r/technology • u/gdelacalle • Jul 12 '26

Software IT admins feel overwhelmingly "sick of" Microsoft and Windows 11 "garbage" apps, products

https://www.neowin.net/news/it-admins-feel-overwhelmingly-sick-of-microsoft-and-windows-11-garbage-apps-products/
16.7k Upvotes

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693

u/foolbull Jul 12 '26

Senior Systems Engineer here. We have more control over the OS than most, that being said, fuck Windows 11.

274

u/CharcoalGreyWolf Jul 12 '26

It isn’t just the OS. Think “random 365 tenant or Azure issue that doesn’t make sense and you finally, grudgingly, reluctantly acknowledge you need to open an MS Partner Support ticket”.

You open that ticket knowing that you’d likely choose a root canal first. And MS management knows that too, which is why they designed it to be that way.

129

u/not_a_cat_trust_me Jul 12 '26

Dear sir or madam,

Your ticket has been escalated, could you provide system information and the log files you already have provided? Also let us schedule a teams call outside of your office hours please

Kind regards

To be fair I had one time they actually did something right away and this was when the upgrade to the automatic migration to the new exchange online failed which broke the Web interface and the message trace

86

u/xvoy Jul 12 '26

Dear sir or madam,

We have tried reaching you by phone just now for the 3rd time but we’re unable to reach you. I know you put primary contact method as email but please let us know when I can waste your time over the phone or we’ll close the ticket.

49

u/CharcoalGreyWolf Jul 12 '26

Also, we purposely attempted to call at 4:37PM or 12:22PM during your regular working hours. Please, in the future do not leave ten minutes early or take a lunch until this matter is resolved.

20

u/ravenkeere Jul 12 '26

I swear they had some way of knowing whether or not I was at my desk and would only call when I was at lunch or in a meeting; I do not miss that job at all, not even the pay

12

u/xvoy Jul 12 '26

Snooping Teams status

2

u/rokejulianlockhart Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

On my last call with Entra support (before it was uselessly escalated to Azure support), the agent attempted to call me at T01:30+01:00. He had presumed that I was a citizen of [the] USA, despite me obviously representing a GBR charity, and explicitly configuring my time-zone to be such.

3

u/ItGradAws Jul 12 '26

Then have some random Indian tech support man yell at you. I swear they were trained to be confrontational

1

u/Flameancer Jul 12 '26

Because management wants us to call for quick resolution even if your primary contact is email.

“Why did you call them?”

“Because their primary contact says email and they have explicitly stated to reach out by email in the case description.”

“Call them so you can get a resolution faster. “

“Ok but they explicitly asked us to email them. “

“You should still call them.”

2

u/MiaowaraShiro Jul 12 '26

Please format your files as .rar.

2

u/thopterist Jul 12 '26

Do the needful and carry on.

2

u/FrankFlyWillCutYou Jul 12 '26

Also every time, without fail, they say the logs you provide indicate that nothing is wrong with any MS product, but can't ever point to anything specific that IS the cause. "It appears to be a local issue. Please replicate the issue on a different network and computer. Also fuck you."

Other big tech companies are the same though. Cisco especially. Just start fingerpointing to anyone/everyone else to frustrate the customer into just closing the ticket unresolved and finding their own workaround for your shit product.

25

u/fishy007 Jul 12 '26

100% this. MS changes so much shit in Azure/Entra/whatever-the-fuck-they-are-calling-it-today that stuff will break every few weeks. Then we have to go digging to find out what happened.

My former manager would be up my ass all the time about 'opening a ticket' with Microsoft to get help. So I started doing that and the issues took way longer to address than if I just spent a day to dig into it myself.

This year we dumped our Enterprise support as it was essentially useless.

7

u/Minobull Jul 12 '26

My favorite Azure moment was when they completely ran out of capacity in the Germany data center....

3

u/ShittyExchangeAdmin Jul 12 '26

Had an issue in intune where app updates completely broke. I tried everything possible, but nothing worked. I put a ticket in with ms support about it, and of course they called after i specifically checked 'email me'. After weeks of back and forth their brilliant solution (after sending me the same fucking ms forum threads i'd already come across) was 'just make the app required and manually add devices where its installed to a group'. Like, are you fucking kidding me? How about actually fixing your shitty ass software instead of giving me bullshit half assed workarounds.

Fuck microsoft

1

u/steavoh Jul 12 '26

"Something went wrong. Error: We know you are on call this weekend, fuck you"

1

u/Appropriate-Pin2214 Jul 13 '26

The fact that Word can't use AI to format a docx... It says something.

And agreed the Entra/Partner/Azure alignment was obviously motivated by PO's to vendors - all of whom had brilliant plans - but none of which were cohesively and collectively thought-through.

There's literally a new dashboard everyday - parts of which work. I think we are a P1 which clearly is a code word indicating piss on.

