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

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 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.

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

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 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.

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

I don’t hate Windows, I don’t care about it. I don’t use it.

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.

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.

Cool operating system bro. Does it run KDE?

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.

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.

A few things (disclaimer, I‘m both a Linux and mac user. Linux on my gaming machine, mac on my work machines):

• Privacy is a big factor. Microsofts track record is bad, even among non FOSS companies.

• Bloatware and Ads. Microsofts insistence on pushing OneDrive, Edge, 365 and bing are annoying to say the least. Why do they think I’m going to change my mind about that after a minor update?

• The UX is less than stellar. Why does the OS have 4 different UI styles for different programs that sometimes even do almost the same thing but not entirely, so you’ll have to use both versions?

• It’s almost impossible for me to keep my desktop tidy short of not using it. I’m dependent on macOS stack feature. On Linux I never had enough random files for it to be a problem.

In short, Windows just annoys me. While Linux and macOS go out of my way and let me just do my stuff, Windows just constantly pulling my attention away from what I advertised want to do and that was even when I was using my PC solely as a gaming machine.

Edit: formatting