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Hum. Windows has been ridden with bugs forever. I don’t see how this is connected to Microsoft abandoning windows in favor of AI.

Windows code base is just too heavy to maintain. They need to break compatibility with older products like MacOS often does, so that Windows can be manageable again… but that goes against Microsoft philosophy it seems.


I only used Windows at work and for games in a VM, so take that with a grain of salt:

Older Windows bugs seemed fair: mostly edge cases, weird UI interaction, or stuff that only came out under heavy workload (also, windows file system).

This past few year, the bugs are incomprehensible. I understand non-professional versions are considered as Beta since Win10, but what it felt like is that Home version are actually alpha, and windows pro seems more and more like a beta.

NT4 had many serious BSODs. SP6 was so problematic due to a critical bug in LSA that it was re-released as SP6a.

Windows bugs have moved more and more into the 'edge case' territory. Not that major issues don't crop up for "everyone" today, but BSODs used to be much more common. Part of that was due to the architecture, thus drivers, but the other side of it was core Windows functionality that just had bugs.

Kernel is almost perfect these days. Can't say the same about user environment. Explorer and shell are buggiest ever.
Explorer is the shell ;)

But Explorer has had it's fair share of issues. I have a 98SE machine to prove the stalls, lockups, lack of refreshing directories, etc...

Not anymore, not entirely. Start menu and taskbar are now in a separate thing I believe. Welcome to 20s!
Explorer.exe is still the shell -- the shell is defined at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell, if you want to look (or replace it).
That's not the whole story. The challenges associated with legacy app support have nothign to do with ads, telemetry, reCall and jamming AI into every crevice. Microsoft is doing both things wrong and 11 is a hot mess for that.
>Hum. Windows has been ridden with bugs forever

Windows had a reasonable share of bug analogous to its huge breadth and backwards compatibility needs. Otherwise, it was very stable and mature.

Now it's gotten way worse...

Yes, but it happened before ChatGPT. Windows 11 was released in 2021, already with shitty taskbar, search, and start menu.
Yes, but those were bad by choice.

Whereas the parent alluded to bugs just been piling gratuitously.

I didn't mean poor design, I meant literal bugs. Start menu search still fails to find things on my desktop, and done so since Win 11. Thank God for Everything.
And Start11 (which can integrate with Everything!)
I mean, define now. Windows has been progressively getting more buggy for a long time, before windows 11 or even 10. Windows 11 is pretty bad but it's been bad. Since day 1 the taskbar crashes for me a few times a day, file explorer crashes, and random things have stupid amounts of lag.
It more or less worked fine until they fired all the QA staff and bundled Windows with adware.

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