Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer

Windows sucks. There, I said it right at

the top so the algorithm can put this

episode in the same playlist as rants

about dishwasher soap pods and the

world's most disappointing sports car.

But if you stick with me past the cold

open, I'm going to do something that

won't actually get me invited to many

brand loyalty barbecues. I'm going to

argue that windows really does suck for

some people and some of the time and for

reasons that are pretty specific once

you peel back the paint. because I

helped paint a few coats of those myself

back in the 90s. I'm going to show you

where the brush strokes went wrong, who

they were meant for, and how I would fix

it if, heaven help us, I were suddenly

put in charge. Now, I worked on Windows

and most of my code is likely still in

there. So, of course, I'm personally

invested. I'm also of the firm belief

that the Windows kernel is every bit as

powerful and robust as the Linux kernel.

But the software, which is then layered

on top of the kernel, the pieces that

you and I interact with daily, have very

different priorities. and what that

means to users like you and me. I also

want to be crystal clear about one thing

upfront. I left Microsoft more than 20

years ago. I'm not on the org chart. I

don't sit in on any meetings and

nobody's calling to ask for my opinion.

I get no credit for the wins and I take

no blame for the boneheaded decisions.

Though I reserve the right to admire one

and roast the other. That distance also

means that I don't have to be an

apologist for the product. We can be

fair, honest, and a little unsparing

because the people who love Windows the

most are usually the same ones who are

getting burned by it at 2 a.m. So, let's

start with my core thesis that Windows

has spent a decade or two rounding off

the edges to make the on-ramp smoother

for the widest possible audience. And

that's not a moral failing. That's a

business decision. When you sell a

product to a billion humans, you design

the UI the same way that the highway

department designs exit ramps. Long,

gentle, forgiving curves that make it

hard to screw up at 40 miles an hour.

The problem is that power users don't

want to drive 40. Like Sammy said, when

you go that slow, it's hard to steer.

So, they drive at 85 on select tires

with three monitors and a text editor

open on every screen. The things that

you do to protect noviceses, like hiding

the sharp tools, adding guardrails,

narrating every step with a balloon tip,

they turn into real friction for the

people who live in the OS all day. It's

the right strategy for the median user,

but the wrong one for the noisy tale of

people who influence everybody else's

opinion. Back in the bomber days, the

chant was developers developers because

Windows needed an app ecosystem more

than anything else. Well, mission

accomplished, the development stack is

solid, the tooling is good, WSL exists,

and the platform serves the world's

software reasonably well. So today, the

chat should really be power users power

users because they set the tone. They're

the ones that friends call for advice,

the ones who answer the questions at

work, and the ones who go on red at the

next and shape the narrative. When they

feel respected, they praise Windows as

the universal adapter at the heart of

the PC. But when they feel patronized,

they defect to Linux for a real shell

and sometimes to Mac OS for a more

coherent, if narrower experience. And

the tragedy is that we don't have to

choose. We can make an OS that welcomes

newcomers without putting the experience

in mitten mode. So, how would I fix it?

Well, I'd add a clutch pedal. Let's call

it professional mode. Call it Windows

Advanced Server. Call it paint it black.

I don't care about the marketing. I want

a first class systemwide setting that

flips the operating characteristics of

the OS from safe and chatty to

deterministic and tur. It's not a skin.

It's not a theme. It's like a treaty

between the OS and the operator. So when

you turn it on, three things change

across the board. First, verbosity and

nudging drops to zero. No app

suggestions. No, consider using

Microsoft this or that. No web search in

your local search unless you actually

ask for them. Second, control collapses

into a single authoritative place. If

something can be changed in settings,

then it lives there and it has parody

with whatever was left behind in the

control panel. No more scavenger

hunting. Third, the tool change should

grow some teeth. Windows terminal

becomes the default console. Windget is

first party and complete. Open SSH, tar,

curl, GP, and all their friends are

unambiguously available and already on

the path for you. WSL is treated like a

peer, not a pet. If you flag yourself as

a power user, then the OS takes you at

your word and stops secondguessing you

constantly. That gets us pretty far, but

the where's my shell bit is just the tip

of the iceberg. If you listen to the

gripes that generate real heat today,

there are three or four big buckets.

