My home desktop is a Phenom II w/ just 4GB. It has had Vista, 7, 8/8.1 and now 10 on it. I think I did a clean sweep with 7, but I've gone through all the upgrades since then, and it's still running pretty well. (It won't cold boot, but that's a motherboard hardware problem!) It's approaching 10 years old at this point. Of course it has an SSD (actually 3...) or it would be pretty painful to use. But it isn't, and that's pretty impressive.

Yes, my Windows just works as well, but not without tweaks and regular maintenance.

> Windows still drives me nuts, has ads, gets stuck in tablet mode when I'm on a desktop, and has driver issues from time to time

Stop, you're making this macOS user jealous.

You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.

And as arguments you mention playing games, watch movies, and browse the web?! All three are possible on all mentioned systems. The last two even in the completely same way as on windows (besides user interface).

I am just glad that i switched to the other two options and never had to look back. Apple also fucks up things. Still a pretty solid system for my use case. Also i am not able to see the iOS-varent movement you mentioned. Also Linux GUIs get better and better. It shocks me everytime what Windows Users tolerate while bashing the other two system, when i have to configure something on our AD (only used Windows Server in house). Inconsistent GUI Designs on expensive software, xbox gaming center preinstalled on a SERVER EDITION, everything shuffeled together, ...

Also do you know what the difference between a Windows fuckup and a macOS fuckup is? The macOS fuckup makes news while the Windows one in business as usual.

And there are adds. Built in to my OS. Fuck that.

That's how Windows 10 behaves for me. I already knew it, but just tried again for you playing a movie using VLC and plugging in my headphones. Works like a charm.

Every so often it will "forget" that it should be using the usb dac and revert to the hdmi audio output.

Apple solved that problem by not even letting you plug in headphones!

3rd party software on Windows machines is an ongoing problem.

I use Debian for work but the gaming rig is straight Windows. Shame SteamOS never took of, I was into it (got the steam wifi dongly doo on the TV in the living room with four steam controllers lol)

If steam on Linux supported 1/10rd of triple A titles instead of 1/100th I would switch and never look back.

This is Emacs vs vi/vim vs GUI editors (Scintilla-based, Sublime, Electron-based, whatever).

You can feel that Emacs is the best thing ever, but still hate Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Meta combinations. You can love vi and still sometimes get annoyed about switching modes.

Seems to me that part of what he's feeling is that MacOS has become the unwanted outsider, and frankly most people have better things to do / aren't OCD enough to want to spend a bunch of time trying different windowing systems.

How is Far Cry 5 on Linux? How about MacOS?

Sure they can tell you that. X can be a disaster and a pain to use, and still be better than Y, if Y is a worse disaster.

If it didn’t poke you in the eye ten times a day it’d be perfect. However Microsoft have been chasing fad dragons for the last decade and only get 80% of the way through engineering efforts before direction changes. That last 20% is what makes people nod approvingly and smile and it’s called quality.

Hopefully this change will resolve that problem.

This is not huge praise for the Windows desktop but there really is a very good OS under all the crap that Microsoft seems to be piling on.

It almost feels like there are two groups running Windows development: One group that is cleaning up the file manager, the settings dialogs, adding the Linux subsystem, fixing the console, etc. And other group adding Candy Crush, Cortana, screwing up the start menu / search, Edge, etc. The look, feel, and usability of these things are so radically different it's hard to believe that same team is responsible for them all.

There are so many things that would just need a better tool shipping with the OS to be fine, but are neglected (say: the event log (slow as hell and not nearly as comfortable as `less`. 'nuff said), the services dialog (still looks like in Win95, still can't auto-refresh, still has no useful search), notepad, PS ISE, the `scheduled tasks` dialog (still confusing as hell), even the effing task manager). Then there are tools MS actually owns (cf. Sysinternals) but refuses to distribute with Windows. And then, there are the new shiny things that get implemented to the point where they just barely work, and are never touched again (like the new terminal windows and workspaces in Win10).

I mean - especially the workspaces! Just give them to an intern and tell them to do the obvious improvements. They could be great, but they are still cumbersome.

Microsoft doesn't want to distribute more tools with Windows (like sysinternals) because they'll have ship them forever. They should, however, put them in the store.

It feels like a lot of the new features are half-baked. They have tried to go to a rapid release model which should mean continuous improvement but I don't think they're quite comfortable with that. It's like the worst of both worlds right now -- slow fixes but lots of churn.

Also, I too can see that there is work that has gone into the task manager. It's still nowhere near where it should be, though. Personally, I'd switch to ProcessExplorer on any machine in a heartbeat, exept that I can't, because it's not bundled, and some businesses are very paranoid on software that has to be installed additionally. Note: I'm not saying it should be the default, but it should be there.

If the thing that's holding such changes back is the release model, then perhaps this reorg might change some things? Though, I somehow doubt that was the issue here...

Whoever is working on the kernel, the driver subsystem, etc, and whoever is working on CLR stuff, can stay. Everyone else is fired.

I had been dabbling with linux, so I switched to Ubuntu for a few years. But then Ubuntu also lost its mind, so I switched to Arch for a a year. I learned a lot during my time with Arch, but the most important lesson is "wow, a full blown OS, with an integrated DE, network management, and a dozen other systems does so much more for me than I ever knew."

