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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft makes the most stable, easiest to use desktop OS, especially since Apple started slowing dwindling MacOS to make it into some kind of iOS varient.

Windows still drives me nuts, has ads, gets stuck in tablet mode when I'm on a desktop, and has driver issues from time to time, but the OS has grown to become my favorite desktop environment in the past few years, if for no other reason than that everyone else keeps screwing around and tweaking things that don't need tweaking. Linux GUIs have been getting all fancy with it, Apple thinks desktops are just for making Apple software, and yet Windows remains a great place to play games, watch movies, browse the Web. It's by far and away the fastest, most responsive desktop GUI out there. I hope it gets back to basics.

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I don't know what "regular users" experience, because I'm a seasoned power user, but I agree. At home, I run things like Plex, Photoshop, Premier, Battlefield One, 1998 StarCraft, Spider Solitaire... they just work. I haven't had a real issue on my desktop, 3 laptops or 1 tablet (RT!) in a few years. (The last big issue was on a pre-release version of Windows 10.) At work I run all the .NET developer tools, alongside some front-end dev tools like Node and Grunt (what even are these things, I don't know, they work). Git, Chrome, Firefox, (Edge did have an issue with sharing an overloaded cache with IE, ew!) They just work. My biggest issue with my work machine is that it occasionally asks me to type in a 5 billion digit BitLocker key. But for the work I make it do, it works remarkably well, without complaint. shrug I am probably not a typical Windows OS user with typical experiences. But I do push my machines hard. (The corporate overlords have this machine running CrashPlan, Trend Micro.. but I run IIS, NodeJS, MongoDB, Bing Desktop, Visual Studio, Outlook, Word/Excel, Adobe Acrobat, SQL Server... the list goes on.)

My home desktop is a Phenom II w/ just 4GB. It has had Vista, 7, 8/8.1 and now 10 on it. I think I did a clean sweep with 7, but I've gone through all the upgrades since then, and it's still running pretty well. (It won't cold boot, but that's a motherboard hardware problem!) It's approaching 10 years old at this point. Of course it has an SSD (actually 3...) or it would be pretty painful to use. But it isn't, and that's pretty impressive.

Bing desktop? Really? What do you use that for?

It periodically uses extra CPU cycles! Oh, and it updates my wallpaper about once a day to something new and shiny. (Similar to what Windows 10 lock screens do, but it's a different set of photos.) Though today's red and white architectural picture is a little harder to look at than the usual landscapes and fuzzy animals.

Cool. They do have some beautiful photos on Bing

Seasoned power users (most HN participants) will generally vastly underestimate how much time they spent learning how to get their OS of choice 'just right' and subconsciously use many tricks that would not be obvious to a layman.

Yes, my Windows just works as well, but not without tweaks and regular maintenance.

> Microsoft makes the most stable, easiest to use desktop OS

> Windows still drives me nuts, has ads, gets stuck in tablet mode when I'm on a desktop, and has driver issues from time to time

Stop, you're making this macOS user jealous.

Mixing some things together, uh?

You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.

And as arguments you mention playing games, watch movies, and browse the web?! All three are possible on all mentioned systems. The last two even in the completely same way as on windows (besides user interface).

I am just glad that i switched to the other two options and never had to look back. Apple also fucks up things. Still a pretty solid system for my use case. Also i am not able to see the iOS-varent movement you mentioned. Also Linux GUIs get better and better. It shocks me everytime what Windows Users tolerate while bashing the other two system, when i have to configure something on our AD (only used Windows Server in house). Inconsistent GUI Designs on expensive software, xbox gaming center preinstalled on a SERVER EDITION, everything shuffeled together, ...

I can't speak for the server stuff, but objectively speaking gamers should be using Windows 10. Even just ignoring DirectX, it has the highest compatibility with the most popular games and most up to date drivers.

I use Debian for work but the gaming rig is straight Windows. Shame SteamOS never took of, I was into it (got the steam wifi dongly doo on the TV in the living room with four steam controllers lol)

I have a Windows 10 license literally only for gaming and they still manage to make that a horrible experience, between first party xbone controllers regularly disconnecting, forced updates happening in the middle of a game (because the clock can’t remmeber my time zone reliably), and random issues like broken Ethernet drivers (on my skylake-era motherboard) after an update, or ads for some office 365 ripping me out of a full screen game. Every time it happens I just think how much I paid for this experience.