Privacy and telemetry, being forced into

a Microsoft account during setup,

updates that surprise like a SWAT team

advance, and the general feeling that

your desktop is the last unmonetized

surface in a world that hates empty

space. And I'm sure they all have good

faith justifications inside Redmond.

They all feel from the outside though,

like rough edges on a product that kind

of forgot who's paying whom, assuming

you are paying. Let's talk telemetry

first because it's the most radioactive

word. There's a legitimate tension here.

Modern operating systems are genuinely

too complex to tune blindly. You need

field data to know what crashes, what

hangs, and what users are actually doing

with the operating system. The kernel is

where a bad day can take a whole machine

down. And the last thing you want to do

at ring zero is a bunch of guesswork.

I've explained in other episodes why

kernel mode is the dangerous end of the

pool. When code in the kernel

misbehaves, the only safe option is to

halt the system and crash. Because

continuing risks corrupting user data in

subtle ways that are worse than just

rebooting. And that's not a Microsoft

quirk. It's how every serious OS behaves

when ring zero equals wrong, including

Linux and Mac OS. The difference is the

Linux screen goes black, the Mac screen

goes pink, and Windows goes blue. The

realistic fix isn't no telemetry. The

fix is radical transparency and control.

Because if I were king, Windows would

ship with a privacy ledger. Think of it

as an always available system log for

outbound telemetry. Every packet that

the OS wants to send on your behalf gets

recorded as an entry with a plain

English Y, a version of schema, and a

link to the documentation. You can click

any entry and mute that category

globally or per app with immediate

effect. You can export the ledger, diff

it across releases, and audit it like

you'd audit firewall rules. Maybe add a

nuclear airplane mode for analytics that

the OS respects everywhere. And because

this ledger is part of the power user

persona, you can lock it so future

updates can't resurrect categories that

you've killed off without your say so.

If Microsoft believes a given stream is

non-negotiable, make the case in the

open and take the PR lumps. Tell the

truth and let the grown-ups decide. Now,

the Microsoft account thing. Now, I can

understand why a cloud identity is the

default. People lock themselves out of

local passwords. They want to roam their

settings. They forget their Bit Locker

keys. As synchronized identity with

device recovery hooks solves real

problems. But a default is not a cudgel.

And the current out-of-the-box

experience too often feels like the

latter. Put the choice on one on a

screen. Continue with a Microsoft

account. Continue with a local account.

No tricks, no connect to the internet to

see what your options are. No dark

patterns. And if you choose local, the

OS should explain once and then stop

asking. We used to pride ourselves on

not confusing policy with preferences.

Let's go back to that. Windows updates

are the next big elephant in the room.

I've spent more mornings than I care to

remember with my coffee in one hand and

a blue screen in the other, so to speak.

So, I'm sympathetic to the need for

security updates and the urgency behind

them. But the cadence and the

choreography matter. When you push to a

billion machines, you can't be surprised

that the last few percent are doing

something you didn't test for. When

those machines belong to power users and

small businesses, it isn't a rounding

error. It's the public narrative. The

fix isn't a magic bullet. It's a new

social contract. In pro mode, the OS

adopts scheduled deterministic Windows

maintenance by default. It never reboots

you out from under work. It never

applies a feature experience pack that

changes the UI behavior outside that

window. It surfaces the dependency graph

in plain language before you commit and

accept. like this update modifies the

graphics stack and will reset your

graphics driver. So you can pick to do

it on the weekend instead of during the

meeting. If something goes wrong, roll

back is one click and complete. And that

means updates are staged with two

kernels and two user lands ready to

boot. If the new one fails health checks

at loon, the loader pivots automatically

to the last no one good one. We learned

this discipline in the data center world

because we had to. People don't tolerate

downtime at that scale and there's no

reason that the client can't behave with

the same dignity. Next, we come to ads,

nags, and suggestions. I get it. There's

a whole field of product management that

believes in discoverability through

gentle props. And yes, a billion user

platform should teach new capabilities.

