They already did that. I sit down at my computer and try to activate the window I want to work in, and the "location" icon temporarily appears in the notification area which causes all the taskbar icons to shift left. I accidentally click the neighboring icon and launch an app that throws up a splash screen for 60 seconds while it loads.

Do you work for Microsoft or something? Please do do not give them ideas.

To protect the children.

Gnome is nice and all, but the default ui, and remember defaults matter for a lot of people, is just too jarring.

The people I am talking about just wanna browse the web, go on Facebook and use their gmail. Look at funny YouTube videos. The default KDE ui has that windows start menu and looks roughly the same so they can hit the ground running.

So why not to create a M365 account? International dispatch to the US :D

a micro shit (tm)

On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.

Things only went downhill from there.

Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.

That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.

Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.

And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.

Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.

Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.

I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.

I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.

This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.

It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.

If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.

Dont even think about it ... it will be private till it isnt then, it will be the reason you are fired. Its corpo world - shut your mouth and dont put anything on a permanent record you dont have to.

It's Microsoft's official Copilot Discord. Microsoft banned the word

They fired all the SDETs 11 years ago. It's catching up with them.

Wouldn't any community that wants to encourage good quality conversations immediately ban everyone posting stupid slashdot-esque jokes like this?

"Bad Bot Problem" (Computerphile)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjQNDCYL5Rg

>Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

You should be angry at the higher ups that instead of saying: "maybe they are right and we can do better" they decided to hide the problem through censorship. Which, btw, always has the opposite effect of putting what you are trying to hide in the spotlight.

But if you don't want childish behaviour, Discord is an ... interesting choice.

There are good and understandable reasons to not want to be in the games business. Game studios are frequently a hot bed of sexual predation and just horrifyingly bad management in general. But it's a business with a large customer base that wouldn't be customers otherwise.

Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring game studios and their IP. They're going to have to make a decision to cultivate growth in that business or sell it for whatever they can get for it. Neither of those choices will be easy to execute well.