I agree with 1,2 and 3 but I don’t really understand the remaining 2,
I’ve never across the 6 systems I’ve had, had windows brick an install to the point it no longer can restore/recover itself without me doing something really wrong (usually something stupid on the Linux partition). it’s way of handling updates and upgrades is actually something I miss on my current system, with windows if it failed the update it rolled itself back, on Debian I gotta roll a snapshot,which isn’t hard but takes longer and is manual.
I’ve also never had an issue with the UI not looking uniform, or at least anything worse than anything not Apple.
Every time I’ve come across this it’s because windows restore points have been disabled for some reason, or the only restore point happens to be from when it was first installed.
Other times it’s been when there are 2 hard drives installed and it somehow shits the bed and installs the bootloader to one and the os to the other, or upgrades to one disk but leaves a half valid install on the other, then boots the old install. Generally getting confused about multiple disks
I had this issue when migrating to a new larger NVME a few years back, where there was technically 2 EFI partitions and it would fight which one was correct. I eventually just had to randomly nuke an EFI cause I wasn’t sure which one it was using.
Then my most recent was with the secure boot key update, windows would fail to update. By that I mean it would install updates, and then fail to update and rollback. So it never became unbootable, it just would stupidly keep trying the same update. So I investigated into it.
I found that when I did work about a year ago I expanded my EFI partition. Since EFI’s can’t be expanded that involved backing the partition up, nuking it then making a larger partition.
I apparently never marked the partition as an “EFI” ID when I did this, so it was marked EFI by type, but not via type id.
I never caught the issue because grub didn’t care that it lacked the proper typing, it knew where windows was, the EFI was “proper” in concept that it contained the right files to boot, and windows while didn’t accept it as an EFI, also didn’t care it didn’t actually have an EFI so it would just silently fail on any update events to it. It wasn’t until the update was pushed that forced the master key to change that it actually started to show signs of failing.
I was amazed that there was no warnings at all that the currently booted system has no valid EFI partition. It was insane it was even able to boot in the first place.
I once accidentally bricked a windows install by replacing the system font with another font, while calling it the same. The system crashed on boot, and apparently the recovery menu also uses the same file, because it instantly crashed too. Had to do a complete reinstall of that one…
On the UI not being uniform, you may not have noticed, but it’s awful. They’ve fixed some stuff, but there was a point with win11 when 40% of the apps were light theme when you had dark theme. Even to this day, you have a complete mix of icons from different generations of windows in different menus (hell, there are still win95 icons in some places, and you can still set them up as folder icons). Some apps, despite rendering with the modern w11 style, clearly have the structure from decades ago (in fact, to this day, you can find menus from windows 3.11 in windows 11, and it also comes with the dialer app hidden in System32). Context menus are also another incredibly inconsistent thing, and for the longest time, win11 had 3 types of context menu styles that were used seemingly at random (some of the context menus also rendered in light mode even when the system-wide dark mode was enabled)
That sucks, yea I’ve broken windows by changes I’ve made as well, never to the extent that I’ve had to reinstall though, but I’ve definitely broke the boot system making changes or have had to uninstall updates for some changes. That being said, the recovery menu uses a whole separate image, usually on it’s own partition, so I’m surprised changing the font on your System was even able to break recovery, that’s impressive.
as for UI, I give a pass to anything that is marked as deprecated as those are decommissioned, but yea if you include the windows 7 interfaces that were never upgraded to the new unified UI design, I agree with you. That or if you include third party software, but I don’t feel that’s a fair comparison.
UX wise? I havent noticed any of that. The most I’ve noticed are that context menus are basically useless now as they remove or moved the pieces that I always used, so moreorless I just use keyboard shortcuts for everything when on windows. A common complaint I have on the new unified settings area is how much it doesn’t look like the older stuff. The menus lack features present in the old system, and if the settings do exist, they are in a different area. With control panel I used to be able to access my settings all in one spot. Now I can look for a specific setting and have to look in three different places for it.
I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That’s why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it’s been like that for a decade.
They’re just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.
I agree with this. they start a major overhaul and then never finish. the half baked integrated settings using the unified settings system was a perfect example, where they still haven’t got feature parity to the old systems.
