• Not surprising. Web search from the Start Menu was always a bad idea.

    Hell, I’ve had to deal with users getting their systems compromised because of this idiocy. User typed ‘ms teams’ in the start menu, clicked on the first link and ended up at an attacker’s page which mimicked the official Teams download page. User clicked “Download”, received the trojaned .msi file and ran it.

    Sure, there’s some blame to go around in that case (and we finally got some default configuration changes out of it), but the fact that Microslop’s greed led to a malvertising link showing up in a user’s Start Menu is indicative of everything wrong with Windows 11.

  • irs remind me teh atrocious active desktop on win98. wen you DARED turn it on hooo buy the pc was slow.

  • 8 hours

    One of the biggest Windows habits I’ve had to break is using file explorer to open documents and files. This was because memorizing file paths is way faster than using search. Search in Windows has never been good, because it’s always been weighted toward what Microslop wants you to find. And the index goes to shit if a user does something unexpected like saving, moving, or deleting files.

    Linux search just works. If I know the file name, there is no reason to open a file explorer at all. Just mash the power key and start typing.

      • 43 minutes

        Did you try to modify the sleep settings and put your computer to sleep again Elijah?

    • I use ‘everything’ by void tools for most file searching. It doesn’t index content but I find files way faster and more reliabily than Windows search.

      • Everything for windows is hands down the most useful tool

        I convinced our IT guy to index the company and host a server so now I can tell people where they stored shit even. In fact, it allows me to profile entire project lifespans and their respective evolution through our company.

  • Only bad management is keeping everything from being crazy fast. No reason for today’s programs to be slower than what we had a decade ago.

    • 4 hours

      I remember when finishing my dissertation and thinking about how my sister did her one several years before me, in a computer that was considered unusable by the time I did mine, and both the work process and the finished result were pretty much the same. I had a computer that was astronomically better than she had, yet, everything was slow, just like she felt when she did her.

      • 3 hours

        The CPU in an average consumer PC can do tens of billions of instructions per second now. 10,000,000,000+ instructions per second. And then it can also offload some work to other devices. Here, graphics card, deal with updating this display at 144Hz. Hey network card, take this buffer and squirt it out the ethernet port at a 1 gigabit line speed for me.

        And even with all that help, it still takes for-fucking-ever to get shit done. What the fuck are all those instructions doing‽

        • 3 hours

          Mine are all used up to block ads and trackers and page elements, then when they’re done, I’m being throttled punitively by the service because i didn’t watch their ads :(

    • There’s also a whole lot of abstraction layers in software these days. All kinds of frameworks, no code platforms, scripts and engines ask introduce their own delays when running software, all added to make time to market a bit shorter or just because of some tech fetish.

      • 6 hours

        Windows OS updates and releases aren’t subject to this as it’s closed source

        Whether human or machine, external factors are all internally decided

          • 3 hours

            Describe the abstraction layers of a closed source project in the context of Microsoft

            You can’t, unless you work for Microsoft

            There’s market forces, which is not what you described; rather tooling and nuance specific to software development

            When Microsoft controls the input and outputs, it’s a closed loop affected by Microsoft governance, not random tools, systems or transparent inputs

    • I think many programmers and business models have given up on programs running ‘fast’ but rather they just running and shoving them out quickly. Add in all the AI programming, and I don’t see it getting better. It’s basically like most people when they earn more income. The more speed and memory a computer has, the more programmers will use of it.

      A computer from the 80’s starts up a million times faster than any modern computer.

      • 9 hours

        That’s nonsense. Every computer I own boots in under a minute. That was unheard of in the 90s, much less the 80s.

        • Eehhh… this person is wrong about programmers and business models but DOS machines did boot really fast (my 486 boots to DOS in about 20 seconds) and C64s and Apple IIs and such were all ROM based and so booted instantly like a Super Nintendo.

        • You realize most computers in the 80’s instantly booted right? Flip power switch and they booted to an internal rom. I’m sorry, are you fairly young?

          • 5 hours

            Computers in the 80s took so long to load anything, I could go out, get some coffee, and come back before they finished, e.g. any Spectrum or Commodore would take 20 minutes to load stuff from the tape drive. Wyse network terminals would leave you hanging for ten minutes and then fail netbooting because some shit with the token ring network.

            So, no, they didn’t “instantly boot”.

            • Except they did instantly boot. I didn’t say anything about how long they took to load a program, and if you had a cartridge, it instantly loaded as well. Have you actually used these computers, or just remember slow tape drives? Not that modern ones are fast by any means either, they just move more data and are prohibitively expensive.

              • 3 hours

                It’s easy to “boot up instantly” when not even the OS is loaded.

                Modern BIOS load also instantly. Care to explain what you can do with that?

                • Apple, Commodore all booted into their OS instantly. Disk drives worked, no BIOS needed. Care to explain what you can do with that? You could easily boot DOS within 40 seconds on a 486. Can’t do that on Windows at all these days and we are talking 30 years later.

