the development/testing is done on Windows under VMs rather than a sample of real world hardware

I highly doubt it, seriously, I don't think they test update some VMs and say "that's good", there's thousands and thousands people working at MS, I don't know how many on win11 but certainly a few hundreds, I doubt none of them install the upgrade on real hardware to test.

Between shit like this, Crowdstrike, and Microsoft Recall I wonder why anyone even bothers with Windows anymore

Out of necessity most likely, sometimes you either have no alternatives for proprietary software on Linux, or it's extremely cumbersome to get and maintain such software on Linux.

the development/testing is done on Windows under VMs rather than a sample of real world hardware

And yet there's a recent update that keeps killing my Windows VMs. They'll run for a while then one day they install the update and won't boot again. It really feels like MS have lost control of Windows testing these days.

Not as if updates that break things aren't a thing on Linux...

Between shit like this, Crowdstrike, and Microsoft Recall I wonder why anyone even bothers with Windows anymore.

It’s mostly a habit. I’m tech savvy I can even work on BSDs if there’s a necessity but the finance and legal teams at my workplace lose their mind whenever a button changes its place in an app update.

So we’re 400 macOS machines and chugging the remaining Windows users who won’t let go. Wish I could manage a single system only.

Between shit like this, Crowdstrike, and Microsoft Recall I wonder why anyone even bothers with Windows anymore.

Or think about it differently. People hate Linux and Mac OS so much that they'd rather deal with this than deal with them.

You'd have thought they'd have learned from losing the browser monopoly they had 15 years ago due to complacency

They are still in the mindset of "we are the only player in the field and people can't live without us".

No, they are in the mindset "we are a company selling cloud Linux, our legacy products are money drain". They clearly state it in their yearly reports.

May we live long enough to witness the year of the Windows desktop!

That's hilarious. I haven't been able to enable IPv6 since the August update. The machine just spins to 100% CPU across every core like a forkbomb.

It pissed me off because my home network is built IPv6-first.

If my work pushes 24H2 I'll just have to disable both :/

Good thing they fixed the ipv6 vulnerability first.

Home users are QA for enterprise.

I'm pretty sure they laid off a lot of their QA team before and didn't replace them since then.

That's what you're for.

If you don't mind wiping out and reinstalling the system, you can get the LTSC ISO from MS and activate with this: https://massgrave.dev/
(This site also has the ISOs)

stable between XP and 10

I'm not sure I agree.

XP was good but definitely unstable, Vista was very unstable at the beginning. Shit, it was essentially broken on release for months for Nvidia users, even.

[E: to be clear, this was actually Nvidia's fault. But MS should have known that expecting every hardware manufacturer to completely rewrite drivers in such short notice was a bad idea!]

It was only late Vista and throughout 7 when windows became pretty stable.

Windows 8 wasn't unstable, I guess, just a major step down for usability (accessing the "charms bar" on a mouse was so bad an unintuitive that I'm shocked it made it past the focus group stage).

Early 10 was pretty stable, but very quickly deteriorated as they continued to shovel more bloat into Windows, spent more and more time working on spying/ads at the expense of other aspects of the OS, and had the bright idea of firing most of their testing team, because beta testing with end users is cheaper and what are they going to do if their PC is unstable? Install another OS? Lmao most people don't even know Linux exists.

Windows 11 is basically the same in that regard. The instability of late-stage Win10, just with a lick of paint.

Rose tinted glasses.

Xp was almost a nightmare on launch. But got fixed (security not withstanding) switching everyone over from DOS to NT was no simple feat, and there were a lot of issues.

Vista wasn’t great, but the change to drivers made it a nightmare.

7, 8, and 8.1 were fine.

But 10 was a nightmare for the first 5 years. Every other update would break things. And those came out about twice a year.

Windows 11 has been surprisingly issue free for me. 24H2 seems to be the buggiest update since so I’ve been holding back. But I updated to 22 and 23 and I never had any issues, nor did I hear too much complaining. Every major update has some minor issues, and that’s largely why MS staggers their releases.

I’m honestly surprised MS took this long to pause the rollout with how bad it’s been.

Disclaimer, I haven't used Windows seriously for decades

Yeah we got that just by reading the first part of your comment...

I never had stability issues in years of being on W11, Bazzite on the other hand, has locked up on me twice in the 2 weeks I've used it.