I agree with 1,2 and 3 but I don’t really understand the remaining 2,
I’ve never across the 6 systems I’ve had, had windows brick an install to the point it no longer can restore/recover itself without me doing something really wrong (usually something stupid on the Linux partition). it’s way of handling updates and upgrades is actually something I miss on my current system, with windows if it failed the update it rolled itself back, on Debian I gotta roll a snapshot,which isn’t hard but takes longer and is manual.
I’ve also never had an issue with the UI not looking uniform, or at least anything worse than anything not Apple.
Every time I’ve come across this it’s because windows restore points have been disabled for some reason, or the only restore point happens to be from when it was first installed. Other times it’s been when there are 2 hard drives installed and it somehow shits the bed and installs the bootloader to one and the os to the other, or upgrades to one disk but leaves a half valid install on the other, then boots the old install. Generally getting confused about multiple disks
I had this issue when migrating to a new larger NVME a few years back, where there was technically 2 EFI partitions and it would fight which one was correct. I eventually just had to randomly nuke an EFI cause I wasn’t sure which one it was using.
Then my most recent was with the secure boot key update, windows would fail to update. By that I mean it would install updates, and then fail to update and rollback. So it never became unbootable, it just would stupidly keep trying the same update. So I investigated into it.
I found that when I did work about a year ago I expanded my EFI partition. Since EFI’s can’t be expanded that involved backing the partition up, nuking it then making a larger partition.
I apparently never marked the partition as an “EFI” ID when I did this, so it was marked EFI by type, but not via type id.
I never caught the issue because grub didn’t care that it lacked the proper typing, it knew where windows was, the EFI was “proper” in concept that it contained the right files to boot, and windows while didn’t accept it as an EFI, also didn’t care it didn’t actually have an EFI so it would just silently fail on any update events to it. It wasn’t until the update was pushed that forced the master key to change that it actually started to show signs of failing.
I was amazed that there was no warnings at all that the currently booted system has no valid EFI partition. It was insane it was even able to boot in the first place.
I once accidentally bricked a windows install by replacing the system font with another font, while calling it the same. The system crashed on boot, and apparently the recovery menu also uses the same file, because it instantly crashed too. Had to do a complete reinstall of that one…
On the UI not being uniform, you may not have noticed, but it’s awful. They’ve fixed some stuff, but there was a point with win11 when 40% of the apps were light theme when you had dark theme. Even to this day, you have a complete mix of icons from different generations of windows in different menus (hell, there are still win95 icons in some places, and you can still set them up as folder icons). Some apps, despite rendering with the modern w11 style, clearly have the structure from decades ago (in fact, to this day, you can find menus from windows 3.11 in windows 11, and it also comes with the dialer app hidden in System32). Context menus are also another incredibly inconsistent thing, and for the longest time, win11 had 3 types of context menu styles that were used seemingly at random (some of the context menus also rendered in light mode even when the system-wide dark mode was enabled)
That sucks, yea I’ve broken windows by changes I’ve made as well, never to the extent that I’ve had to reinstall though, but I’ve definitely broke the boot system making changes or have had to uninstall updates for some changes. That being said, the recovery menu uses a whole separate image, usually on it’s own partition, so I’m surprised changing the font on your System was even able to break recovery, that’s impressive.
as for UI, I give a pass to anything that is marked as deprecated as those are decommissioned, but yea if you include the windows 7 interfaces that were never upgraded to the new unified UI design, I agree with you. That or if you include third party software, but I don’t feel that’s a fair comparison.
UX wise? I havent noticed any of that. The most I’ve noticed are that context menus are basically useless now as they remove or moved the pieces that I always used, so moreorless I just use keyboard shortcuts for everything when on windows. A common complaint I have on the new unified settings area is how much it doesn’t look like the older stuff. The menus lack features present in the old system, and if the settings do exist, they are in a different area. With control panel I used to be able to access my settings all in one spot. Now I can look for a specific setting and have to look in three different places for it.
I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That’s why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it’s been like that for a decade.
They’re just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.
I agree with this. they start a major overhaul and then never finish. the half baked integrated settings using the unified settings system was a perfect example, where they still haven’t got feature parity to the old systems.
I once found a dialog that default searched for a:/ in a windows 98 style popup. Pretty sure it was early windows 10