The Windows OS Thread - Formerly THE OS for gamers and normies, now sadly ruined by Pajeets

[Seethan Ralph]

What is Windows K2? Inside Microsoft’s big plan to save Windows 11 and win back trust from users.​

In March, Windows president Pavan Davuluri () confirmed plans to address serious "pain points" across Windows 11 that have eroded user trust and generated a wave of negative sentiment around the OS, spawned from Microsoft's relentless push into AI and enshittification while neglecting core Windows fundamentals such as performance and reliability.

Of course, what Microsoft says externally isn't always reflective of what it's really thinking internally, but in this case, my sources say the company is serious about turning Windows 11 into a platform that people are proud to use. By the end of 2026 and into 2027, Microsoft is striving to have Windows 11 in a much better place.

According to my sources, this effort is codenamed Windows K2. It’s a project that was put together in the second half of last year that addresses the biggest complaints that people have about Windows 11 today. Everything from an overabundance of AI features and bloat to performance issues and reliability mishaps will be tackled.

Windows K2 isn’t a dedicated release of the OS. Instead, K2 is an ongoing initiative that will ensure Windows quality remains both high and consistent across current and future versions, building an OS that is always focused on improvements to fundamentals to ensure foundational aspects of the platform are continuously strong.

These are the three core pillars of focus with the Windows K2 initiative.

These pillars are what drive the Windows experience. If one of these pillars falls behind, the entire product suffers as a result. With Windows K2, Microsoft is working to ensure these three pillars are strong by addressing feedback directly from users and Insiders, analyzing telemetry data, and conducting focus groups with customers.

I'm told that K2 also looks inward at the teams themselves. It's not just about addressing feedback and fixing Windows 11, but it's also about how teams internally can better contribute code to the Windows product. I understand there's a huge culture shift happening internally right now that drives the K2 initiative.

 

[Mr. Racewar1488]

What is Windows K2? Inside Microsoft’s big plan to save Windows 11 and win back trust from users.

Cool, another series of Winblows updates I'll never install because they're all vibe coded by pajeets.

 

[Hellwalker]

*snip*

The rest of the article is proof that this is gonna bloom so brightly into nothing.

Performance, Craft, and Reliability

These are the three core pillars of focus with the Windows K2 initiative.

These pillars are what drive the Windows experience. If one of these pillars falls behind, the entire product suffers as a result. With Windows K2, Microsoft is working to ensure these three pillars are strong by addressing feedback directly from users and Insiders, analyzing telemetry data, and conducting focus groups with customers.

I'm told that K2 also looks inward at the teams themselves. It's not just about addressing feedback and fixing Windows 11, but it's also about how teams internally can better contribute code to the Windows product. I understand there's a huge culture shift happening internally right now that drives the K2 initiative.

In the past, Windows has been obsessed with agility. It was keen to ship new features as quickly and as frequently as possible, but this ultimately came at the cost of quality and reliability. While teams were able to get new features out the door fast, users became frustrated with an OS that never stood still and becoming ever more problematic.

One of the biggest cultural changes internally that I've heard about is that teams are no longer striving to ship fast. The obsession with with being agile has been replaced with an obsession with quality. I understand that new features aren't allowed near public preview builds before reaching a certain quality bar internally now, and while that bar has always existed, the bar is much higher now.

There's a lesser known fourth pillar, too: Community. The Windows K2 initiative is eager to rebuild a community of fans and enthusiasts around Windows. It's bringing back Windows Insider meetups, and appointing members of the Windows team to be more forward facing on social media and in forums to respond directly to feedback from people online.

I'd wager that the supposed time spent "ensuring quality" is only gonna delay broken updates and whatnot happening to end users further back instead of actually ensuring some semblance of a quality standard. Who's to say whatever MS employees are working on 11 aren't just gonna work the same as they've always been? The only thing that would've have changed is more time to do fuck-all instead of anything else.

That promise about working with the community is obviously full of shit as well. Microsoft comes out of their slumber whenever something is harming their reputation which would *maybe* be fine if we're talking about a company that actually cared and delivered on their promises but with MS? Lol. A mountain of letters complaining about Windows 11 could cover the entire MS offices like it was snowed in and nobody there would see a problem still. Every promise they make is empty.

