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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

I just started using windows after being on macOS since Vista. I planned to go full Linux for a gaming pc, but there are still some kinks, so dual booting it is.

The shocking negative was the amount of ads and tracking I had to get rid of, like chinese budget phone tier of crap.

Once you get rid of that though, the experience is halfway decent. But there are absolute head scratchers for 2026: some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display, apps adding itself to self start at boot left and right, and so on.

The most laughable event happened after I installed windows home when my license was for windows profesional. The official way to solve this was... to turn down wifi and write a hardcoded switch-to-professional key as a fake activation. That was the most amateur workaround I've seen in decades.

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> some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display

Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.

Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.

The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.

At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.

The OS is no longer a product they care about. Brings no money compared to Azure.

That lack of care is the part that's annoying to me, combined with them being one of the largest corporations that has the resources to throw at those issues if they chose to do so. Quality issues aside, there's lots of similar aspects like the long drawn out migration of the control panel (i.e. their own control panel applets, putting aside third party) since win8 in 2012, if they wanted they could have completed that in the last 14 years and however many major releases you count since then.

It may not be the bean counting optimal, but it is a long term image they project of the company.

I think the general issue they have is that pretty much nobody who cares chooses Windows actively. It's mostly gamers, which seem to be on the way out, corporations who don't care about this, and creatives who, for whatever reason, don't want to buy a mac.

I'm in the latter category. As a Sunday photographer who daily drives Linux for work, I can't justify investing in Apple hardware. I used to daily drive macs, so I'm not against Apple on principle, but for my current needs it's just too expensive, since for my actual work Linux works better for me and the hardware is free (through work). Since I don't spend 8 hours a day using Windows and my income doesn't depend on it, I just put up with the shoddy quality. I can do what I need with my photos and it's good enough.

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