How do people still use Windows?
Windows 7 was great, but after that it felt like someone scraped together bloat, telemetry and spyware and called it "Windows".
Windows 7 was great, but after that it felt like someone scraped together bloat, telemetry and spyware and called it "Windows".
11 I hated, until it fixed its weird breakages and compatibility issues. And of course after switching everything around to look and function just like 10.
But Windows apps (let's be clear this is more an app problem than an OS problem) are filled with dumb shit like this. I have had many app performance issues where ProcMon shows a high number of IO operations against files, folders, registry, etc. Part of this is due to Windows Installer advertisement, which can inject this behavior into an application!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/platform...
(How does this happen? When an advertised entrypoint is invoked - shortcut, COM interface, file extension association, a few other things), there's 'Darwin Code' injected into the registry which causes an evaluation of *.msi packages installed which have that advertised entrypoint registered. It checks to see if any components are broken by checking the keypaths (keypaths could be files, folders, registry entries).
If you have an application invoking COM Interfaces many times a second, it's going to inject a bunch of IO ops to each time check all the components installed. I've seen apps when repackaged from an *.exe install into an *.msi slow down to a crawl (until you rebuild them with self-registration instead of using the MSI advertised tables).
What are you going to do, install linux? Then you get to enjoy your package manager deleting your windowing environment when you try to install Steam because of some stupid overlooked thing. You can't even click a single button to roll back your install to a previous known good condition, like Windows has had since like 2000.
I haven't had this issue, strangely. These days all my OS's are on SSD's though. But that was not the case when I first moved over to Win10 for my gaming PC and work both.
The shenanigans with windows updates though... I am convinced that there's something in the OS to intentionally cause strange behavior when updates are pending as a way of incentivizing you to reboot. This didn't used to happen. I haven't yet made the time to properly study it, because it's always at a moment where I have more important things to do.
You can, just use an immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue.
Linux, in my personal experience, requires faaaaaaar more debugging and tinkering and configuring. A full order of magnitude more time spent at least. This time is reduced if you’ve been using and configuring Linux boxes for 20 years. YMMV.
Now if you want to configure every little thing maybe that’s a good thing. If you want your computer to work consistently and without tinkering it’s maybe a bad thing.
And Windows + Visual Studio is still the best debugging experience for native code.
While Windows isn't without its flaws and has had its share of problematic updates, it generally feels more stable during routine updates compared to Linux.
Linux does offer better recovery options when things go awry. In contrast, troubleshooting on Windows can be challenging. Nonetheless, I find the recent versions of Windows to be more user-friendly than Linux desktops. Plus, with the addition of WSL, I can run Linux applications — including those with a GUI — when needed.