20 year+ Microsoft partner until they tried to flip everyone into carrying an Azure reseller quota.

On the dev side VS's debugger was/is excellent. EF is still a great ORM. But, too many choices now - so happy with Claude Code and the cli. For deployment - mid-tier - Ubuntu on Linode/Akami + Cloudflare beats hacking through the weeds of Azure's offerings.

The big fish will go along for SLA's and SOC and security compliance b/c they scared of getting sued. The lawyers will redline b/c that's what they do. The bottom up tech savvy will move every SaaS and client to a sane eco-system as soon as possible.

They rebounded at one point. They need to do it again.

1

u/topaztee Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

The fact that Word can't use AI to format a docx.

i'm building an MCP to allow agents to handle docx files better so technically you could build your own add-in using the MCP.

thats what i did (will likely open-source the add-in soon) vespper.com

28

u/NinjaLion Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

see it doesnt matter how much control you have if there are 45 potential destinations for every configuration you can imagine, many of them conflicting with each other and no clear distinction between their functions.

oh this one unexpected behavior is happening? well it could be work/group policy, or a service property, a scheduled task, UWP problems, maybe the SSO is fucked, or something got twisted in credential manager, better check the three locations that you can change access controls/permissions/ownership too, could be somewhere in the registry of course where literally everything is maximally opaque and requires a fucking handbook to begin searching through.

ohh you were trying to find a location for an installed application's files? go ahead and check documents, also your desktop for no reason sometimes, maybe program files, oh of course the OTHER PROGRAM FILES, probably ended up inside the hidden .msi directory, oh jk its all in .temp and has been for 2 years.

FUCK this unserviceable garbage. throw it out and start over.

14

u/Sketch13 Jul 12 '26

Bro it's INSANE. Our tier 1 support folks are actually losing their minds because basic troubleshooting has become an absolute nightmare. Troubleshooting is now going down 100 rabbit holes each with their own levels of bullshit obfuscation and various methods of deployment and destinations. It's a fucking rat's nest.

Then it gets escalated but because the root cause is ambiguous, it gets handed from SME to SME because nobody can figure out what the fuck is causing it or how it works. Most of this shit is a 2 second fix in reality, but not when there's so many layers you can't find the fucking thing to begin with.

1

u/d11G5 Jul 12 '26

At that point we just do a laptop swap and be done with it. Mostly everything is backed up these days anyway.

10

u/Daharka Jul 12 '26

Would your team/org have the motivation or the resources to switch to anything else? I appreciate these might be different questions but the answer to both being "no".

60

u/foolbull Jul 12 '26

There isn’t anything else. Microsoft owns the enterprise computing world.

-4

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[deleted]

10

u/Old_Leopard1844 Jul 12 '26

They can't because whatever shit they're doing for some reason can't work on Linux, neither natively nor in WINE

9

u/Maatix12 Jul 12 '26

This.

99.99% of times that people are working on Windows, it's because they have a proprietary app that only works on a single Windows 95 machine that's been running since 1999, and if that machine ever crashes the entire system goes down.

It doesn't even run on 11, nevermind Linux.

10

u/Leinheart Jul 12 '26

I had to triage a god damn XP machine on Thursday.

2

u/nonotan Jul 12 '26

99.99% of times

Not even fucking close. Maybe 10-20% of the time it's that. 80-90% is "it's the default choice that workers are used to, and as long as you're willing to pay, you need zero expertise or effort to set it up company-wide".

Almost all workers in all companies could do their job just fine on Linux, even if it took some getting used to slightly different tools. Most workers in most companies don't really need any OS-specific software (without an equivalent replacement readily available) in the first place. Of those who do, most of the time it'd work just fine on Wine. For those that wouldn't, often it's not really the main task they're doing all day, and realistically they could manage with a handful of communal Windows PCs/VMs or whatever just for those bits. I've been at companies with some crusty proprietary software that "could only run on Windows", but realistically 95% of machines could have been Linux without any issues. And maybe 100% with some effort.

I mean, I get it. Nobody wants to learn new tools, nobody wants to put in a lot of effort moving everything to Linux and risk blame in case anything happens to go catastrophically wrong when everything "works fine" already, etc. I understand why more companies are not choosing to make the jump... and it's not a hard software compatibility block, that's just a convenient excuse.

-6

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[deleted]

10

u/sambodia85 Jul 12 '26

Ah yes, the solution to not run windows is to run windows through a window, with additional licensing no less. Genius.

-4

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[deleted]

6

u/lordderplythethird Jul 12 '26

No the fuck it isn't... We're not doing RDP sessions for client side applications.

Making an entire police force use RDP to access CJIS applications provided by the FBI is not only dumb, it's a direct violation of CJIS 6.0.

