Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users. Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11’s initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it.
Now, those setting up a new Windows computer the way Microsoft wants them to (in other words, connected to the internet and signed into a Microsoft account) will get to their desktops with OneDrive already syncing stuff from folders like Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos. Depending on how much is stored there, you might end up with a desktop and other folders filled to the brim with shortcuts to various stuff right after finishing a clean Windows installation.
Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode introduced the ability to run MS-DOS programs in a virtual machine. This by itself was already quite an achievement, but it didn’t stop there. It also let you put the MS-DOS session in a window, and run it on the screen along with your other Windows programs.
It should be no secret to anyone reading OSNews that I’m not exactly a fan of Windows. While I grew up using MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x, the move to Windows XP was a sour one for me, and ever since I’ve vastly preferred first BeOS, and then Linux. When, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Wine community and Valve gaming on Linux became a boring, it-just-works affair, I said goodbye to my final gaming-only Windows installation about four or so years ago.
However, I also strongly believe that in order to be able to fairly criticise or dislike something, you should at least have experience with it. As such, I decided it was time for what I expected was going to be some serious technology BDSM, and I installed Windows 11 on my workstation and force myself to use it for a few weeks to see if Microsoft’s latest operating system truly was as bad as I make it out to be in my head.
Installing Windows 11
Technically speaking, my workstation is not supported by Windows 11. Despite packing two Intel Xeon E5 V4 2640 CPUs for a total of 20 cores and 40 threads, 32 GB of ECC RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro w5700, and the usual stuff like an M.2 SSD, this machine apparently did not meet the minimum specifications for Windows 11 since it has no TPM 2.0 security chip, and the processors were deemed too old. Luckily, these limitations are entirely artificial and meaningless, and using Ventoy, which by default disables these silly restrictions, I was able to install Windows 11 just fine.
During installation, you run into the first problem if you’re coming from a different operating system – even after all these years, Windows still does not give a single hootin’ toot about any existing operating systems or bootloaders on your machine. This wasn’t an issue for me since I was going to allow Windows to take over the entire machine, but for those of used to have control over what happens when we install our operating systems, be advised that your other operating systems will most likely be rendered unbootable.
The tools you have access to during installation for things like disk partitioning are also incredibly limited, and there’s nothing like the live environments you’re used to from the Linux world – all you get is an installer. In addition, since Windows only really supports FAT and NTFS file systems, your existing ext4, btrfs, UFS, or ZFS partitions used by your Linux or BSD installs will not work at all in Windows. Again – be advised that Windows is a very limited operating system compared to Linux or BSD.
Once the actual installation part is done, you’re treated to a lengthy – and I truly mean lengthy – out of box experience. This is where you first get a glimpse of just how much data Microsoft wants to collect from its Windows users, and it stands in stark contrast to what I’m used to as a Linux user. On my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora KDE, there’s really only KDE’s opt-in, voluntary User Feedback option, which only collects basic system information in an entirely anonymous way. Windows, meanwhile, seems to want to collect pretty much everything you do on your machine, and while there’s some prompts to reduce the amount of data it collects, even with everything set to minimum it’s still quite a lot.
Once you’re past the out of box experience, you can finally start using your new Windows installation – but actually not really. Unlike a Linux distribution, where all your hardware is detected automatically and will use the latest drivers, on Windows, you will most likely have to do some manual driver hunting, searching the web for PCI and vendor IDs to hopefully locate the correct drivers, which isn’t always easy. To make matters worse, even if Windows Update installs the correct drivers for you, those are often outdated, and you’re better off downloading the latest versions straight from the vendors’ websites. This is especially problematic for motherboard drivers – motherboard vendor websites often list horribly outdated drivers.
Updating Windows 11
Once you have all the drivers installed and updated, which often requires several reboots, you might notice that your system seems to be awfully busy, even when you’re not actually doing anything with it. Most likely, this means Windows Update is running in the background, sucking up a lot of system resources. If you’re used to Linux or BSD, where updating is a quick and centralised process, updating things on Windows is a complete and utter mess. Instead of just updating everything all at once, Windows Update will often require several different rounds of updates, marked by reboots.
You’ll also discover that Windows Update is not only incredibly slow both when it comes to downloading and installing, but that it’s also incredibly buggy. Updates will randomly fail to install for no apparent reason, and there’s a whole cottage industry of useless ML and SEO content on the internet trying to “help” you fix these issues. On my system, without doing anything, Windows Update managed to break itself in less than 24 hours – it listed 79 (!) driver updates related to the two Xeon processors (I assume it listed certain drivers for every single of the 40 threads), but every single one of them, save for one or two, would fail to install with a useless generic error code. Every time I tried to install them, one or two more would install, with everything else failing, until eventually the update process just hung the entire system. A few days later, the listed updated just disappeared entirely from Windows Update. The updates had no KB numbers, so it was impossible to find any information on them, and to this day, I have no idea what was going on here.
Even after battling your way through Windows Update, you’re not done actually updating your system. Unlike, say, something like Fedora or literally any other Linux distribution, where both the system and applications are updated from a single location and with a single operation, some Windows applications are updated through the Microsoft Store instead. This application is slow, takes a long time to load, and it, too, is slow at actually updating and installing applications. Why Windows doesn’t just do what modern, well-designed desktop-ready operating systems do and properly centralise updates is beyond me. A major missed opportunity.
Oh but we’re not done yet. Even after battling your way through Windows Update and the Microsoft Store, you’ll eventually discover that a huge array of Windows applications and drivers need to be updated manually. As in, yes, they come with their own updaters that you need to keep track of and run manually to keep your applications and drivers updated. This is apparently some weird, archaic holdover from the days before the internet, where you would install applications offline, and only install updates if you could get your hands on them. Why this hasn’t been fixed and properly centralised over the past 30 years is beyond me. If you’re used to the convenience of package managers keeping your system nice and updated with little user input, this feels like going several decades back in time.
