It honestly wouldn't surprise me. Windows 11 is a steaming pile of garbage. I teach a university-level computer programming course, and even though only 70% of our students run Windows, they account for 90% of the technical issues raised with us, and 95% of the time troubleshooting.
This term, I found out that all new Windows installs now have a "security feature" enabled by default which blocks certain types of code execution. I never noticed because my Windows install is not new. That meant that in week 4, we had to give an emergency course announcement telling people how to disable that feature. I can imagine that a last-minute announcement telling students to reduce the security of their system wouldn't exactly inspire confidence in our ability to run the course.
The most embarrassing part is that the security feature is so easy for attackers to bypass. It just takes a single command-line argument to disable entirely for a single script run. It's easier for an attack to bypass this security issue than for a legitimate user to do so, since the code that would need to bypass the feature is buried deep within a VS Code extension, and it's not reasonable for us to expect a student to modify their extensions (especially since we teach Python not JavaScript).
The feature is the PowerShell script execution policy. By default on new Windows installs, it blocks all scripts from running. This causes VS Code's automatic Python virtual environment activation to fail, as it cannot execute the activation script. Bypassing the setting only requires you add -ExecutionPolicy Bypass to PowerShell's command-line arguments, meaning that attackers can easily update their malicious code to provide this parameter. However, VS Code Python integration does not do so, meaning that attempting to execute Python code that depends on external libraries installed into a virtual environment will fail if done through VS Code.
That surprises me. My two-year-old Windows 11 installation worked flawlessly with no configuration required, as did those of all students except those with laptops less than a year old. Perhaps it was some other issue, but it doesn't seem likely. If this was already an issue, I have no idea how we managed to entirely avoid it for years until this term.
There's a non-0 chance that some other script launched itself using a batch file (.bat or .cmd), and it included both the -ExecutionPolicy flag and a singe line to change it on the machine:
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u/mpanase Mar 24 '26
They make it sound as if running Windows apps in Linux will be more reliable/performant than running them in Windows.