I see so many people claiming that windows is crap and that’s why they moved to Linux.
That got me thinking: I can no longer have an opinion in the matter. I haven’t used Windows at home since 2004. I used it at work until the beginning of 2019 but someone else maintained it, since then, I haven’t had the need to touch windows.
Whether good or bad, I feel I’m not as knowledgeable as I was.
Well, actually, two years ago I cleaned up and “revived” my dad’s desktop which was taking two minutes to boot and about the same time to open the first app. After installing an SSD and a couple of hours of clean-up, it was as fast as new. I guess with proper maintenance it can be good enough. However, isn’t it the main criticism about Linux? That you “need to know” to use it?
People complain about Linux drivers, but as far as I remember, it was quite common that new versions of Windows dropped old drivers and your perfectly good printer/scanner/video card/etc. became a paperweight. Is that still the case?
Tap for spoiler
(It’s not)
The only reason has wider device adoption (if that argument can even be made) is because manufacturers were given incentives for a long time to ship drivers for Windows. As it became the defacto desktop in corporations, they were further incentivized to ensure their hardware or peripherals had drivers available. The tides are turning a bit more towards Linux again, with every hardware manufacturer who even cares to dream of selling their products to the largest buyers (data centers) provides extensive support for Linux, because that’s what the backbone of everything really runs on anymore. Windows isn’t even a contender in the DC space in comparison, so much so that the entirety of Azure runs on Linux, and Microsoft has their own Linux Distribution.
I think the biggest problem is Windows behaves like freeware with it’s ads but it’s not even cheap, let alone free.
I still have a laptop with a tiny shrunken Windows partition on it in case I need it for some reason, but I’ve not actually booted it since installing debian. I can’t be bothered to figure out how to clean up the bloat, disarm the telemetry, avoid the online MS services, block the ads, dodge the bugs, wait for the updates, get used to all the various stupid ways the UI has changed since the win XP I was familiar with, et cetera.
Using Windows these days is just way too much work, I don’t know how anyone even does it.
I can’t be bothered to figure out how to clean up the bloat, disarm the telemetry, avoid the online MS services, block the ads, dodge the bugs, wait for the updates, get used to all the various stupid ways the UI has changed
And once you figure that all out, an update turns half the shit back on without telling you.
Also, Microsoft Store reinstalls the apps you uninstall almost every other time you reboot and twice if you check for updates.
Windows 11 has CPU spikes when you search for an app because search-bar runs chrome in the back to render its graphics.
It’s objectively bad as in they did not care about users when programming.
While I don’t like 11 (have to use it daily for work), my biggest gripe is it’s even harder to fix than the last couple of releases of windows before it. In XP and 7, you just adjusted settings in the control panel, and if it was a niche setting, it was in the control panel, probably a few layers deep. In 10, you had the settings app, which was fine for basic stuff, but if you went beyond the basics you were going to control panel (and yes, it coexists with a settings app). Now in 11, the settings app was expanded, but there still exists a bunch of stuff in the control panel, but it’s often not obvious where you would do something.
One specific instance I’ve had of that is our print server at work updated drivers, and so everybody needed admin permissions to update their drivers.
Of course we pushed it through normally, but some people it just didn’t push through.
So I had to go to those computers and then open control panel and go to printers and scanners which would bring up a different interface which would bring up a printer interface that click on the printer to bring up a different interface to bring up the printer interface so that you can finally go to the print queue so that you can find the right intersection to update the driver.
I am so fucking glad that it was a small handful of systems, and this is a task that if I had to do it on XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, or 11 up to 23h2 would have taken me less than a minute.
Having to constantly remind myself of the exact pathway to get to the specific interface in order to do a very basic function like updating a printer driver was fucking maddening.