Windows 11 does come with a very rudimentary package manager you can use in the terminal, but it’s not exactly the most useful package manager you’ve ever seen. If you install, say, something like Neofetch using this tool, it’ll just download the installer, run it like normal, opening up the installer UI that steals focus, and then drop you back to the terminal. It’s not exactly elegant, and because it can only be used to install applications listed in the Winget repository, it’s not a replacement or alternative for managing all your applications – it’s just yet another place to manage applications.
So, in order to keep your Windows 11 system updated, you need to keep an eye on Windows Update, the Windows Store, individual updaters for applications you’ve installed, and possibly Winget if you’re using it. Coming from a platform that effectively solved updates decades ago, this feels utterly broken and archaic, and I can’t believe this is considered “ready for the desktop” by some. Compare this entire Byzantine process to my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora KDE: I open Discover, hit update, reboot (optional). Done. The entire operating system, from system, drivers, to applications, from RPM to – god forbid – Flatpak, is updated, and it rarely takes more than a few minutes.
First impressions
Now that everything’s finally sorted, you scrounged up and updated all your drivers, you rebooted a few times, and Windows Update is done hogging the system, you can finally start to take a proper look around your new operating system. At first glance, it actually looks kind of nice – I definitely like the most recent version of Windows’ theme, and some of the blur and animations are quite nice. Sadly, you’ll quickly discover it’s all a massive ruse.
The first thing I noticed is that there’s a lot of lag in the Windows user interface, which, considering the Radeon Pro w5700 and 160Hz 4K display I’m using, really shouldn’t be there. Something as simple as right-clicking the desktop to bring up the context menu takes a few noticeable moments, after which the menu suddenly gains another option and expands; some AMD Software: PRO Edition software shortcut. This entry alone adds like a full second or more to loading the context menu, which is just wild to me. Whether I’m using KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or anything else on Linux or BSD – I’ve never seen a context menu being anything but instant. I eventually figured out you can remove this AMD entry to speed up the context menu (what a sentence…), but only by modifying the registry.
Or take something like opening the file manager, Explorer. For some reason, the bottom two-thirds of the window renders instantly, but the top third, where the titlebar, toolbar, and tab bar are, renders a full second later. These are just two examples, but you’ll find similar stutters all over the operating system. KDE or GNOME, running on this very same machine, show no stutters whatsoever, and even on something like my mini-laptop with a paltry Intel N100 do I never experience stutters in KDE.
The second thing I quickly noticed is just how inconsistent the Windows user interface really is. There are two competing ‘themes’ at work in Windows, what I (probably wrongly) refer to as the Win32 and modern theme. The Win32 theme is the same as it’s been for several years now, and comes straight from the olden days, just tarted up with some rounded window corners here, some more white there, but it’s mostly just what you know. The modern theme is the one Microsoft prefers to show off in marketing, which is indeed quite nice, but only used in parts of the operating system.
The end result is so many inconsistencies and weirdness I barely know where to start.
One of the first inconsistencies that jumps out at you is that Windows seems to be using two different methods of rendering fonts. In Win32, they are smaller and use ClearType, while in modern applications, they are bigger and don’t use ClearType. But this is just the beginning, and as you start using Windows 11, you’ll notice this operating system is defined by inconsistency.
There are basically two different versions of every type of UI element – a Win32 one, and a modern one. Sometimes, they’re even present in the same application. Explorer, for instance, is a Win32 application, but it’s wrapped in a modern theme, so it looks (mostly) like a modern application, but feels like a Win32 one. Context menus are either Win32 or modern, as are settings panels, dialog windows, and so on.
But it gets worse. Even the modern variants of these UI elements are inconsistent between each other. There are a variety of modern (context) menu designs, and they all look and behave differently. Some fade in, some slide down. Some have rounded corners, some are square. Some have icons, some have not. There’s some menus with a black border, which most others lack. Some have a blue-ish selection, others are grey. And mind you – this is just talking about menus!
Four titlebars from Microsoft applications, four different titlebar heights. Kill me now.
Nothing embodies the deep, jarring inconsistency more than the fact that some context menus… Have context menus. The desktop context menu, for instance, has its own context menu, called “Show more options”, which opens another context menu. The first one is one of the various modern designs, the second one is a Win32 one. The second one mostly replicates the items from the first menu, so I’m guessing it’s there for some odd backwards compatibility reason.
A context menu with its own context menu encapsulates the current state of Windows more than any article ever could.
Do note that much like the lag and stutter examples I mentioned earlier, these are all just examples – you can find way more of them by just using Windows 11 for like ten minutes. And if you really want to have a good laugh – enable Windows 11’s dark mode, and you’re in for random windows just not supporting it, windows opening in white and as they load their contents turn dark, or windows that flash white when opening, which is always very much appreciated when using dark mode in a dark environment.
None of these issues exist on the platforms I’m used to. A KDE desktop or a GNOME desktop is consistent, almost to a fault, in either light or dark mode. If you learn how to use one GNOME application, you pretty much know how to use them all – they look the same, feel the same, and have their important elements and functions in the same place. KDE definitely went through a bit of a rough patch in this regard, but ever since roughly the second half of the KDE Plasma 5 lifecycle, and especially now with Plasma 6, it’s also incredibly consistent.
You may not care about consistency, but that’s probably just because you’re not used to it. Once you’ve become accustomed to a graphical user interface where things are where you expect them to be, where things look, feel, and behave the same, and where you’re never faced with jarring inconsistencies, it’s really hard to go back to something as downright messy as Windows 11. I hear macOS is, sadly, also moving in the direction of Windows 11, due to things like AppKit, SwiftUI, Catalyst, and UIKit applications all running side-by-side, while all looking and feeling different from each other. Linux desktops really are the last bastion of consistent user interface design, it seems.