But I think we've crossed the line over

to where the operating system feels like

a sales channel for all their other

properties. And that's corrosive in a

way that telemetry never will be. When

the OS suggests, hey, maybe you should

switch browsers after you explicitly

chose another one, that's not

onboarding. That's just disrespect. When

the start menu shows sponsored apps, you

put a price on my attention on my

machine. And the fix here is both easy

and hard. Easy because it's just a

switch in pro mode that zeros the entire

suggestion pipeline. And it's hard

because it's going to take somebody with

coonies to tell a few internal

dashboards to go paddle down a different

river. But it's worth it. Trust is more

valuable than any click-through metric.

And right now, this is what people mean

when they say Windows sucks. They're not

complaining about the anti-thread

scheduleuler or the IO stack. They

detest the experience of being sold to

by your own computer that you already

own. If you're thinking, "Okay, Dave,

that's a lot of philosophy. Where are

the nuts and bolts?" We'll pull up a

stool. One quiet example of getting it

right in the last cycle was adding

native support for popular archiver

formats and giving us a proper pseudo

command. Those are baby steps towards

the world I'm describing. Making the

obvious tools first class and stop

sending people on scavenger hunts. If

you're going to ship a console by

default, ship the one that people

actually want to live in and put the

batteries in the box. I remember 25 to

30 years ago, there were internal

discussions around acquiring a popular

sea shell and making it the new default

console. Didn't come to anything, but I

like to imagine what the Windows world

would be like today if it had. Another

deep fix lives in the land where power

and fragility meet. Kernel versus user

mode. In recent years, we've all seen

what happens when third party drivers in

the kernel get it wrong. The blast

radius reaches the whole machine.

sometimes the whole fleet. The reason is

simple. Ring zero is the control room.

And if you dreerence the wrong pointer

down there, nobody's coming to save you.

The right long-term answer is to keep

more rich functionality like security

scanning, antiche, exotic device

mediation out of the kernel whenever

possible and to harden the colonel's

contracts where it must be involved. In

other words, shrink the surface area for

catastrophic failure. I've told the

CrowdStrike story elsewhere, not to dunk

on them, but to show that Windows isn't

unique in the risk. It's the nature of

kernels. When trusted code in RingZero

ingest bad data, you don't just get a

plate error, you can get a stop code and

a blue screen. The closer we can move

functionality to user mode with robust

APIs. And the more we can make the

kernel hostile to undefined behavior,

the less any of us have to roll a card

around an office park on a Friday. If

you want a bright spot to keep you

optimistic while we grumble, it's this

part. The platform is still a marvel of

compatibility. We did the 32 to 64-bit

transition with a minimum of drama

because the underlying architecture

respected reality. X64 didn't demand a

revolution. It offered another ramp.

More registers, cleaner calling

conventions, the no execute bit rep

relative addressing, and a a way to run

32-bit code on a 64-bit kernel without a

science fair in between. That kind of

humility and design is why the PC still

runs everything from last year's AAA

titles to your dad's old accounting

programs. Windows inherited that virtue,

and when it leans into it, it shines.

All right, let's name and tame the other

pain points that keep coming up in the

video comments. There's the

fragmentation between settings and

control panel. And that one's on me

partly, I guess. Historically, we built

a cathedral of configuration over

decades and then tried to move it room

by room into a new wing without closing

the old one. And so you end up with like

two faucets for the same sink. The fix

isn't finish the move already. The fix

is to declare bankruptcy on duplication.

Pick a canonical location for each

capability and make a ruthless list of

redirects. Every time a new release

ships, the list gets shorter. Pro mode

gets a search that only returns a

canonical location so you stop seeing

the old ghosts. And for the love of

small mercies, print the actual registry

key or group policy behind each toggle

or make it available on a right click so

that operators can script without

spelunking. When you treat the power

users as adults instead of an annoyance,

they stop prying up the floorboards just

to find the plumbing. Then there's file

associations and default apps. If I set

a default, don't change it. If an update

must touch it for some legitimate

reason, tell me why and ask. Don't throw

up a confetti animation and a screen

that says, "Yay, Edge," after I chose

something else. A deterministic OS is

respectful in small ways, and those

small ways add up to whether people feel

at home or under supervision. Search

deserves its own paragraph, maybe its

own episode, but local search should be

local by default. When I type the name

of a tool I installed yesterday or the

word downloads because I want to go to

my downloads folder, I want the indexer

to know because it's talked to the file

system, not because some web service

blessed it and happened to say that,

hey, and this is a good site for

downloads and you should get this and

all the other nonsense. In pro mode, it

should be text first, fast, and

predictable with an opt-in to federate

results to the web if you want. That

keeps your workflow snappy, your privacy

intact, and your blood pressure down.

