The very point that Microsoft devs need two machines in their work, one to do dew stuff, another - with its own special flavor of locked down windows - to touch anything that is even remotely similar to prod (including staging with no real data) says a lot about Microsoft stance on developers and power users ..
This story seems overly kind. They aren't going to do anything to fix Windows burning platform, and just try and cram in more AI.
A PR statement that amounts to "we still love you" with no action whatsoever means nothing. We've had years of terrible management decisions about Windows 11 at this point. If they want any trust back statements aren't going to cut it, they would need to actually do things that they don't like and that users do.
Windows is solid under the hood, but the UI/UX is crap and has gotten progressively worse over the years
MacOS isn't perfect either, but it is so much better in not trying to upsell you at every single opportunity
Just let me use my fucking computer lol
No operating system is perfect. I can't customize the hardware for Macs and Linux doesn't have all the software I need (and has other issues, too).
It all feels too little too late. Developers have long since abandoned Windows as a go-to if it ever was one. The amount of projects, even for cross platform languages like Python that basically boil down to run it on Linux only or WSL speaks volumes. And of course anybody who tries to do serious work on Windows has the experience of bloat. Even a classmate in school, borrowing her mom's work laptop for the day while her Mac was under the weather noted how painfully slow it was and how short the battery life was, and of course there's like 10 anti virus programs running. Windows laptops get loaded up with so much junk that even if the OS was better, it still grinds productivity to a halt. Truly disappointing.
And relative to the agentic, I saw a painful demo of using some voice assistant to change the scaling ratio. Which if search was better or anybody gave a hoot about cortana, should be an already solved problem.
Unfortunately I kind of doubt it, although Windows is still what I get to use, not paying Apple tax and Tahoe isn't great either, and I have better things to do than fine tuning Linux installations, even on laptops sold with it pre-installed like my old Asus netbook.
Lets see in practice how much they are actually listening.
Now, this would be a great opportunity to actually get stuff like Dell XPS with Ubuntu on PC stores.