I realize this is a Linux community, but I was wondering why you still hate Windows. I mean, I love Linux, but I will not argue that it’s more convenient to the average person in most use cases to use Windows, I recently had to switch back to Windows and I realized how convenient it all was and how I was missing so many things because of my love for Linux. But at this point, Linux is a part of my personality and my self-image and I will not leave it, but I gotta be honest, it’s pretty convenient being on Windows. So, why have you guys chosen to still stay on Linux? Some reasons I can appreciate include
- The terrible privacy policies of Microsoft. It sometimes makes you feel like your computer is not owned by you but lent to you by Big Tech.
- The community and the spirit of sharing
- The joy of “figuring it out” and customizing everything you want to the minutest details
- FREEDOM!!!
sudo suKinda ties into the previous points, but still one of the best selling points, the freedom to do whatever you want is liberating. You can run a server on it or you can create a script while knowing you have control over almost every FOSS app there is or just destroy your whole system with one command. Idk, feels good man!
These are the big ones, but one must realize you are sacrificing many things while not using windows too, productivity can be much greater there if you are a normie, it’s really convenient! So yeah! Give me your reasons! Also, how many of you dual boot?
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
More or less applies to Apple and most companies.
I still rank OSX higher, simply because it’s at least consistent. Windows is a fucking mess.
I genuinely don’t find Windows easier to use. And troubleshooting Windows problems is a friggin’ nightmare compared to Linux.
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
diskpartand 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.
You can move Windows Recovery to C: drive but I don’t recall the exact commands. Maybe I moved the recovery image to C: partition. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/reagentc-command-line-options?view=windows-11
eh…i installed windows 10 for someone last month and it went pretty smoothly. just say you don’t want to connect an account, “you wont be able to use one-drive” , ok whatever . reject all “send us optional data” prompts. update to the latest version, and done.
the shittiest part of the install was trying to download the ISO… apparently windows doesn’t want Linux users to download their system or something, had to get it from a windows laptop.
Offlive account during install works only when you are not connected to the internet from that PC. Maybe also only with Win Pro, not Home.
The crap you have to disable are all dark patterns and I hope the EU rips them a few more holes.
“Just update”… I think I went into enough details about what pissed me off in my initial comment.
Almost every Linux distro would have been: boot the installer, select disk, select meta packages, username, password, done. 10 mins later you have an up to date system with no shady online crap.
I honest to god find Linux easier to use. Though it’s maybe because the most used programs on my laptop are neovim, gcc and rust compiler and Firefox . And I shit you not, Microsoft purposefully slowed down the Firefox browser I installed from their store.
Plus I like using a tiling window manager when coding, now in Linux I have 500 options. On windows I get a middle finger and a dedicated nsa/fbi agent. Whats not to hate?
Same, basically Windows became progressively harder to use for me. It’s so slow, for one.
Because every time I’m reminded the underlying OS exists it’s always something negative.
On windows: Forced restarts and updates that take over 5x as long as my Linux (or FreeBSD build), ui that constantly undoes what I customized, ads and preinstalled malware essentially like candy crush even on builds from Microsoft directly, worse performance with a much higher number of crashes under load on my current box, and no auto login/name any simple customization without screwing around with registry editor to name just the simple things. More advanced problems include no hypervisor built in to the home version, everything is pay to unlock features my Linux install does for free, no zfs software raid for storage safekeeping, most fixes when I do have errors involve googleing cryptic hex codes and being told to run fsck/chdsk as the only solution for often times hours of searching before finally finding the actual answer - not to mention most other fixes being to download a library/binary of the sketchiest sounding website ever that i can’t verify isn’t a virus.
On linux or even FreeBSD which took a bit to get installed to my liking i may have put work in up front but its like 3 hours at most of my time for 6+ years of stability and proper functioning to avoid all of the above plus no microsoft telemetry etc. I switched when i first tried Vista and even today every time i have to use Microsoft’s horrific excuse for an OS it is heartburn inducing.
Each time I tell this story, I try to make it shorter and more terse.
Circa 2012 or 2013 I bought a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby. With that I learned a little bit of Python and Bash, learned to type sudo etc, and kinda liked what I saw. Meanwhile, my Win 7 laptop died right as I was going back to school, so I bought a new laptop. This new laptop had two problems: 1. it came with Windows 8.1 and 2. it was a lemon. For most of the first semester going back to school I had no reliable laptop. The only modern supported computer I had was that Raspberry Pi. And for most of a semester that’s what I did school assignments and email on until I finally bullied Dell into replacing that lemon Inspiron they sold me outright.
So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.1 did. So I fully switched.
That was 10 years ago now, and for the last decade I’ve heard Windows users do nothing but piss and moan about the new holes Microsoft has found to fuck them in.