If steam on Linux supported 1/10rd of triple A titles instead of 1/100th I would switch and never look back.

> you mention playing games, watch movies, and browse the web?! All three are possible on all mentioned systems

How is Far Cry 5 on Linux? How about MacOS?

That has more to do with ubiquity than quality.

Owner of windows 10 desktop, windows 7 laptop, and macbook pro here. Windows can go to hell. So many important things are crazy inconsistent. When plugging headphones stops being a complicated and finicky process I will consider re-evaluating my opinions.

Also do you know what the difference between a Windows fuckup and a macOS fuckup is? The macOS fuckup makes news while the Windows one in business as usual.

And there are adds. Built in to my OS. Fuck that.

Actually Windows has one of the easiest ways to switch between Audio outputs, right from the taskbar. I have no idea what you are talking about.

I don't think you have used a Mac recently then. When you plug headphones in, the sound outputs through the headphones. And it works if the computer was off when you plugged them in. Or asleep. Or closed. I probably care way to much about this.

> When you plug headphones in, the sound outputs through the headphones.

That's how Windows 10 behaves for me. I already knew it, but just tried again for you playing a movie using VLC and plugging in my headphones. Works like a charm.

No pop-up menus?

I think that's a vendor implementation. I used a Lenovo for a long time, worked perfectly without a pop-up. Just got a Dell XPS 15, it pops up a prompt when I plug stuff in (but it also allows me to set a default behavior, so.... ‍️

No, never experienced them on my machine while switching between headphones and external speakers. Maybe you have some misconfigured driver?

No nothing. Also, forgot to mention another test, went to hibernate while the sound playing through laptop's speakers, plugged in headphones while the machine is off, started the machine. Sound was coming through the headphones after the boot. I'm on a t450s.

Windows frequently gets confused by my USB DAC and tries to send sound to my HDMI connected monitor.

I have the same experience - on-board sound, usb dac (primary) and hdmi audio interface on an nvidia card.

Every so often it will "forget" that it should be using the usb dac and revert to the hdmi audio output.

I'm consistently baffled by MS. It employs some incredibly smart people, but reliably generates consumer products that are bywords for uninspired user hostility.

I use Windows and that's how it worked since I can remember. There must be some issue with your OS installation, driver or laptop.

This is exactly how my Windows laptop behaves as well. I never care about it, and when I want to override it, I just do it in three clicks.

I believe that's how it work on Linux too!

Same thing happens on Windows.

Usually, it's up to the audio chipset driver manufacturers to provide the headphone switching logic. Windows itself has a more passive view of sound devices. You can change the active device from the context menu of the speaker icon in the system tray, and some chipsets (e.g., Realtek) tend to do the headphone switching for you.

> When plugging headphones stops being a complicated and finicky process

Apple solved that problem by not even letting you plug in headphones!

My notebook had some issues re plugging in headphones and Bluetooth because of some bad Realtek drivers. Uninstalling that and using Microsoft's own drivers solved the problem.

3rd party software on Windows machines is an ongoing problem.

> You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.

Sure they can tell you that. X can be a disaster and a pain to use, and still be better than Y, if Y is a worse disaster.

You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.

This is Emacs vs vi/vim vs GUI editors (Scintilla-based, Sublime, Electron-based, whatever).

You can feel that Emacs is the best thing ever, but still hate Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Meta combinations. You can love vi and still sometimes get annoyed about switching modes.

Seems to me that part of what he's feeling is that MacOS has become the unwanted outsider, and frankly most people have better things to do / aren't OCD enough to want to spend a bunch of time trying different windowing systems.

And there’s a fine example of windows user bipolar disorder, a condition I suffer from also. It’s amazing but it pokes you in the eye ten times a day with ridiculous things that should just bloody well work.

If it didn’t poke you in the eye ten times a day it’d be perfect. However Microsoft have been chasing fad dragons for the last decade and only get 80% of the way through engineering efforts before direction changes. That last 20% is what makes people nod approvingly and smile and it’s called quality.

