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?
What was the last version you used? The move from XP to 7 to 8 to 10 to 11 has been fairly consistent in terms of removing power from the user and adding bullshit, with the exception of 10 being better than 8.
It’s virtue signaling. Like in politics. It’s disconnected from real life or common use.
I have to use MS Windows and their office suite daily at work. I can certify they’re crap. And it has been getting worse since 11.
I think the biggest problem is Windows behaves like freeware with it’s ads but it’s not even cheap, let alone free.
I would say upgrading to an SSD is like a magic wand for an ailing system, regardless of OS.
As others have said, at the core the issue is enshittification, be it AI, or Recall, or ads, or Microsoft account requirements.
Truth is, if Microsoft had taken all of that out, left me with something that was functionally very much like what was available in the XP & 7 era, then eh… Windows would probably still be my daily driver. I still have to use it for work. But there has just too much encroachment on the ways I want to use and control what is on my system that I couldn’t justify using it anymore, let alone pay for it.
All my home computers are on Arch or Debian now, and I couldn’t be happier.
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.
The reason people say Windows is “crap” isn’t the performance, it’s the ads.
I left before the ads era. That’s sounds awful. I’ll search to see how they look.
kinda is the performance also though, that’s the reason I switched from Windows just over a year ago. My laptop battery was horrible. on win11 I might get maybe an hour out of it. Also for whatever reason Windows insisted on constantly removing my Wifi adapter completely where the only “fix” was completely reinstalling the OS. I had enough and switched to linux.
My laptop battery now lasts 3+hours and haven’t had any issues with wifi. Also as an added bonus I noticed better performance/higher FPS with games as opposed to Windows on the exact same machine.
That’s definitely it for me. I have one Windows computer remaining, my gaming PC in my living room. And every few weeks, when I turn it on, I get the full-screen “let’s finish setting up Windows” wizard, which wants me to subscribe to Office 365 and OneDrive. This PC is six years old; it’s set up already. I’m going to install Bazzite pretty soon.
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.
Would it not be Edge, MIcrosoft’s own browser? You have their Bing search results too…
It’s in react/electron which is chromium. It does use bing for search engine tho.
The Start menu is C++/XAML, but the “recommended” section uses React Native for Windows. That still means a performance hit, but it’s got nothing to do with Electron.
I did not know that, interesting. Modern Edge is based on Chromium too, so there’s two I guess.
Edge, opera, brave, they’re all chromium based.
The only independent browsers still standing are Safari and Firefox (and its forks).
Windows has been fine for years. It’s being more rapidly enshittified to death recently.
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 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
Don’t say that. The arch fans will come to point out that Arch based isn’t true Arch then put you to death for wasting their time.
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.
Using Windows as intended by Microsoft is pretty damn easy. It becomes a chore if you try to disarm spyware, avoid the cloud, etc.
This is it for me. I’m tired of swimming upstream for my privacy.
Yep. The forced install of Copilot Vision was the straw for me. Linux was a steep learning curve, but worth it
I’d say Windows 11 is equal parts the best and the worst Windows ever made.
I haven’t had a computer running Windows in my home for like a decade or so but I get exposure to it because of working at large corpos. Frankly, LTSC + proper policy set by administrators is okay for day to day work. It is kind of annoying and decaying in terms of usability but the core experience hasn’t changed that much. My partner works at a company that doesn’t use LTSC and that’s a big oof - unwanted features get shoved in your face all the time, breaking basic functionality like search etc. I can’t even imagine how it looks like in a regular consumer version.
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.
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.