I was a Windows user up until last year. I ditched it for EOS after I got tired of telling Windows NO I DON’T WANT WINDOWS 11 for the 500th time. Between having to manually remove Cortana, Edge, trackers and spyware and having ads shoved in my notifications, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
Now, as an average user they’re not gonna care about any of that. Hell, I didn’t start caring until I upgraded from 7 to 10 (I deliberately skipped 8) and they started enshitification. 10 was good, at first. It’s what they added that made it unbearable.
My biggest praise of Linux over Windows is not having to check for updates for different programs manually. I just hit sudo pacman -Syu and it does it all. Proton just makes my games work and I can do everything I did in Windows. Can I play AAA games with anticheat? Yes, but not all games. The ones I can’t, I really don’t feel the desire to play anymore anyway.
He uses Arch, btw
I’d say Windows 11 is equal parts the best and the worst Windows ever made.
Windows has improved the processes for updating software.
Everything else has gotten worse either by removing options or jamming ads/useless ‘features’ that get in the way. It still sucks, but in some different ways.
Finally, somebody gets it. Everyone with a bit of IT backbone in them for used to knowing how to deal with Windows and don’t realize it’s something they need to relearn for other OSes.
Windows isn’t Unix and as someone who has spent a career coding for Unix and Unix-like systems, Windows just isn’t useful to me. I’m perfectly happy with Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD or even OS X or whatever it’s called this week. The code I write generally runs on any of those and things behave as expected.
I’ve never really used Windows, but I have had to deal with the problems caused by developers using Windows. EOL chars, not putting a trailing EOL char in a file (postconf no like that), a lack of understanding of various Unix things. It’s kind of tedious to deal with, but that’s more the devs than Windows.
Windows 11 IoT LTSC is very good. I don’t know about the normal consumer version.
I use both at home and at work. For work some of our contract work is supporting large customer installs. There was a definite performance hit with Windows 10 (upgrading software on same hardware). So much so that we had endless customer calls on why the application was now slow. Windows11 has the same issue, plus some other janky stuff. But now windows 11 has ai.exe and aimgr.DLLs running in the background as part of Office install. It will regularly grind PCs to a halt, even when not using Office.
The one work application had a Linux version, the Linux version remained the same speed as always. While the windows app gets slower every release.
At home my wife’s laptop was 2010, upgrading to W10 made it absolutely unusable to even navigate with file explorer. I put Linux on it, and she runs spreadsheet and her zoom calls as well as my brand new work workstation. Granted it can’t compete for video edit render output, just doesn’t have modern CPU/GPU.
There may be some odd hardware where you have to find a driver, but 95% of drivers are built into the kernel. You just plug stuff in and it works without having to install shady apps like windows.
If you have a specific Windows only app(that for some reason can’t run under WINE) then stay with Windows, but otherwise with some mental adjustment you will find Linux just works and makes for a nicer user experience.
Windows Recall should turn off everybody. A system that captures everything you do and holds it forever is going to be a backdoor hack into your entire life. All a country has to do is get Pegasus software to infiltrate your system via a bad URL vulner and they can watch everything you do.
I partitioned 80gb off for work and installed Windows 10 on it. Install was fast, it found all of the drivers itself and had no bloatware using the Windows Media Creation Tool for another machine. Every device I have plugged into it or connected via Bluetooth has just worked. I don’t have a printer, but I imagine if you have an old printer that you will have to fuck around with drivers to get it working if you can’t use a generalized pcl driver for it. The entire OS with LibreOffice, and the work software I need runs on ~48gb with more than 30gb still free if I need random stuff but I don’t think I will as I’ve been using it for 2 weeks already.
I don’t have a Microsoft account signed into anything, and when I went to Windows Updates the first time I clicked the button that said “Don’t upgrade to Windows 11”.
Overall the OS is solid, I think it’s mostly people worrying about bloatware (which often comes from Manufacturers, though Windows does some) and advertisements, and Microsoft trying to monitor people.
It’s virtue signaling. Like in politics. It’s disconnected from real life or common use.
Windows good . . .
Windows good . . .
I know not of what you speak of.
