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Comment by pixelpoet | Hacker News Reader

What makes my blood boil is that they are just going to keep pulling shit like this which they KNOW everyone (with zero exceptions) intensely HATES, and it's up to everyone to push back ferociously (very high threshold) every damn time. It's up there with "not now" instead of "get rekt and never ask me again" choices in terms of user-antagonism.

I'm aware that other OSes exist, but I happen to hate Windows least on the whole :/

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I'm glad that it's shining a light on the reality of Windows 11 as a subscription and data collecting vehicle.

If you still hate Windows least, that's almost certainly because it's what you know best. I work with Windows, Linux, and OSX on a daily basis and Windows is easily the most user-hostile of the three.

Edit: All you know -> What you know best

I've used them all, Mac OS most begrudgingly as needed for cross platform building and testing/support, Linux is alright (and obviously more powerful than Windows) but... just because I have programmer-level troubleshooting skills and computer knowledge, doesn't mean I want / have the energy to use the full force of that all the time for every random thing that could be solved with a simple dialog box and/or sane default. (I understand that opensource OSes don't have paid devs responsible for all this, but it is what is when I download it and try it out.)

It's true that I'm most familiar with Windows; given free choice, why would someone use an OS they dislike more? I personally think Mac OS is more user-hostile (it's a whole lifestyle and worldview they really want to sell you!) but it's comparable.

What I actually want isn't Linux or Mac OS, but a Windows-like OS that isn't so goddamn user hostile and doing stupid shit like always-listening Cortana or this Recall feature or whatever they feel trumps what the user actually wants. If there were a "Windows but actually a user-first product and not a data collection vehicle" I bet it would utterly crush in the marketplace (inasmuch as there is a viable market for OSes).

Apple really likes to limit hardware interoperability because hardware is where they make their $, but there's a lot more overlap in software compatibility between OSX and Linux than Windows and anything else. Just having the familiar terminal environment alone is worth a lot to me.

> I'm aware that other OSes exist, but I happen to hate Windows least on the whole :/

Have you given Linux a try? Unless you have an Nvidia card or an Adobe workflow; it is usually good. The Nvidia issue may go away in a year.

What do you mean about NVIDIA? I find their drivers have become pretty good. Especially so if you're using them with containers.

> What do you mean about NVIDIA? I find their drivers have become pretty good. Especially so if you're using them with containers.

Have they? What GPU? Are you using the new open source kernel driver? Wayland or X?

Yeah, a few times. Got burned very early on installing Slackware from about 10 billion stiffie disks, and have kept up reasonable effort to be a responsible nerd and keep trying it, but every time there's some roadblock; when I was younger gaming was one example, being an MSVC dev has been a constant throughout, and yeah the ordeal with drivers is also more or less a constant.

I'm an OpenCL guy, not even using CUDA, and have had a decent enough experience with AMD's drivers, but that wasn't enough. I still think MSVC, again with all its flaws, is the best C++ IDE (I've similarly tried them all, repeatedly over decades).

> Yeah, a few times. Got burned very early on installing Slackware from about 10 billion stiffie disks

Please do not use Slackware. With respect to Slackware, almost no one uses it because it is very old school. If I remember correctly you have to use a 3rd party tool to even download updates or packages. It took years for the maintainer to actually have a release. Please use a modern developer distro that has a regular release cycle and modern tools. Fedora or Ubuntu. If you need to use Nvidia, go with Ubuntu.

Also when did you use it? Linux distros haven't used floppy disks in so long.

> I'm an OpenCL guy, not even using CUDA, and have had a decent enough experience with AMD's drivers

That is not my field, but Fedora added the ROCm packages in 40. You can install those and give it a try.

> I still think MSVC, again with all its flaws, is the best C++ IDE (I've similarly tried them all, repeatedly over decades).

I still remember during my time in college (where they required us to use Visual C++) a friend and I were playing with the latest C++ features. We had this very difficult runtime bug. I later found notes in the news that Microsoft's implementation of C++ at the time was incomplete. Tried it in GCC-worked out of the box.

>I'm aware that other OSes exist, but I happen to hate Windows least on the whole :/

Would you like to share what you like about windows that you don't have on other operating systems, or what puts you off about other OSes? Not trying to be passive aggressive, just curious

Sure; originally it was about having the best graphics and OpenCL drivers for my development needs, and that I've been an MSVC user since version 5. My hate for Windows pales in comparison to things like CMake / the overarching philosophy that every bit of software needs its own configuration language and cmdline arg convention, things like that.

Around the time of Windows 7 for example, to me there was just no contest whatsoever in terms of ease of use, no shaming / cargo culting (Apple can piss right off telling me that my scroll direction is "unnatural" and pushing me to use Apple-everything, users putting stickers on their cars etc), ... Windows is just the default for people coming from a gamedev and graphics background from the 90s, for better or worse. I'm painfully aware of its shortcomings, and I don't want to champion Windows, it's just what made me hate my life least on average :)

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