For me the straw that broke the camels back was the fucking updates. I got so tired of Windows forcing updates, and I never could get the registry edits to disable it to stick. Besides, you shouldn’t have to EDIT THE REGISTRY to just turn off updates! But there’s also stuff I’d really miss if I went back (I’ve been on Nobara for a year now) like the package management on Linux. I love that I can choose to update on MY terms, and that almost everything updates during the process. I have a few random jar apps for Switch hacking stuff, and an appimage for R2Modman, but besides that I don’t have to worry about needing to download the latest version of shit all the time. AND, having most of what you need just available on a software store is so nice. Never mind that its so much safer to not have to download random .exe’s from all over the internet. These days the only thing I actually struggle with is modding certain games. Like BG3 took me awhile, but then I found out there’s a Linux mod manager called lampray and it works perfectly. Then there’s also the fact you have to know how to do DLL overrides for things like bepinex or anything that adds some kind of DLL. But otherwise, it just works and infuriates me less than windoze

They killed Clippy! Those bastards!

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

I don’t hate windows, it just annoys me. I’ve run linux in a VM under windows for years and about 2 years ago it annoyed me enough (I think it was something about a patch breaking things badly enough that I had to restore the system) that I said ‘screw it’ and switched the arrangement to linux and the few windows programs I really wanted running in wine. I’ve been skipping back and forth between them since Yggdrasil was a thing, so it wasn’t like it was uncharted territory.

And after hearing some of win11’s BS, I’m glad I did.

Windows is always going to be proprietary software, so I’m never going to give it the time of day.
Next question.

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.

Proprietary software is a security risk, especially for US companies that can be legally served NSLs

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.

I don’t hate Windows for work. On the clock, I am balls deep in their ecosystem and I can’t say that it’s not working. However, that’s probably because I get it mostly set-up by IT!

Casual reminder that on Windows, it’s the norm to go fetch packages from the fucking internet using a web browser and give them root access to your system, including drivers…
A lot of settings are still scattered as well, with stuff randomly hidden away, completely unconfigurable or named so it’s not at all clear what it even does.

For everyday stuff like browsing, I totally do not see why people would want to use Windows.

If it wasn’t for (some) ((multiplayer)) games and other Windows-only software, I wouldn’t recommend this OS to anyone at this point.

I haven’t used Windows in years and rarely think about it. But, ads. I hate ads with the burning fury of a thousand suns. Therefore, MS catches some fraction of that hate by putting them in the OS.

As someone who routinely installs new Laptops for various reasons:

Installing

• Preinstalled Windows is unusable, due to preinstalled spyware
• No torrents
• No multiple versions
• No real support for actually chaning the locale, what you download is what you get. Even if that means redownloading 5 GB for every language, even though the interesting parts are just a few language files, which every OS can also replace while running (Note: OSes, not spyware with a program loader strapped to it)
• No live version
• Unnecessarily complex/long installation (Locale settings being required two times, circumventing the M$ account with cmd, denying all spying stuff)
• Installer does not have drivers for many things eg. some Touchpads, special storage setups etc.
• Installing takes a long time overall
• Removing bloat, with varying success (sometimes uninstalling Edge is one click, sometimes it requires powershell hacks) takes ages (my hand always hurts afterwards because removing one thing takes three clicks at different locations)
• Installing stuff is extremely annoying, inconsistent and insecure (VLCPlus …)
• Everyone loves hunting down 10 different obscure drivers from various websites, each with unique installers, right?
• Windows fucks itself up within a few days with a non-insignificant chance … eg. by entering S-Mode (halfway) somehow

Usage

• It may be in part due to me being used to a tiling WM with dozens of workspaces, but even with KDE I have much better workflow - somehow, Windows’ way to multitask is really strange to me, and I can only use it like a 70 year old with only 10% sight in one eye and 0% in the other: very slow and inefficiently
• You can’t integrate anything with anything, except if you have dozens of accounts of services, some even with costs, and only use everything exactly like daddy manufacturer wants you to
• Literally no support. Windows fucks itself up in so many ways, and the only “reliable” fix is a reinstall
• Even with the dumbed down nature of Windows, users are morons. I’d rather teach my grandparents (including my very loud grandfather and said nearly-blind grandmother) Linux from scratch (yes, also LFS) than teach them the “correct way” to use Windows
• Even when knowing how to use Windows properly, with all tricks applied, it’s less powerful than a pregnancy test running BASIC
• Paying 250+$ to get served ads to pay even more, money and data, is obviously stupid

I wouldn’t say I hate Windows. I’ve had Windows 2.0 through NT 4.0 installed, but it was more of an application that I rarely started because it usually just interfered with my MS-DOS programs. DESQview was a much preferable option, as it had true multitasking (yes, so did NT 4.0 - but it broke a lot of things).

I dual booted DOS and Linux for a couple of years, but DOS box was good enough in 1997 that I rarely had to boot DOS, so I’ve been Linux only for a couple of decades.

Sounds like I should give Windows another try.

Because it’s a tool by one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, corporation ever made. It’s nothing more than a way to lock-in users deeper in an ecosystem of extortion and learned helplessness.

Through Windows, computer users discover that they have a black box at work and then at home. It is NOT their computer. It is a computer that they are allowed to use a certain way. This then is extended in a myriad of ways, through other tools, e.g mobile phone, and services, e.g Office360, reinforcing that behavior. It becomes a second nature to the point that computer users dare not even imagine HOW they want to use a computer. Instead they buy whatever they are allowed to consume.

I do not care for Windows as an OS, I absolutely do HATE it though as a vehicle for cognitive enslavement. I do so keeping in mind the history of the company that made it. It is not a repeated random process, it’s a strategy. This is what I find disgusting.

Windows forced me to update to a version that has advertisement in it. It has built in network calls in the start menu. I would have to pay a licence and make an account, something I avoided for years. Sharing file on a private network is insanely hard to do and very buggy.

Now I’m not a Windows admin, but I’m a Linux admin, so there are many, many things I know how to do on Linux and not on Windows.

This made me realize that there is a bias: when something doesn’t work on windows, the something doesn’t work, or you only need to find how to hack it to work. But when something doesn’t work on Linux, it’s Linux that doesn’t work. That’s a double standard. The same kind of work or problems on Windows is ignored.

There are so many things today to help people use Windows, like classes, professionals, help desk, it’s everywhere, for everyone, yet it’s somehow considered easy to use windows. BTW any organisation that made the move did saw it happen. I mean that many organisations moved to Linux and gave the support and formation for it to work, and it worked.

sudo su is a bad idea. sudo -iu is better for ACLs and avoids the potential security gap.