Hopefully this change will resolve that problem.

With a non-trivial amount of tweaking (and 3rd party apps) you can make Windows 10 a non-poke-in-the-eye OS at least until the next major named release where you then have to redo at least a third of those tweaks.

This is not huge praise for the Windows desktop but there really is a very good OS under all the crap that Microsoft seems to be piling on.

It almost feels like there are two groups running Windows development: One group that is cleaning up the file manager, the settings dialogs, adding the Linux subsystem, fixing the console, etc. And other group adding Candy Crush, Cortana, screwing up the start menu / search, Edge, etc. The look, feel, and usability of these things are so radically different it's hard to believe that same team is responsible for them all.

That's my impression too:

Whoever is working on the kernel, the driver subsystem, etc, and whoever is working on CLR stuff, can stay. Everyone else is fired.

The problem is management and organizational priorities rather than the developers themselves. Microsoft was clearly able to give users what they want in the past (Windows 7) but that's clearly not the direction they're going.

What actually still constantly boggles me is the tooling for Windows.

There are so many things that would just need a better tool shipping with the OS to be fine, but are neglected (say: the event log (slow as hell and not nearly as comfortable as `less`. 'nuff said), the services dialog (still looks like in Win95, still can't auto-refresh, still has no useful search), notepad, PS ISE, the `scheduled tasks` dialog (still confusing as hell), even the effing task manager). Then there are tools MS actually owns (cf. Sysinternals) but refuses to distribute with Windows. And then, there are the new shiny things that get implemented to the point where they just barely work, and are never touched again (like the new terminal windows and workspaces in Win10).

I mean - especially the workspaces! Just give them to an intern and tell them to do the obvious improvements. They could be great, but they are still cumbersome.

The task manager has gotten a lot of work. I massively prefer many of the old Windows-style control panel items like services, add/remove programs, networking dialogs, etc. I will give you that scheduled tasks is confusing and the event log (which is fast enough for me) isn't super comfortable.

Microsoft doesn't want to distribute more tools with Windows (like sysinternals) because they'll have ship them forever. They should, however, put them in the store.

It feels like a lot of the new features are half-baked. They have tried to go to a rapid release model which should mean continuous improvement but I don't think they're quite comfortable with that. It's like the worst of both worlds right now -- slow fixes but lots of churn.

I get that MS isn't just twiddling their thumbs and that there are tradeoffs to be considered. It's just that from the outside, it looks like they're not really considering changing anything.

Also, I too can see that there is work that has gone into the task manager. It's still nowhere near where it should be, though. Personally, I'd switch to ProcessExplorer on any machine in a heartbeat, exept that I can't, because it's not bundled, and some businesses are very paranoid on software that has to be installed additionally. Note: I'm not saying it should be the default, but it should be there.

If the thing that's holding such changes back is the release model, then perhaps this reorg might change some things? Though, I somehow doubt that was the issue here...

I left Windows years ago, when they released Vista. Vista was so bad that, suddenly, I could no longer see a credible upgrade path.

I had been dabbling with linux, so I switched to Ubuntu for a few years. But then Ubuntu also lost its mind, so I switched to Arch for a a year. I learned a lot during my time with Arch, but the most important lesson is "wow, a full blown OS, with an integrated DE, network management, and a dozen other systems does so much more for me than I ever knew."

Then I switched to OSX for a time. I suffered greatly. Folks think Apple's software quality issues are a recent thing, but they aren't. Apple has always been extremely bad at making reliable software. I wasn't doing anything fancy, but experience data loss issues due to file system errors, iTunes wiping out years of song metadata, and on and on. And OSX is incredibly slow - not because of the software, but because of the CPU, RAM, and heat limits imposed by apple form factors. Even now, my work laptop is a fancy MBP, and it is just dog slow when doing any kind of meaningful work. The only nice thing about OSX is being able to pull of a terminal with familiar tools.

I decided to try out windows 10 on my home desktop. I built this rig for much less than the cost of a mac, with all top-end parts. With 8 logical CPUs and 64gb RAM, it flies and I almost never experiences a slowdown of any kind. It doesn't matter how many dozens of browser tabs, terminals, or apps I have open. Running Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux is very pleasant and gives me access to proper command line tools. I haven't experienced the issues you mention (drivers all work like magic, haven't seen any ads, no tablet mode issues).

