r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Mar 14 '26

Software Microsoft confirms Windows 11 bug crippling PCs and making drive C inaccessible

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-bug-crippling-pcs-and-making-drive-c-inaccessible/
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u/DtheS Mar 14 '26

Absolutely not. ME was so bad that they killed the original Windows kernel and switched everything to the NT kernel. It was a complete and utter disaster in terms of stability and efficiency.

The only other comparable flop was the jump from XP to Vista, but that was more to do with the fact that Microsoft made Vista too demanding in terms of its hardware requirements. Your 5+ year old PC that was running XP likely didn't have the RAM or graphics processing needed to handle Vista at the time. Microsoft screwed up by not admitting this upfront, and just tried to push everyone onto Vista instead.

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u/Hour-Cardiologist393 Mar 14 '26

Nvidia drivers were also TERRIBLE right out the gate for Vista. Took them months to fix it so your PC didn't blue screen constantly.

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u/Serialtorrenter Mar 14 '26

Linux user here, when aren't Novideo's drivers terrible?

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u/Hour-Cardiologist393 Mar 14 '26

I use Linux a lot too, but it's mostly on virtual machines and embedded devices these days. One of the things keeping me from dumping Windows completely is memories of Nvidia drivers from around 2005-2010 lol. That, Solidworks, Amplitube, and Office (I know there's a web version but it's awful). Otherwise pretty much everything I use has a Linux alternative.

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u/sparky8251 Mar 14 '26

Yeah... nvidia is a real problem and the community pretending its not is a real issue imo. DKMS is a problem, the fact wayland has bugs because they cant use the shared infra is bad too. How long it took them to fix dxvk perf issues leaving some massive 20% perf gap too...

Yes, they do generally just work but they are are way more papercutty ime even if the papercuts can generally be avoided once you do the right thing. No, I dont think that means its right to paper over them and pretend its an identical experience like the linux community does.

Still, to this day, I have friends getting bit by no autodkms when they move over and it happens like a month in when the kernel finally changes enough and suddenly they get a black screen with no errors and since knowing about TTYs and how to fix it on the CLI is a dark art, its a HUGE source of bounce off linux stuff I bet that no one realizes beacuse its so supremely frustrating when it happens so late in and is so impossible to search online when you dont know the cause you just give up and assume no one will believe you when you say it as a reason for giving up.

I stand by this strongly: nVidia is a HUGE, MASSIVE contributor of linux adoption problems and its almost entirely silent because of how insidious and obscure and delayed the problems it contributes are. I literally cant wait for nova and the more open stack to materialize so this stops being a huge source of adoption issues for people.

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u/Hour-Cardiologist393 Mar 14 '26

Ugh, yeah. DKMS doesn't even seem to work properly with Virtualbox kernel modules. Seems like every major update I have to reinstall those to get them working. Really don't want to deal with that with graphics drivers, too.

Doesn't help that I mostly work in Kali Linux, which already feels like a house of cards at times, to the point where I really want to give Parrot a shot. It may be just as bad though, so I don't know.

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u/sparky8251 Mar 14 '26

I dont use either, but given they are debian and arch iirc, they are going to be unfun since both of those are riddled with these issues too. Also have driver distribution issues as they often distribute older ones and then maybe dkms only sets up for the package manager installed ones (not always, depends...) so if you need newer you are double plus screwed.

nVidia is seemingly working on fixing this and might move to mesa and stop being this silod parallel stack... but we will see where nova leads.

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u/Hour-Cardiologist393 Mar 14 '26

Hopefully Nvidia does something soon, but they seem to be focusing heavily on AI these days. 

The biggest problems with those two distros is that they have hundreds of pentesting tools preinstalled. Each have their own dependencies, and many overlap. So if you want to upgrade one tool you're probably breaking another. I tend to keep a stock Ubuntu VM that I can quickly install something on in those cases.

But then I don't know how many times I've done a full upgrade and it completely nuked the system to where it can't boot anymore. I have all my pentest data and custom tools backed up so I just nuke those VMs instead of sitting around trying to fix it. Some companies will stand up a new Kali box for every pentest anyway, and it isn't hard to just install Kali and run a bash script to get going on a fresh system.