It's almost as if the deportations aren't the problem. Maybe one day you'll figure this out.

As long as they don't make the rest of us look bad.

There's no such thing as a "financial crime" in the US if you have over a billion dollars and are willing to pay tribute to the king.

I treat everything I type into a computer that way. I always have and always will. Back in the 80s I figured I would never put anything online that I wouldn't want my mother to read.

Finding myself upside down in my pickup truck, thanks to a teenager and her cellphone, getting into some sort of position to kick out a window in time would have been impossible if the truck were on fire.

In fact, my first and main thought was 'pleasedontcatchonfirepleasedontcatchonfirepleasedontcatchonfire'

I was able to crawl out because the drivers side window shattered as it rolled over.

There is no job in the world that involves the word "swarm" that can be managed competently and intelligently unless it's being done by literal insects.

... and all that stuff could be probably fixed with a few registry changes.

Like George Carlin said, it's big club and we ain't in it.

That reminds me of when Microsoft acquired Skype and it almost immediately got much worse. Teams is another low-effort product that they presumably acquired from another company because Microsoft doesn't make software any more, they just buy products and then make them worse. I just sat through another meeting yesterday where we struggled to get audio working for about a half-hour. Even when you do get it working right, one day it will simply decide to change all your audio devices, leaving you scrambling to get sound working, because of course you only find out when you need to use it for a meeting.

Even the text chat is unreasonably buggy.

This started 20 years ago when they tried making all their UI work like web pages, something nobody asked for or liked.

Eventually, like you said, everything became an instance of Chrome. Even their popular programmer editor, VS Code (worst name ever) is basically a web browser underneath, and I _like_ VS Code. I used Multi-edit for about 30 years, only abandoning it for SublimeText in 2019, and then to VS Code in 2020 because that was all I was allowed to use at work. But, VS Code, despite being pretty bloated, is a pretty powerful and customizable tool that becomes a full-blown IDE without much effort. In fact, it can replace Visual Studio for a lot of development work. So Microsoft can still do something well, even if they don't do it in the best way.

But Windows itself is suffering from enshittification at an increasing rate, as nothing Microsoft changes is ever for the sake of the user, but for their own sake. Just look at the hopelessly misnamed "Modern" UI they came out with for Windows 8, where they looked with unfettered avarice at Apple's 30% of cut of every app sold and decided to completely tank their usability and saddle users with a barely functional app store with awful, subpar apps to try to force us all into an Apple-style walled garden just to get that slice of every sale. How'd that work for, Microsoft? Is there a person on the planet that didn't see this failure coming a light-year away?

And don't get me started on "Flat UI", the long decomposed goat spew remains of the Modern UI which still inflicts Windows, making it much worse visually and much more confusing because they punted on all the HCI expertise they developed in the 80s along with companies like IBM and handed all their UI/UX work to a bunch of art-school dropouts who never saw an Apple UI element they wouldn't copy badly.

And since Windows 11, I've started experiencing total system lockups, something that didn't happen to me with Windows 10, or if it did, it was so rare I don't remember. Microsoft stopped caring a long time ago, and now they are actively contemptuous of Windows users, as if they are resentful that they have to keep Windows going, because they clearly don't like working on it any more.

And now they are shoving AI into every crevice possible, although pretty much every company is doing that, so they aren't alone. I can't wait until the AI bubble pops, and the functionality gets distilled down to only those places where it truly provides value, instead just being the 20s version of Clippy.

Aside from some bug fixes, almost nothing Microsoft has done to Windows in the last 10 years has been for the users' benefit, but for their own benefit.

Every knowledgeable and tech-savvy Windows user just wants Windows 7 back.

On the other hand, I was not aware of this feature and enabled it IMMEDIATELY.

We're supposed to just take them at their word that this is unrelated to the white collar job cuts.

When I bought a new laptop that came with Vista, I _paid_ for an XP license so I could go back to that.

I upgraded to Windows 11 around the end-of-life deadline. Things were mostly the same (I've been using OpenShell for a long, long time), although my machine (and my new Windows 11 work machine) have been locking up on me occasionally, something I don't recall happening with Windows 10, or if it did, it was much rarer.

Putting a stake in the ground for the end-of-life for a version of your OS is reasonable thing to do. What's not reasonable is when the successive version is worse, and no one wants it. Windows biggest competitor has always been the previous version of Windows. After 40 years, Microsoft should have realized why.

Some new versions of Windows were improvements over all, but the last one for which that was true was Windows 7 (and before that was XP), and it's probably the last one that will ever feel like an overall improvement. Some things are definitely better in Windows 11, but they are very few.