"Your privacy is important"

I'm also a Windows user (and a Linux one too, no worries guys), and I must admit, this parody is a little bit real ...

I don't know about you but after a few seconds, I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.

I'm glad I didn't have to spam the back button to do it.

I feel like this would be overprocessing. Is the state really that important or difficult to recreate?

Stop giving Microsoft ideas!

Some other ones to add on from my fresh install: Start menu search will search the Microsoft Store for apps they want you to install, some key combinations will launch copilot and if it's not setup it will take you to a webpage that will help you set it up, every office application has a cheap looking unhideable jeweled title bar button to "Upgrade your plan".

Solutions in order of the problems listed: https://superuser.com/questions/1927207/how-to-remove-the-st..., https://github.com/midrare/hyperenable, and my favorite: downgrade to a previous version of office which is almost certainly unsafe and has active exploits (16.0.19929.20106). But I hate that button THAT much and my wife refuses to move off of Onenote for our family knowledge management. I am close to just using Onenote in a browser (where I can zap the offending element) but the loading pages on demand is annoying.

I have a microsoft account but I use a local account for Windows 11. I always had MSDN and had a pro key so maybe its an enterprise thing. It is a legit copy. I don't use onedrive or 365. When I go to Accounts it has a blue button to Sign In, so maybe local accounts don't get ads.

Same story here. I have much more frustrating experience with my MacOS laptop.

Haters gonns hate I suppose

True, but the search fails to reduce the number of options, so some things are right.

2k appeared to retain NT's responsiveness with seemingly separate threads for processing UI stuff where XP appeared to devolve to Windows 98 (pre NT) in terms of UI and app event processing merged together into a single foreground event loop.

A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible.

Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.

Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.

It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.

Yeah the volume slider wasn't disabled for 2 seconds after opening the dialog, Microsoft should take notes!

Well, it does say "Unofficial parody" on the initial, loading, screen

Start menu comes up too fast.

Proving once again that Windows isn't ready for the desktop.

The "fix everything" button should link to a Linux installer.

who else got rickrolled?

Whoever curates the Edge homepage knows they have mere seconds to capture a new recruit before they manage to escape to a different browser. Their jobs depend on the amount of bait they can dump in one window.

There’s a lot to unpack here but if you want acceleration to work better in a VM you should use Parallels instead. VMware on mac has been in life support only mode for years and has not kept up in this area. You are also handicapping performance using the VM at all. M1 is well supported by Asahi at this point and even has native 3D acceleration. Not saying your lived experience isn’t real but the issue you experienced reflects a lot more on the state of mac virtualization and Vmware than linux.

It's soul destroying going from personal computer Linux (been figuring out the distro for me) to Windows for work.

Even worse they use Office 365 with sharepoint, they've even turned off web search somehow on copilot and can only search internal servicenow and SharePoint pages making it worse.

Things are pretty dire.

Anybody hiring who uses Google workspace and (preferably) Linux or MacOS let me know.

That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.

But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.

This is straightforward with Powertoys (official config utility from Microsoft) on Windows.

I've been on KDE for the past 2 years and it's been a great experience. I wiped Windows everywhere (impractical before).

I keep it installed on a secondary drive just-in-case but I haven't booted into it in months.

I've been using KDE for the last few years, it's been the most familiar experience.

I use the KDE Plasma Fedora. It feels basically like Windows 10.

Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop

One of the things that most impressed me when I switched from Windows to OSX was that OSX prohibited programs from stealing focus.

Sadly, that prohibition ended maybe five versions ago, and now macOS is like Windows -- You can be typing a document in a word processor, and then suddenly for no reason you're typing it into a browser, and then into a password field that popped up out of nowhere.

Hey, Johnny Apple! Fix this!

Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.

I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.

CAD and video games are the areas where I struggle to ditch Windows. Many games work well under Proton and I have had luck with running Windows with an assigned GPU - but that does sometimes break for seemingly no reason.

I only have Windows at work, which means less pop ups. Nevertheless, lately I get forced updates with 5 minutes “grace period” more often than I’d like. Soon will be approaching pop up frequency.

I can feel my blood pressure raising. Very accurate to the Windows experience.

Parodies are supposed to be fun!

That wasn't fun. At all.

screams into pillow

Back when Windows RG (2001) was considered a sharp mockery.

(Random fact, at the time that flash came out, clicking on the A: drive made your real floppy drive light up)

so much rage seeing this

You're doing something serious aaand suddenly out of nowhere the fan starts screaming cause some cryptically named process decides right now is the time to get stuck in some loop

People still bother to deploy XP exploits?

Don't worry, AI's gonna fix it in Rust in Windows 12

Valid. The good news is it's a nicer experience once you click through those. (Be careful; there are a few tricks where the "skip" button changes position and emphasis). Then sometimes a Windows update will make you go through part of it again; once every 3 months or so.

Windows is activated with a digital license. The parody watermark will remain because it is part of the joke.

Thank you for a good laugh

this is too much fun. nice one :)

You mean the Copilot-ed sounds?

This is wayyy too accurate!

Very cool website!

Missed opportunity to have that say "365 Microsoft apps installed"

This is a remarkable depiction of a modern operating system.

I've spent a few months trying to convince my management on getting a Macbook after fighting with a kernel memory leak that consumes the 128Gb of RAM in my freshly new Dell Pro Max 16 with Windows 11. It seems the best solution my IT gives me is to replace my laptop... which I have already done... three times.

It's too fast to be real windows and there is not a task manager so I can kill apps when they always freeze.

