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Comment by tills13 | Hacker News Reader

Anecdata: Windows has been rock solid for me for over a decade, including the latest versions.

Given raw Linux or WSL I'd choose WSL 9 times out of 10.

Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.

I think your experience has been unusual. My experience with windows has been buggy patches that occasionally break my computer, bizarre and hard to track down performance issues, and features that I immediately want to not only disable but completely remove (anything copilot related, for instance)

It's also just plain disrespectful to users. For instance, having to hack the installer to allow for local user accounts, forcing edge on me constantly to the point where even when I change the default browser, things still load in edge, and it still reverts my settings on occassion. Using Windows actively makes me hate microsoft. I'm mostly just on Linux and Mac now, I only use Windows when I absolutely have to.

Linux does have annoying technical issues to fix on occasion, but I'm a lot more tolerant of them because I feel like the creators of it respect me and my rights, whereas Microsoft treats me like I'm renting my own computer.

I think your experience has been unusual.

Windows has hundreds of milions direct users worldwide.

If it was that unstable as HN tries to make it, then a outrages would be in news every week

It is so unusable the market share of Mac is increasing and google sees an opportunity with googlebooks

Have you considered that there could be other reasons for that like better hw at the time

Or even mac or its ecosystem could be better while windows isnt unstable!

> Windows has hundreds of milions direct users worldwide.

A BIG chunk of these are captured users working at Big Corp™.

I work at a company of 100k+ employees. The enterprise-managed Window machines we're issued are unbelievably bad. But I'm 100% sure if Microsoft pulled a Darth Vader "I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" and 10x'd the price, nothing would change. Maybe at 100x (or the point of actual unaffordability).

People just put up with it because they don't know how to use anything else. My nephew (who has no idea what Linux is) was complaining his laptop was slow and unstable.

This is how it is with a lot of modern tech, btw. Most people just suffer using it.

Similarly, interest in restoring/repairing older vehicles has increased because people are so fed up with using modern cars.

I drove a modern long-wheelbase Ford Transit last week when I moved house, and the whole experience was constant annoyances. Often the tech wasn't working correctly. I daily drive a 30 year old vehicle (which runs perfectly btw) and wasn't aware of how bad modern annoyances are.

e.g.

- The backup camera didn't work properly.

- The speed warning was incorrect, e.g., it thought I was speeding when I was actually 10 mph under the speed limit. The speed limit on that road has been the same for at least 7 years, and the van was 4 years old.

- Lane assist was constantly moving the wheels and taking over what I was doing. I was bang-on in the middle of the road. It was very jarring to have the wheel move when you haven't turned the steering wheel. It scared the absolute shit out of me when it first did it, I honestly thought there was play in the control arms.

- The driving awareness check said I was tired for some god knows what reason, and I had been driving for all of 20 minutes!

- It also said I wasn't holding the steering wheel when I had both hands on it.

- I couldn't feel the clutch biting point at all. Maybe the clutch was electronic as well.

- It had the most annoying electronic handbrake as well. Required you to hold the button before you could pull away the first time. This worked differently than if you were using it at a traffic light.

I know people that bought older vehicles (people in their 30s) because they dislike this stuff as well.

People just put up with this crap on Windows because they often don't have any other choice because, quite frankly, most people have no idea what Linux is and don't really understand how a computer works even at a basic conceptual level.

If your problems stem from Microsoft's invasive updates and policies, I'd suggest switching to Windows 10 IoT Ltsc Enterprise, https://massgrave.dev/. It's a version meant for stable systems like your ATM machines, which means minimal AI bloat pushed to you. Startup is really fast too.

Spread it around. MS needs it's head screwed right.

I’m at roughly 7 years without Windows. PopOS has been rock solid for the entire time, and I installed it mostly by accident. I can just click to install games from Steam, my containers run unbelievably fast, as do my games and media. I even replaced the hardware, and the system booted up and just worked. The only issue I had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers, at which point all I had to do was boot into a terminal and run: sudo apt remove drivers && sudo apt install drivers. I rebooted and boom everything worked.

I stopped using Windows when I got an update prompt while playing a game that had two options I had never seen before, and was shocked to see at the time: “Now” or “Ok”. After clicking “Ok” the system waited a few minutes and then rebooted, causing me to lose the game, and get issued a short ban for leaving a game. And that was just the final straw. A few months prior, a Windows update corrupted two drives (NTFS) and I wasn’t able to repair them. Probably six months before either of those I was left with an inoperable system after a botched driver update for my (NVidia) GPU that caused me to do a full reinstall. Those are just issues I can remember.

Windows was a nightmare for me, in a way Linux has not been. In fact Ive had such a good time in Linux, I stopped buying Macs as well.

It’s not self-inflicted or being forced to hate windows, it’s just that for a lot of folks, myself included, Linux is a measurably better experience. If Windows works for you, that’s great, congrats I’m happy for you. But I think it’s weird to say Windows hate is forced or self-inflicted.

Agree, I feel you only hear from people who hate Windows and for every such loud opinion, there are probably 20 who are quite satisfied but never mention it.

Angry people are more likely to want to make themselves heard. But Windows' problem isn't technical, like performance, stability, compatibility, etc. It's actually great in some of those aspects. The problem is that Microsoft is working hard to shovel shit on top of what could be a great OS. That shit is the part aimed at extracting more from users for MS' benefit. That's not what an OS is supposed to be, certainly not a paid one.

