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Comment by enlightenedfool

10 months ago

What exactly did you find so much worse in windows?

The built-in bloatware (LinkedIn, TikTok, Clipchamp, etc.), the constant nagging (like full-screen reminders to buy Office 365 to "protect" your PC), Edge is basically forced on you. MSVC has insane licensing terms — you can’t use it outside of Visual Studio or VS Code, not to mention it's lacking support for C. Windows seems actively user and developer hostile.

Beyond that, Windows' architecture is a mess, I hate it (There's a reason Microsoft has to ship WSL2). macOS runs all of my tools fine, just like Linux does.

  • I hate Win11. It is horrible, but the first few points don't really make sense. I use it in 2 environments. - enterprise version: no bloatware, no ads, and edge is there but never has to be used for anything - professional version: bloatware is uninstalled in like 2min after OS install, another 2min later all ads are disabled. And it usually stays like that after updates too. Edge is never used at all.

    Windows architecture is great. the WinAPI is better documented and more comprehensive than anything on Linux or Mac.

    There are so many other issues. - The file explorer gets slower and more broken with each update. context menus randomly don't show, or take literally 30 seconds to load. - The renderer crashes randomly once a week (it's not a huge issue, but the screen goes black for 10 seconds or so) - the settings dialog is bad. goes through like 5 different layers of Windows generations and recently makes the old dialogs hard to find but doesn't offer adequate replacements (looking at network and sound) - and much more...

    • I uploaded a video because no one can show me this alleged slowness or context menu stuff, it's all "vibes" and it is getting ridiculous on hackernews.

      I have a huge problem with windows - some api uses "@" for something, so all my folders with @ in the name(it sorts alphabetically before everything and is easy to type - on macos it's option-8 for similar, Linux I use @ as well) and because of that Windows API most applications crasb if you last saved into a path with @ in it and do file->open. Notepad++, notepad.exe, handbrake, VLC, mplayer, and so on.

      Its a frustration, but it is my fault for developing a stupid habit back before metadata or changing colors of folers or what ever exists now to force an arbitrary sort order.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_t8SUwrEk

With every Windows release since 8, it feels more and more like the OS is actively antagonistic towards the user. This has come to a peak with Windows 11.

Not too long ago I booted up an old laptop and put a fresh install of Windows 7 on it for kicks. Amazing how much of a breath of fresh air that was.

Not the OP, but one thing I've run into is that I've had three or four Windows installs (both Windows 11 and Windows 10) just fail to upgrade - one of them new upgrades just stopped showing up, I had to install an 'enablement package' and that fixed it but there was literally no warning or instructions of what to do, I just had to Google it when I noticed I wasn't getting updates.

The others just failed with random hexadecimal error codes, again I had to Google to try and work out what was going on.

With one of them I had to use the command line and diskpart etc. to expand the recovery partition because apparently the default size when I'd made that Windows 10 install was no longer big enough, and Windows Update couldn't work this out (the error code from the failure was nondescript, took ages to find out what was actually wrong) and couldn't fix it. Had to do it manually in Powershell.

Another one I think might have fixed by running sfc and dism recovery commands in the command line, again it would be nice if Windows could work this out itself!

  • To be fair, macOS isn't much better in this regard, the error codes can be quite cryptic, for example what is a -2003F.

    For some reason, a game I play called DCS can be buggy and I've been told by the support to sfc /scannow and dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. For some reason on every install of Windows 11 I've ever done, it always picks up tons of broken files. This is installing using the latest at the time Microsoft ISO. I've had this issue on multiple different systems, a modern gaming pc, a Mac with bootcamp, an older Lenovo M93p and when installing inside VMWare or KVM.

    I do get less application and operating system crashes on a Mac though.