Shovelware and built-in applications
Windows 11 comes loaded with a lot shovelware. When you first open the Start menu, it’s littered with all kinds of garbage like mobile games, LinkedIn, Spotify, and god knows what else, and it seems the selection of shovelware you get depends on when you install Windows 11 and in what region you live. Most often, these are actually just little shortcuts that when clicked tell Windows to download the application in question. It definitely takes a while to uninstall them all.
Thanks to living in the European Union, I also get to remove a whole bunch of other preinstalled stuff people outside of the EU cannot remove, which is a nice bonus. However, since there’s no easy package management, and because some applications can only be removed from a legacy control panel that’s harder to find, it’s a nuisance that takes a lot of time post-installation.
Right! Windows 11 has two different settings applications. The new, fancy one, and the old one you may remember from older versions of Windows, called Control Panel. I swear I’m not making this up. Okay, back to the topic at hand.
The applications that come preinstalled with Windows are actually quite nice. The modern versions of Windows mainstays Notepad, Paint, and so on look great, work well, and offer a host of features their old counterparts never got due to a serious lack of development on them on Microsoft’s part. You now get tabs in Notepad, countless new editing features in Paint, the ability to record the screen in the Snipping Tool, and so on – features people have been asking for for sometimes decades have now finally come to Windows’ base applications, and that’s great.
Windows now finally also has a more capable terminal application. While in the olden times you were stuck with an emulated DOS prompt, the new Windows Terminal application now defaults to PowerShell, which is infinitely more capable than what came before while still usable with the same basic commands as the DOS prompt. I’m not much of a command line user, so I can’t say much about how PowerShell compares to common UNIX shells, but as a casual user, I have no issues with it.
The Terminal application allows you to open either PowerShell or DOS shells in tabs. It also has an option for launching an Azure Cloud Shell, but that’s not something I’ll ever need. In addition to all of these, you can also install Windows Subsystem for Linux, which will install an entire Ubuntu distribution, so you can use its shell inside the Terminal application as well. It’s just a good terminal application, and a massive improvement over only having access to the basic DOS command prompt.
Once you move beyond the applications that come bundled with Windows 11, however, things start to get messy again. The Microsoft Store contains only a small subset of the available Windows applications, and since the store is littered with crapware and shovelware, unfinished or unmaintained proof of concepts, and other junk, it’s a slog to find anything valuable. The more common way of installing applications on Windows is something that may seem alien to us Linux users – you browse the web to find applications and download them.
How do you know if anything you download is trusted? Well, that’s the thing – you don’t. You just have to wade through Google or your preferred search engine, and hope for the best that what you find isn’t adware or some other malicious piece of software. You’ll also have to deal with “installers”, which are little pieces of software that take you through the process of installing the application you found, step by step. They often look and feel quite outdated, originating from the Windows XP, or worse, Windows 9x days. And yes, this means most of those applications will come with their own update mechanisms too, often running in the background, that you have to keep track of.
You can also use the aforementioned Winget, which weirdly enough might be the best way to install applications on Windows these days. You just have to hope the application you want is in the Winget repository, which is really not that different from dealing with packages on Linux, except that there’s only a little over 4000 packages in the Winget repository, which is a far cry from the vast software library available in the Fedora, Debian, or Void repositories.
In other words, you’ll be juggling between the Microsoft Store, browsing the web and downloading installers, and Winget, and neither of those three are optimal. Coming from a modern, desktop-ready platform like Linux, this all feels cumbersome, archaic, dangerous, and tedious. Application management on Windows is decades behind the state of the art that us Linux users are used to, and it’s absolutely wild that this is considered acceptable.
As a final note about applications for us Linux users, you’ll be surprised to learn that Windows 11 does not, by default, come with an office suite. If you need to perform office work, you’ll either need to download LibreOffice (or an alternative) manually, or buy or subscribe to Microsoft Office. Luckily, LibreOffice is available in the Winget repository, so installing it is as simple as opening the Terminal application and executing winget install TheDocumentFoundation.LibreOffice. Neat, but I found that for me, LibreOffice on Windows felt like it came straight out of 2005, with lag and stutter, blurry icons on my 4K display, ugliness and all. Manually switching to the SVG version of the icon set fixed at least some of that.
Am I the owner?
There’s one thing you can’t escape when using Windows 11: the feeling that you’re not the owner of your operating system, but a mere renter. And let me tell you – Microsoft is a shit landlord. The advertising inside Windows 11 is absolutely insane, and if you’re used to a platform without any advertising at all – which, at this point, is really only the Linux desktop, since macOS is riddled with Apple ads and upsells as well – this is a massively jarring experience.
I already mentioned the various shortcuts in the Start menu post-installation, which are really just ads for shovelware games, Spotify, and other services. OneDrive is another name you’ll encounter often, as Microsoft really, really wants you to use its cloud storage service, and is not shy about shoving it in your face everywhere, from the system tray to setting it as the default storage location for documents in Microsoft Office. Speaking of Office – Redmond really, really wants you to subscribe to Office 365, the subscription version of their office suite. Trials come preinstalled, it’s in the Settings application, and probably in a few other places I forgot about. And it gets so much worse. You need PC Game Pass! Please use Bing! You need Microsoft Rewards (whatever the hell those are)! You need CoPilot Pro! Please use Bing! Please! I know where you sleep. Ư̷̙̰̖̣̿͑ŝ̸͎̖̻̺̽e̵̛̘̽͗̋ ̴̫͓̮͗ͅB̸͉͍̬̍ì̵̟͒̈́͋n̵̯̒g̶̦̫̖̜̈́.̴̧̡̖͉̼͠ ̷͓͕͋̿̈́N̸͈͓̈͒̈́͜ö̵͕̲w̶̤͆̄̒̊.
