When things go wrong in Windows at an app or third party software, stuff is often fixable. At worst you might need to reinstall the damn thing. But if the OS itself starts doing weird stuff, things often go to the headache territory really fast. Get a weird error, log says some OS component is going boom, no idea how to fix it, official instructions are along the lines of “Well if DISM and SFC are not going to fix it, looks like you need to reinstall the entire damn OS.” Which usually wouldn’t be a cause for anxiety, but blergh, muh preschus licence key, hope I won’t screw that up.
Meanwhile, I ran one Debian install for over 20 years once. Stuff is usually very fixable indeed. There are good logs. It’s rarely a complete mystery why some program is doing what it doing. At absolute worst you might need to look at the source code, which is actually rare.
I’ve spent the entire morning trying to install sql 2022 and it fails on a mysterious error message. The suggested fixes don’t work.
I’ll have the same problems on Linux occasionally but at least I did not pay to have those issues.
No touchpad gestures, terrible window management and a non-unix shell are the big ones for me with the Microsoft account AI bullshit being a close second.
ITT people who didn’t/couldn’t install Windows via Rufus, and/or don’t know how to set up an OS
It’s rare and fixable, but every now and then I download a file and it just fucks up my icon cache and makes Explorer practically impossible to use. Some other issues I’ve encountered is that if you have a ton (and I mean it, over 10k) of fonts, then apps in general start lagging (VLC and Figma are the ones most affected by this), and that Defender is a bit too good and causes certain apps to lag like mad since it sandboxes it iirc
Bill Gates, except when Ballmer was there.
Lots of stuff and while telemetry eventually made me quit, the most annoying have always been random performance issues. Still have to use Windows at work and I sometimes get progress bars in the Windows Explorer when accessing a fucking directory on the local SSD.
To list a few:
- Onedrive deleting my files
- Very slow
- ads
- ai bullshit
- updating is a pain
- recall
it feels like the natural result of corporate agile. dozens of teams doing little pieces with one dude making each smaller part all on their own. then someone just overrides the merge rules. and now i’m stuck trying to follow the ravings of angry lunatics all talking at once. i just want the os to shut up and do what i tell it to do. and i absolutely do not want it to start pretending its alive with some stupid chat bot ai nonsense.
Ads in a purchased OS.
Forced Edge openings that, as far as I can tell, can’t be avoided.
The fact that it isn’t open source and costs money to use. I actually like Windows over Linux even as someone who has written Linux kernel drivers for a living, or maybe because of that but the fact that I can’t poke around the code and improve the system is annoying to me.
It’s also why I’m working on a project to develop my own OS from scratch that has a better design and programming interface than POSIX and Linux respectively and is easy to use like Windows. It’s not an easy task but certainly a worthwhile one IMO.
- The search in the start menu searching the fucking web with bing instead of my computer
- Accidentally hitting F1 and Edge immediately opens with some “help”
Try MSEdgeRedirect, friend. It won’t stop it from opening a browser, but at least it won’t be Edge.
I switched to Linux Mint, it helped as well!
I have to use it for work, and I hate how links to other apps, say a Teams meeting, dot open up the app. Rather, they open a new tab in a browser, only to open the app while leaving a blank open tab in the background. It’s just sloppy as hell.
Eroding / taking away user agency. It’s always little bits they chip away but over the time those chips amount to a huge cut off edge of things you cannot do anymore, or only through very convoluted and potentially breaking third party tweaks & tools. Every Windows installation ended up with a growing shit-list of things to do. Disable this, tweak that, download tool X, Y & Z just to further disable & tweak shit, and whoop-de-doo several hours have already passed when you’re finally “done”. Then, in the middle of doing shit, Windows update! “No! Go away!” 10 minutes later… “Hey, I think you forgot about me?” - “NO, I UPDATE WHEN I SHUT THE DAMN PC DOWN, NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS! GO AWAY!” … “BUT HAVE YOU HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, THE WINDOWS UPDATE?! OH AND BY THE WAY, WE RE-ENABLED OUR SPYING OPTIONS AGAIN AND WILL SEND ALL THE UNSENT DATA BEFORE YOU CAN DISABLE IT AGAIN!”
At some point I just realized that using Windows became more of a hassle than using Linux. And when you finally do the switch, you suddenly realize how fucking awesome it is that your OS is not constantly nagging you, not constantly spying on you, not constantly fighting you, not constantly changing its configuration to re-enable the things you purposefully disabled. I finally have an operating system again that does what I want it to do, a system that respects my privacy, as well as me as a user.
A lot of software did not run under windows NT4. Especially stuff that used the soundblaster directly.
Plug-n-play never worked, and drivers for hardware usually only came on floppy for DOS/win3/win95.
For some reason USB-drivers were not installed by default, either. That’s after swapping through 18 diskettes during installation. Just copy it all if you’re going to have me be a human jukebox.