          • 9 hours

            Here is a 486 taking over three minutes to boot.

            The person you replied to countered a broad generalization with an anecdote which probably matches the lived experience of most of us oldies who lived through the time. Your comment did not contribute to the conversation.

            • 7 hours

              Once again, that’s a single video of one example of an old computer booting up. It’s hardly irrefutable, like anything anecdotal. I’m not even disagreeing on the consensus of newer computers being undeniably faster, this is just a flimsy evidence regardless.

              And frankly I don’t care about “contributing” as you describe it. That just amounts to adhering to everyone’s idea of contribution on social media, and I’m not Sisyphus, so…

  • 13 hours

    If they want to push Bing so hard I wonder why didn’t they just show you the local results first and then asynchronously load Bing suggestions in a separate section. It would make good UX while still promoting their search engine.

    Good that it can be disabled though

    • show you the local results first and then asynchronously load Bing suggestions in a separate section

      Actually, that’s fn brilliant.

      • 3 hours

        It’s not brilliant, it’s something a software engineer should have mentioned in the first 5 minutes of the initial design meeting. It very likely was.

        So what you need to understand is that mashing Bing and local results together was a deliberate design decision. Whether to artificially inflate Bing search numbers , or to get that sweet cash from sponsored results, who knows?

      • 4 hours

        How do you expect them to maximise their profits if people find what they are looking for immediately?

    • background services sucking up all the ram.

      I love how the (mandated) Teams running on the (mandated) win11 work laptop is gobbling A GIGABYTE AND A HALF OF RAM all by itself. What the actual flapping fuck is that?

      • Teams, like a lot of MS products, uses Edge Webview 2 (an Electron clone). So if you have Teams, and VS Code, and Chrome or Edge running you are running 3 Chromium instances.

        • on top of that, I’m pretty sure electron apps in the background can’t be moved from RAM to Pagefile when they’ve been idle for a while . . . id imagine edge webview likely works the same

  • I have done this (or had this done by IT) on every Windows 10/11 machine that I have had to use. There has long been a registry tweak to kill the online search and it really does improve the experience.

  • “We’ve listened to customer feedback and started putting REAL tomatoes into our Shitburger again. People will come flocking back in DROVES!”

  • That’s like them deliberately closing a strait (for profit), and then reopening it to much glory to their very achievement.

    And they didn’t even debloat telemetry, they just turned off the ads.

    Also what local search these days isn’t close to instant (which I would say it’s faster than “crazy fast”)?

    • Are there programs for Windows/Mac or Linux that make search of everything quick and instant? I can’t think of any that don’t involve pre-indexing or massively fail to find what you are looking for (or are slow).

      • Oh, … I got caught not reading the article, but I assume that goes for Microsoft as well - they do use indexing, right? Have since ever (but in those days you had to manually enable indexing, bcs slow HDDs at the time really bottlenecked)?

        By “instant” I meant for indexed content (including installed things, etc). Idk, I don’t search much locally, but if I need a txt file from Documents that how I get it (Linux tho).

        Doesn’t Spotlight on Macs work the same-ish or did they enshitify that too?

        Edit: The article only says that they turned off Bing results (and added a toggle for the store)? That’s just how Windows users using O&O experienced search this whole time, right?
        I don’t immediately see how this is different to eg KDE search functionality (also with added cools that I can do it in desktop, not having to click the search/start before).

    • 6 hours

      As someone who runs Linux on all of his own computers, you’re part of many more problems. Grow up.

    • If you still use microslop, you are part of the problem.

      Me getting paid - and therefore eating and paying rent - requires me to use the mandated OS on the company-provided gear. It’s a great job, it has a great union retirement package that won’t leave me destitute like my folks and anyone else who went through abject poverty, and in all I accept that trade-off while working to modernize us out of M$. So maybe moderate that crusade a bit before you enter the workforce?

      • You are reading a “I condemn you” where there isn’t one into “you are part of the problem”.

        If I participate to an economy which exploits third world countries for quality of life and luxury, then even if I do not have a choice, I am part of the problem.

        Becoming all defensive about it however suggests that you actually don’t give a fuck about using an operating system operated by a fascist enabling corporation, while looking for excuses that it’s “not your fault”.

      • Still, they are part of the problem. Not as big as their corporate IT or responsible manager, but still a part.

        • What the fuck are they supposed to do? Burn down the company, and go homeless? As a Linux daily driver (both home and work; I’m just fortunate on the latter), you are making a really dumb argument.

          • You clearly do not understand the point I am making. It’s not that hard to miss, so it’s more likely that you just enjoy getting offended on behalf of people. Bad habit.

          • I mean, maybe the baby didn’t understand the movement, so --yeet!–

            Skippy is trying to save the world, you know.