Performance and Reliability

Performance is a top priority for the Windows K2 effort. In documentation viewed by Windows Central, Microsoft is aware that it has let performance slip in apps like File Explorer and games, as well as system UI elements such as context menus. Windows 10 is often found to be faster than Windows 11 in certain benchmarks, and the company is moving to change this.

For gaming, Microsoft views steamOS as the benchmark, and is working to optimize the platform so that steamOS and Windows gaming performance are comparable. Within the next year or two, it believes that Windows will be able to truly compete head-to-head with steamOS in gaming performance on identical hardware due to foundational changes that are being made to the platform in the coming months.

File Explorer is set to gain some major performance improvements too, speeding up file navigation and processing, and improving the speed of search within the File Explorer app, with capabilities such as “instant filename search” coming. The company views a third-party app called File Pilot as the benchmark for these improvements.

Windows Update will also be improved, with the goal of making Windows 11 reliable enough so that a restart is only necessary once a month. Under the hood changes are also expected that are designed to make updating Windows more seamless, such as only updating display and audio drivers when restarting instead of during active use.

I’m told there’s also a concerted effort to debloat Windows 11 too, focusing on minimizing memory use at idle and reducing the overall footprint of the OS so that it runs better on low-end hardware as well as smoother on high-end systems and gaming handhelds.

Hasn't this shit been promised a gazillion times by now? I swear that I'm reading the same shit over and over again but nothing happens, especially with the File Explorer and its mythological performance improvements. I also love that new feature of "instant filename search" coming to explorer. Only took 21+ years for Microsoft to get to Everything's level. Maybe they should also finally replace the default search indexing with whatever instant search tech is going to be in explorer as well, idk.

Craft and UI

Craft is also a huge area of focus for K2, addressing user experience complaints and bringing back fan favorite features that have been missing since Windows 11's inception. Microsoft has already confirmed plans to bring back the ability to move and resize the Taskbar, one of Windows 11's most requested features.

The K2 initiative is also pushing teams internally lean more heavily on its in-house Windows UI framework. WinUI 3 is a core foundational aspect of K2, with performance improvements in the works to ensure these native UI surfaces are faster and more reliable so that it can be used in more areas of the system, including where legacy interfaces currently exist such as Run and Control Panel.

One of the ways I'm told this is happening is with a new System Compositor for WinUI 3, which will reduce latency and memory overhead across the UI so that elements such as the Start menu and Taskbar are always responsive and available to use, even under heavy system load.

In fact, with this new compositor in place, Microsoft is rebuilding the Start menu from scratch with WinUI 3 natively. I'm told this new Start menu will be up to 60% faster and more responsive than the existing one, while also sporting more customization options such as the ability to resize it and hide sections of the menu.

The K2 project also address some of the big issues around enshittification. I'm told Microsoft is removing ads from the Start menu, which is no small feat from a financial perspective. It's also planning to stop MSN from appearing by default in the Widgets Board, instead prioritizing the Widgets Panel with MSN being a secondary functionality instead of the primary one.

What do I even need to say at this point?

K2 evolves

Windows K2 doesn't have a completion date. It's an ongoing initiative that essentially defines how Windows should be built and what it should prioritize going forward. The goal is to fix up Windows 11 and reposition the platform as something people are proud to use, and maintain that consistently.

It's a positive movement that Windows desperately needs, and is helping to position the platform as a viable competitor well into the future. Changes and improvements that are part of the Windows K2 initiative are already beginning to ship, with many more shipping in preview over the summer.

>Windows K2 doesn't have a completion date. It's an ongoing initiative
Yup, this is going to be something that's gonna fizzle out and be forgotten about in like 6 months lmao.

I don't want to be this snarky about something good that can happen but holy shit, maybe Microsoft should actually shut the fuck up and get to work instead of throwing out promise after promise about fixing their intentionally crafted fuckups. It's been close to 5 years since 11 has released and it's only gotten worse when fucking 10 did the opposite.

