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>using windows feels like fighting a living thing that constantly want to make me experience bloat.

Never has my professional life been distilled to such an accurate description.

It's sad Microsoft is lazy on this, it could be a marketing lever to make people have really simple and stable experience on their OS. And there's enough infrastructure to programmatically ensure "immutability" to some degree. Alas they have other unicorns to chase these days.

But why would they bother? Everyone and their grandma is using Windows anyway, and most people don't even know (or care) there are alternatives.

Slight counter point, I have 80yo neighbor. Her laptop is sluggish due to some strange problem in the windows install (I investigated hard but it's "window boot event log" level of problem).

I mentioned her I can put another windows like thing, safer, faster, freeer, and probably easier. She agreed, when I ran Mint on a live usb key she said yeah but where are my icons and my things and lost interest in a second.

Humans are complicated.

Sure, I know there are such counterpoints. I, myself, only use Windows for games and Photoshop (both of which I'm looking to find alternatives for on Linux, which is my daily driver). My mom, who's quite computer illiterate, also used to use an Ubuntu laptop.

But the broader point was that MS's market share is so huge, and most people and companies seem to care so little about these annoyances, that it wouldn't change much for their bottom line.

I've become convinced that the same things that make GNU/Linux good for us are exactly the same things that make normal people dislike it. Freedom means responsibility, in this case the freedom to configure your computer means the responsibility to understand its behavior, something people naturally avoid. They don't even mind learning things to avoid it; Microsoft and Google completely rearrange everything twice a decade meanwhile I still have my FVWM2 config from when I was 15.

This whole effect even predates Linux: You can watch the archives of the "Computer Chronicles" from the late 80s to see it. You have everyone bringing in the fanciest new software wearing suits (because TV used to cost a zillion dollars a minute) and explaining state of the art OOP abstractions in the GUIs so that the machine "does the right thing" when you drag x onto y and the user "doesn't even have to think about it" (an idea that disturbs most of us because we know it's going to do the wrong thing probably 30% of the time and then you're going to have to untangle the mess.) Then they pan over to the guy at SCO who's got 5 Xclocks/Xterms on the screen who says "look, we've got graphics now! That's why people haven't been using Unix on the desktop in the past."

It's not about the graphics, it's not even about learning new UIs or paradigms like shell scripting. People genuinely do not like personal computing.

These are interesting aspects of it. I cannot disagree with the burden of responsibility. I felt it, and I have a sweng diploma (at the same time I don't consider myself that smarter than average and I cringe hard at the fake complexity of programs we force people to use). We all want freedom .. if we get what we want easily. Otherwise we enjoy sharing the duty and going back to a consensus (market / companies search for what is 80% best and I'll accept that because I don't have to care).

Anthropology, ergonomics, pedagogics and economics all matter for an object. I've been seeking joy and productivity in software for a while, but for people computers are rarely that.

- a requirement (especially since the web re-rooted society and administration)

- a confusing toy (you pay 1000 to click and consume music/film)

- a strange tool at work

another thing is that the computing field has either a glowing magic aura, or a dark cloud around it. Some people will be amazed by things that are not especially amazing relatively speaking [0] and some will be scared by any software or keyboard.

[0] it's easy to forget the intricacies, subtleties, beauty of pre-computer things.

I don't disagree, there is a level of difficulty that comes from Linux being so configurable.

I would say though that it doesn't discount sensible defaults that work for the majority of people. I only briefly used it but it seemed like elementary was on its way to towards that goal (before what seems like an implosion on the side of the company).

That's never going to eliminate the problem, the user can always screw something up or bugs rear their ugly head. The one thing is though there has to be a reason to most non-tech people outside of conceptual ideas like Freedom. Like if my dad doesn't want to spend the money for a new rig but not have the OS slow to a crawl, then I might suggest Linux. If everything is working fine, then I probably wouldn't bother.

It kinda links to Alan Key 100kLoC OS. Nobody wants to learn 34 different sub systems, languages, scripts, etc etc. Some say BSDs are saner in that regard, the core is smaller, more integrated, better documented etc..

Your comment reminds me of a talk that was on LibrePlanet 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQM-GWKdHsU There's a point at which complexity becomes irreducible. Computing freedom requires that the user elevate themself by learning (not the other way around).

> Windows GUI are not composable, news flash: almost no graphical app is, and even in linux it's not the case AFAIK. Fun point, some Desktop Environments have worse keyboard navigation than Win95

The author also ignores (or is ignorant of) that tools in PowerShell are generally far more powerfully composable than Linux tools in a bash-like environment.

I didn't want to go in on the powershell side of things, it's still too early, but it fits my needs as a tech user to have a smaller learning surface, safer (typed objects vs stringly typed bash) and potentially faster (maybe awk still beats powershell I don't know).

Last year I found out, powershell 5+ included a generic hashmap/table viewer, so you can get stupid simple output presentation on the fly with one pipe.