Linux

The "we know better than you" attitude Microsoft has. They've very slowly removed more and more power user functionality. Almost every customization has to be hacked in with a group policy or registry edit now, or by outright replacing explorer.exe

I genuinely don't find Windows easier to use. And troubleshooting Windows problems is a friggin' nightmare compared to Linux.

Because I don't sit down at my Linux destop and feel like the product. There's no ads or suggestions or popups or apps installing themselves or shit copying my files around in ways I didn't really want or AI bullshit or anything even remotely suggesting I buy more shit, just... whatever the fuck it is I was intending to do.

The value in not having my computer act like a damn slot machine trying to get me to insert more quarters is, frankly, immense.

I like being in control of my computer.

Windows and Android have this attitude where they decide how you want to use your device and block customisation. And the fact that they feel entitled to be able to change how your device looks and feels without warning or permission is something that's deeply uncomfortable to me. There's also this feeling of not knowing what my device is actually doing, and how much of my data it is actually collecting.

With Windows, there's also a lot of small papercuts that make it annoying to use (and that my Windows friends don't seem to understand):

• Lack of middle click paste.
• Lack of the ability to drag windows using "alt".
• You can't turn off the window previews in the task bar.
• You can't disconnect from a wired network connection from the connections list.
• Sometimes the computer just restarts on its own for fun.
• Finding settings is a pain because they keep adding new settings menus.
• Whatever garbage the start menu is doing nowadays.
• Installing software and drivers is a pain.
• The attitude that you have to download (or buy!) third party software for core features that should be included in the OS.
• It doesn't support my keyboard layout, and the editor for making new layouts is terrible.
• The bitlocker password entry doesn't respect your keyboard layout. Or clear the entry when you get it wrong.
• Windows licenses are a pain to manage.
• Managing the bootloader just sucks.
• The registry just kinda sucks compared to dconf and/or text config files.
• Font rendering is ugly, imo.
• I don't care about edge, fuck off with that shit.
• I can't change the volume by using the scroll wheel.
• Launching a pinned app on the task bar causes all the other pinned apps to shift around so I misclick.
• Device letters are not stable if you add or remove devices.
• It just resets settings sometimes, because why not?
• It can't be installed to a partition that isn't the first partition on the disk. This is not mentioned anywhere, nor is the error useful.
• It's just bad for developing on, due to lack of tooling.

... Whew I ranted for a while there, didn't I? Yeah, I dual boot Windows for the games that either don't run under protonwine or the devs want to add a rootkit to.

Just this weekend I had the pleasure of installing Win 10 on a blank disk. The install went ok, but then it bothered me logging into the MS Account. After cursing for a while and since it wasn't my PC, I gave in. I know I can fight it, but it's not worth it here. Then it continued trying to get me to consent to all kinds of shit. NO, I DON'T WANT FUCKING OFFICE AND I DON'T WANT MY FILES IN ONEDRIVE you assholes!

Then it forces me to choose a PIN for "secure login". DUDE! That motherfucking PC is used for a bit of office work and gaming. Just let these poor people boot up the machine and use it! 0000? Too simple. 1234 too. Fuck you, MS. Ok, random PIN and a sticky note it is, asshats.

Anyway, after getting it to fuck off, I continue to the desktop. Oh wow, 10 updates and a ton of missing drivers? It's a fresh install! What the fuck did it install?! Of course the installation of all these updates takes an hour and countless restarts... AFTER A FRESH INSTALL! Not even my overblown super slow Ubuntu server takes that long for updates; and that runs on a HDD not a SSD like that PC I set up.

But wait. One update failed. Why? Ah, the rescue partition is too small.... THE ONE THAT DUMB SON-OF-BITCH CREATED ON ITS OWN AS PART OF THE INSTALL! How to fix? Ah, execute a bunch of commandline foo with diskpart and other tools. Wait, isn't that exactly the kind of shit that Windows fans laugh about when looking down on us Linux nerds?!

So ... ugh .... just one simple anecdote of why Windows can fuck off.