 

[Pippa is a spic whore]

 

[Betonhaus]

What is Windows K2? Inside Microsoft’s big plan to save Windows 11 and win back trust from users.

I would rather Microsoft instead work on stripping Windows to be as minimal as possible, where you basically end up with a fully headless OS you can swap out modules at will - so that you can have a super minimal server OS or even install KDE Plasma or Cinnamon and run completely third party apps on a NT core. Then they can go see what components are popular or not and work on improving the components that people usually use third party solutions for.

 

[Seethan Ralph]

The only way to unfuck Windows is to ship all jeets back to Mumbai or some other shithole, rehire senior engineers, go back to Windows Server 2008 R2 and base the new Windows on it once again. Only then the enshittification stops.

 

[The Ugly One]

Here are the core problems with Windows:

1. They have a jeet CEO
2. They fired their entire QA department and reverted to a "devs test their own code" strategy that has been a known failure since 1966
3. They fired their experienced engineers because their jeet CEO listened to a Jewish homosexual who told him that autocomplete has made skill & knowledge obsolete

 

[United Abominations]

The only way to unfuck Windows is to ship all jeets back to Mumbai or some other shithole, rehire senior engineers, go back to Windows Server 2008 R2 and base the new Windows on it once again. Only then the enshittification stops.

I started having it where Garuda Linux wouldn't shut down or restart on me and went back to my LTSC windows dual boot because its genuinely much more stable than normal Windows or even the most stable of Troonix distros

I noticed that the updates have been making 11 LTSC run faster and have less bugs while normal win11 is getting the reverse and each update breaks something so picking between normal Winjeet breaking something and Troonix breaking is a false dichotomy

Windows is already unfucked and 10 and 11 LTSC work far better than troonix for desktop purposes but your average niggercattle doesn't even know you can bypass the microsoft account on a domain join if you choose work or school account on pro

What Microjeet is doing is using the niggercattle home users as the QA team to report on bugs so then the updates for Education edition and LTSC are super stable when all the kinks and bugs are worked out

 

[⚞⛇⚟]

the funny part is that they don't let the people host their own 2G/3G apparatus with the excuse of interference... totally not control, at all...

Apparently 2G bands are being removed so that 5G bands with the same frequency can take their place. This is fucking retarded because even if you go along with their premise of "everyone's phones have 5g anyways so no one is going to miss the 2g towers", 2g is still more power efficient and has a larger range than 5g. Even if you aren't paranoid, you should still support 2g networks staying for emergency situations where your nearest tower isn't available for some reason.
T Mobile still supports 2G, but they won't for much longer.

 

[Legalize Asbestos]

2G bands are being removed so that 5G bands with the same frequency

This sentence makes no sense. The higher frequency (and thus bits/sec) of 5G is what makes it 5G. If you switch to a lower frequency - stretch out the wave - you get less information per second. Maybe they're just repurposing 2G for some other industry? They did that with the bunny-ear TV spectrum a while back.

 

[⚞⛇⚟]

This sentence makes no sense. The higher frequency (and thus bits/sec) of 5G is what makes it 5G. If you switch to a lower frequency - stretch out the wave - you get less information per second. Maybe they're just repurposing 2G for some other industry? They did that with the bunny-ear TV spectrum a while back.

4G and 5G use OFDMA and probably some other stuff (Don't ask me what OFDMA is because I don't really understand it myself). That is what makes it separate from 2G (GSM), which just uses TDMA. 4G and 5G do have benefits beyond just having a "higher frequency", although these benefits come at the cost of requiring more power and often not transmitting as far.
By shutting down 2G signals, the carriers are attempting to bring the benefits of OFDMA (4G/5G) to lower frequencies.

 

[Legalize Asbestos]

4G and 5G use OFDMA and probably some other stuff (Don't ask me what OFDMA is because I don't really understand it myself). That is what makes it separate from 2G (GSM), which just uses TDMA. 4G and 5G do have benefits beyond just having a "higher frequency", although these benefits come at the cost of requiring more power and often not transmitting as far.
By shutting down 2G signals, the carriers are attempting to bring the benefits of OFDMA (4G/5G) to lower frequencies.

