I've recently reinstalled Windows for brother in law. System become unusable, quite performant after reinstall. Looks like your experience is not universal. And I can not remove user configurations as I can on Linux.

I've tried Windows 10, it is not bad as consumer OS. Tray notifications gone, so good. WSL1 has limitations, should be solved in WSL2. PowerShell, OpenSSH and winget are good improvements.

Windows interface is changing, at least some people should like it. I feel it is getting progressively worse. That's strange — I like macOS Aqua. I didn't like brushed metal, it has gone now. I have no other explanation but blind spot of Windows users.

We Windows users just have no rational choice - the utility is carefully tuned to outweigh the annoyances and anti-features for the majority of users.

So we suck up MS treatment of us as cattle whose data and behaviours to be harvested and the dumbing down of the UI in the interest of getting things done and getting on with our lives.

It's a faustian bargain, but the alternative is worse.

I already work on a computer all week, then and spend a lot of my discretionary time on it for career research, for necessary involvement in modern life and for some leisure.

If I fulfil my desire to use linux for all the various advanced desktop scenarios I demand of my computer I'm giving up the remaining free time in my life!! And for what - to tweak driver configurations and DEs, again, AGAIN, for the hundredth or thousandth time in my life to keep things working. Learning how everything works was fun but constantly canoodling with configuration and setup for the nth time is as pointless as working around MS antifeatures, and seems to take up more time on balance if you are doing a wide variety of advanced scenarios occasionally (in my experience as a 20 year linux tinkerer).

So it's not a blind spot, it's a faustian bargain to have some hours left in my life to exercise, to look after my health, to go outside and enjoy the garden and live a wider life.

And I’m the opposite, always running into annoyances on Windows. It’s that our brains are trained on two different systems not that either is superior. I live in the terminal anyway except for VSCode, Chrome and Steam: so the DE doesn’t really concern me I use the default on Fedora and Ubuntu.

> "You couldn't pay me to put up with the massively inferior environment of any of the Linux DEs at this point."

Sounds like you're using Visual Studio... which at this point is closer to an Operating System than an IDE...

Why do you say that? I just hate jank, and KDE, Gnome, and XFCE are all janky as hell in their own infuriating ways.

PS: I haven't had any version of Visual Studio installed since about 2004.

Can you give examples of what you disliked in each of KDE, GNOME and XFCE?

Ahh, my mistake, I misread your initial comment to be about IDE's.

I would encourage you to try Gnome again. I use it everyday on a 7 year old laptop with Ubuntu, and it is impressively stable and smooth and a pleasure to multi-task with vertical windows.

My Linux computer uses a tiling-based window manager, and damn, I could never go back. The workspaces concept they use is infinitely superior to alt-tab.

Windows has virtual desktops with Win + Alt + Tab to show the options and then you can switch with Win + Alt + Left/Right arrow. Also you can tile your apps in every corner/side you want or size? I use a 43" Dell 4k monitor and it even comes with software (Dell Display Manager) to manage all these options.

Microsoft has revived the good old PowerToys as well. It now includes a FancyZones utility that allows to define zones that windows can automatically snap into while dragging them (while holding a key). It also has a setting to overwrite the Win+Arrow key functionality to move windows between these "fancy zones" instead.

Maybe this is interesting for you?

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases

That sounds interesting! Thanks for bringing this to my attention I'll definitely check it out!

Well it's better than alt-tab, but if it relies on arrow keys, it's not ideal. Being able to go directly to any workspace with a dedicated key combo is the best option.