I honest to god find Linux easier to use. Though it's maybe because the most used programs on my laptop are neovim, gcc and rust compiler and Firefox . And I shit you not, Microsoft purposefully slowed down the Firefox browser I installed from their store.

Plus I like using a tiling window manager when coding, now in Linux I have 500 options. On windows I get a middle finger and a dedicated nsa/fbi agent. Whats not to hate?

Aside from all the usual points that everyone else has already made: automation. Scripting stuff on Linux is relatively simple, trying to fuck about with powershell or work around a tool that's GUI-only is infuriating.

I don't know if I "hate" Windows but more like "I'm done dealing it." I might come and use it time to time, but only when absolutely necessary, and the mental capacity to remove things I don't need and make sure its removed.

I swapped away from Windows about a year and a half ago. The last straw was them sticking ads in the OS. And from everything I've heard, they continue to boil the frog; they continue to add more and more telemetry and unasked for "features" and bloat the system more and more and more with every update. Even my own parents are growing tired of Windows; it's a clunky, poorly optimized operating system that's positively frustrating to use.

I will concede that not everything that runs on Windows will run on Linux. It's true. But I severely disagree that Windows is "easier to use." Of course, when you grow up on Windows, Linux has a learning curve. It's different OS. But once I got past that? Nah, Linux is far easier and more intuitive in most cases.

Installing programs? Open your software manager and click a button.

Playing video games? Open Steam or Lutris and click a button. Occasionally you might need to tweak things, but you have to do the same on Windows sometimes, especially for older games!

I could go on but those are the biggest two examples that come to mind immediately.

As to another point you made, I personally gave up almost nothing. Destiny 2 and League of Legends don't work, but I quit league before fgsh added Vanguard and neither of these games want me. That isn't my fault, and it isn't a short coming in Linux's fault, it's the devs being assholes.

In spite of this, I do acknowledge some people would have to give up more than me, and for some people that's too much, and that's valid! I hope one day they truly get a choice.

Because every time I’m reminded the underlying OS exists it’s always something negative.

On windows: Forced restarts and updates that take over 5x as long as my Linux (or FreeBSD build), ui that constantly undoes what I customized, ads and preinstalled malware essentially like candy crush even on builds from Microsoft directly, worse performance with a much higher number of crashes under load on my current box, and no auto login/name any simple customization without screwing around with registry editor to name just the simple things. More advanced problems include no hypervisor built in to the home version, everything is pay to unlock features my Linux install does for free, no zfs software raid for storage safekeeping, most fixes when I do have errors involve googleing cryptic hex codes and being told to run fsck/chdsk as the only solution for often times hours of searching before finally finding the actual answer - not to mention most other fixes being to download a library/binary of the sketchiest sounding website ever that i can't verify isn't a virus.

On linux or even FreeBSD which took a bit to get installed to my liking i may have put work in up front but its like 3 hours at most of my time for 6+ years of stability and proper functioning to avoid all of the above plus no microsoft telemetry etc. I switched when i first tried Vista and even today every time i have to use Microsoft's horrific excuse for an OS it is heartburn inducing.

I find Windows significantly less convenient than Linux. It took a few years for my mindset to flip but there's just no going back. Whenever something requires me to use Windows, I reach for a Windows virtual machine. Whenever I've been forced to use a Windows or a Mac machine for work, I've reached for a Linux virtual machine.

It just.. lacks features? I couldn't use ZFS or Btrfs, FDE requires third-party software (veracrypt) and lots of other things that I see as standard system utilities (think ssh, git etc.) are not available on a fresh install. And then you're supposed to download and install .exe files from the internet? Since microsoft controls what goes in the windows store, that could provide the same experience as your distro's repositories. But again, most things you want aren't there, and you can't even trust the things that are there. For some reason, a billion dollar company cannot curate a software repository of the same quality as the ones maintained by unpaid volunteers in the Linux world.

So yeah, I think it's just not there yet. Maybe in a few years windows will be a viable alternative for desktop systems.

I think I need like 2 weeks to tell all the reasons I hate it.

Each time I tell this story, I try to make it shorter and more terse.

