Comment by ionised | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ionised | Hacker News Reader

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I love PC gaming and I really dislike Windows.

I begrudgingly upgraded to Windows 10 because it will be the only OS with DirectX 12 support.

However the absurd level of phoning home the OS does made me also build a new machine running Debian, which I now use for all my work and general personal computing.

My Windows machine is gaming/Steam focused only now. No cloud integration, no Microsoft Account.

If 99% of games worked on Linux, or SteamOS makes good progress as a viable replacement for Windows on a desktop I'll drop Windows in a heart beat.

I have zero attachment to it and the OS offers nothing I can't get elsewhere. Except perhaps for Netflix, the Windows Store is a wasteland of terrible apps that for the most part are worse than their Win32 counterparts.

I too hate the phoning home, so good point. I feel like apps in general, whether on my phone, ps4, anything are trying to do this in some form or another. I do not want improved recommendations, a "better" future experience, or anything else. I do not want to contribute to your analytics meetings.

I agree the Windows store apps are also terrible. There are still quite a lot of non-windows store exclusive apps that you might not use that work great on windows. Likewise, there are various cross-platform apps that also work better on windows.

In a second life, I've done quite a bit of side work in graphic design, music production, and animation. Suffice to say that while Mac OS and later OSX were dominant at times in these spaces, there were always periods where this was not true. If anything, Apple seems pretty evil to these users in the last 5 years. I've had very little trouble with my apps in these areas on windows, while on OSX my friends can't stop ranting about things that have happened to Final Cut Pro, Logic, Garage Band, and other apps. I still use the aforementioned and don't necessarily agree in all cases, but it is true for some people. It may be bias or laziness on the dev, but reality is reality - just the other day I got a new sound interface and it works much better on Windows than OSX, and I use it on both for different tasks.

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