by sota_pop - > "The paste operation might fail silently," according to Microsoft.
> Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 are affected. Microsoft said: "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message."
How many people wrote lgtm on the security patch?
by htrp - I remember the time when spurious copy-paste failures meant something shit the bed so badly in the Win32 subsystem you needed to reboot. Never did figure out why that would happen but it kinda stopped around the Windows 8 era...by kmeisthax
- I’ve got that problem.
I think I’m just going to roll that machine back and turn updates off now. It’s too risky.
by sdcfgy - Similar behaviour here:
> Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, and File Explorer might also become unresponsive," Microsoft admitted.
> "Additionally, the Windows Update page might stop responding and continuously display a loading indicator."
This culture of trying to avoid showing the user an error message has to stop.
by cube00 - There's a massive RDP bug in the new update that is breaking stuff with no fix right now. Congrats Microsoft on the help desk ticket generation.
(KB5124008)
by post_break - Thanks for the headsup.
it seems they claim to have fixed it :
> September 14, 2026—KB5129195 (OS Builds 26200.9457 and 26100.9457) Out-of-band
> [Remote Desktop Services (known issue)] Fixed: This update addresses an issue affecting Remote Desktop Services (RDS) after installing the September 2026 Windows security update (KB5122880). In affected environments, RDS might become unstable, causing RDP connection and sign-in failures or servers to become unresponsive during Remote Desktop configuration. Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, File Explorer, and the Windows Update page, might also stop responding.
by albert_e - A recent update broke the file history service for me, which I only discovered when I went to restore a previous version of a file. If you use it too, you should probably check it's actually working.by taviso
- joke's on you, it has never worked for me.by kasabali
- Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.by xvxvx
- > remote access and pasting issues
And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...
by moepstar - > in QA
No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026
by baal80spam - > ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
They were. QA is paying Customers now.
Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
by EvanAnderson - Haven't you heard? QAs are unnecessary ballast now, devs and managers can test product just as well in their spare time ;) . Also, people are buying bug ridden products anyway, so why bother.by Yizahi
- Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble with suspend, I _basically_ have to shut down my session every day, just like in the bad 'ol Win 9x days - my machine will sleep, but only after I shut down the entire GUI and make sure nothing is using NVIDIA, oh and turn off the intel wifi driver.
GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok.
I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability.
Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
by trashface - Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff. Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works. Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571.... don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that
(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
by xlayn - > This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.
by ainar-g - it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.
(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
by mikestew - My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.by karp773
- > I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.
Just spawned did you :)
by Razengan - I can. I could've told you decades ago, that this was the late stage of not just Microsoft, but any software company whose bread and butter was vendor lock-in. Microsoft was just the worst at the time because they were the biggest. Eventually the vendor lock-in becomes so great that the marginal cost, in terms of customers lost, from not fixing/improving your software, or at least not not letting it get worse, becomes much smaller than the cost of improving it/maintaining it. Any resources the company has to spare go into solidifying the lock-in, rather than making the software worth staying on in the first place. Even Apple seems to be in the early-mid stages of this transformation.by bitwize