Laptop support is definitely hit-or-miss, though it's come a long way in the last few years.
But once it works, it generally stays working.
Maybe that's because I'm better at using Linux now, or maybe that's because I have better hardware now. My point, however, is that Linux has its share of problems, especially if you do release upgrades. There's a reason LTS versions exist, and I haven't had anything break when staying on an LTS branch.
That being said, I've had fewer people since switching to Linux. On Windows, if something breaks, it's a royal pain to find the fix most of the time. Sometimes it's a bad driver, other times software needs to be reinstalled, and still other times a system file got corrupted and I need to figure out how to replace it. I've never had those types of problems on Linux, just configuration issues for hardware that isn't well supported anyway (can be solved by being a little picky about hardware).
The difference is expectations. When I pay for Windows, I expect it to work since the hardware all claims to have Windows support. I don't have the same luxury with Linux, so I expect problems. Maybe Microsoft needs a grade for hardware to determine how well it should work, idk, but having issues with "supported" hardware is really frustrating.
My main desktop has been upgraded from Windows 7, WIndows 8, 8.1, and now Windows 10. I've never have to re-install in all that time. It's stable and fast. No update issues.
This is really the norm. And I'm not particularly easy on Windows -- I have tons of development tools, games, customizations. I've changed hardware.
Again anecdotally; most of my friend group (professional developers and CS students) who run Windows seem to constantly complain about performance issues and bugs (UI issues, not sleeping correctly on laptops, etc.). I don't think anyone has ever said "hey guys, come check out this slick new feature" or really anything positive at all about it.
> No update issues.
<insert anecdote about Windows 10 updates interrupting activity X and taking Y hours>
Which has happened to me. And seemingly many others on the 'net.
> Whatever you're doing, it's not typical.
That's what I'm trying to figure out. I was under the impression that running Steam games (on my personal machine) or Eclipse (in my professional Windows experience) were more or less the happy path for the use cases of gaming and development respectively.
And if you start looking around, you'll notice that people complain about Mac OS stability and Linux stability all the time too. It's pretty hard to gauge reality this way.
When someone's describing a completely untypical break scenario on a Linux desktop thread, it not being typical is dismissed by Windows users as not a valid response.
Funny how that works.
I also have a macbook pro now and it's confusing to me still, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Either way windows 10 is more than adequate, as far as stability goes it's great, I can't say for sure about performance but looks fine to me. Or maybe I just won the win10 lottery or something, "it just works" for me. Either way it doesn't feel like there should be a better or worse OS, they just have somewhat different flows and each has their upsides and downsides.
I have a Linux desktop and a laptop (Linux preinstalled) and resume from sleep works about 50% of the time (usually GPU driver crashed during resume).
I've run normal updates that have broken the boot, or cause X to stop starting up. I get more nervous running updates on Linux than Windows.
At work a guy changed the password on his LUKS volume and it hosed his entire encrypted partition and he lost all his days.
Linux is very easy to break and very hard to fix.
Windows is definitely more reliable as a daily driver than Linux, in my experience.
Funny enough as a Linux admin I feel the opposite. In Windows I'm using EventViewer and Procmon to try to dig through bullshit UIs to try to find events. Hell, lots of times Windows components and applications themselves are schizophrenic about how they log. Either zero logging, way too much logging, non-standard logging, or some other bullshit. Let me grep a text file or use a bpftrace instead!
> Windows is definitely more reliable as a daily driver than Linux, in my experience.
I support ~50 Linux desktops (you read that right) that are in use 24/7/365 and almost never have to intervene. If I do usually it's because of a change elsewhere that requires updates to a package (looking at you freerdp) or the Kernel needs to be updated. It's not out of the ordinary to see up times of months with no intervention required.
On the other hand I am touching the other ~40 W10 laptops multiple times a week.
We use computers to achieve goals. What they run tends to be, more often than not, merely circumstantial.
Linux users: "It's a conspiracy!"
If it's pushed by your employer, you aren't "conspiring" in any normal use of the word. And even if they are "working together" to respond to anti-microsoft posts, ... what are you suggesting they are conspiring to achieve?
I replied elsewhere in this comment thread that Win10 is the first Windows version that I found usable.
I don't game. So, I probably don't stress the os the same way you do.
I run Eclipse, an Eclipse-based tool called Anypoint Studio, Netbeans, PyCharm, various developer tools like Git, Toad, etc. Also, I run various MS-based tools due to employer mandate. Overall, it's a pretty vanilla setup but it's all that I need to write software for my employer.
We don't run VM's or containers of any kind.
My main problem with Windows in the past has been BSoD happening in the middle of testing software, wiping out my entire setup. Win10 hasn't done it even once to me. So, I'm happy with it.
In principle, the feature set that Windows 10 ships could be useful. I don't find it appealing personally, but if it works well for you then that's great.
The issue that I have had is that every version of Windows I have used (from XP up to 10) has had serious reliability and performance problems.
As a specific example, it seems that the one Windows machine that I keep around to play games on needs a complete re-install every 6-12 months, usually because Windows tries to update and bricks itself so badly that even "Windows Recovery" cannot salvage the install. This is a relatively nice machine (Haswell i5, 24GB DDR3), and I tend to stay on the happy path of just running the vanilla install plus Steam and a small number of games (never any programming, web browsing, etc.).
In cases where I've had to use Windows for work, I've found that most of the built in programs lag and take a long amount of time to respond to keyboard or mouse inputs (in the specific cases I'm thinking of, this was on top-of-the line Dell Precision notebooks at the time). Most of my code seemed to run subjectively much slower natively on Windows than it did in a Linux VM running on the same machine.
I'm not trying to be a power user of Windows, as I generally try to avoid using it as much as I can due to the bad experiences I've had in the past. I'm not doing any crazy registry editing or anything like that. Just pretty basic development work and gaming over the years. In that time, I've never had a Windows install where the features reliably worked, and the install remained stable for any period of time.
This is all anecdotal of course. It's possible I've just be incredibly unlucky, or that I've had a string of a half dozen machines that have hardware that's somehow broken in a way that only affects Windows.
So what I'm wondering is: all you people who keep chiming in on these types of posts claiming that Windows works well for your use case -- what are you doing? What's the secret to having it actually function reliably? I've not been able to replicate any such success.