this has probably already been named differently and expounded upon by people much smarter than me but after actually trying to use windows 11 i can't stop thinking about it.
big companies are pushing what i call "bean counter OSes". these are operating systems that aren't designed for ease of use or accessibilty but instead pushing metrics, making number statistics go up to look good for advertisers. like the OS was made by the marketing/accounting team themselves. the amount of bugs in them only furthers that feeling.
i recently had to help someone print a pdf in windows 11 and it took me way longer than it should have to figure out. every little thing is totally different, all existing workflows were changed or removed entirely. i used windows almost all of my life, i remember 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 10. fucking none of that applies to windows 11. which could be a good thing, windows has always been shit and needs to change. but it is only changing for the worse, getting harder to use in service of shoving microsoft AI and ads and fear-mongering news right down your fucking throat, on your own desktop, whether you like it or not.
windows 11 set me off but the worst one i've ever used has to be the horizonOS or whatever the fuck facebook calls the godawful bullshit they put on their VR headsets. i was gifted a quest 2 and it's a just fine piece of hardware plagued by the worst fucking user experience i've ever had. you have NO control over what happens, you WILL look at advertising-laden "worlds" on their hideous VRChat copy for shrieking racist children EVERY time you boot the headset. the worlds thing WILL be in your favorite apps (along with some other bullshit) with no way to remove it, limiting your actual favorites to three slots.
the options get sparser and less useful with every update. every time i turn the quest2 on i wonder "what did they break/remove/make worse this time?" its like the developers don't even actually use this thing. where is the button to, i dunno, pop up a fucking keyboard? just kidding it doesn't exist. now you don't even get an option to not update to the newest version, you have to suffer with whatever broken shit they push to main branch. this is so they can serve ads more effectively. hey look at our mcdonalds world, our fucking walmart world, isn't this a cool and fun use of technology?? here's the latest "free-to-play" micro-transaction riddled shovelware designed to addict children to gambling!
want to cast the quest to a screen so other people can see what's going on? too fucking bad, they made it horribly shitty on purpose. the device used to be able to cast directly to supported TVs, now you have to cast to a phone and then cast the phone to a TV. if you've ever tried this, you would know the experience is fucking awful. everything is delayed by multiple seconds and the sound comes out of the fucking phone lmao. i can only assume they did this as another reason to make you reliant on their phone app, which is now the only option of 2 you have to cast the screen (the other being browser, which is slightly better but still total dogshit and requires chromium on a computer of some kind). their phone app is required to activate the headset as well. apps can steal a lot of valuable data from the device you carry with you all day every day. if you haven't heard of cambridge analytica, look it up.
want to use a link cable to play wired to your PC? nope, they made those link interfaces purposefully shitty too. spending money on games outside of their walled garden isn't good for the numbers. so they slowly broke the oculus pc app they adopted from the company before facebook was in the picture. today it is renamed and in a godawful state that i can only assume is purposeful to drive users back to standalone, the space they control. with a bonus of collecting data from your personal computer before you discover the program is useless and uninstall it.
not to mention the quest 2 update that bricked headsets. ohhh nooo, i guess you have to buy a new headset now. they break the battery on purpose too. if you just sleep the headset (instead of turning it off, which you have to go into a menu of a menu now to achieve) it drains the battery at an excessive rate, probably phoning home to give facebook all your data it can grab. it constantly begs and pleads to be connected to wifi.
lithium batteries drained to 0 and left there will die permanently and possibly become explosive. the quest is not user serviceable in any way, shape, or form. they want you to throw it away and buy the newer device. more headset sales for the almighty metrics! when you go to turn the headset off, it reminds you to "keep it charged before hopping back in!" this is another tactic to destroy the battery (hopefully when its out of warranty) and ruin the device so you buy another. lithium batteries do not like sitting fully charged 24/7, that will eventually kill it. and as far as i can tell it does not try to float that charge at all. it goes up to 100% and keeps it there. awfully suspicious.
numbers on a spreadsheet making more numbers on a spreadsheet, that's all it is. we forced horizon worlds in front of every user and our "engagement" is through the roof! we set the batteries to die eventually and our headset sales have skyrocketed! we forced ads into every crevice and you're not gonna believe this, but ad impressions are at an all time high!
the worst part is people keep eating it up. pathetic bootlickers ready to lap up whatever garbage their tech overlords feed them. desperately huffing copium that "the next version will be better!" i promise it will only get worse as the bean counters that "design" these things see the numbers go up and up. if i had a nickle for every time i saw the wishful thinking of "windows 12 will be better" i'd be richer than billy gates right now. it will get worse and worse if people keep rewarding this behavior.
so we must free ourselves. don't pay facebook or microsoft to advertise to you and steal every bit of data they can get their disgusting hands on. don't buy the quest 3 no matter how much they underprice them to juice the numbers. don't buy it secondhand either, you're buying into a platform that is well into it's planned obsolescence and will fail one day, probably suspiciously soon after the quest 4 comes out and they "accidentally" push through an update that bricks the 3.
my quest 2 is still working but god knows for how long. facebook recently ended support for the quest 1 and it's only a matter of time before they do it to this one. i opted for bazzite linux over windows 11 because i didn't want microsoft in my life any more. i didn't expect it to be so much more usable than win11 but here we are.