Comment by novagameco
2 years ago
I'm a software engineer who chooses to use Windows.
I grew up a windows user. I downloaded the Windows 7 Beta when I was 12 years old (and still think it's the best UI any OS has ever had). When I was in college I used Linux more, but found that the only reason I used it was as glorified desktop customization software. All of my assignments were in Java and my personal projects were in C.
I switched to a chromebook halfway through college and did all my assignments by SSHing into a rented VPS running Ubuntu. After college I finally got some money and bought some used thinkpads, which I ran Windows on.
My first job out of college we had macbook pros, and I hated those frickin things. The UI was so opinionated and slow with all of its animations. There was no way to disable the paneled desktops and there was no built in package manager or tiling window manager. Their bash version (this was pre-zsh) was an ancient build from 2007 and their coreutils lacked all the neat GNU extensions features (I recommend anybody who uses a macbook immediately install coreutils from homebrew and also upgrade bash). I had a million things I hated about macOS and still do.
Other companies let me choose between a mac and a PC, and I went with PC. My current company gave me a Macbook pro and I haven't turned the thing on in a year. I use my desktop PC for everything. I like powershell, Windows Terminal, Winget/Chocolatey, vcpkg, Visual Studio, and MSVC language features like SAL. DirectX11 blows OpenGL out of the water in terms of syntax without getting as complicated as Vulkan. I prefer the Win32 API Convention of initializing things with structs and getting more descriptive return types to Linux's everything-is-an-int. I don't mind the Windows 11 UI as much as I thought I would but still sometimes customize my taskbar to look like Windows 7 (but it's just not the same).
tl;dr: I like windows, and not because I'm a captive user
I grew up on Windows as well, starting with Win 3.0. I switched fully to Linux in 2010, but have still usually had at least one Windows machine in my life. Windows is really pretty damn good, and if they would just stop trying to force things on users (MS accounts, Edge browser, etc) and stop trying to further monetize the system (ads), it would be a really compelling option. I spent a total of 24 months on macs, and like you, when your preferred workflow doesn't match Apple's opinion of the correct way, macOS is like cement blocks around your ankles.
I remember looking up how to disable certain features on macOS, and the people on Apple forums usually responded with some version of "Why would you want to do that? You think you know better than Apple?"
haha, yep, exactly my experience too. And then also the occasional "Go buy this $20 tool that lets you do that by (ab)using accessibility APIs"
I also rather use Windows, even though I have an extensive UNIX experience since getting introduced to it via Xenix in 1993, and using most well known commercial variants since then.
Mac OS occasionally at work, in project assigned laptops.
Linux plenty of distributions since getting Slackware 2.0 on 1995's Summer.
Eventually I gave up on the Linux Desktop dream, around Windows 7 timeframe.