The first thing I did after installing Windows 11 is use a little script I found to purge everything CoPilot off the machine. Not only do I not wish to be beaten over the head with this stuff at every turn, I also have deep moral objections to machine learning tools like CoPilot, both regarding the questionable way they source their training data and their impact on the environment. The fact that one most resort to registry hacks and scripts just to remove unwanted applications and features is absolutely bizarre from the perspective of a Linux user.
Nowhere does the question of ownership over what should be your computer come more to the forefront than when trying to delete the Videos folder from your home directory. One of first things I do after any installation is remove the predefined folders in my home directory that I don’t use, as I really don’t want them littering around for no reason. As it turns out, while there’s quite a few you can delete on Windows, the Videos folder is special, and even after granting administrative privileges, Windows simply will not allow you to delete it.
I cannot delete a folder in my home directory on my computer.
If this is “ready for the desktop”, I’m glad Linux is not
If you’re used to a better designed, more modern, more capable, and more well-rounded, optimised desktop operating system like Linux, whether you’re using KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or even one of the smaller desktop environments, using Windows 11 feels like going back in time, and handing over control of the journey to get there to someone else, far away, who actually owns your computer.
So, so many basic things that are effortless on a modern Linux distribution are slow, fragile, fractured, and disjointed chores on Windows 11. Updating your computer is no longer a mindless, quick thing you barely notice you do, but a slow chore interrupted by reboots and breakage spread out over countless manual tools and individual updaters. Installing software is a balancing act of several, individually incompetent installation avenues, like trying to spin multiple egg-shaped plates on bent sticks. All while every new window, menu, dialog, or panel you open looks and feels different form the one that came before, with billboards blaring commercials at you for shit you don’t want or need, but can’t always get rid of.
And there’s so many more issues I haven’t even touched upon, like the bizarre installation footprint of the operating system, which takes up considerably more space than what us Linux users are used to, or the complete and utter lack of any customisation options for things like the taskbar or window controls, or the general unpleasantness of using Explorer, or how hard Microsoft tries to get you to use Edge, or how there’s still two different Program Files folders, or how Windows applications, even Microsoft ones, never respect the rules about where user files should be stored, or… It just never ends, but I just got tired of making myself sad.
Windows 11 is many things to many people, but ready for the desktop it surely is not.
Somehow, this folder bugged out. I don’t know how to fix it.
I have a feeling Microsoft is really starting to feel some pressure about its plans to abandon Windows 10 next year. Data shows that 70% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, and this percentage has proven to be remarkably resilient, making it very likely that hundreds of millions of Windows users will be out of regular, mainstream support and security patches next year. It seems Microsoft is, therefore, turning up the PR campaign, this time by publishing a blog post about myths and misconceptions about Windows 11.
The kind of supposed myths and misconceptions Microsoft details are exactly the kind of stuff corporations with large deployments worry about at night. For instance, Microsoft repeatedly bangs the drum on application compatibility, stating that despite the change in number – 10 to 11 – Windows 11 is built on the same base as its predecessor, and as such, touts 99.7% application compatibility. Furthermore, Microsoft adds that if businesses to suffer from an incompatibility, they can use something call App Assure – which I will intentionally mispronounce until the day I die because I’m apparently a child – to fix any issues.
Apparently, the visual changes to the user interface in Windows 11 are also a cause of concern for businesses, as Microsoft dedicated an entire entry to this, citing a study that the visual changes do not negatively impact productivity. The blog post then goes on to explain how the changes are actually really great and enhance productivity – you know, the usual PR speak.
There’s more in the blog post, and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more and more of this kind of PR offensive as the cut-off date for Windows 10 support nears. Windows 10 users will probably also see more and more Windows 11 ads when using their computers, too, urging them to upgrade even when they very well cannot because of missing TPMs or unsupported processors. I don’t think any of these things will work to bring that 70% number down much over the next 12 months, and that’s a big problem for Microsoft.
I’m not going to make any predictions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft will simply be forced by, well, reality to extend the official support for Windows 10 well beyond 2025. Especially with all the recent investigations into Microsoft’s shoddy internal security culture, there’s just no way they can cut 70% of their users off from security updates and patches.
After initially announcing it was going to change its Recall feature and then pulling the preview Windows release containing the feature, Microsoft has now given in almost entirely and is delaying Recall altogether. Instead of shipping it on every new Copilot+ PC, they’re going to release it as an optional feature for Windows Insiders.
Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks. Following receiving feedback on Recall from our Windows Insider Community, as we typically do, we plan to make Recall (preview) available for all Copilot+ PCs coming soon.
It’s incredible just how much Microsoft has bungled the launch of this feature, as it’s now almost overshadowing everything else that comes with these new ARM laptops. They rushed to shove machine learning into a major feature, and didn’t stop to think about the consequences.
It’s likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It’s not unheard of for Microsoft to stop distributing a beta build of Windows after releasing it, but the Release Preview channel is typically the last stop for a Windows update before a wider release.
The company doesn’t actually mention why the release was pulled, but the reason is pretty obvious if you connect the dots. I’m at least glad Microsoft is taking the complaints seriously, and while I don’t personally think Recall is a good idea, if a user gives their consent and uses it knowingly and willingly, I don’t see any problems with it.
Enlarge/ The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person's PC usage. (credit: Microsoft)
On Friday, Microsoft announced major changes to its upcoming Recall feature after overwhelming criticism from security researchers, the press, and its users. Microsoft is turning Recall off by default when users set up PCs that are compatible with the feature, and it's adding additional authentication and encryption that will make it harder to access another user's Recall data on the same PC.