Then I switched to OSX for a time. I suffered greatly. Folks think Apple's software quality issues are a recent thing, but they aren't. Apple has always been extremely bad at making reliable software. I wasn't doing anything fancy, but experience data loss issues due to file system errors, iTunes wiping out years of song metadata, and on and on. And OSX is incredibly slow - not because of the software, but because of the CPU, RAM, and heat limits imposed by apple form factors. Even now, my work laptop is a fancy MBP, and it is just dog slow when doing any kind of meaningful work. The only nice thing about OSX is being able to pull of a terminal with familiar tools.

I decided to try out windows 10 on my home desktop. I built this rig for much less than the cost of a mac, with all top-end parts. With 8 logical CPUs and 64gb RAM, it flies and I almost never experiences a slowdown of any kind. It doesn't matter how many dozens of browser tabs, terminals, or apps I have open. Running Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux is very pleasant and gives me access to proper command line tools. I haven't experienced the issues you mention (drivers all work like magic, haven't seen any ads, no tablet mode issues).

I have some issues with Windows still. They've really outdone themselves in making the system settings windows almost totally unusable and confusing. And I wish a bash shell was the default terminal, along with more pre-packaged open source tools. Probably the single worst part is Windows Update - it is a fucking abomination, impossible to predict (will restarting or shutting down actually cause a 20 minute update cycle?) and disrupting work at all the wrong times. And bitlocker's refusal to just encrypt a hard drive without a TPM module present is stupid, especially since it wont let me save the encryption key to dropbox (saving to the same drive being encrypted is not allowed).

But none of the downsides are deal breakers for me. My system is super stable, is always fast, and let's me get work done. I love it.

???

Do you have Pro or Home? The full Bitlocker in Pro does (or did) allow encryption without TPM. Both my desktop and old laptop did not have TPM and have Bitlocker enabled. It also let me back up the key to the local (Bitlocker encrypted) drive.

Linux: 0 MacOS X: 1 Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year.

Have you ever noticed how in most orgs, every IT guy's first response to a weird-looking Windows problem is to suggest a reinstall? And that's not even irrational. Troubleshooting Windows takes too long to be worthwhile, because there are too many places to look for where things might be going wrong. Its complexity has become unfathomable to mere mortals, and it shows in maintaining the OS.

https://imgur.com/a/u1h1a

But ... patching.

When I was first reading your comment I assumed it was experience in the distant past. The different experiences people have with the same software is incredible to me. I have owned four Windows computers, up to present day, and maintained those of family and some friends, and not once have I had to reinstall Windows since the days of Windows 2000, excepting harddrive failures. I always wonder what makes the difference.

But I guess if I knew, Microsoft would know (being staffed by people smarter and more informed than me), and hopefully fix whatever causes the problems necessitating reinstall.

It's like all the complaints about Firefox's memory usage - people have complained about it for years, it's clearly a real problem for some? many? users, but I have never seen it on any platform.

To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine.

Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more.

Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works.

This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.

If you're interested in avoiding that, try a rolling-release distro (updating frequently) with good documentation and a sane low-level setup.

I've heard good things about OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I have never tried it, so I can't vouch for it.

If you have the time and energy, I'd recommend you to look at a couple of distros yourself and see how much of the "dirty hands" part you can grasp yourself from the documentation. Can you fix GRUB or their equivalent yourself? Is there documentation on how to do things without a GUI? I'd say those are certainly a good sign.

As a bad example, I wasted a whole afternoon once trying to uninstall a botched Radeon driver in the TTY on Fedora (since it screwed up Xorg beyond repair). Their documentation was abysmal[1]. That's the stuff you want to avoid.

[1]: In fact, in the end, it turned out I had to set a magical environment variable that was never mentioned in the small paragraph there was in the docs. Oh, and of course, the driver was botched because of a system upgrade I couldn't revert.

Edit: OTOH, if you're more patient than me (and don't screw around with e.g. PPAs because you want a new-ish version of certain libraries), you might find using ZFS for your main drive to be a good idea. Make a snapshot, upgrade and if something breaks: revert and wait for a fix.

Edit2: Also, if you're going to try a rolling release: Don't wait too long for updates and find the news channel where breaking changes (and the necessary upgrade steps) are communicated. It's important to know about those, and it simultaneously helps you in guessing how often they're about to happen. Arch's feed is on their landing page, for example.

In fact, you have to go the extra mile to break stuff.

Previous leaks of Windows source have indicated Microsoft ends up putting in a lot of workarounds to give specific third party apps old functionality just because some app is popular and badly written and a fix for something else broke it.

Sadly, Microsoft has decided to follow this path lately too. It's truly terrible that this mentality has infected them because there doesn't currently exist a decent alternative. They'll just keep screwing things up just enough that other desktops are still screwed up worse.

Makes me want to give up computing and live in a cave.

this is true mainly only for current Gnome and KDE-

stay with xfce, lxde or even a window manager and this is not the case.

The menus, etc. help me grope my way through the dark as I learn the "Linux Way" of computing concepts.

Edit: fix my grammar a bit

Unity or whatever Ubuntu ships with did not like working from an install on neither my macbook pro nor my thinkpad, and it really didn't like my 4k monitor. KDE didn't like switching between 4k and my laptop screen.