The Decline of Windows
My Windows 11 PC is a cobbled together mess of upgrades, customisations and workarounds. It seems okay at first glance, mainly because my desktop is well organised and I don’t allow too many apps to start on boot up. But beneath this superficial veneer of efficiency and optimisation is a bloated mess. Every Windows update adds yet more spurious features which slows performance and tries to harvest your data. Windows is no longer a user friendly operating system that you buy and use without impediment. It is now a sprawling live service that actively gets in the way of your productivity so that it can make a buck off your inconvenience. There was a time when you could quickly learn its processes and foibles, so you could customise it into the tool you needed. Nowadays I have to continuously use third party tools to get Windows to do many of the things I want, or to access functionality that Microsoft has obtusely decided to restrict.
I have recently stopped using Microsoft Office 365. I had to download a specialist tool to “cleanly uninstall” it from my PC and when it finished running, it still left numerous orphan files and icons. I spent hours trying to remove a rogue blank icon from Control Panel and eventually had to use the Local Group Policy Editor to hide it, rather than delete it. The process is akin to trying to remove Japanese Knotweed from your garden. My latest headache is trying to remove (or hide) data that appears on screen when you click on your account icon on the Windows start menu. Details such as an email address should not be displayed by default, unless superficially requested by the user. This is a prime example of Microsoft trying to do the users thinking for them and pursuing a “one size fits all” approach. I expect to be able to fully customise any aspect of the UI in an operating system. Sadly Windows no longer seems to champions such customer choice.
This should be a capital offense
Naturally, there are alternative products to Windows and if I were starting totally from scratch, I would certainly embrace some version of Linux and a wealth of other indie production tools. Sadly, both my computer and user habits come with a lot of baggage and requirements. PC gaming is a substantial part of my leisure activities and that means using Windows. I’ve written various scripts to do simple tasks such as change screen resolutions or redesignate the default monitor. I don’t relish having to port these to a Linux environment, as well as dozens of other tweaks I have made. I afraid that I, like many other PC users, have my desktop, folder structures and naming conventions set up “just so”. Hence migrating to a new operating system would be a substantial and labour intensive undertaking. As such, the fear that something catastrophic could happen during such a project is sufficient for me to defer it for the immediate future.
The dream scenario would be to have dual boot PC, where I use Linux to write blog posts, record and edit podcasts and videos as well as browse the internet. Windows would be reserved exclusively for gaming and I would not install anything else beyond possibly Discord or some others means of communicating online. I would also exclusively use Proton Mail so I could manage my emails far more effectively. It would be a spartan but secure PC environment. As a very wise man once said “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain”. However, for the present the dream scenario and indeed, any deviation from the status quo, are just idle speculation. It’s a shame how a once good product such as Windows has declined into a barely adequate money pit. And more fool you and me, for becoming so dependent on such corporations and products.
