If you need Windows software, why not just run Windows? Why make life more difficult?
The cost of it not withstanding, the OS itself is just janky. So. I’d prefer not to.
Windows unactivated is actually free to use (just use a generic key from its official documentation) and most of its preloaded bloatware can be removed with single-use scripts.
It’s so much of a surface area that it’s hard to be objective on all fronts, nothing is perfect and I could come up with 1000 ways that Linux is better or that macos is better or that windows is better. But it largely doesn’t matter.
The parent postulated “why not use windows”. Well, I don’t like using windows but often I need to run software developed for windows.
The same way that windows now has an emulation/virt layer for Linux, people want to use Linux programs from windows.
I dont begrudge those users for using Linux software on windows or look down on them for that.
Enjoying the Experience of the operating system you use is just so incredibly subjective…
I recently had the mispleasure of reinstalling a windows machine and kept getting frustrated at the requirement to have a Microsoft account, drivers that didn’t seem to find my drives (?) but could with an Intel computer from the same brand (and similar model) of motherboard. I got frustrated when trying to use the win32 api because it expects WTF16, padded and null terminated strings but only passed as mutable pointers.
And if you want to pass a strict to a function, you must pass a raw pointer. Which is inherently unsafe in rust.
These things annoy me.
Then: I tried to activate windows and saw the jaw dropping price. The price is more than a quarter of a reasonably priced home PC. No wonder the OEMs install bloatware to get the price down.
You’re not wrong, using virtualization like a Windows VM in Linux is still using windows and is the best way for compatibility. Wine either works ok (mostly), needs lots of weird configuration to get it to intergrate into Linux or look ok, or it doesn’t work at all most of the time.