I have some issues with Windows still. They've really outdone themselves in making the system settings windows almost totally unusable and confusing. And I wish a bash shell was the default terminal, along with more pre-packaged open source tools. Probably the single worst part is Windows Update - it is a fucking abomination, impossible to predict (will restarting or shutting down actually cause a 20 minute update cycle?) and disrupting work at all the wrong times. And bitlocker's refusal to just encrypt a hard drive without a TPM module present is stupid, especially since it wont let me save the encryption key to dropbox (saving to the same drive being encrypted is not allowed).

But none of the downsides are deal breakers for me. My system is super stable, is always fast, and let's me get work done. I love it.

> And bitlocker's refusal to just encrypt a hard drive without a TPM module present is stupid, especially since it wont let me save the encryption key to dropbox (saving to the same drive being encrypted is not allowed).

???

Do you have Pro or Home? The full Bitlocker in Pro does (or did) allow encryption without TPM. Both my desktop and old laptop did not have TPM and have Bitlocker enabled. It also let me back up the key to the local (Bitlocker encrypted) drive.

I disagree with a few things in your post, but foremost among them is the word "stable". Just some anecdata, but the number of times I've had to reinstall because the OS was misbehaving and I couldn't figure out how to fix it:

Linux: 0 MacOS X: 1 Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year.

Have you ever noticed how in most orgs, every IT guy's first response to a weird-looking Windows problem is to suggest a reinstall? And that's not even irrational. Troubleshooting Windows takes too long to be worthwhile, because there are too many places to look for where things might be going wrong. Its complexity has become unfathomable to mere mortals, and it shows in maintaining the OS.

Haha, how have you managed to avoid Linux re-installs? I almost always eventually break something horribly while tinkering. Always my fault, but still requires a reinstall.

Oh if I'm screwing things up just to learn, I don't count that, and I've done that plenty of times on all operating systems I've used. Not the OS's fault, even for Windows. Just part of the fun!

I had the same problem until I realized this is actually a distro problem. Most distros focus very much on making the installing and configuring "easy" (still leaving much room for debate), but in turn make their system so rigid that it's pretty much unthinkable to fix lower-level problems during updates. Often, the software they package is ancient, which also doesn't help.

If you're interested in avoiding that, try a rolling-release distro (updating frequently) with good documentation and a sane low-level setup.

Is there a particular distro you'd recommend?

Hardly; I personally settled with Arch and am pretty pleased with it, but I understand that it's far from everyone's cup of tea. Their documentation is excellent though, and can be a great help with problems on other distros, too. You just have to be aware that your distro might not do everything the same way when you use it.

I've heard good things about OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I have never tried it, so I can't vouch for it.

If you have the time and energy, I'd recommend you to look at a couple of distros yourself and see how much of the "dirty hands" part you can grasp yourself from the documentation. Can you fix GRUB or their equivalent yourself? Is there documentation on how to do things without a GUI? I'd say those are certainly a good sign.

As a bad example, I wasted a whole afternoon once trying to uninstall a botched Radeon driver in the TTY on Fedora (since it screwed up Xorg beyond repair). Their documentation was abysmal[1]. That's the stuff you want to avoid.

[1]: In fact, in the end, it turned out I had to set a magical environment variable that was never mentioned in the small paragraph there was in the docs. Oh, and of course, the driver was botched because of a system upgrade I couldn't revert.

Edit: OTOH, if you're more patient than me (and don't screw around with e.g. PPAs because you want a new-ish version of certain libraries), you might find using ZFS for your main drive to be a good idea. Make a snapshot, upgrade and if something breaks: revert and wait for a fix.

Edit2: Also, if you're going to try a rolling release: Don't wait too long for updates and find the news channel where breaking changes (and the necessary upgrade steps) are communicated. It's important to know about those, and it simultaneously helps you in guessing how often they're about to happen. Arch's feed is on their landing page, for example.

I also have to reboot my Mac once in a while when it gets in some broken state.

> Linux: 0 MacOS X: 1 Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year.

