Best of Microsoft — December 2025

  1. 1
    Article
    Avatar of itsfossIt's Foss·23w

    Denmark Begins Its Exit from Microsoft — and This Is Just the Start

    Denmark's Road Traffic Authority is piloting SIA Open, a government initiative to replace Microsoft Windows and Office applications with open source alternatives. The agency cites data sovereignty and avoiding vendor lock-in as key motivations. This pilot involves a portion of their 600 employees, with plans to expand to 15,000 government users across multiple state agencies. The specific open source alternatives haven't been disclosed yet.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of itsfossIt's Foss·25w

    Linus Torvalds Defends Windows' Blue Screen of Death

    Linus Torvalds suggests that Windows' Blue Screen of Death errors are often caused by unreliable hardware rather than software bugs. He emphasizes that ECC (Error Correction Code) memory makes systems more reliable, and believes memory issues and hardware problems, especially in overclocked gaming systems, are frequently responsible for system crashes that users attribute to Windows instability.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of theregisterThe Register·25w

    Zig quits GitHub, gripes about Microsoft's AI obsession

    The Zig Software Foundation is migrating from GitHub to Codeberg, citing declining engineering quality and neglected critical bugs in GitHub Actions. A CPU-spinning bug in GitHub's safe_sleep script went unaddressed for years despite being reported multiple times, causing CI runners to hang indefinitely. Zig's president criticized Microsoft's AI focus as distracting from core platform maintenance, pointing to what he calls 'vibe-scheduling' where jobs run seemingly at random. The move reflects broader developer concerns about GitHub's priorities, with Codeberg doubling its membership since January as other projects also consider leaving.

  4. 4
    Video
    Avatar of codingwithlewisCoding with Lewis·23w

    Atom: The Editor That Accidentally Built Its Own Killer

    Atom was a revolutionary open-source code editor built on web technologies that pioneered the Electron framework. Created by GitHub's Chris Wanstrath in 2015, Atom democratized code editor customization using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, Electron's architecture caused performance issues. Microsoft leveraged the same Electron framework to build Visual Studio Code, which proved significantly faster through better optimization. After Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, Atom development stalled despite promises of continued support. The editor was officially sunset in 2022, but its legacy lives on—Electron now powers billions of daily interactions in applications like Slack, Discord, and VS Code itself.

  5. 5
    Video
    Avatar of primeagenThePrimeTime·24w

    Github continues to Downfall

    GitHub Actions has suffered from critical bugs for years, including a poorly implemented sleep function that causes infinite loops, consuming entire CPUs and costing users thousands of dollars. A simple fix submitted in 2024 took over a year to merge despite the bug causing CI jobs to hang indefinitely. The codebase shows questionable engineering decisions, from using ping commands as sleep alternatives to busy-wait loops that waste compute resources. These neglected issues have led projects like Zig to abandon GitHub entirely for alternative platforms.

  6. 6
    Video
    Avatar of t3dotggTheo - t3․gg·23w

    The Github Tax (I can't believe they actually did this...)

    GitHub announced a new fee structure charging 0.008 cents per minute for using self-hosted runners with GitHub Actions, even when compute runs on third-party platforms like Blacksmith or Depot. This pricing change affects all self-hosted runners and has sparked widespread criticism from developers who view it as penalizing users for choosing alternatives to GitHub's infrastructure. The fee applies regardless of whether jobs run for seconds or minutes, and critics argue GitHub is extracting revenue from an ecosystem while failing to invest in improving Actions' performance, reliability, and observability. The change has intensified concerns about GitHub's direction under Microsoft ownership and lack of clear leadership.

  7. 7
    Article
    Avatar of infoworldInfoWorld·22w

    Microsoft is not rewriting Windows in Rust

    Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt clarified that his LinkedIn post about eliminating C and C++ code by 2030 was a personal research goal, not a corporate strategy. His team is developing AI-powered tools to automate code translation between languages at scale, aiming for "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code." The research project uses Rust as a demonstration target but isn't specifically focused on rewriting Windows. While pressure exists to adopt memory-safe languages due to security vulnerabilities, research shows AI-generated code typically contains more issues than human-written code.

  8. 8
    Video
    Avatar of awesome-codingAwesome·21w

    One MILLION lines of code every month

    Microsoft posted a job seeking an engineer to output 1 million lines of code monthly using AI to replace C/C++ with Rust by 2030. This represents a problematic industry trend of measuring software quality by lines of code rather than actual value. The expectation that one person could meaningfully review 65 lines per minute is unrealistic. Industry leaders are promoting AI-assisted junior developers over experienced seniors for cost savings, despite evidence that many companies laying off workers end up increasing expenses and rehiring later. The push treats software development as industrialized manufacturing rather than skilled problem-solving work.

  9. 9
    Article
    Avatar of arstechnicaArs Technica·24w

    In comedy of errors, men accused of wiping gov databases turned to an AI tool

    Two federal contractors were arrested for allegedly deleting 96 government databases and sensitive records minutes after being fired. The defendants, previously convicted of similar crimes in 2015, attempted to cover their tracks by using an AI chatbot to learn how to clear SQL server logs and Windows event logs. Despite their efforts to destroy evidence, including wiping their laptops three days later, prosecutors obtained sufficient records to charge them with conspiracy to destroy government databases.

  10. 10
    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·22w

    Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together

    A developer expresses frustration with VSCode's autocomplete behavior, specifically with the C# Dev Kit plugin. When pressing tab to accept a suggestion, the autocomplete ignores the displayed options and suggests something different instead. The author calls on Microsoft to fix this inconsistent behavior.

See all Microsoft archives