So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.
Know and respect this feeling, I am using MX Linux and have a very customized panel, settings and shortcuts. It’s home, even if it were to be wiped out, I would still put in all the effort to reinstall it.
But, I gotta admit, when Windows works as intended, it’s good for being productive and I technically should be learning how to use Windows properly as my work requires me to :')
My computers at work are on win 11 and good god, almost every time I log in I have to reset all my Taskbar setting (left instead of goddam CENTER, minimize the search bar, unpin the bullshit, only combine when full) and the most egregious issue of all is win11 doesn’t let you reposition the task bar anymore!
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.
FDE requires third-party software (veracrypt)
There’s bitlocker, I think it was added in 7 or Vista. What do you mean?
But other than that, I would rather use VC too.standard system utilities (think ssh, git etc.) are not available on a fresh install
Hmm, depends. It has a built in openssh client and server, but the “feature” (automatically installing package) is off by default. It can be enabled at install time with the use of the standard windows image modification tools (DISM I think?)
And then you’re supposed to download and install .exe files from the internet? Since microsoft controls what goes in the windows store
I think it’s better that Microsoft does not have that much control over software distribution.
But again, most things you want aren’t there, and you can’t even trust the things that are there.
Of course you can’t, nobody can tell by looking at the store page if it was modified by anyone, including Microsoft.
The amazon app store for android explicitely tells that they are adding tracking code to every uploaded app, and to make this possible they replace the digital signature of apps uploaded. Google with the play store does not tell anything like this afaik, but for a few years now it also basically compromised the digital signatures of developers, by requiring the private keys to be mandatorily handed in for continued app updates.
I don’t trust that these companies that already rely on mass surveillance as a revenue stream, they won’t add tracking code to apps unauthorized by the devs. If not right now, it will happen in the future.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.
Besides quality, I think open source distro’s repository and it’s packagers are largely more trustable. They are not motivated financially to modify the packages in unwanted (by the user) ways, and they are transparent.
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 think they are drifting farther and farther away.
It was an option. But the shitshow of 11… thanks that’s too much. I’m not installing that for anyone. And 10 is soon end of life…
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 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.
.” I might come and use it time to time, but only when absolutely necessary
I get that!
Installing updates… Do not turn off your computer
Please stay to the end because it’s important, and it’s going to be a horrible bait and switch but it’s not INTENDED that way. I can’t think of another way to present the difficult combination of interests that seem to be driving MS software lately.
I actually quite like Windows 11, and I love Edge when they’re doing their core functions. Windows 11 is reasonably solid and useful for normal use. Edge is faster than Chrome and has the best vertical tabs implementation on the planet. Much of the baseline software that Microsoft is putting out has never been better, and is often really good at doing the basic things software should do. I really do feel like the genuine technology people in Microsoft are trying, and often succeeding, to make good technology products.
But… the bottom-feeder marketing drones and MBAs got their hands on them and started layering creepier and creepier nonsense over the top. Mandatory logins to glorified data collection engines. Monetization strategies masquerading as features. Overt advertisement. Heavy-handed promotion of Microsoft’s own products. I finally stopped using Edge (on Linux!) when I discovered that just looking at the settings the wrong way would re-enable every intrusive setting imaginable and ditched Windows entirely when I saw the same things creeping into the OS (as well as a general disgust with privately-owned OSes in general). They are destroying trust.
In the great irony of my life, because normally work PC Windows installs have been hot garbage, I have Win11 on a work laptop and it’s actually really great to use since all of the intrusive stuff is turned off by our security team. I would still prefer linux or macos (in that order), but as a “forced to use it” option, it’s not bad at all. Go back and read that again: it’s a pleasant and easy to use OS if all the intrusive marketing functionality is turned off because it presents a security hazard.
PS. Not sacrificing anything being predominantly linux-based and am in fact far, far more efficient on linux (and I am not a programmer or in any other technology role).
Great answers already, I’ll not repeat them. One thing I want to mention though is the interoperability of the Linux applications. Things work together well. With Windows (up to 10 at least, I haven’t used windows much in the last years) applications are mostly their own silo. In KDE it’s quite fluent. E.g. gwenview, the image viewer offers to open an image in krita, gimp, etc. It also offers an option to add a folder to the “places” list in dolphin (the file manager). Dolphin lets you quickly (F4) open and close a terminal at the current folder within its window. Small things like these make the system feel coherent.
The other big thing for me is the plethora of great apps you have out of the box. And the ease to install new ones without worrying whether you are the product.
Ayy thanks for letting me know that keyboard shortcut! I try to keep that terminal window open but sometimes I accidentally type exit and have to open it again through the GUI, f4 is much easier!
I think I need like 2 weeks to tell all the reasons I hate it.
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.
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