It's likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It's not unheard of for Microsoft to stop distributing a beta build of Windows after releasing it, but the Release Preview channel is typically the last stop for a Windows update before a wider release.
Microsoft hasn't provided a specific rationale for pulling the update; the blog post says the pause is "temporary" and the rollout will be resumed "in the coming weeks." Windows Insider Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc posted on social media that the team was "working to get it rolling out again shortly."
It turns out that the storm of criticism Microsoft’s recently unveiled Recall feature has actually pushed Microsoft to change its mind and make some very significant changes to the feature. Today, after over a week of sustained criticism and worries, Redmond announced it’s going to implement Recall very differently.
First and foremost, instead of Recall being enabled by default and only configurable after installation and the out-of-box experience, it will not be disabled by default, and the user will be prompted during the OOBE if they want to enable the feature or not. This in and of itself should alleviate quite a few worries, since having this on by default without most users really realising it was a recipe for disaster and privacy issues.
Second, Recall will not be taking advantage of Windows Hello, and using Window Hello will be a requirement before you can use Recall. On op of that, Recall will use Windows Hello presence detection, so that it will only show any collected and saved data if you’re the one sitting behind the computer. It’s wild to me that they didn’t think of this one sooner, but alas – I have a feeling a lot of this “AI” stuff has been implemented in a bit of a hurry.
Last but definitely not least, the Recall database, where information extracted from the screenshots is stored as well as the search index will now be properly encrypted. They will only be decrypted once the user in question is authenticated. Here, too, one really has to wonder why it wasn’t implemented this way from the very beginning, and the fact that it wasn’t makes me think we’ll be finding more questionable security and implementation details as the feature becomes widely available in a few weeks.
Before PC users can enjoy everything Windows 11 has on tap, they must first enter an e-mail address that’s linked to a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, you’ll be asked to create one before you can start setting it up.
A frequently used trick to circumvent this block is a small but ingenious step. By entering a random e-mail address and password, which doesn’t exist and causes the link to fail, you end up directly with the creation of a local account and can thus avoid creating an official account with Microsoft.
Microsoft has now “fixed” this trick, and it’s no longer possible to use it. The other popular method of circumventing the Microsoft account requirement, by opening the command prompt during installation and running OOBE\BYPASSNRO, still works, but one has to wonder how long it’s going to take before Microsoft plugs that method, too. It seems the company is hell-bent on getting every consumer onto the Microsoft Account train, come hell or high water, so I wouldn’t be surprised seeing local accounts eventually being positioned as a “pro” or even “enterprise” feature that will simply no longer be available on consumer PCs.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with offering an online account option, but the keyword here is option. You should always be able to set up any computer to run with a regular old local account, even if only because internet access isn’t always a given in many places around the world. Add the obvious privacy concerns to that – an issue amplified by Recall – and I doubt users’ desire to run a local account and jump through hoops to do so will fade any time soon.
The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion feature to work. Beaumont says “several days” of data amounted to a database around 90KB in size. In our usage, screenshots taken by Recall on a PC with a 2560×1440 screen come in at 500KB or 600KB apiece (Recall saves screenshots at your PC’s native resolution, minus the taskbar area).
Recall works locally thanks to Azure AI code that runs on your device, and it works without Internet connectivity and without a Microsoft account. Data is encrypted at rest, sort of, at least insofar as your entire drive is generally encrypted when your PC is either signed into a Microsoft account or has Bitlocker turned on. But in its current form, Beaumont says Recall has “gaps you can drive a plane through” that make it trivially easy to grab and scan through a user’s Recall database if you either (1) have local access to the machine and can log into any account (not just the account of the user whose database you’re trying to see), or (2) are using a PC infected with some kind of info-stealer virus that can quickly transfer the SQLite database to another system.
It really does seem Recall is kind of a mess in the security department, and it has a certain rushed quality about it. All the screenshots are saved in an AppData folder, and data pulled from those screenshots is stored in a local SQLite database that happens to be entirely unencrypted. TotalRecall, a tool developed by Alexander Hagenah, will neatly pull the data from Recall for you without any hassle or issues.
This truly is a security nightmare. Aside from all the obvious issues this presents, such as making it even easier for law enforcement to gain access to pretty much everything you do online, something especially troubling for minorities or in countries with less-than-stellar police departments, Recall also presents a whole host of other problems. Imagine being in an abusive relationship, and the abusive partner demanding Recall be left on at all times to exert even more control. Imagine an unscrupulous employee abusing Recall to steal sensitive information from a company for a competitor. Imagine living in some backwards part of a country with controlling religious parents, and you happen to be gay. The problems here are endless.
The fact you can turn Recall off doesn’t mean much, since in the above examples, turning it off is not an option since there are controlling people involved who will demand you keep it on. Browser history and other forms of history in your computer exist as well, of course, but they’re not always as easy to parse, they’re easier to manipulate, sanitise, and temporarily hide. Recall just combines all of this and puts a neat little bow on it, ready to be abused by anyone with bad intentions.
Recall is ill-conceived, badly implemented, and a solution looking for a problem, that in an of itself creates tons of other problems. I hope Microsoft reconsiders, but in a world where “AI” makes investors go nuts, I doubt we’ll see a sudden sense of clarity coming out of Redmond.
Remember when I said the honeymoon with AMD’s consumer-friendly chipset and socket support policy would eventually end? Well, while this is not exactly that, it will make a lot of people very unhappy.
While AMD, as does any other company, was boastful about its product touting the 16% IPC boost on Zen 5 and the big AI performance leap delivering up to 50 TOPS on the NPU side, an interesting drawback of the Ryzen AI 300 series that has managed to avoid getting media attention is the lack of support for Windows 10.
