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I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

Comments
  • 2
    Amen!
  • 0
    Dragging a file to terminal works for me though. Maybe it's a WSL2 problem, or where did you face it?
  • 3
    My opinions about the various operating systems are the same as yours but unlike you I was an hardcore Windows fanboy for most of my relatively short life, I even learned OOP, regex and other key programming studying PowerShell. On the other hand the UNIX way of doing things always fascinated me but as a teen without access to actual IT education I always struggled to understand it trough the filters of cluttered Linux distros like Ubuntu.

    It took my first job to see how UNIX command line made me more productive and how PowerShell is annoyingly slow and verbose.

    Now I'm on macOS for professional reasons but my favorite system remains FreeBSD.
  • 4
    Tbh only thing where I see Windows performing better then any other OS are games, and that has a lot to do with DirectX.
  • 2
    @myss If you want to play and mod AAA games Windows is practically all there is. Back when Oblivion was popular I tried modding under Linux. First of all it ran with lackluster speed compared to Windows. Second there was a dynamic library chaining limitation in the kernel at the time that made it so I could not use OBSE plugins. Which made modding in Linux for this game practically useless. I have no idea if this limitation still exists. Another issue is the relationship between Linux and graphics card vendors has deteriorated. This isn't a good situation for gaming at all. I do like what Steam is doing with their Linux gaming. So maybe this will get better. My main issue with Linux for gaming is the time I spend trying to get Linux to play games not made for the system. Linux is great for work, but I don't want to spend hours getting it to do something another OS can do without effort. So it comes down to tooling for modding for me.
  • 2
    @myss Good comment. It varies from people to people. I don't usually play on the computer, I spend so much time in front of it that when I want to play I go to my Playstation. If that were an important criterion, maybe I would tolerate windows and put more effort into it. But it was never my case.
  • 1
    @happygimp0 I said that my story was reversed to the mainstream even because I had no contact with computing when I got my hands on Linux at the beginning of my studies. Therefore, there were no vices in the beginning. It's not in that hipster sense. His comment was exactly the same as my co-worker's about LibreOffice. You got it, but wrong.
  • 2
    @Demolishun Perfect. But this is far from being a decisive factor in my case. The view I wanted to convey is exactly that of a person who has always had contact with Linux and Unix, and used Windows "as an alternative" for the first time. It is very easy to find the testimonies of the reverse scenario. Although it seems, it is not a flamewar. It's more of a blunt testimony.
  • 1
    @codingfreedom I ran Linux at home for over 10 years. Got called all sorts of names and told I was stupid. Was running Windows NT at work at the time. It worked for what I wanted at the time. But when I got customers who needed Windows solutions I switched to Windows. I wish I could have stayed on Windows 7. Unfortunately newer hardware seems to require newer versions of Windows. Which is stupid. I hate that. Linux is fine, but I just don't want to spend the effort fighting the problems. My daily driver is Linux at work. My boss is funny as he loathes Windows.
  • 0
    @Demolishun Your comment is very good. I have several Windows solutions in production for my customers (I confess that where I work, it is not the majority of customers), but I managed with VMs to do what I needed and then close. Perhaps if my market share were greater in the Windows world, this view would change. In the end, command lines, language and frameworks have nothing to do with productivity. Productivity happens when you feel good and manage to earn money faster to pay the bills. And in that productivity I had more with unix-like operating systems. That's the kind of thing I wanted with my Rant. We see a lot of shallow criticism of Unix-Like from people who have been "trying it out". And as I had never seen it, I went to give my testimony of someone who had never seen (at least on a day-to-day basis) Windows.
  • 1
    @codingfreedom BBC Linux as in British Broadcasting Corporation, or Big Black Cock?
  • 0
    @codingfreedom How do you deal with drivers?

    Like, if want to use my hardware, I want to be able to use all its features that I paid for. (Preferably without wasting hours of my life just to have a clunkly workaround...)

    How do you update firmware without windows?
  • 0
    @d4ng3r0u5 Linux Business Bootable Card
  • 2
    @SuspiciousBug I've had a few machines: Compaq Pentium 166, LG with AMD Sempron, Dell Optplex Pentium 4, HP Pavillion core2duo, (...mac era...) and now Dell G-5 5590. The machines I've had have always been well supported. This current computer of mine, although I'm a gamer and I don't play, I bought it because it had a lot of ram and a good processor and it was on sale. The only annoying driver is the one from NVidia, that every time the kernel is updated I download the official one and reinstall. (Yes, driver neauveau is a bad joke). So, I never had this bad perception regarding drivers.
  • 2
    @SuspiciousBug Regarding firmware and bios updates, my machine vendors have always had good Linux support. Only in my solaris days do I remember using Linux live cd to update the Dell Optplex bios.
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