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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Mac & Linux user since about 2007 or so, and I had no idea what Windows had become. Then a couple weeks ago I caved and built my son a Windows gaming PC. Egads, Windows is annoying! Even more so than I remember! I'm amazed that people actually put up with it for their daily driver. Right on schedule, my son came to me yesterday evening and asked what he should do about the backup warning. It didn't give any option other than enabling backup or telling it to remind later. WTF.

Not to say that MacOS isn't occasionally very annoying as well. It is. But as a tool it's also much more useful than vanilla Windows, which helps a little.

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My Mac tells me 5+ times per day that it's unable to backup something or another because I'm not logged into the Apple cloud or whatever it's called. And there's not obvious way to make it stop.

This is not unique to Windows.

If you don't want to receive notifications from iCloud, go into Notifications in the System Settings and uncheck the box next to iCloud in the list of what is allowed to send notifications.

How do you do you block One Drive on Windows from nagging you constantly?

True that was the other reason I moved off it. Linux and KDE have never bothered me about such matters <3

However macOS doesn't cram this party advertising, news headlines, shopping coupons and (for now) AI services down your throat.

You can't turn off notifications on MacOS AFAICT, but you can set "quiet hours" to 24 hours a day. So now I only see any notifications if I happen to be using my computer at exactly 10:00 pm.

If you have any notifications you actually do want, this isn't a viable solution. But personally I have yet to ever see a notification on my computer which I considered important.

You can quite literally just turn off notifications on macOS.

May I ask how?

I'm aware you can disable notifications for a single app at a time. Is there a way to disable them entirely?

I don't run into that, but I do have an iCloud account and I'm logged into it, which probably helps. I'm logged into my Microsoft account on Windows, too, but it is still pushy.

The only, as per personal exp, way to properly setup a Win11 machine these days is strictly via LTSC release and WinUtil from Chris Titus + local account - clean and no "feature" updates for almost 10 yrs. Add to that Chocolatey for package management that takes away the "every piece of software adds it's own autoupdater crap"-pain and the OS is suddenly very capable for almost all computing needs.

It's funny to me to see that to achieve this Linux-like result you need to go through the Linux-like installation process.

We're a niche, but at this point most people I see around are spending the majority of their time in unix/linux through whatever layer feels right for them, be it the Darwin system or WSL2 or straight docker/container. The overall maintenance being linuxy is par for the course.

Good timing to plug this other article on the top page, Exactly om that paradox:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286

> Linux-like installation process

Maybe that of 20 years ago, it's very smooth these days if you use e.g. Debian.

Somehow, archinstall is more straightforward than even this.

It's worth mentioning that 10 also has LTSC variants, the IoT LTSC version in particular will be supported with security updates until 2032 if I recall.

Is buying the Enterprise version another method? I heard someone suggest that, but without any explanation other than it allowed you to use Windows without a Microsoft account. Is there something that makes it unsuitable for gaming?

You cannot simply buy Enterprise edition. It is subscription-only. It comes with Enterprise subscription to M365.

Why Chocolatey and not WinGet?

I started out with WinGet but found the coverage lacking and ended up sideloading stuff which then soured the whole thing for me.. Choco basically has better coverage in my experience.

On their own devices, lots of non-power users probably just accept whatever Windows suggests. Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.

Techie users might just find tweaks online that allows disabling dark patterns on their devices.

I don't know how people who care but aren't techie enough to install workarounds (or to tell good ones from bad ones) deal.

> Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.

Generally if the company is deploying Windows they are using OneDrive, although the exact configuration will vary.

Windows has always been designed with corporate customers in mind. That's true more than ever today, the whole Azure ecosystem is very lucrative for them. Personal Windows users have always been an afterthought, but starting around Windows 10 they became less important than their own data. Which Microsoft has been getting away with brazenly claiming as its own.

Yes though corporate OneDrive is very different from the consumer one. It's a lot less pushy.

Though it's very well possible to use another service as a corporate client. We did for many years.

Personally, I use ShutUp10!, and after running it once, it settles everything down and Windows is my preferred OS experience.

Maybe take a look at Atlas (https://atlasos.net) next?

You install it onto a fresh Win10/11 install, and it strips out the dumb crap that MS forces on everyone. It's especially targeted towards people doing gaming on Windows, and seems to work pretty well.

People dont care about their operating system. Most Mac users never learn Mac and most Windows users never learn windows. They use their computers for emails, some presentations and occasional gaming. They dont want to learn different kinds of software. Which is fine. For most people its just a power tool they never read the manual for. They dont even know what other tools there are so they dont know that life could be better, by not using windows.

