The “we know better than you” attitude Microsoft has. They’ve very slowly removed more and more power user functionality. Almost every customization has to be hacked in with a group policy or registry edit now, or by outright replacing explorer.exe

I genuinely don’t find Windows easier to use. And troubleshooting Windows problems is a friggin’ nightmare compared to Linux.

Because I don’t sit down at my Linux destop and feel like the product. There’s no ads or suggestions or popups or apps installing themselves or shit copying my files around in ways I didn’t really want or AI bullshit or anything even remotely suggesting I buy more shit, just… whatever the fuck it is I was intending to do.

The value in not having my computer act like a damn slot machine trying to get me to insert more quarters is, frankly, immense.

I like being in control of my computer.

Windows and Android have this attitude where they decide how you want to use your device and block customisation. And the fact that they feel entitled to be able to change how your device looks and feels without warning or permission is something that’s deeply uncomfortable to me. There’s also this feeling of not knowing what my device is actually doing, and how much of my data it is actually collecting.

With Windows, there’s also a lot of small papercuts that make it annoying to use (and that my Windows friends don’t seem to understand):

• Lack of middle click paste.
• Lack of the ability to drag windows using “alt”.
• You can’t turn off the window previews in the task bar.
• You can’t disconnect from a wired network connection from the connections list.
• Sometimes the computer just restarts on its own for fun.
• Finding settings is a pain because they keep adding new settings menus.
• Whatever garbage the start menu is doing nowadays.
• Installing software and drivers is a pain.
• The attitude that you have to download (or buy!) third party software for core features that should be included in the OS.
• It doesn’t support my keyboard layout, and the editor for making new layouts is terrible.
• The bitlocker password entry doesn’t respect your keyboard layout. Or clear the entry when you get it wrong.
• Windows licenses are a pain to manage.
• Managing the bootloader just sucks.
• The registry just kinda sucks compared to dconf and/or text config files.
• Font rendering is ugly, imo.
• I don’t care about edge, fuck off with that shit.
• I can’t change the volume by using the scroll wheel.
• Launching a pinned app on the task bar causes all the other pinned apps to shift around so I misclick.
• Device letters are not stable if you add or remove devices.
• It just resets settings sometimes, because why not?
• It can’t be installed to a partition that isn’t the first partition on the disk. This is not mentioned anywhere, nor is the error useful.
• It’s just bad for developing on, due to lack of tooling.

… Whew I ranted for a while there, didn’t I? Yeah, I dual boot Windows for the games that either don’t run under protonwine or the devs want to add a rootkit to.

Just this weekend I had the pleasure of installing Win 10 on a blank disk. The install went ok, but then it bothered me logging into the MS Account. After cursing for a while and since it wasn’t my PC, I gave in. I know I can fight it, but it’s not worth it here. Then it continued trying to get me to consent to all kinds of shit. NO, I DON’T WANT FUCKING OFFICE AND I DON’T WANT MY FILES IN ONEDRIVE you assholes!

Then it forces me to choose a PIN for “secure login”. DUDE! That motherfucking PC is used for a bit of office work and gaming. Just let these poor people boot up the machine and use it! 0000? Too simple. 1234 too. Fuck you, MS. Ok, random PIN and a sticky note it is, asshats.

Anyway, after getting it to fuck off, I continue to the desktop. Oh wow, 10 updates and a ton of missing drivers? It’s a fresh install! What the fuck did it install?! Of course the installation of all these updates takes an hour and countless restarts… AFTER A FRESH INSTALL! Not even my overblown super slow Ubuntu server takes that long for updates; and that runs on a HDD not a SSD like that PC I set up.

But wait. One update failed. Why? Ah, the rescue partition is too small… THE ONE THAT DUMB SON-OF-BITCH CREATED ON ITS OWN AS PART OF THE INSTALL! How to fix? Ah, execute a bunch of commandline foo with diskpart and other tools. Wait, isn’t that exactly the kind of shit that Windows fans laugh about when looking down on us Linux nerds?!

So … ugh … just one simple anecdote of why Windows can fuck off.

I honest to god find Linux easier to use. Though it’s maybe because the most used programs on my laptop are neovim, gcc and rust compiler and Firefox . And I shit you not, Microsoft purposefully slowed down the Firefox browser I installed from their store.

Plus I like using a tiling window manager when coding, now in Linux I have 500 options. On windows I get a middle finger and a dedicated nsa/fbi agent. Whats not to hate?