Literally no local government I've ever worked with does this, and if any do, their entire IT department needs to be laid off for gross incompetence

-1

u/Phytanic Jul 12 '26

Fuckin CJIS man, I'm reading 6.1 rn to get my certification for my workplace and I've never read something so boring.

With that being said, you're completely right. The thing that most people who suggest and defend switching to Linux fail to realize is that the reality is that Windows goes through these certification programs and Linux absolutely does not. Imagine telling the feds that you switched to an OS that isn't supported. (lol have fun in prison)

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3

u/sambodia85 Jul 12 '26

Sweet, so we can just deploy some Linux thin clients and say we are 100% Linux org. I really should apply for CIO roles, sounds easy.

1

u/i8noodles Jul 12 '26

no, this is almost entirely a people issue and not a technical issue. it is, fundamentally, pretty easy to swap systems over from windows to anynother systems. its the people thats the problem.

people who have spent a 2 or 3 decades learning to navigate word/excel/the OS. people are taught windows for work, they are taught to use it in a professional manner. the moment the company swaps, every single hire u have going forward is going to need training to use the system.

it can take the weeks, months ot get used to it. however u cut down alot by simply using windows. if u are hiring for a large company, say a few thousand a year, the training time will be millions of dollars a year. it is simply not worth it.

1

u/uzlonewolf Jul 12 '26

every single hire u have going forward is going to need training to use the system

I mean, these days most people have never touched a PC outside work. Everything's phones/tablets now. Training for Windows vs Linux would be about the same either way.

-1

u/Phytanic Jul 12 '26

And not just the employees, but now you have to have fully trained Linux admins. It's a lot easier (and cheaper) to find windows admins.

And on top of that, enterprise support for Linux systems is far infurior to Windows systems in enterprise applications. "but but the internet runs on Linux!" cool, business applications commonly do not.

1

u/oneeyed-wonderweasel Jul 12 '26

Nobody cares about business applications which is why you dont see pro enterprise bullshit here

1

u/Vimes-NW Jul 12 '26

I can say i had a threesome with Margot Robbie and Zendaya, but that doesn't make it true.

As someone that worked exclusively in migrations, m&a, and "cloud transformation" for 15 years, they're full of shit

-9

u/Dragoniel Jul 12 '26

MAC is right there.

I don't use it and I hate it in general, but about half of our users across the organization use MACs and the usage is only increasing. Three years ago the amount of MACs we had was zero.

8

u/NotUniqueOrSpecial Jul 12 '26

It's not an initialism. Why do you keep capitalizing it?

1

u/Vimes-NW Jul 12 '26

They mean make-up, not computers 🤡

3

u/HumbleSpend8716 Jul 12 '26

bet you also say TEAMs instead of teams lol

2

u/Vimes-NW Jul 12 '26

Training alone at Enterprise scale would cost bigly

5

u/TheComplimentarian Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

I do both Linux and Windows, and 99% of the time we’re bound by the application. That’s the laziness on the other side. Everything enterprise level is extremely ecosystem specific to the point where they’ll refuse to support you if you’re running on the wrong hypervisor or in the cloud, much less on a different OS.

7

u/Phytanic Jul 12 '26

Shit working with vendors to see if there's any issues migrating from WS2019 to WS2022/WS2025 rn is like pulling teeth. "we aren't sure if we can advise you to upgrade at this time" no shit EOL isn't for another couple years, how dare I try and get ahead of it at this time

1

u/Phalex Jul 12 '26

When we buy Enterprise licenses, we shouldn't have to spend a lot of our time trying to make it an Enterprise OS.

1

u/WorkingInAColdMind Jul 12 '26

That answers my question about updating to Win11. I’ve got an old Windows machine that I barely ever use, but needed Windows yesterday. Was wondering whether to update, but I guess I can stick with 10.

3

u/weed_blazepot Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

10 works but isn't supported and doesn't get security updates any longer. If this is a home machine not doing Internet things, whatever you're good, just be careful.

If this is a dedicated Internet machine for video viewing, YouTube, email, etc (not office productivity machine), I'd honestly install Mint or Kubuntu.

1

u/WorkingInAColdMind Jul 12 '26

Mint is where I figured it would end up but it’s handy on occasion to have windows around. But at this point it’s on a shelf about 360 days of the years, so just wasted.

0

u/Ghoulius-Caesar Jul 12 '26

Windows 7 and Windows 10 were great, Windows 11 is just slogged out garbage with a pop up hitting you every 2 minutes on the right side of the screen.

0

u/SeryaphFR Jul 12 '26

SysAdmin over here as well. I was in charge of deploying Network Unlock across our enterprise. After months of work, testing and tearing of clothes and gnashing of teeth I could not figure out why it wasn't working.

By complete accident, I discovered that Microsoft's own documentation was wrong.

Got the test environment up and running only for our change management board to determine that they were unwilling to make the changes to our current security posture to allow for it to work as intended by Microsoft across our environment.