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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

I'd give my favorite toes for a windows computer that can turn on reliably without having to apply innumerable updates, open a document without involving a web browser, or leave my taskbar icons alone from one month to the next. And I would literally pay a fee if my MS-powered work machines were able to go a day without some inane popup notification getting between me and whatever I want to click on. The best UI for an is one that stays out of the user's way. I cannot stand all these over-engineered, ad-forwarding, popup obsessed cartoon interfaces. When I want you to open a PDF then open the GD PDF using Adobe and go away!

(I talk of my work machines over which I have absolutely no control. Every personal machine I own, that isn't a phone, runs some variation of linux.)

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IMO a blind spot that all OS vendors have is the "use just once in awhile" use case. The problem is that every small little thing that is added accrues while the system is offline and when it is brought back online you have dozens of updates pending.

I use Windows daily and think it's fine. However today I turned on a laptop in a coffee shop that has been offline for a few weeks, needing to get a few things done. It saturated the small amount of wifi bandwidth allocated to me by the AP for at least a half hour doing stuff, making the work I wanted to do take longer. Under normal circumstances if I used this laptop daily I probably wouldn't have noticed.

It is a paradox that in our world of always-online software that the less you use it the worse it gets.

>> "use just once in awhile" use case.

Like the non-removable link in my start menu for the MS "Mixed Reality Portal". Total waste of good pixels.

My daily boot into Linux I'm prompted by no end of updates. Hundreds of megabytes of core libraries, fonts, office suites I never asked for but are installed by default, and of course, the weekly or so kernel update and getting to play the lottery as to whether your computer will boot again.

On Linux you can turn that off if you don’t like it. And if it installed something you don’t need, just uninstall it. You don’t have to moan about it here, just fix it once and then it won’t annoy you again.

Windows 10 LTSC does most of what you said and can be acquired for less than your toes ;)

I totally get it though, they make it unreasonably difficult to get a usable OS. Default home or even """Professional""" windows makes my eyes water it's so stinky.

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