They'll tell you to use the Feedback Hub, but all of that feedback promptly gets discarded or drowned out in the SNR of overzealous "insiders" acting as free QA for Microsoft praising every horrible decision they make.

We've been in this world long enough, and we should be smarter about understanding that.

Leave it for a proper OS.

It might not be possible for your company issued computers if they don't allow you to use something else[1][2] but for your personnal uses it is fairly easy.

[1] I doubt it would be configured to receive popup ads in that context anyway [2] Having a toxic work environment is a good reason to change job. I personnally count being forced to use Windows as a toxic env.

IT is often engrained in Microsoft's environments. It is by no means easy to walk away from Microsoft unless it is personal computing.

At least now at work, I was given a research ticket to find out which legacy Windows OS applications are viable to run in WINE. And how viable it would be move our main product application away from Windows.

PS. You have to pay me to engage with Microsoft and run Windows OS.

> It might not be possible for your company issued computers if they don't allow you to use something else[1][2] but for your personnal [sic] uses it is fairly easy.

It's not that easy, unless you're willing to make a bunch of sacrifices for the sake of using a different OS. Windows is by far the dominant desktop OS, and there's a lot of software people need and want to use that's available only for it.

This is mostly a mindset issue.

A bit more than 2 decades ago I would have said you would have pried photoshop from my cold dead hands.

Then I got fed up by a lot of things in this ecosystem, and I left it completely. I may not have access to the same applications, but I have access to decent applications that allows me to get the job done. And it applies to a very broad range of domains.

There are a few exceptions of course, but rarely ones you encounter in a non professionnal setting. In these very few and rare use cases there are options:

1. wine if it works would be the preferred one 2. accessing an app running on a windows through rdp, either as a full desktop or as a standalone window.[1] OK granted you are still using windows in that case, in the background, but you can do that only sporadically by launching a cloud windows vm instance for the small amount of time in a year you definitely need that dirty OS for personnal use.

Obviously YMMV but the barrier is mostly psychological imho.

[1] I think there was a project to facilitate that for office, adobe applications called winapps, see the different active forks here:

https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html#Fmstrat/w...

there is also this: https://github.com/ne0YT/Linux-Subsystem-for-Windows_Seamles...

I've heard that, but I'm skeptical. I'm assuming "most apps" don't include MS Office. How much wrestling is involved? Can you just run a Windows installer and have it work? Do updates break things?

The Steam Deck has shown that there are no essential technical barriers to rendering the Windows operating system irrelevant.

This is good work, and it should be done.

Downgrade to Windows 10.

If enough users did this, they might realise that people still want to use Windows, but without the user-hostility, so will be more incentivised to change things back to how they were instead of just squeezing harder on what remains of their userbase.

> Downgrade to Windows 10.

Windows 10 introduced things that would have been (and were) deemed unacceptable by people who care about things like this at the time, too. You could have said all this about Windows 8 or Windows 10 with a retreat to Windows 7 being the prescription. Many people did.

The only message a move like this sends is that if Microsoft moves slowly enough, people will accept basically anything as 'the less user-hostile alternative'.