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Spoken like someone who does not know Windows. If you buy a machine that comes with windows, and just use it off the shelf it, is a total mess as you say. (As well as probably loaded with crapware) If you know Windows youre gonna install LTSC on that machine and have a nice productive time. I am curious, do you buy a mac and just use it for work without any setup, off the shelf? If so that is a point in its favour I guess.

Also as someone who only knows Linux and Windows and is not familiar with Mac OS, anytime I have to use it, it is a baffling experience, common things are done with gestures and keyboard shortcuts that one would never be able to intuit or discover. I find some random completely new Linux windows manager that Ive never seen before much easier to get to grips with than Mac OS.

Funny you say that, because I wiped whatever was on my X1 Carbon and installed LTSC. Then I had to install the Lenovo touchpad driver because two finger scrolling didn’t work. But that installed a “synaptic touchpad enhancement” background task that was a marked battery hog. The touchpad driver would restart the service if it was killed, so I had to delete the executable. (It led to no apparent change in functionality and notably improved battery life.) at this point, we are solidly in “total crap” territory. I’ve had half a dozen Macs, and never do anything to it besides install the apps I use. I sometimes change the wallpaper, but not even necessarily that. Everything is perfect out of box.

Thats fair enough. Laptops can be very finicky for drivers.

I've been using LTSC on my work / gaming desktop for about 6 months and its been the best OS experience ive had since DOS. Everything works perfectly, and otherwise it just stays out of my way.

You're right that the off-the-shelf experience with Windows can be very dodgy depending on what your OEM is and what crap they decided to put into the core OS.

I'm conflicted about all this myself because I have a good experience with Win10 once I get all the extra nonsense removed, the settings changed, and my shell setup working. I feel like Windows rewards people who are willing to put the time into it now, but its not as easy as dealing with Mac OS where you basically just clear off the toolbar, put the shell and whatever dev apps onto it, and maybe tweak a few settings and you're okay to go.

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