When I was first reading your comment I assumed it was experience in the distant past. The different experiences people have with the same software is incredible to me. I have owned four Windows computers, up to present day, and maintained those of family and some friends, and not once have I had to reinstall Windows since the days of Windows 2000, excepting harddrive failures. I always wonder what makes the difference.

But I guess if I knew, Microsoft would know (being staffed by people smarter and more informed than me), and hopefully fix whatever causes the problems necessitating reinstall.

It's like all the complaints about Firefox's memory usage - people have complained about it for years, it's clearly a real problem for some? many? users, but I have never seen it on any platform.

I don't think it's really fixable. As I mentioned, Windows has gotten too complex, and one of the reasons why is that there is too much legacy cruft. Some bug in a random piece of software flipped a bit somewhere in the registry that upsets another piece of software? Good luck ever finding that. And is the registry ever going to go away? Nope. Not unless MS decides to break with backwards compatibility on an apocalyptic scale.

To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine.

Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more.

Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works.

This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.

Hmm, doesn't that sound like a job for the hosts file (on any of the OSes)? Unless 'server' and 'router' don't have fixed IPs somehow?

No. Then every time I make a change in my network (not just changing IPs, but when I add a machine), I would have to modify a bunch of host files on all my different machines. No, this is actually what DNS is made for. As I said, Linux and MacOS are fine with it. It's Windows that's causing a problem.

Anecdata: I have never had to re-install windows in the last decade on my personal machine (neither have I had to reinstall Linux or OSX). My current W10 machine at work is at a 140 day uptime because I netured the update and can't be bothered to update. My W7 Laptop hasn't been re-installed since I purchased it in 2012 !!

https://imgur.com/a/u1h1a

I gotta say, that's impressive.

But ... patching.

That's business as usual actually. I don't know wth you are doing with your machines but Windows is crazy stable. Much more than my mac at work. And linux... like... nevermind...

Well I guess that's business as usual on Windows if you turn off software updates. I don't think anybody should do that.

Microsoft/Windows backwards compatibility is absolutely insane. I am running software from the 90s on my Windows machine. It works fine.

There's nothing particularly insane about not breaking the APIs with every single release like OS X does with user-facing stuff or Linux does with kernel-facing stuff.

In fact, you have to go the extra mile to break stuff.

You'd be surprised, because a lot of Windows software developers do unholy things like plugging into undocumented APIs or modifying parts of the OS that should not be modified.

Previous leaks of Windows source have indicated Microsoft ends up putting in a lot of workarounds to give specific third party apps old functionality just because some app is popular and badly written and a fix for something else broke it.

Can you please give an example of something that is used frequently and that is as backwards compatible as Windows. Android is not from my experience(having to be often be recompiled for newer version.)

I can't, and that's sad.

>if for no other reason than that everyone else keeps screwing around and tweaking things that don't need tweaking.

Sadly, Microsoft has decided to follow this path lately too. It's truly terrible that this mentality has infected them because there doesn't currently exist a decent alternative. They'll just keep screwing things up just enough that other desktops are still screwed up worse.

Makes me want to give up computing and live in a cave.

It's unfortunate but OSX really does have lots of bugs and quirks that don't get fixed while linux and wayland are being integrated at a snails pace.

> Linux GUIs have been getting all fancy with it

this is true mainly only for current Gnome and KDE-

stay with xfce, lxde or even a window manager and this is not the case.

Barebones gnome has been great for me. One time I did the "full" install by accident and yea it came with a bunch of bullshit games and stuff, but otherwise it's been the most stable out of all of them.

Unity or whatever Ubuntu ships with did not like working from an install on neither my macbook pro nor my thinkpad, and it really didn't like my 4k monitor. KDE didn't like switching between 4k and my laptop screen.

I'm only just now trying out Debian KDE as a daily driver (previously only Windows/OSX for all non "RDP/SSH into this box, run 5 commands for troubleshooting stuff then exit" usage scenarios) and I have to say, I'm okay with them getting all fancy with it if it means I have fuzzy analogues to Windows' Start Menu, Control Panel applets, settings dialogues, etc.

The menus, etc. help me grope my way through the dark as I learn the "Linux Way" of computing concepts.

Edit: fix my grammar a bit

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