While this was just an unconfirmed rumour last month even though it was suggested by a supposed Lenovo China manager, we have now got confirmation from AMD itself that the report, that Strix point and newer CPUs and APUs will not support Windows 10 is true.
Official support for Windows 10 is ending next year, so there is some reason to AMD’s madness, but at the same time, almost 70% of Windows users are currently using Windows 10, and leaving those users behind might not be the best idea AMD ever had. There is an argument to be made that at least a reasonable number of these people are still using Windows 10 not out of their own volition, but because of Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements, and as such, anyone buying a new AMD machine will just opt for the latest version of Windows out of habit, but I still think there’s a sizable contingent of people who actively choose Windows 10 over 11 for a whole host of reasons.
On a strongly related note, despite 2025 marking the end of regular support for Windows 10, Microsoft yesterday announced it’s expanding the the number of Insider channels for new Windows 10 features from one to two, adding a Beta tier below the existing Release Preview tier. Microsoft, too, will have to come to terms with the fact that with 70% of Windows users using Windows 10, they might not even be able to drop support for the operating system as early as next year. While this 70% number will surely slowly decrease over the next 12 months, with many people simply being unable to upgrade due to hardware limitations, I have a suspicion we might see an extension on that 2025 date.
When you launch a game on a Snapdragon on a Windows laptop, you might get an AI frame rate boost from Microsoft’s mysterious Auto Super Resolution (Auto SR) feature. But while Microsoft hasn’t fully explained how the feature works, The Verge can now confirm it’s not Qualcomm technology, not exclusive to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips, and not exclusive to specific games, either.
These resolution enhancer technologies from NVIDIA, AMD, and apparently Microsoft are another great use of what we today call “AI” technologies. Of course, I wish we didn’t have to deal with several proprietary offerings but instead enjoyed several open source versions and possibly a standard to work off of, but give it some time, and we may still get there.
Like I’ve said before – there’s nothing inherently wrong with “AI” technologies, as long as they’re used in ways that make sense, run locally, and most importantly, aren’t based on the wholesale theft of artists’ and programmers’ works. Unsurprisingly, the tech bros at companies like OpenAI don’t really understand the concept of “consent”, and until they do, their offerings should be deemed illegal.
Aside from that, the company also announced Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 this week. The company has also published the minimum system requirements as well as supported processor families. They have been categorized as Preferred and Optional. Interestingly, SSD has been added as a minimum system requirement, which has been a rumour about the client OS since mid-2022.
The LTSC release, which is not really supposed to be used by average consumers, is still remarkably popular. It contains a fixed feature set and gets far fewer updates than regular Windows releases, it omits otherwise stock applications like Edge, and gives its users far more control over which updates are and are not installed. LTSC also enjoys 10 years of support from Microsoft.
Interestingly enough, the minimum specifications for the IoT version of LTSC do not require a TPM 2.0, unlike the regular version of Windows, which infamously does require one. I would assume that the “preferred” minimum requirements, which does require TPM 2.0, line up very well with the minimum requirements for the regular LTSC version of Windows 11. Both will become available later this year, alongside the regular release of Windows 11 24H2.
About a month ago we talked about the rumours, but now the feature’s officially announced: Microsoft is going to keep track of everything you do on your Windows machine by taking a constant stream of screenshots, and then making said screenshots searchable by using things like text and image recognition. As you might expect, this is a privacy nightmare, and the details and fine print accompanying this new feature do not exactly instill confidence.
First, the feature is a lot dumber than you might expect, as it doesn’t perform any “content moderation”, as Microsoft calls it.
Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry.
Well, Microsoft says Recall doesn’t do any content moderation, but that’s actually a flat-out lie. Recall will not show any content with DRM that happens to be on your screen, and private browsing sessions in Chromium-based browsers won’t be shown either. You can also exclude specific applications and websites – filtering websites, however, is only available in Edge. In other words, managing this privacy nightmare is entirely left up to the user… Except for DRM content, of course. The mouse must be pleased, after all.
It also seems Microsoft is enabling this feature by default for at least some business users, as machines managed with Microsoft Intune will have Recall enabled by default, and administrators will need to use Group Policy to disable it. There is no way in hell any company serious about data security will want Recall enabled, so I guess this can be added to the pile of headaches administrators already have to deal with.
My biggest worry is the usual slippery slope this feature represents. How long before governments will legally require a feature like this on all our computers? The more Microsoft and other companies brag about how easy and low-power stuff like this is, the more governments – already on the warpath when it comes to things like encrypted messaging – will want their hands on this.
At the heart of developer productivity lies improving performance for developer workloads on Windows. Last year at Build, we announced Dev Drive a new storage volume tailor-made for developers and supercharged for performance and security. Since then, we have continued to invest further in Windows performance improvements for developer workloads.
With the release of Windows 11 24H2, workflows will get even faster when developing on a Dev Drive. Windows copy engine now has Filesystem Block Cloning, resulting in nearly instantaneous copy actions and drastically improving performance, especially in developer scenarios that copy large files.
Microsoft’s developer conference Build is taking place this week, so there’s been some major Windows news and announcements, and for once – we’re not talking about more ads in your operating system, or even “AI” shoehorned into, I don’t know, Phone Dialer or Windows Fax and Scan.
First and foremost, Windows is going to get a new compiler, kernel, and scheduler, but despite such massive low-level changes, the marketing version number won’t jump from 11 to 12. Of course, we all know the marketing version number has nothing to do with the actual Windows NT version number, which currently sits at 10. The Windows NT version number, meanwhile, is actually also meaningless, since it magically jumps around left and right too, going from 6.2 to 10 between Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, where it has stayed ever since.
