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foxygen

Who cares about Windows?

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people who don't make OS preferences their entire personality

I do: they're important for ventilation in this heat wave.

People who don't like messing around with drivers and like running Linux VMs on a Windows OS.

What? Drivers?

Driver issues are way more of a thing on Windows than Linux or MacOS.

Getting hardware to work is MUCH harder on Linux

Last years I have had more problem with hardware in windows than in linux. It is not so trivial anymore.

Please provide examples.

In 2022 we got new zen 5 amd cpus almost when they came out, windows did not recognize a bunch of stuff and had to find and download individual drivers. In linux (ubuntu) everything worked out of the box, except only that the LTS release did not support the kernel that supported the new mobos yet and had to install the rolling release instead.

Please provide examples.

It depends. For a lot of hardware it's actually easier to get working on linux, because the driver is just part of the kernel and you don't have to do anything special, including manually installing drivers, to get it working.

There are some cases where hardware support on Linux is suboptimal, such as Nvidia cards and many fingerprint readers, but things are a LOT better now than they used to be. Most consumer laptops and desktops will run linux just fine.

I think the parent meant vs MacOS, not vs Linux.

Users of MacOS rarely have an active dislike for Windows, nor are they likely to announce this.

I use macos and I do actively dislike windows: here I announce it.

I liked the apple II, and the TRS 80 as I rather like basic. And then I didn’t hate DOS, and then I actively hated the graphical shell of Windows 3, but could not afford a Macintosh -so suffered through it where I had to, but mainly used DOS. Then I discovered UNIX, and did almost all of my work on a timeshare - in the early 90s!

Then Windows 95 came out and I actively hated it, but did think it was amazingly pretty - somehow this was the impetus for me to get a pc again, which I put Windows NT on. Which was profitable for freelance gigs in college. Soon after that, I dual booted it to Linux and spent most of my time in Slackware.

After that, I graduated and had enough money to buy a second rig, which I installed OS/2 warp on - which was good for side gigs. And I really liked. A lot. But my day job required that I have a Windows NT box to shell into the Solaris servers as we ran. Then I got a better class of employer and the next several let me run a Linux box to connect to our solaris (or Aix) servers.

Next my girlfriend at the time got a PowerBook G4 and installed OS X on it. It was obviously amazing. Windows XP came out, and it was once again so much worse than Windows NT - and crashed so much more - which was odd as it was based on Windows NT. (yes 98 was before this but it was really bad). Anyhow, right about here the Linux box I was running at home, died. And it was obvious that I was not going to buy an XP box, so I bought my first Mac.

And it’s been the same for the last 25 years - every time I look at a Windows box it’s horrible. I pretty much always have a Linux box headless somewhere in the house, and one rented in the cloud, and a Mac for interacting with the world.

And like the parent I actively dislike windows. And that’s interesting because I’ve liked most other operating systems I’ve used in my life, including MS-DOS. Modern windows is uniquely bad.

DOS was bad by UNIX standards too. Only Windows NT/2000 was decent.

I use windows and absolutely hate the mac UI. Having the current window title bar always at the top of the screen doesn't make any sense when you have a very big monitor. It only made sense with the tiny monitors available when the mac UI was originally created.

Yeah, that is an annoyance for me too but for a different reason. I have set the menu bar to be only in the internal display (to avoid issues with my OLED external monitor) so when I have a window in the external monitor, I have to move the mouse to the internal monitor screen space if I want to open something that is in the app's title bar.

On the other hand, it is actually useful that there is mostly a specific place you find settings etc, as in windows/linux it tends to vary depending on the app where to find those (is there a bar on top of the window? Is there a button to expand a menu somewhere? Something else? Who knows).

The very idea of being able to have the programs' main menu on a different screen is so silly.

Me, personally, I have an active dislike for windows and I announce it broadly. But I may be weird :)

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