I’ve been using windows 11 for six months. when I hover over the taskbar, a phantom windows explorer window appears, but it’s not clickable and it disappears when I move the mouse away. my right hand monitor has a white box with a small ‘no’ symbol in it stuck in the middle of the screen. it doesn’t seem to derive from any running application and I cannot get rid of it. on the windows 10 install I ran before, the task manager totally stopped working, it just froze every time I opened it. I run Linux on all my other machines and stuff does go wrong, but it goes wrong in ways that make sense to me and which I can fix. on windows people just tell you to run sfc scannow and reinstall if it doesn’t work. that’s no way to live your life.

every programmer I’ve seen who says their code is self documenting writes dogshit code

the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be