“We really focused on modernizing this update of Windows 11,” said Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri at a technical briefing on Microsoft’s campus in mid-April. “We engineered this update of Windows 11 with a real focus on AI inference and taking advantage of the Arm64 instruction set at every layer of the operating system stack. For us, what this meant really was building a new compiler in Windows. We built a new kernel in Windows on top of that compiler. We now have new schedulers in the operating system that take advantage of these new SoC architecture.”
The focus is clearly on ARM here, which coincides with the launch of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, a new SoC that finally seems to truly make ARM laptops that aren’t from Apple a real, competitive thing – so much so that Qualcomm is even breaking with tradition and taking Linux support very seriously for this new chip.
Microsoft also unveiled the name for its new x86 translation layer for Windows on ARM: Prism. Microsoft told Ars Technica that Prism is as fast as Apple’s Rosetta 2, which is interesting because Apple’s M series chips contain special silicon to speed up the translation process, making me wonder if Qualcomm has done the same, or is just brute-forcing it.
Performance like this means the apps customers love work great. Microsoft has partnered closely with developers across the globe to optimize their applications for this processor. In addition, the powerful new Prism emulation engine delivers a 2x performance boost compared to Surface Pro 9 with 5G. On the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, powered by Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors, experiences like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365 and Chrome will feel snappy, quick and responsive.
The new Windows on ARM machines using the Snapdragon X Elite will be marketed under the new Copilot+ brand name, which brings with it some requirements, the biggest of which is the neural processing unit: it must be capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second. At the time of writing, the only Windows-capable processor that can boast such numbers is, of course, the new Snapdragon X Elite. AMD and Intel need not apply. They simply cannot match this.
Microsoft tied a bow on all this stuff by unveiling the new Surface Pro and new Surface Laptop, both powered by the new Snapdragon SoCs. You can preorder them today, but they won’t be available until 18 June.
Windows Server 2025 comes equipped with dtrace as a native tool. DTrace is a command-line utility that enables users to monitor and troubleshoot their system’s performance in real-time. DTrace allows users to dynamically instrument both the kernel and user-space code without any need to modify the code itself. This versatile tool supports a range of data collection and analysis techniques, such as aggregations, histograms, and tracing of user-level events. To learn more, see DTrace for command line help and DTrace on Windows for additional capabilities.
DTrace was originally developed by Sun as part of Solaris, but eventually made its way to other operating systems as Sun collapsed in on itself and Oracle gave it the final push. DTrace is available for the various surviving Solars-based operating systems, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS, and QNX, and Microsoft ported DTrace from FreeBSD to Windows back in 2018. With Windows Server 2025, DTrace will be shipped out of the box.
I didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently Microsoft offers a Windows tune-up application in the vein of things like CCleaner and similar tools. One of the things it does is protect users from applications that try and change default settings, and it seems the application takes this matter very seriously.
Microsoft may be taking a bit of liberty with that last bit. It looks like the PC Manager feels your PC is broken and needs repair if you changed your default search engine from Bing.
Setting aside just how defeatist it feels that the creator of Windows needs to make an application to keep Windows from falling over, I find it almost endearing just how hard Microsoft is trying to get users to choose Bing.
If you’ve ever seen the Swedish film Fucking Åmål, it’s also very likely you remember the gut-wrenching, maximally cringe-inducing birthday party for main character Agnes where nobody shows up, while her mother, oblivious to just how deeply disliked Agnes is by her classmates, tries desperately to assure her daughter that people will show up. Director Lukas Moodysson takes no prisoners and drags out the scene to really maximise just how uncomfortably sad the whole thing is.
It’s incredibly hard to watch.
Well, Agnes is Bing, Microsoft is its mother, and nobody shows up to Bing’s birthday party either.
As Nintendo Switch unlocks and homebrew software develops, people are inclined to explore the possibilities and whether or not they actually provide a good experience. Our new prime example seems to be a full install of Windows 11 Arm on the Switch. As noted by @PatRyk on Twitter, who actually set this up, the experience is pretty grueling! The initial installation took three hours, and even basic system tasks were unresponsive.
Silly, sure, but efforts like these all contribute to emulation efforts, which will eventually be important once Nintendo drops support for this machine and they become increasingly harder to get. Give it a decade or so and we’ll need the Switch emulators to keep playing Switch games.
The grabber in Windows 3.1 was improved to save and restore the index register as well, but it does not attempt to restore the flip-flop state, which is significant. The problem with the VGA emulation was that it erroneously applied the flip-flop state to reads from port 3C0h, and Windows 3.1 would save the wrong index register value… but only the second time through, because the flip-flop state was different at that point. That is to say, the Windows 3.1 standard mode grabber read from port 3C0h to query the attribute controller index register state, but the emulation returned the currently selected data register contents instead.
And then, when restoring the attribute controller index register the next time around, the register would be restored to the wrong value which didn’t have bit 5 set, causing the screen to go blank.
It’s not every day that you learn how an aspect of the workings of VGA causes a blank screen under very specific circumstances when running Windows 3.1 in Standard mode under emulation, and that this specific aspect of the workings of VGA was implemented to maintain backwards compatibility with EGA.
Windows 11 supports a variety of ARM processors from Qualcomm. According to the official documentation, you need a computer with the Snapdragon 850 processor inside or newer to run the current operating system officially. However, customers with PCs powered by the Snapdragon 835, the original Windows on ARM chip from 2016, can bypass hardware requirements and install Windows 11 at their own risk. Sadly, those days will be ending soon.
Starting with Windows 11 version 24H2, Microsoft’s operating system requires ARM v8.1 to run. An attempt to boot it from a device with an ARM v8.0-based processor results in system crashes. For reference, the Snapdragon 835 from 2016 is a chip with Kryo 280 cores, which are derivative of ARM’s Cortex-A73 cores.