Oh I see now. They want to swap the hardware to newer '5th Gen' kit on the '2nd Gen' spectrum. OFDMA splits up the wave to cram multiple users onto one transmission - instead of each transmission serving one user. Like a bus instead of a motorcycle.

TT:
Something something... Windows 11.

 

[Sneedmason]

Yup, this is going to be something that's gonna fizzle out and be forgotten about in like 6 months lmao.

Honestly, I have feeling it will fizzle out. Who is the market for? Think about. Most autists are already going towards steam OS and having an AI subscription that can help you set up any Linux OS to get you 99% there, if that doesn't work you just use win10 dual boot or VM (just like every single old emulator does today). Who would want to pay more or replace their AI subscription for an OS that already has a low trust amongst the users. If you are not an autist, you are already a win11 enjoyer.

I would like to have a debloated win10 for the software that doesn't work on Linux (such as audio software + audio drivers), but the AI has made the linux set up work and win10 on my offline desktop just work for now. How can Microsoft compete with a free OS + $20 AI subscription (honestly, I got it to work with the free tiers)? They can't!

Unless windows "K2" is free with no catch to save their reputation, I don't care. The Windows pajeet 11 OS damaged the last trust I had in this company.

 

[Wraithdolf the White]

What is Windows K2? Inside Microsoft’s big plan to save Windows 11 and win back trust from users.

This means nothing unless I can press a button in windows 11 and a bucket of lava is dumped on a jewish microsoft executive.
And when they run out of executives, anything looking jewish or brown.

 

[Betonhaus]

Unless windows "K2" is free with no catch to save their reputation, I don't care. The Windows pajeet 11 OS damaged the last trust I had in this company.

My understanding is that K2 isn't an OS version, it's an initiative. It won't ever be a product for sale because Microsoft needs to first address serious issues about how the company functions.

 

[The Ugly One]

This means nothing unless I can press a button in windows 11 and a bucket of lava is dumped on a jewish microsoft executive.
And when they run out of executives, anything looking jewish or brown.

Why are you skipping the CEO?

 

[Fear&LoathinginMcDonalds]

I just ordered a new Lenovo laptop that comes with Win11 installed.
I've been using the same Dell with Win10 on it since like 2017.

Is there any merit to just flashing a Win10 install on it in the year of our Lord 2026 or am I just better off sucking it up and dealing with Win11 and yanking all the bloatware off?

I have slid into my boomer era and my competency levels with new tech have dwindled so any advice or recommendations on cleanup utilities/useful software is always helpful

 

[Wraithdolf the White]

Why are you skipping the CEO?

[In a horrifically bad Australian accent] First ya flame the bottom, then the poo comes tumblin' down!

I just ordered a new Lenovo laptop that comes with Win11 installed.
I've been using the same Dell with Win10 on it since like 2017.

Is there any merit to just flashing a Win10 install on it in the year of our Lord 2026 or am I just better off sucking it up and dealing with Win11 and yanking all the bloatware off?

I have slid into my boomer era and my competency levels with new tech have dwindled so any advice or recommendations on cleanup utilities/useful software is always helpful

I took a brand new comp and did that. Some teething troubles but never looked back.

 

[Baraka Obama]

I just ordered a new Lenovo laptop that comes with Win11 installed.
I've been using the same Dell with Win10 on it since like 2017.

Is there any merit to just flashing a Win10 install on it in the year of our Lord 2026 or am I just better off sucking it up and dealing with Win11 and yanking all the bloatware off?

I have slid into my boomer era and my competency levels with new tech have dwindled so any advice or recommendations on cleanup utilities/useful software is always helpful

If it has a newer processor / platform installing windows 10 might not even work, and if it does you'd get much worse battery life than you'd get with 11.

I'm really happy with Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC activated via massgrave. No bloatware, no AI, doesn't even have the Microsoft Store or Xbox but you can install if you want them. It doesn't get feature updates so it's functionally frozen at 2H2024, but this means any tweaks you apply stay for good.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I just ordered a new Lenovo laptop that comes with Win11 installed.
(...)
Is there any merit to just flashing a Win10 install on it

I dunno, do you care if you can use WiFi 6? Win10 won't do it.