Circa 2012 or 2013 I bought a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby. With that I learned a little bit of Python and Bash, learned to type sudo etc, and kinda liked what I saw. Meanwhile, my Win 7 laptop died right as I was going back to school, so I bought a new laptop. This new laptop had two problems: 1. it came with Windows 8.1 and 2. it was a lemon. For most of the first semester going back to school I had no reliable laptop. The only modern supported computer I had was that Raspberry Pi. And for most of a semester that's what I did school assignments and email on until I finally bullied Dell into replacing that lemon Inspiron they sold me outright.

So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.1 did. So I fully switched.

That was 10 years ago now, and for the last decade I've heard Windows users do nothing but piss and moan about the new holes Microsoft has found to fuck them in.

Installing updates... Do not turn off your computer

I hate windows 11, because it's bad. Installing drivers is annoying, removing the ads and de-bloating a PAID operating system is just ridiculous. It's also unstable, random crashes galore, uses a ton of system resources and sleep doesn't work. As you mentioned yourself it's also a privacy nightmare. But that's not all of my reasons for hating windows...

• Horrible CLI experience, can't get any work done without needing to go through 15 different menus to find some arcane setting to adjust simple things like global variables. Powershell also has the habit of randomly forgetting that certain commands exist, I am aware it's probably me doing something wrong there, but I do not care enough to figure it out, to me it just doesn't work.

• Horrendous laptop experience. 1:1 touch pad gestures? Smooth animations? A workflow that makes sense? Not on windows! And yk, sleep doesn't work.

• WORSE gaming performance on AMD graphics cards. Yep, this has been the case ever since I switched to AMD a few years ago and despite all their driver updates, I still get a much better performance in games on linux through wine. This is just ignoring the fact that radeon software on windows is a piece of fcking garbage that likes randomly crashing and then uninstalling itself.

• Virtualization is bad. No KVM = bad for me... It's just slower on windows and you can't do fun stuff like GPU passtrough.

• I can't even fcking install windows 11 without doing ridicuous hacks to bypass the secure boot/TPM/other garbage.

• No app store/normal package manager. Winget sucks... it just does. Yes, it's better than nothing, no, it's not good... Same goes for chocolatey. It's nice, but it's just not that good.

Fundamentally, there are many reasons... A lot of which I've listed, to dislike windows. And I'm not a Linux elitist, my main work machine is a Mac, I just use what works best and windows just... doesn't. It's been enshittified beyond belief and even ignoring the enshittification, there are things that fundamentally prevent me from liking/using windows for anything more than a piracy machine... As that's the one thing that's easier on windows.

Because windows is inconvenient for me.

Nothing works as I expect it, terminal takes ages to open, everything lags like shit, annoying popups everywhere, every setting is hidden behind ten thousand menus, subpar packaging system, explorer crashes every so often, PATH is hard to access and modify, takes a PHD to install a raw compiler without visual studio, you can forget about shortcut system cus even with autohotkey it's a pain.

(Talking about permissions) Why do I have to write names of users from the ground and then click button "check if it actually exists" in a fucking gui? Couldn't there be a drop down list?

If you ever want to modify the windows iso image or make an automated script without using online services you're just done mate. There's nifty surprises like special software which name I so conveniently forgot (God bless) that can open the file image contained inside the iso image, but if that inner image has wrong format you have to spend time converting it. Then you'll see some fucking insane shit in front of you, where you need to drag objects from a drop down list into different categories that have random ass names and not at all simple to understand even after reading official documentation. Oh you think that's all? You can drop same objects into different categories and they will do different shit. I took TWO WEEKS WORTH OF CLASSES to work with that software and I ALREADY DONT REMEMBER JACK.

Then there's utterly long startup times even on ssds, colemak dh mod basically doesn't exist... And that's all I could remember out the top of my head.

The only redeeming quality I'd say, is having a very simple setup for Japanese and Chinese IME. On arch KDE it took me awhile to set up fcitx with mozc the first time around.

Please stay to the end because it's important, and it's going to be a horrible bait and switch but it's not INTENDED that way. I can't think of another way to present the difficult combination of interests that seem to be driving MS software lately.