That’s right: it’s PowerPC, the most unloved of the architectures CE ever ran on — in fact, this is the first PowerPC Windows CE device I’ve ever found, and I’m the self-described biggest pro-PowerPC bigot in the world. Here’s an unusual form factor Windows CE device, running on the operating system’s least used CPU, from a storied computer company near the end of its run, intended for medical applications, produced in very small numbers and cancelled within months.
What are we going to do with it? Well, what do you think we’re gonna do with it? We’re going to program it, so that we can finally have some software! And, of course, since this wacky thing was there at the bitter end, we’ll talk more about the last days of Data General and what happened next.
I knew Windows CE supported PowerPC, but I never knew any PowerPC-based Windows CE devices ever actually shipped and made it to market. Only Windows CE 2.0 seems to have supported the architecture, and it seems to have been eliminated in 3.0 and 4.0, so it’s not surprising there weren’t many PowerPC Windows CE devices out there. The device that’s the subject of this article, too, only lasted on the market for a few months, so it’s definitely a rarity.
To support Zero Trust deployments trying to lock down devices to only access approved network destinations, we are announcing the development of Zero Trust DNS (ZTDNS) in a future version of Windows. ZTDNS was designed to be interoperable by using network protocols from open standards to satisfy Zero Trust requirements such as those found in OMB M-22-09 and NIST SP 800-207. ZTDNS will be helpful to any administrator trying to use domain names as a strong identifier of network traffic.
ZTDNS integrates the Windows DNS client and the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) to enable this domain-name-based lockdown. First, Windows is provisioned with a set of DoH or DoT capable Protective DNS servers; these are expected to only resolve allowed domain names. This provisioning may also contain a list of IP address subnets that should always be allowed (for endpoints without domain names), expected Protective DNS server certificate identities to properly validate the connection is to the expected server, or certificates to be used for client authentication.
If you think I know nothing about programming – wait until you hear me talk about networking. I consider it to basically be arcane magic, and my knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond “plug in cable to make light blinky” and “unplug from power to fix light no blinky”. Network administrators are the real heroes in my eyes.
Anyway, what I do get from painfully reading this announcement over and over again until my eyes started bleeding is that ZTDNS will give network administrators more finegrained control over which DNS servers and domains are accessible, and perhaps more importantly, it will encrypt traffic between clients and the DNS server. I have no idea if this is unique, or if it even makes any sense to do so, but it seems like a good idea, especially for corporate and government networks.
Well, this was a wild goose chase of a read. J. B. Crawford dove into the history of something I’ve never heard of – Microsoft At Work – and came away with a story that’ while clearer thanks to his research, is still frustratingly nebulous. I’m still not entirely sure what Microsoft At Work really was, but I think it had the goal of running Windows on communications devices like faxes, to make it easier to share and work on documents across various devices. Crawford did a lot of digging, and eventually settles on what he thinks might be a description of what MAW really consisted of.
I am being a bit dismissive for effect. MAW was more ambitious than just installing Windows on a grape. The effort included a unified communications protocol for the control of office machines, including printers, for which a whole Microsoft stack was envisioned. This built on top of the Windows Printing System, a difficult-to-search-for project that apparently predated MAW by a short time, enough so that Windows Printing System products were actually on the market when MAW was announced—MAW products were, we will learn, very much not.
[…]
MAW devices like the Ricoh IFS77 ran 16-bit Windows 3.1 with a new GUI intended to appear more modern while reducing resource requirements. Some reporters at the time noted that Microsoft was cagey about the supported architectures, I suspect they were waiting on ports to be completed. The fax machine was probably x86, though, as there’s little evidence MAW actually ran on anything else.
The ’90s were a wild time, especially as Microsoft, and this MAW project seems to have ’90s written all over it, but I’d still love to learn a lot more about this. I hope this article will bring out some former Microsoft execs or employees who can give us more details, and possibly even some code. I want to know how this works and what it did.
Microsoft is about to go even more hog-wild with “AI” in Windows, as it intends to start recording everything you do on your Windows computer so “AI” features can find stuff for you.
According to my sources, AI Explorer will run in the background and capture everything you do on your computer. It will document and triage everything it sees, no matter what apps or interfaces you’re looking at, and turn them into memories that you can recall at a later point.
For example, you can have a conversation with a friend in the WhatsApp app for Windows, and AI Explorer will record and remember the content that was on-screen and process it with AI for you to recall later. AI Explorer can also summarize conversations, emails, web pages, and general UI surfaces just by asking for it during or after the fact.
I’m told that much of this experience is rendered on-device and does not reach out to the cloud to process information. This is important for privacy reasons, but also for performance reasons. To reduce latency, AI Explorer will rely on NPU silicon to process content that has been recorded. I also understand that users will be able to filter out specific apps from being recorded by the AI Explorer process, or disable AI Explorer entirely.
Is this really something people wan to devote constant resources and thus battery life to?Setting aside the privacy implications of something like this, do people really want to have a permanent record of everything they’ve done on their machine? Maybe I’m just the odd one out here, but nothing about this appeals to me in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – something like this would make make me run for the hills, looking for an alternative to the operating system I’m using.
And the weasel words “much of this experience is rendered on-device” definitely did not go by unnoticed. This wording makes it very clear at least some data will be sent to Microsoft for processing, and over time, that amount will only increase. No data company has ever reduced the amount of data it captures, after all.
The maker of Tiny11, a third-party project that aims to make Windows 11 less bloated with unnecessary parts, released a new version of Tiny11 Builder, a special tool that lets you create a custom Windows 11 image tailored to your needs and preferences. The latest release makes it much easier to create a lightweight Windows 11 ISO without worrying about installing a system modified by unknown third parties.
Perhaps you can make Windows 11 slightly more bearable with this. If there’s any interest from y’all, I could build my own debloated Windows 11 install and see if I can make this platform bearable for myself? Let me know in the comments.
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