למה Windows 11 כל כך מעצבן?

Two weeks ago, my external monitor for a MacBook Air that I use for work stopped working. So, I switched to my five-year-old Windows desktop and connected a different monitor. I love it. Productivity is through the roof. But it means I'm finally spending significant time on Windows 11, and God, isn't that dumb.

There are a few things Windows does very well compared to macOS and Linux. All the games are there, for one, and Windows runs on all sorts of hardware without much hassle. You don't need to spend at least a thousand dollars on an unupgradable machine to use it. You also generally don't need to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line manually assembling the operating system.

But for every headline like "Windows 11 Notepad Gets Spellcheck Feature at Last," there's "Microsoft Starts Testing Pop-up Ads in Google Chrome on Windows." For every Windows subsystem for Linux, there's "Microsoft Begins Testing Start Menu Ads in Windows 11." It seems like Microsoft is dying for the release of Windows 11 full of "features" that steal your attention or try to persuade or shame you into using any Microsoft product instead of where you intended to go. I'm in my 30s or 40s, and I don't need this.

I grew up on Windows 3.1, NT, and 95. I passed college on my Dell workstation. I worked for a maximum PC magazine for five years, for God's sake. I built dozens of computers. I'm typing this on my main desktop, a mini-ITX gaming rig I lovingly put together by hand in 2019. I remain using Windows.

But in recent years, I've spent more than 40 hours a week using macOS for work, and the hours outside of work I spent much less time in front of a computer. So even though I upgraded my desktop to Windows 11 about a year ago, I didn't spend that much time with it. When I used my computer, it was mainly for casual use or, occasionally, gaming, so there wasn't much interaction with the operating system itself. I'm a frog out of the pot; I just jumped back in and got burned.

At some point, a button appeared next to my start menu. Clicking on it or even hovering over it covers a full third of my display with things I never asked for and don't want. A new firehose of news. Stock prices. Weather. (It's useful, but I can get it in many places.) There's now also a button in the system tray for Copilot, my daily AI assistant, which now exists in Microsoft products at a reverse benefit ratio to its benefit.

The start menu has mostly been junk since Windows 8, but now it's almost entirely useless in its default state. Half of it is pinned apps I didn't pin or even install. And I don't blame the OEM. I am the OEM, and I didn't put these here.

Somewhere in the recent versions, it seems like Windows forgot how to index the files on my computer. So if I try to open a program, file, or setting in the usual way – by clicking on Windows and starting to type – it mostly shows me web results, which are not useful because it uses Bing to find them.

Microsoft really did something truly amazing also with support documents. That information was baked into the operating system. Now, if you're in the display settings window (for example) and you move to the support section and click on "Set up multiple monitors," it opens Microsoft Edge – even if it's not your default browser – showing the phrase "How to add multiple monitors to a Windows 11 PC site: microsoft.com" and displays a page with a single result: a box of information relevant support page on Microsoft's website with a link to open the exact settings screen you arrived from.

That's a) outrageous and b) still a significant improvement compared to the last time I tried this, when a similar link returned zero results. This is Microsoft's organizational synergy at work. Why keep all Windows users to yourself when you can make sure Bing and Edge teams also benefit?

Edge used to be a slightly improved version of Chrome. Now it's chock full of sidebars and bloatware. (It's still definitely an improved version of Chrome.) It continues to prompt to switch the default search engine back to Bing (I won't do it), and the default home screen is, yes, full of junk.

Why would one of the world's largest technology companies release an operating system that's so… dumb? Well, part of it is certainly the 30-plus years of building each new version of the operating system on top of the old. That doesn't really explain why things like this are in use to work as they should have been replaced by new, if not other, systems.

Windows is very successful. It makes money. It has over 70% of the global desktop computer market. For Edge, which is still a pretty decent browser, and Bing, which is a search engine, they have much smaller slices of their markets. Any Windows user that Microsoft can annoy, harass, or nudge toward Edge, Bing, or Copilot over competitors is great for Microsoft, hence the rationale for some sort of electronic flier to introduce as many synergistic opportunities as possible.

It's not just Windows, of course. Every app under the sun wants to steal your attention a million times a day. And many budget phones and Windows PCs come with pre-installed adware and bloatware that companies pay original equipment manufacturers to squeeze in. Purging bloatware technically is an ancient daily tradition among Windows users.

But once, that junk was separate from the operating system itself. The Samsung version of Android has a lot of bloat, but that's the Samsung version, not Android itself – there's a reason the phrase "clean version of Android" exists among many phone reviewers and why Pixel phones are praised by reviewers much more than when they're purchased by customers.

Ars Technica has already written a good, practical guide to disable most of the junk that Windows 11 includes. And this isn't my first rodeo. I *loathe* to turn off most of this junk. Most people will never bother or know how or understand that it's optional. They'll just learn to live with it, mostly. Occasionally they might click on something, and then some part of Microsoft gets a little money.