Mind you I have my grub set to boot into windows by default so that if there's a power outage, my game streaming and backup setup, which is on my windows partition for now, will relaunch if I'm traveling or something. Yet if it had booted into that stupid splash screen, Steam and etc won't have been able to launch, and I'd have been SOL!
I hate windows!!!!! I can't wait to get EVERYTHING onto linux. I have a todo to see about using proton compatibility for desktop gaming, it works great on steam deck. After that the only remaining thing is ableton, and I'll have been completely freed from windows forever!
The other day I changed /etc/ld.so.conf and the system would not boot—my fault. I choose the previous deployment in GRUB and I had a working system back.
Because the amount of time spent on unwanted Windows things is radically less than the amount of time spent on Linux evenings.
Windows does by and large just work. Every OS has warts and bugs. I want to spend the absolute minimum time on them.
Linux is getting better and may not require too many Linux evenings these days. But that’s really only true if you’ve burned hundreds of hours dealing with increasingly obscure Linux errors.
It’s not too hard to understand why different people prefer Linux, Mac, or even Windows. They all have pros and cons.
I think better UX and more configurability would solve this stuff (from a friendly interface). The reason desktop/distro people won't do that is because it is considered bad UX practice to have too many decisions for the user. But imo, a Linux user would be an exception. In an ideal world, whoever decided to disable the boot flag in this case should have provided an easy to access distro/de setting to flip it back on.