a good reminder that a lot of difficulty people have in switching to Linux is because their computer didn't come with it preinstalled, and they're just not used to Linux yet

Windows has lots of issues that people just became accustomed to over time and kinda forgot were issues, or aren't issues when the OEM preconfigures everything

That was a delightful read. I somehow forgot you had to download every program yourself and update it yourself or put up with a third party update app at all times. I've only been away from Windows for like a year but it's like "I completely forgot about that".

Tldr for you guys, tons of issues with installing and basic functionality but he did say Edge was fine and so was Outlook after paying the ransom subscription and neglecting privacy concerns. Ads though? Yikes. Also they finally got an emoji/character picker, which was news to me. But yeah, massive corporate dumpster fire otherwise.

I wish I could get paid to use and then talk shit about Windows 11. 😩

Good on him for giving it an honest go. I do think that for fresh installs, laptops feel more likely to run into issues unless you are buying very mainstream hardware or using the OEM image with the driver bundles in the installer.

Also, using edge, native tools, and no cleanup or debloat is just painful. But I suppose the point is to highlight what you get out of the box, and if you used Titus Utils to dump all the quality of life things on the system you aren't really assessing the stock os.

The last time I maintained my own windows dev and reverse engineering box was Win 98 with the Borland C++ compiler and SoftICE resident debugger. Also did some casual gaming and had a nice 5.1 surround audio setup.

Rebuilds were an absolute trial. I had a specific order of drivers, packages and so on that had to be followed to avoid an unusable system.

I also used to do on call PC engineer work for a medium sized employment agent corporation. Network drivers and printer driver installers world conflict and fuck up systems. Training machines needed hardware dongles which cost 1000s and we're horribly unreliable. In short it was a massive pain in the dick.

Against this backdrop I started mucking about with a SuSE 5 cd I got off a magazine cover. It was also a pain in many ways (xf86config anyone?), but it was a breath of fresh air compared to Windows because with a little persistence it could always be figured out. Nothing hidden. Nothing proprietary.

I am truly astonished at how windows has continued to be as bad as ever, and equally amazed at how good the Linux desktop experience has become.

Over the years, corporate work helped me understand how quality slips and repairing the culture to improve that is borderline impossible. I see little hope for windows ever getting better. Microsoft have enough money to last for many years, but they long ago traded what technical soul they had for MBA wank.

Linux treads a tightrope - there's a lot of corporate pressure - both helpful and a hindrance. Keep supporting the fringe - diversity is our best guard against the darkness!

Another pain point is Explorer, Windows’ file manager. It takes longer to load than a file manager should

This drives me bananas anytime I have to interact with Windows. When I open my file manager on my own PCs, it'll be rendered and ready to go between the clicking of the button and the animation of it opening. It takes under 300ms.

On my Windows 11 work PC, I've had it take well over five seconds before I can actually do something. Given how handling files is a hella common task, I'm surprised no one at Microsoft has fixed this just from having to deal with it on a daily basis. I sure as hell couldn't.

For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard

Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face.

I mean I can't stand the thing but this is basically paid-for nuthugging - watch me dunk on the team you hate. fluff, bereft of any semblance of standards. you're allowed to pay for office but not install 7zip and any other utility. haven't tried in the past decade or so, but I am sure you can make a usable workstation out of any windows - rip out the irritants, fall back on tons of stuff developed over what four decades?

it ain't GUI inconsistency issue; you got that plenty on the other side of the fence with Qt/GTK/Ayatana heterogeneity. and also not the thing where you can change a setting in three places, that's also present ova here, in spades.

the issue is MICROS~1 and I have a fundamental disagreement on the concept of "whose shit is my shit". no other thing can alleviate that clash of interests, this is someone judging the quality of the chopped onions in a shit sandwich - don't matter how skillful the chopping was or wasn't, I ain't having none of the thing.

I have the exact same problems with overheating, fans and sleep/awake on Windows. It's crazy that this even happens on a clean install. You would think that after 40 years of OS experience they would get something as basic as this right.

Desktop Linux solved keeping applications updated decades ago. Microsoft seems to be making it worse every time they add another different application delivery and management framework.

True, Linux did solve this decades ago. And then made it significantly worse in the last decade with multiple package managers (apt-get, AppImage, Flatpak, Snap, brew, random .sh install scripts etc.). Remembering how a Linux application was installed and calling its update command is a chore, and updating will probably pull in some other 500MB+ dependency that's not shared with other apps because of a minor version change.

Would still use Linux any time of day over Windows, since I can actually use my laptop, but the state of package managers on Linux today is hot garbage, and in a worse state than 10 years ago.

Since I didn't pay him, I'm not invested enough to read it.

I have a weird situation. I was a Windows user from 3.x to 10. I genuinely like Win9x, XP, and a lot of 7. I switched to Linux as my main machine with Mint because Cinnamon works like Windows. The only hassle I have is external display issues (X11 displayport stuff) - so I'm not looking at Cachy or KDE Neon or anything like that. But my gaming PC is Win11. It all works. Getting back to Windows, while there's some challenges, everything feels "right" again. 7-Zip, Notepad++, various games, it's all natural. I have trouble running arbitrary software on Mint, but Windows just runs every exe I throw at it. It works with my trackball and external display painlessly.

Basically, they both work.

Also, I disagree with the article author about the email client in the OS. I think that's bloatware and the results of Microsoft being monopolistic. Webmail works fine. If you want an email client locally, it's your choice. Then again I'd love to see what he says is better than Outlook - because it isn't Thunderbird.