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.

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?

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.

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.

Installing updates… Do not turn off your computer

I hate windows 11, because it’s bad. Installing drivers is annoying, removing the ads and de-bloating a PAID operating system is just ridiculous. It’s also unstable, random crashes galore, uses a ton of system resources and sleep doesn’t work. As you mentioned yourself it’s also a privacy nightmare. But that’s not all of my reasons for hating windows…

• Horrible CLI experience, can’t get any work done without needing to go through 15 different menus to find some arcane setting to adjust simple things like global variables. Powershell also has the habit of randomly forgetting that certain commands exist, I am aware it’s probably me doing something wrong there, but I do not care enough to figure it out, to me it just doesn’t work.

• Horrendous laptop experience. 1:1 touch pad gestures? Smooth animations? A workflow that makes sense? Not on windows! And yk, sleep doesn’t work.

• WORSE gaming performance on AMD graphics cards. Yep, this has been the case ever since I switched to AMD a few years ago and despite all their driver updates, I still get a much better performance in games on linux through wine. This is just ignoring the fact that radeon software on windows is a piece of fcking garbage that likes randomly crashing and then uninstalling itself.

• Virtualization is bad. No KVM = bad for me… It’s just slower on windows and you can’t do fun stuff like GPU passtrough.

• I can’t even fcking install windows 11 without doing ridicuous hacks to bypass the secure boot/TPM/other garbage.

• No app store/normal package manager. Winget sucks… it just does. Yes, it’s better than nothing, no, it’s not good… Same goes for chocolatey. It’s nice, but it’s just not that good.

Fundamentally, there are many reasons… A lot of which I’ve listed, to dislike windows. And I’m not a Linux elitist, my main work machine is a Mac, I just use what works best and windows just… doesn’t. It’s been enshittified beyond belief and even ignoring the enshittification, there are things that fundamentally prevent me from liking/using windows for anything more than a piracy machine… As that’s the one thing that’s easier on windows.

Please stay to the end because it’s important, and it’s going to be a horrible bait and switch but it’s not INTENDED that way. I can’t think of another way to present the difficult combination of interests that seem to be driving MS software lately.

I actually quite like Windows 11, and I love Edge when they’re doing their core functions. Windows 11 is reasonably solid and useful for normal use. Edge is faster than Chrome and has the best vertical tabs implementation on the planet. Much of the baseline software that Microsoft is putting out has never been better, and is often really good at doing the basic things software should do. I really do feel like the genuine technology people in Microsoft are trying, and often succeeding, to make good technology products.

But… the bottom-feeder marketing drones and MBAs got their hands on them and started layering creepier and creepier nonsense over the top. Mandatory logins to glorified data collection engines. Monetization strategies masquerading as features. Overt advertisement. Heavy-handed promotion of Microsoft’s own products. I finally stopped using Edge (on Linux!) when I discovered that just looking at the settings the wrong way would re-enable every intrusive setting imaginable and ditched Windows entirely when I saw the same things creeping into the OS (as well as a general disgust with privately-owned OSes in general). They are destroying trust.

In the great irony of my life, because normally work PC Windows installs have been hot garbage, I have Win11 on a work laptop and it’s actually really great to use since all of the intrusive stuff is turned off by our security team. I would still prefer linux or macos (in that order), but as a “forced to use it” option, it’s not bad at all. Go back and read that again: it’s a pleasant and easy to use OS if all the intrusive marketing functionality is turned off because it presents a security hazard.

PS. Not sacrificing anything being predominantly linux-based and am in fact far, far more efficient on linux (and I am not a programmer or in any other technology role).

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

Because windows is inconvenient for me.

Nothing works as I expect it, terminal takes ages to open, everything lags like shit, annoying popups everywhere, every setting is hidden behind ten thousand menus, subpar packaging system, explorer crashes every so often, PATH is hard to access and modify, takes a PHD to install a raw compiler without visual studio, you can forget about shortcut system cus even with autohotkey it’s a pain.

(Talking about permissions) Why do I have to write names of users from the ground and then click button “check if it actually exists” in a fucking gui? Couldn’t there be a drop down list?

If you ever want to modify the windows iso image or make an automated script without using online services you’re just done mate. There’s nifty surprises like special software which name I so conveniently forgot (God bless) that can open the file image contained inside the iso image, but if that inner image has wrong format you have to spend time converting it. Then you’ll see some fucking insane shit in front of you, where you need to drag objects from a drop down list into different categories that have random ass names and not at all simple to understand even after reading official documentation. Oh you think that’s all? You can drop same objects into different categories and they will do different shit. I took TWO WEEKS WORTH OF CLASSES to work with that software and I ALREADY DONT REMEMBER JACK.

Then there’s utterly long startup times even on ssds, colemak dh mod basically doesn’t exist… And that’s all I could remember out the top of my head.

The only redeeming quality I’d say, is having a very simple setup for Japanese and Chinese IME. On arch KDE it took me awhile to set up fcitx with mozc the first time around.

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.

It isn’t hate. It’s disgust.

But it’s everything. The intrusion, the quasi monopoly, the shitty anti,consumer choices, all of it.

Since either Linux or win 7 do almost everything I need, I’ll never use anything higher than win 7

Windows, macos, all the same. I want a free device. I love donating to KDE. How could I love giving money to microsoft?

Microsoft is more difficult for me nowadays because I use it very rarely. I hate that nothing works as expected. I hate that they force everything upon you.

We are free. We are GNU. We are linux.

Because my experience is always the exact opposite of yours. Windows has never been convenient for me, it always does random shit, and stuff just suddenly stops working because fuck you that’s why. For example, I have a Windows computer at work to build and test the games I work on, this week it decided that it won’t use more than 20% of the CPU for building the latest game, there’s no other bottleneck, temperature is stable at 60°C, disks have space, and most importantly, other games compile just fine, it’s just the one I’m actively working currently that doesn’t. And it’s not an issue in the code either since I’m the only person in the company experiencing this. And, this is the important part, I can’t do anything about it, because no one knows why Windows decided to do that, so there’s nothing anyone can do. On Linux when you have an issue there’s an explanation, and someone with enough experience will find it quickly, on Windows you can be the world’s expert and still the OS will just decide to nope the fuck out.