I don’t know if I “hate” Windows but more like “I’m done dealing it.” I might come and use it time to time, but only when absolutely necessary, and the mental capacity to remove things I don’t need and make sure its removed.

Aside from all the usual points that everyone else has already made: automation. Scripting stuff on Linux is relatively simple, trying to fuck about with powershell or work around a tool that’s GUI-only is infuriating.

Because every time I’m reminded the underlying OS exists it’s always something negative.

On windows: Forced restarts and updates that take over 5x as long as my Linux (or FreeBSD build), ui that constantly undoes what I customized, ads and preinstalled malware essentially like candy crush even on builds from Microsoft directly, worse performance with a much higher number of crashes under load on my current box, and no auto login/name any simple customization without screwing around with registry editor to name just the simple things. More advanced problems include no hypervisor built in to the home version, everything is pay to unlock features my Linux install does for free, no zfs software raid for storage safekeeping, most fixes when I do have errors involve googleing cryptic hex codes and being told to run fsck/chdsk as the only solution for often times hours of searching before finally finding the actual answer - not to mention most other fixes being to download a library/binary of the sketchiest sounding website ever that i can’t verify isn’t a virus.

On linux or even FreeBSD which took a bit to get installed to my liking i may have put work in up front but its like 3 hours at most of my time for 6+ years of stability and proper functioning to avoid all of the above plus no microsoft telemetry etc. I switched when i first tried Vista and even today every time i have to use Microsoft’s horrific excuse for an OS it is heartburn inducing.

I think I need like 2 weeks to tell all the reasons I hate it.

I swapped away from Windows about a year and a half ago. The last straw was them sticking ads in the OS. And from everything I’ve heard, they continue to boil the frog; they continue to add more and more telemetry and unasked for “features” and bloat the system more and more and more with every update. Even my own parents are growing tired of Windows; it’s a clunky, poorly optimized operating system that’s positively frustrating to use.

I will concede that not everything that runs on Windows will run on Linux. It’s true. But I severely disagree that Windows is “easier to use.” Of course, when you grow up on Windows, Linux has a learning curve. It’s different OS. But once I got past that? Nah, Linux is far easier and more intuitive in most cases.

Installing programs? Open your software manager and click a button.

Playing video games? Open Steam or Lutris and click a button. Occasionally you might need to tweak things, but you have to do the same on Windows sometimes, especially for older games!

I could go on but those are the biggest two examples that come to mind immediately.

As to another point you made, I personally gave up almost nothing. Destiny 2 and League of Legends don’t work, but I quit league before fgsh added Vanguard and neither of these games want me. That isn’t my fault, and it isn’t a short coming in Linux’s fault, it’s the devs being assholes.

In spite of this, I do acknowledge some people would have to give up more than me, and for some people that’s too much, and that’s valid! I hope one day they truly get a choice.

I find Windows significantly less convenient than Linux. It took a few years for my mindset to flip but there’s just no going back. Whenever something requires me to use Windows, I reach for a Windows virtual machine. Whenever I’ve been forced to use a Windows or a Mac machine for work, I’ve reached for a Linux virtual machine.

It just… lacks features? I couldn’t use ZFS or Btrfs, FDE requires third-party software (veracrypt) and lots of other things that I see as standard system utilities (think ssh, git etc.) are not available on a fresh install. And then you’re supposed to download and install .exe files from the internet? Since microsoft controls what goes in the windows store, that could provide the same experience as your distro’s repositories. But again, most things you want aren’t there, and you can’t even trust the things that are there. For some reason, a billion dollar company cannot curate a software repository of the same quality as the ones maintained by unpaid volunteers in the Linux world.

So yeah, I think it’s just not there yet. Maybe in a few years windows will be a viable alternative for desktop systems.

Installing updates… Do not turn off your computer

Each time I tell this story, I try to make it shorter and more terse.

Circa 2012 or 2013 I bought a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby. With that I learned a little bit of Python and Bash, learned to type sudo etc, and kinda liked what I saw. Meanwhile, my Win 7 laptop died right as I was going back to school, so I bought a new laptop. This new laptop had two problems: 1. it came with Windows 8.1 and 2. it was a lemon. For most of the first semester going back to school I had no reliable laptop. The only modern supported computer I had was that Raspberry Pi. And for most of a semester that’s what I did school assignments and email on until I finally bullied Dell into replacing that lemon Inspiron they sold me outright.

So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.1 did. So I fully switched.

That was 10 years ago now, and for the last decade I’ve heard Windows users do nothing but piss and moan about the new holes Microsoft has found to fuck them in.