I actually quite like Windows 11, and I love Edge when they're doing their core functions. Windows 11 is reasonably solid and useful for normal use. Edge is faster than Chrome and has the best vertical tabs implementation on the planet. Much of the baseline software that Microsoft is putting out has never been better, and is often really good at doing the basic things software should do. I really do feel like the genuine technology people in Microsoft are trying, and often succeeding, to make good technology products.

But... the bottom-feeder marketing drones and MBAs got their hands on them and started layering creepier and creepier nonsense over the top. Mandatory logins to glorified data collection engines. Monetization strategies masquerading as features. Overt advertisement. Heavy-handed promotion of Microsoft's own products. I finally stopped using Edge (on Linux!) when I discovered that just looking at the settings the wrong way would re-enable every intrusive setting imaginable and ditched Windows entirely when I saw the same things creeping into the OS (as well as a general disgust with privately-owned OSes in general). They are destroying trust.

In the great irony of my life, because normally work PC Windows installs have been hot garbage, I have Win11 on a work laptop and it's actually really great to use since all of the intrusive stuff is turned off by our security team. I would still prefer linux or macos (in that order), but as a "forced to use it" option, it's not bad at all. Go back and read that again: it's a pleasant and easy to use OS if all the intrusive marketing functionality is turned off because it presents a security hazard.

PS. Not sacrificing anything being predominantly linux-based and am in fact far, far more efficient on linux (and I am not a programmer or in any other technology role).

I don't hate Windows for work. On the clock, I am balls deep in their ecosystem and I can't say that it's not working. However, that's probably because I get it mostly set-up by IT!

Casual reminder that on Windows, it's the norm to go fetch packages from the fucking internet using a web browser and give them root access to your system, including drivers...
A lot of settings are still scattered as well, with stuff randomly hidden away, completely unconfigurable or named so it's not at all clear what it even does.

For everyday stuff like browsing, I totally do not see why people would want to use Windows.

If it wasn't for (some) ((multiplayer)) games and other Windows-only software, I wouldn't recommend this OS to anyone at this point.

Lol Windows is slow garbage, doesnt run on half my families devices soon, and is full of adware and spyware.

As someone who routinely installs new Laptops for various reasons:

Installing

• Preinstalled Windows is unusable, due to preinstalled spyware
• No torrents
• No multiple versions
• No real support for actually chaning the locale, what you download is what you get. Even if that means redownloading 5 GB for every language, even though the interesting parts are just a few language files, which every OS can also replace while running (Note: OSes, not spyware with a program loader strapped to it)
• No live version
• Unnecessarily complex/long installation (Locale settings being required two times, circumventing the M$ account with cmd, denying all spying stuff)
• Installer does not have drivers for many things eg. some Touchpads, special storage setups etc.
• Installing takes a long time overall
• Removing bloat, with varying success (sometimes uninstalling Edge is one click, sometimes it requires powershell hacks) takes ages (my hand always hurts afterwards because removing one thing takes three clicks at different locations)
• Installing stuff is extremely annoying, inconsistent and insecure (VLCPlus ...)
• Everyone loves hunting down 10 different obscure drivers from various websites, each with unique installers, right?
• Windows fucks itself up within a few days with a non-insignificant chance ... eg. by entering S-Mode (halfway) somehow

Usage

• It may be in part due to me being used to a tiling WM with dozens of workspaces, but even with KDE I have much better workflow - somehow, Windows' way to multitask is really strange to me, and I can only use it like a 70 year old with only 10% sight in one eye and 0% in the other: very slow and inefficiently
• You can't integrate anything with anything, except if you have dozens of accounts of services, some even with costs, and only use everything exactly like daddy manufacturer wants you to
• Literally no support. Windows fucks itself up in so many ways, and the only "reliable" fix is a reinstall
• Even with the dumbed down nature of Windows, users are morons. I'd rather teach my grandparents (including my very loud grandfather and said nearly-blind grandmother) Linux from scratch (yes, also LFS) than teach them the "correct way" to use Windows
• Even when knowing how to use Windows properly, with all tricks applied, it's less powerful than a pregnancy test running BASIC
• Paying 250+$ to get served ads to pay even more, money and data, is obviously stupid

I... Don't? But I've used it since 3.11. It's incredibly usable software, when it works. Switched recently because even I have my limits - that win11 recall even made it as an idea at the table is enough to make me jump ship. The ads in win10 pushed me to the limit, but recall is insane unless they're literally gonna give away free hardware and software. I paid for that damn computer and bought a license - wtf. It's not Microsofts hardware to datamine or put ads on. Paid for things with ads in them that also keylog and screen scrape and datamine can fuck all the way off.