And I don't claim to be a UI designer,

but for me, the install experience has

way too much ornamentation. A clean

install should be exactly that. A

machine with the OS and the essentials.

No candy in the start menu, no third

party trials, no you might also like

things. If OEMs want to sweeten the deal

with bundles, that's fine. Put them in

an obvious single place, manufacture

add-ons folder, something like that, so

that the first act of a new PC owner

isn't learning how to install four gigs

of things they never asked for in eight

different places. And if I've sounded

like a grouch for the last 15 minutes,

let me balance the ledger a little bit.

There are ways in which Windows

absolutely does not suck, and it's worth

saying a few of them out loud. The

kernel is mature and high performance.

The storage stack is worldclass, and the

driver ecosystem, warts and alls, is an

unmatched feat of cooperation. Games run

here first and best because DirectX is

the lingua frana of GPUs. Corporate

fleets run here because active directory

and group policy are boring in exactly

the right ways. Developers are

increasingly happy here because WSL and

a real terminal mean you can straddle

worlds without straddling hardware and

because shipping native archive support

and pseudo meant that somebody was

actually finally reading the room. The

punchline then is that Windows doesn't

really suck. It's that Windows tries to

be a friendly town for everybody and the

zoning board forgot to include a

neighborhood for the weirdos who build

their own furniture. We don't want to

take over your town. We don't even want

to change it. We just want a workshop

with sharp chisels and permission to

make a mess. Give us that and we'll stop

complaining about the art that you

choose for city hall. If all this sounds

like a love letter wrapped in a

complaint, well, that's a bit of exactly

what it is. Winders holds a special

place in my heart because I watched it

grow up. I wrote code that still lives

deep in his bones. I've seen it carry

the world's work for three decades in

spite of all the jokes and jabs. The

things that people hate about it today

are mostly the things that got bolted on

around the edges in the names of growth,

engagement, and a smoother on-ramp. The

heart of it, the kernel, theulerul, the

IOP pass, the architectural pragmatism

that made the x64 transition a non-event

for most users. That heart is sound and

robust. So, does Windows suck? Only when

it forgets who it's working for. Most

days, it's for everybody, and that's

fine. But some days, it has to be for

the person who knows exactly what they

want and is willing to take

responsibility for asking. Give that

person a switch, give that person

respect, and then get out of the way.

The promise is that nostalgia isn't

going to stop me from calling it like I

see it. If Rebin wants to win the next

decade of hearts and minds, it won't be

with one more sidebar that glows when

you hover over it, or a sponsored tile

in the start menu. It'll be with a

product that is not afraid to say, "We

trust you. Turn on the clutch pedal,

hand us the keys, and let the power

users do what they've always done best.

Make everybody else want one of those

machines." But at the end of the day,

remember, somebody has to pay. So, Pro

Windows with no monetization is going to

cost you some kind of annual or monthly

fee because they can't just give away

Windows forever hoping to make it up on

one drive fees. So, pick your poison.

And when they ask why it suddenly

doesn't suck anymore, tell them the

truth. It never really did. It just

needed a mode for people who still like

to drive and that know how to drive and

shift the four-speed. If you're still

with me, remember I'm mostly in this for

the subs and likes. So, I'd be honored

if you consider leaving me one of each

before you go today. If you found this

video interesting, you might enjoy my

other video, why Windows removes

features that you love, and there's a

couple other Windows topics. I'll put

one up here in the corner if I can

figure out how to do that. Otherwise,

I'll put links in the video description.

Please check them out. Thanks for

joining me out here in the shop today.

In the meantime, and in between time,

hope to see you next time right here in

Dave's Garage.