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It's funny but I would make the same argument in reverse.

All my windows boxes in my house have suffered BSODs periodically, get stuck in update cycles, and need complete reinstallation around once every year or two to remain stable. Error messages are cryptic and unhelpful. Logs are lacking.

My linux boxes almost never lock up, errors are resolvable and logs are better. The issues I've had were trivial to fix. Obviously I use hardware on which Linux is known to run well. I have run the same OS and updated it in place for years without any problems.

I'm surprised at that on the reliability front - things are a fuss to get going, but if you're on a LTS version of whatever-distro, its usually pretty rock-solid (hence why its powering everything you look at...)

I'm surprised that it is a fuss to get going! Installing Linux with a full basic suite of applications takes around half an hour.

Same thing on Windows takes about half a day for me, and involves hunting for drivers and so on...

Maybe much is simply what you are used to.

I think I may have been trying to appeal to the masses - would agree, seems to be a lot more straightforward installing linux. The installer "Just works" (try pointing windows setup at a disk with something it doesn't understand on it...), and the driver support is generally fantastic. When you do need proprietary drivers, its generally taken care of too (thinking of NVidia etc)

Tip: there's much, much less fuss if you not it preinstalled, with support.

I'm not sure I count "Have you tried sfc /scannow?" as support!

Then don't?

> Linux? The fucking thing breaks down if you so much as look at it wrong. No reliability, zilch, nada, /dev/null. I don't trust Linux with anything mission critical, unless I'm paying someone monies to make sure my time isn't wasted (eg: Red Hat, Synology, Steam Deck).

From the mention of Steam Deck I'm going to guess most of the "breaks down if you so much as look at it wrong" is from graphics related stuff?

Or maybe using Ubuntu? When I stopped using Ubuntu the bug reporter came up often and quickly crashed.

However I've been using NixOS for many years now and had nearly no stability issues. The one I can remember I just rebooted and went to an old generation.

Before that I was using Debian and also had no issues, but their packages were outdated.

> So Windows is the only operating system that I can use to do everything I want to do on a computer, in the ways I want to do them, with the software I want, trusting my time will not be wasted on trivially stupid nonsense.

s/Windows/Linux or perhaps even s/Windows/NixOS for me :)

Ubuntu is IMO far from the best choice. Even manjaro offers a more stable experience at times. Fedora is what i install newbies today.

Edit:// to be more precise I use Ubuntu LTS on servers because it's stable and runs everything. But as soon as we get graphical there are better choices

Linux used to break down all the time when I used Ubuntu variants and Gnome. Either Nvidia drivers, distro upgrades, gnome configs going awry. Switching to KDE Plasma Desktop & openSUSE Tumbleweed, reliability has been 99.9999% SLA! There are immutable Linux distros too. Very reliable esp. with fs snapshots/rollback and rolling updates.

Is Windows actually customizable? Ever since they removed the Windows Classic theme the most you can really do is change the "accent" color, which barely shows up anywhere.

It's very customizable because with enough gumption you can hook into Explorer directly and make it appear and behave however you want.

And that's just the shell.

What, where and how Windows can do something for you depends entirely on what you install and how you configure everything. Windows is a blank canvas.