Saw the netbsd video posted on lemmy recently and dude said he was offended at the lack autonomy he had over his own hardware in ms and I kind of get it now.

Great answers already, I'll not repeat them. One thing I want to mention though is the interoperability of the Linux applications. Things work together well. With Windows (up to 10 at least, I haven't used windows much in the last years) applications are mostly their own silo. In KDE it's quite fluent. E.g. gwenview, the image viewer offers to open an image in krita, gimp, etc. It also offers an option to add a folder to the "places" list in dolphin (the file manager). Dolphin lets you quickly (F4) open and close a terminal at the current folder within its window. Small things like these make the system feel coherent.

The other big thing for me is the plethora of great apps you have out of the box. And the ease to install new ones without worrying whether you are the product.

I'm the kind of user that cares about function over form, so everything in Windows 11 just annoyed me. Mainly because it was just changes in design that required me to reorient and to learn to use again with no good reason.
I still use Windows at work just because our whole dev stack is on Windows. And every new design change just gets in my way. An OS should enable me do the things that I need and want, it should move out of my way. Sure I've added some hacks to restore the functionality I was used to. But the fact that I need to fight the OS to bring back context menus annoys me to no end.

Also, as a dev, I find many things easier done on Linux that Windows, mainly because it just has a better CLI support. It's not as bad now with Windows terminal, winget and other improvements (dotnet having a proper CLI interface), however I still mostly use git-bash for common stuff like searching the file system. Not to mention that for something like docker I basically just need WSL.

Windows, macos, all the same. I want a free device. I love donating to KDE. How could I love giving money to microsoft?

Microsoft is more difficult for me nowadays because I use it very rarely. I hate that nothing works as expected. I hate that they force everything upon you.

We are free. We are GNU. We are linux.

It isn't hate. It's disgust.

But it's everything. The intrusion, the quasi monopoly, the shitty anti,consumer choices, all of it.

Since either Linux or win 7 do almost everything I need, I'll never use anything higher than win 7

Proprietary software is a security risk, especially for US companies that can be legally served NSLs

Because it's a tool by one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, corporation ever made. It's nothing more than a way to lock-in users deeper in an ecosystem of extortion and learned helplessness.

Through Windows, computer users discover that they have a black box at work and then at home. It is NOT their computer. It is a computer that they are allowed to use a certain way. This then is extended in a myriad of ways, through other tools, e.g mobile phone, and services, e.g Office360, reinforcing that behavior. It becomes a second nature to the point that computer users dare not even imagine HOW they want to use a computer. Instead they buy whatever they are allowed to consume.

I do not care for Windows as an OS, I absolutely do HATE it though as a vehicle for cognitive enslavement. I do so keeping in mind the history of the company that made it. It is not a repeated random process, it's a strategy. This is what I find disgusting.

I don't hate Windows, I don't care about it. I don't use it.

Warning, no technical stuff, only creed:

I don't hate Windows in and off itself. For me it represents my first contact with a computer and influences my choice of UI to this day.

I hate what it stands for, which for me is something I call "gated computing"; a restriction of access to computational power and abilities. It turns a machine with near limitless potential, like watching cat videos, sharing how to best build bridges or calculating the bygone cycles of the moon, to a machine that maliciously distracts people while giving a selected few the power of watching over them with ever changing objectives as to why they watch them.

Windows, like few others, eased people into thinking that that was the right way to use a computer all along.

That is why I hate it.

