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Comment by isbvhodnvemrwvn | Hacker News Reader

They absolutely do, the moment you have any problem you are on your own. I spent half a day troubleshooting why nvidia drivers were not loading (mint was not signing them and secure boot silently kicked the module out), and I'm many times more proficient at technology than an average person.

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I bought a brand new Dell laptop with Windows 11 25H2 at the end of November 2025. The first patches released by Microsoft in December did not install. WTF!!!

If you go online, you will see a whole YouTube videos and articles on how to fix the issue. Let me tell you, after a considerable amount of time, I gave up.

I'm running Ubuntu 24.04 on my desktop, and I can't remember the last time I had issues applying patches.

Windows has problems all the time. There is widespread knowledge on how to troubleshoot and fix these problems.

Similar problems will have very different solutions for Linux. The knowledge of how to resolve them is much less widespread. I’ve had very good success in asking ChatGPT how to resolve Linux issues, probably better success then I would on Windows because the error messages on Linux are much more detailed.

Windows has a "check the Internet for solutions" option that never works. You can just let Claude code loose on your system and have it go fix your shit for you instead of copy and pasting anything.

A lot of the time the "solution" to problems on Windows is to reinstall/in-place upgrade because, as you said, Windows errors tend to be more generic so you can browse Google all you want but none of the instructions people provide will be of much help. So I'm not sure "widespread knowledge" is a point in favor of Windows when the errors frequently aren't specific enough to be reliably actionable.

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