For every 1 person who hates it, there's probably 50 that don't know or care what the problem is. They just decide that laptops or desktops are meh and use a phone for everything and are satisfied.

Why would you prefer WSL over native Linux? What's the rationale here?

> Why would you prefer WSL over native Linux?

I have a number of both. I like WSL for when I'm working in Windows and need to run some quick bash and handle the output in Windows file explorer.

Today I'm working on a project that runs bash scripts in WSL; it utilizes multiple unbound servers (that run in Ubuntu minimal and in pfsense).

Because you want the best the both worlds, but it makes people think Linux has no GUI so it just keeps them locked to windows

They are very afraid of replacing Linux with windows, don't know how it's done, what it is etc.

Or they use software for which there is no Linux build or version with feature parity. That still exists.

Or they prefer the GUI in Windows like some people prefer the GUI from Apple. Those preferences still exist.

Nobody stays in Linux for the GUIs? Heck if it purely a GUI decision I'd move away from the horror of Linux, the fact that the best "GUI" being told are TUI tells you more than enough of what people's priorities on Linux are.

I would switch over to WSL in a heartbeat if speeds were 60-80% of bare Linux (cpu/memory) and every other subsystem was interoperable / accessible with Windows (cough network) which was my main issue with WSL, anything that wanted to run services was a disaster in WSL (DB/exposing port to host/etc).

GUI of what?

For example, you can't pry KDE out of my cold, dead hands, ever. The capabilities of the desktop and the standard KDE installation blows anything I have used out of water easily.

We (as in Linux users, sysadmins and devs) love our TUIs because they work transparently over SSH. I have more than 100 servers which I reach regularly. I neither want to install a full graphical user interface, nor forward it to my desktop to manage them.

If you want to discuss this, I'm chill & all ears.

With debloat, Windows 11 is a great experience. And WSL makes it easier to test out various distros . Lots of great windows apps. Great Terminal, VS Code, Great Browser with MS Edge. Hyper V is a decent hypervisor and easy to work with. Windows 11 is very nice. and RDP is excellent. Overall I prefer Windows 11 + WSL over a Linux desktop experience.

> Windows has been rock solid for me for over a decade, including the latest versions.

I have many Windows, FreeBSD and Ubuntu instances in use. They're all pretty great but none are the best fit everywhere.

No it is not forced. I jumped ship the day they force upgraded "selected" users to windows 11 and left others in the dust because their hardware was "incompatible"

I have never messed with the windows registry nor updates. Windows will just randomly like not show you the start menu, not show you icons, mess with file operations etc.

This is a compatibility problem with my hardware. I couldn't believe all issues just went away when I switched over

Yeah Windows is solid for me.

Tried a few Linux distrod last year and had endless issues.

MS keep doing dumb stuff with the UI but there's tweaks to solve everything and it's similar to tweaking/ricing Linux so I didn't see any particular advantage of Linux.

NixOs is one that intrigues me though. I absolutely love the idea of OS as config files.

Unfortunately Nix seems to have so much drama and barely any 2 users can agree on the best way to do something.

I heard Rumours DHH/Omarchy might take a crack at simplifying/integrating Nix

Some user friendly Nix concept would make me switch asap

I understand where you are coming from, and it's not uncommon. I have never formatted and reinstalled Windows 2000, for example.

On the other hand, given raw Linux or WSL, I'd choose raw Linux 20 times out of 10.

While I had my fair share of problems, for the last 20 years, Linux allowed me to be closer to hardware, allow me what I want to do with it and even more stable and performant than a "rock solid" Windows installation. I dual booted Windows and Linux until ~2022 IIRC, just for gaming, and no, I don't miss that bloated thing.

I have a Windows Laptop for my wife and a VM for specialized software which has no Linux counterparts, and even that limited exposure is enough to remember why I don't miss that thing. The experience is inferior to what I have on Linux.

> Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.

Uh, no. I can't self inflict ads, bloat, performance issues and other papercuts by installing from an official ISO, using my legitimate license, and playing the Microsoft's way of using my online account during install. These are bundled with Windows itself. I even didn't install Microsoft PowerTools to these installations. They are "that" vanilla.

It isn't. The last time I bothered installing Windows got into an unrecoverable update problem on Windows 11, which forced a reinstall. Couldn't use a local account without having to use workarounds.

Manage to get through all of that, and I couldn't activate without signing into Microsoft because it took my key I had for Win 7 and used to upgrade to 10 and associated with my Microsoft account. So I had to basically use mass grave activator to fix that.

It then decided to rewrite my entire EFI partition (which wasn't on the same disc and had nothing to do with Windows) and give it a new unique identifier. This made Debian unbootable as a result, and I had to use a rescue USB to rebuild the EFI partition.

When I log in, everything wants you to log into Microsoft. The debloat script is now basically mandatory to have it work reasonably well.

Win 11 is just shit. I am not some sort of FOSS zealot. I just got fed up of fighting Microsoft every time they did a major OS update.

It's self inflicted. The type of person that complains about stability is the same person who runs the windows decrapify stuff that fucks with the registry and changes what Windows expects to be true. They'll block updates as well. After they've got their system into a really deep place where it was never meant to be, they are shocked when shit breaks randomly. Windows is not Linux. Leave it alone or don't use it.

I have never messed with the windows registry not updates and neither have most of those with windows problems on the Lenovo legion 5, when I put Linux on it, all problems disappeared like magic

Problems with a single Lenovo laptop model seem more like an issue with Lenovo's drivers than an issue with Windows

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