Because my experience is always the exact opposite of yours. Windows has never been convenient for me, it always does random shit, and stuff just suddenly stops working because fuck you that's why. For example, I have a Windows computer at work to build and test the games I work on, this week it decided that it won't use more than 20% of the CPU for building the latest game, there's no other bottleneck, temperature is stable at 60°C, disks have space, and most importantly, other games compile just fine, it's just the one I'm actively working currently that doesn't. And it's not an issue in the code either since I'm the only person in the company experiencing this. And, this is the important part, I can't do anything about it, because no one knows why Windows decided to do that, so there's nothing anyone can do. On Linux when you have an issue there's an explanation, and someone with enough experience will find it quickly, on Windows you can be the world's expert and still the OS will just decide to nope the fuck out.

A few things (disclaimer, I‘m both a Linux and mac user. Linux on my gaming machine, mac on my work machines):

• Privacy is a big factor. Microsofts track record is bad, even among non FOSS companies.

• Bloatware and Ads. Microsofts insistence on pushing OneDrive, Edge, 365 and bing are annoying to say the least. Why do they think I’m going to change my mind about that after a minor update?

• The UX is less than stellar. Why does the OS have 4 different UI styles for different programs that sometimes even do almost the same thing but not entirely, so you’ll have to use both versions?

• It’s almost impossible for me to keep my desktop tidy short of not using it. I’m dependent on macOS stack feature. On Linux I never had enough random files for it to be a problem.

In short, Windows just annoys me. While Linux and macOS go out of my way and let me just do my stuff, Windows just constantly pulling my attention away from what I advertised want to do and that was even when I was using my PC solely as a gaming machine.

Edit: formatting

Windows forced me to update to a version that has advertisement in it. It has built in network calls in the start menu. I would have to pay a licence and make an account, something I avoided for years. Sharing file on a private network is insanely hard to do and very buggy.

Now I'm not a Windows admin, but I'm a Linux admin, so there are many, many things I know how to do on Linux and not on Windows.

This made me realize that there is a bias: when something doesn't work on windows, the something doesn't work, or you only need to find how to hack it to work. But when something doesn't work on Linux, it's Linux that doesn't work. That's a double standard. The same kind of work or problems on Windows is ignored.

There are so many things today to help people use Windows, like classes, professionals, help desk, it's everywhere, for everyone, yet it's somehow considered easy to use windows. BTW any organisation that made the move did saw it happen. I mean that many organisations moved to Linux and gave the support and formation for it to work, and it worked.

there are too many little details to point out but windows just controls your experience too much. for example on a widescreen i don't want to be forced to have the taskbar on the long edge. and up to including w10 the taskbar placement could be chosen. in windows 11 it's forbidden... i installed a software to hack this but of course then explorer.exe breaks every 10 minutes.

the spirit of computer technology is a universal tool. Microsoft strongarms the user to be a tool. so no thanks

Many government agencies and businesses are too dependent on Windows and other Microsoft products. The dependence on a few huge American corporations is problematic especially for organizations outside the US.

I don't hate Windows but I see it as a political problem.

Honestly, I don't. I stopped caring about windows ages ago.

I don't hate Windows, but I find Linux a much more natural way to use my PC. I started with Linux in 1996 and have been daily driving different distros since 2010 on all my PCs and servers. 

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate how flexible and customizable Linux is. The open-source community is always ready to help, making the experience even better. For personal projects or managing servers, Linux is efficient and reliable, and I’ve grown to depend on it.

On the other hand, I've had to use Windows at various jobs and never found it enjoyable. The constant updates, 'bloatware', and lack of transparency can be frustrating. 

While Windows is user-friendly and compatible with many programs, it often feels less intuitive and more restrictive compared to the freedom I have with Linux. 

Each time I switch back to Windows, I’m reminded why I prefer Linux for both personal and professional use.

Hate is a strong word, i don't feel strongly enough about an os to really hate it. I still use a Windows 10 pc for my music production since all of my vsts work there and continue working there even after updates and whatever else.

My daily driver is running pop os. my main reason for switching was just a personal disagreement with the direction windows was going back around 2021ish when they were talking about integrated advertising in the file explorer. Linux was always something I wanted to get to learning so the timing just seemed right to switch over.