> Most Mac users never learn Mac and most Windows users never learn windows.

Why bother when annual releases will change everything?

> For most people its just a power tool they never read the manual for.

What manual?

You should read the manual to how metaphors work

Exactly! The lesson that Microsoft doesn't want to learn.

I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).

Even Linux allows such basic customization.

If Apple allowed this type of user-friendly customisation on MacOS, I suspect a lot of Windows users will migrate to Mac.

> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).

Classic Mac OS was released first, with well-considered, consistent design standards. Windows arrived almost 2 years later, and in the interest of not looking it like copied Macs, Microsoft essentially flipped the positions of everything, including window controls, toolbars, desktop icon placement, and button order. (Yes, both copied Bell Labs).

Windows has no standards, so maybe they could provide that kind of option instead.

They tried once - they released interface guidelines with Vista and for a while it worked but soon they started to flip everything over as usual. W7 was relatively a polishing up release but they mangled everything with W8 - not only because it didn't had Start button but also because they tried to combine Aero with Metro and it just look awful. It's hard to not see similarity in Apple's Liquid Glass on top of flat elements from previous releases.

All in all, Windows still comes with that 90s-early 00s flat 9x widgets buried deep beneath fancy W11 interface for compatibility reasons. Because Microsoft never could have their OS9 to OSX transition equivalent. They swapped DOS based 9x line but interface was still same - hell even NT got sprinkled with 9x and dropped old 3.x one

I have extreme doubts that there is any meaningful number of windows users holding out on trying macos based on such a thing.

The users are much more simple than this. Most have never even tried Mac. If they want to, they will just buy one the next time they need a computer and accept the new experience as being the new norm.

> Even Linux allows such basic customization.

Does Windows allow such customization? I think that's the relevant comparison. Both macOS and Windows are trying to be "user-friendly," which more and more means "take what we tell you and like it." I personally am a techie and like the Unix way of exposing everything that one can imagine to customization, but I do know that I'm often lost when I want to learn a new piece of customization-minded software and have to decide how to, and whether to, twiddle lots of knobs before even getting into just using it. I think that there's definitely a reasonable place for an OS that spends its time getting those settings right so that the user doesn't have to worry about them.

(Whether any particular setting is right or wrong is, of course, going to depend on the user. I'm a Mac user, there are some defaults I've always hated, and others that I think used to be good but are moving in the wrong direction. But, so far, I stick with it at least in part because there are lots of other things it gets right, and it doesn't feel fundamentally hostile to me in the way that Windows does.)

Windows allows third-party software (e.g., Stardock's suite of programs) to customize its GUI.

Linux has such customization options built in (e.g., Gnome/KDE GUI settings).

I couldn't find such third-party apps or inbuilt options for MacOS for my Mac Mini 2012. It's one of the reasons I stopped using the Mac Mini, but the main reason is that Apple made it too hard to swap the old HDD in the Mini to a new SSD I could purchase, and the Apple service center guys refused to do such upgrade even when I offered to pay them extra for it. There are YouTube DIY videos to do such SSD and RAM upgrade for the Mac Mini, but I was scared to brick the Mini attempting to do such upgrade myself.

I think you're using "annoying" here to describe what is in fact, flat-out inappropriate.

Bail and go Linux.

> I'm amazed people actually put up with it for their daily driver

Bit of an overreaction, the majority of the world is on Windows (I use both as my daily). I'm sure as a Mac user you remember the days around 2007 where there were a lot of compatibility issues on Mac, it has come along way.

Your annoyance with Windows is likely due to what I see a lot of which is simply that the operation system works and does things differently, which requires you to do things in a way you might not be familiar with. We use operating systems almost instinctively once we're familiar, jumping to another OS is going to rock your boat.

I used all three every day for years. Until I dropped Mac because I got sick of apple's opinionated design. Linux with KDE of course because gnome is even worse than Apple.

That kinda solved the only big issue I had switching OSes constantly, the copy paste shortcuts. Apple is command-c/v and if you constantly switch you never get used to it.

> I used all three every day for years.

Yeah, would not recommend. From my experience tweaking three OSes to be similar enough to be able to form muscle memory for efficient use is not trivial.

Unless you spend 99% of time in terminal, then it can be done, but in that case OS doesn’t matter. That is what I personally ended up doing.

I didn't really have any issues except for the control-C/V problem. I still use Linux and windows intermingled (windows for work and gaming and Linux for everything else)

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