I haven't used Windows in a long time, but IIRC Windows behaves the same way. At least, on Linux, there is an expectation that user accounts be actively used, and this is indeed the model followed by most critical software like nginx, postfix, dovecot, etc.

This is true for essentially all Win32 programs too, including the ones that have started to appear in the MS Store. Developers can play in the sandbox from the get go by using Windows Runtime, but no one wants to rewrite their application with a library or environment that Microsoft is going to deprecate and replace in 6 months time.

It's not like Flatpak is perfect, but at least it uses primitives that we understand through containers, and can apply to already existing programs. Even though they were written without playing in the sandbox and might expect full access to services and files, we can fudge it for the most part with bind mounts and open up safer doors through Portal and widget toolkits over time.

I get updates for 10 without having signed into an account (I refuse to).

Someday I'd like to see someone do a similar parody of Linux where your job is to get a printer working in Kubuntu. Preferably on a laptop with a HiDPI monitor.

Meanwhile Linux updates and upgrades have given me grief far more than Windows ones have, FWIW. As does the UX, all the time. As do a million other things I have no energy to list. Every OS has nonsense you have to wade through. It's just that love is blind, and Windows's feels like it's more out of spite than ignorance.

Over time it’s becoming this way.

Have you subscribed to Mozilla VPN?!

How about your Canonical Pro subscription?

A couple recommended additions

1. the full screen "welcome to your windows experience" to enroll with Office 365

2. Run a Space Force satellite app that stalls into involuntary windows update

Someday in the future, business students will be directing their agents to study cases written by the Harvard Business Review's LLM agent about how people at Micrsoslop saw:

- What good UI/UX could be

- What good LLM integration can look like

- What good office productivity software looks like

And how after seeing those thins they went on to do the exact opposite. I simply cannot believe how bad most Microsoft products are these days. Windows in particular is so much worse than even Windows 10 from just a few years ago that it's almost funny.

I can only conclude that Satya Nadella is a mac user, because nobody who actually dogfoods Windows would consider the current state of affairs to be acceptable.

My windows 10 pc continues to bother me to update because I won't get security patches anymore. I will absolutely never update to Windows 11. The only way they ever get me to pay for an OS again is if they go far out of their way to be respectful to the user to compensate for all the disrespect.

Please, Please, MS, Streisand this. And then they can change the name to "Microslop Winblows"...

just want to add that if the creator adds Powerpoint, then starting a Powerpoint presentation should prompt a 10 second countdown to a forced update and restart...

they say wardogs will support proton at some point... looking forward to the day linux is the default gaming OS.

Nice. A couple thoughts:

1. It needs to take a minute to load. While doing so it should display an "Installing Updates" progress bar that is controlled by a random number generator.

2. After booting in, it should try to sell you several services. The decline options should be hidden and possibly moving around evasively. Clicking them should have good chance of backing up all your files to OneDrive anyways.

Pretty good!

Could maybe use a "Catastrophic failure!" error message (experienced for real last week)

Real windows is still actually worse...

So glad I moved off Windows at home back in 2003.

Needs the "update completed" notice then moves all your icons, apps and menu items around to new locations or gone completely

MacOS is going the same way unfortunately.

hmmyou should add random delays for each actions. Also add random freezings for each element. This is too clean to be windows.

Yes, by default the start menu pushes blogspam and ads for software.

In many installations there's also a default widget that tries to get you to stop what you're doing and go look at stocks.

If you use windows, I am sorry but you deserve it

Reminds me of windows rg and microshaft winblows

Will anybody, ever, write an OS that doesn't serve the purpose of itself? Like Solaris, Win 3.11.. So many pop-ups, every so often... very nice, very useful, thank you. Worse than Micro and soft guy os.

That's just awesome and makes me regret not switching to Linux earlier. I wish the creator of this made the start menu suddenly change after running Windows update, because Microsoft knows best on which folders you need to be visible by default. It can be customized, but you can't go back to how the start menu was.

Ex-Microsoft, but it's incredible how mismanaged this company has become.

Firstly, the level cronyism is just ridiculous, almost comical. You see Principals and Directors that can barely code at what I'd consider SDE 2 level, but are there purely because of favoritism. Then, you have multiple factions duking it out and releasing iterations of the same product over and over, just for the sake of empire building. All this while blocking or even sabotoging other teams from getting ahead.

There's also the constant rotation of the same people speedrunning features and wrecking havoc on projects before getting promoted and rotating out. Then, whoever's left behind to clean the mess gets PIPed because "the project was running fine when we left it!"

And not only that, but executives and PMs shoving a barrage of pop-ups and notifications for the sake of improving key metrics because We'Re A DaTa DriVeN CoMPAnY. Yeah, no shit you get more engagement by adding popups, but who cares because the customer satisfaction metric is too abstract to be tied back to your team.

Finally, at the end of the day, everyone goes home and uses Macbooks and iPhones.

As many comments already mention, windows is way worse than this.

Some obscure background task consuming all cpu. Burning your battery when on a laptop.

There is just so much crap in windows, it’s not even funny.

And man I really really liked it. Windows 7 + the performance work they did for 8 that was the last time it felt like they cared.

Restore failed. Control Panel was replaced by Settings, except for the settings that are still in Control Panel.

Microsoft really needs to remove the Control Panel and let us control everything in the Settings app. It's infuriating to have to go dig in this old mess because of backwards compatibility or something.

Look - we have entered into a full gambling society. I need to know that every update I do there is a chance candy crush gets installed.