Comment by lambada

You think that's bad? I'm using Linux at work on a laptop specifically designed for Linux and it's been a nightmare to get even basic functions to work right. The computer immediately resumes after going to sleep, it took several days to get hibernation working, the nvidia driver keeps locking up the system, external monitors aren't automatically detected, after an apt upgrade, hibernation stops working because my EFI loader file gets overwritten and I can't figure out from where, I managed to completely break X after trying to get Optimus (GPU switching) to work, applications written in different GUI frameworks (QT, GTK) use different themes and even different mouse cursors, applets don't always show up, bluetooth crashes randomly, and the list goes on.

Windows has annoyances, but Linux is like building a car in a garage full of car parts. Yes, you can build a working car, but you better be a mechanic.

I’d like to highlight a few points that are mostly not about Windows.

> * windows don't remember their previous position on multi-screens.

Not an OS concern. Most applications do remember, by the way.

> * terminal beeps at you on every tab with more than one option, always have to keep sound muted.

Windows terminal doesn’t have a bell. WSL does, as does macOS or anything Linux/UNIX really. You can disable it of course. Google "wsl disable bell".

Either way, nothing new or objectively bad.

> * no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.

That’s mostly Spotify. It can be disabled in settings. Windows only shows the volume "slider", which is gone after 5 seconds

* some older Logitech mouse I connect has buggy assignment of forward/back keys - does a completely random operation instead. Windows doesn't seem to have a GUI-way to set this stuff up

Nothing is "random". Except perhaps when the device is broken. Mouse buttons 1-5 have been well-defined for 10+ years now.

> * terminal has no tabs and crappy colors and I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator. I've installed the spring update, won't touch october one for a while at least.

Yes, it sucks. You can either enable SSH and SSH into WSL or just use wsltty (which offers bell options!).

> * there's no integration of WSL & windows GUI layer.

That’s a given. WSL is only for developers.

>no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.

Is Spotify, go to settings, display options and deselect "Show desktop overlay when using media keys". For some time I had to do that after every Spotify update, but seems to stick now

Your explorer issue is Windows Defender's realtime protection. If you toggle it off you'll see the operation you're trying to run complete almost instantly.

I like Windows 10 and generally have been happy with it -- but that particular behavior has been driving me nuts for a while. They really need to fix it.

I've been using FreeBSD, then Linux since 2002 and I'm seriously considering moving to Windows, which I haven't ran on any of my machines since back when Windows XP was fresh. If you think all the stuff you listed is bad, wait 'til you run into Gnome, GTK and KDE, where not only do windows not remember their previous position on multi-screens, but desktop icons don't remember their position on a single one :-).

(Or you can't have them at all without an extension, yeah, that too...)

Windows has progressed by leaps and bounds since 2003. Linux, not so much. We have this fixation on building something, then deciding it's full of legacy code that doesn't allow us to build what we really want, so we throw it out and do it all over again.

The good news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while. The bad news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while so I expect there's not much time left until the next "revolution"...

Most of your terminal issues can be resolved by using http://cmder.net

Don't underestimate Microsoft's willingness to keep their system as a minimum that gets enhanced by third parties.

> I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator.

You open whatever terminal you want and run the WSL command, by the way. So just 'wsl' or 'bash' or 'ubuntu', etc.

There's not actually a rabbit hole. You don't need to change the default launcher.

> terminal has no tabs and crappy colors

Okay, the tabs thing we haven't been able to fix yet, but if you want to change the console colors real quick, you can use ColorTool:

https://github.com/Microsoft/console/tree/master/tools/Color...

Also, it you want a tab-like experience, you could always try tmux. It's a linux commandline tool that gives you tabs, panes, and all sorts of other goodies, and as of 1809 you can even use cmd.exe within it.

When I first tried W10, I noticed a distinct lag before the start menu opens. Often, menus would pop under the taskbar, instead of over, being unreadable and unclickable.

I assumed they pushed it to market before it was ready, allowing users to find the bugs to save on testing costs (helping justify why it was free). Only, now, years later, the start menu still lags, and things still open behind other things.

Combined with all the mysterious data it sends to various IP's, I think that when you press Start, those first 300 ms are spent as part of some sort of distributed computing effort.

Have to agree on all points.

You’ll find the slow file operations are entirely down to NTFS. Regardless of how you play around in fsutil it’s hopeless on lots of small files. This incidentally makes WSL unbearably slow. Hence why I still use VirtualBox and putty.

You've got until January 2020, which is when Windows 7 goes end of life, and at that point updates will probably stop.

If you can get your hands on Windows Thin PC (Cut down Windows 7) you can eek out the support until November 2021.

Windows 7 is the best OS M$ ever made. If it had DirectX 12 (and subsequent updates like raytracing support) i don't think I would ever update.

Thinks work, OS doesn't get in my way anyhow, its fast and takes relatively little RAM (well not compared to XP but these days its OK).

Never tried Win10 because everything seemed worse, but I had hope they would polish things over the years. When I read comments here, it doesn't seem so. Sad story...