I disabled OneDrive syncing on Edge, and the next time Windows refused to boot. I had to reinstall the OS from the recovery partition.

Tracking: it’s mandatory!

Somehow it feels like there's more to this story

I also tried to install WSL that day, but that’s just a package with no customization. Seems unlikely.

more likely than browser sync, dont' you think :)

Right. I guess your SSD has zero checksum errors and your RAM passes memtest for a couple of days too.

I've been using Windows for 30 years and haven't encountered either issue you've described.

That kind of attitude leads to user blaming. I have fond memories of the workgroup network scan freezing my computer for extended durations in the xp days

Or just download a large file, choose save as on a drive other than the C drive because it is too big, and watch IE proceed to fill up the temp dir on the C drive, completely ignoring the fact you asked to save on another drive.

Or if you had enough space, still waste minutes copying the deleting the file...

IE? We're in 2023 dude, don't think that is even usable anymore.

A memory of XP was invoked, hence the comment about other XP anecdata.

haha! can totally relate

that 'save to temp-dir first and copy later' behavior is so frustrating because it's inconsistently applied and not easily avoided, yet somewhat incomprehensible to the average user.

> in the xp days

Those days ended in 2007. I don't know if that issue persisted after XP because I've never experienced it.

I've been using Windows since 1998 and I can confirm all the issues described. The last time I enjoyed hanging Explorer was yesterday, and it was exactly because Explorer was trying to open a network link that I didn't ask to open.

To be fair I have that constantly on Linux. Default applications like ark trying to query every connected drive on every use and just hanging there until they get a response even when all you want to do is open a zip file on a local ssd.

I don't use windows daily but was trying to add an additional keyboard layout (US English) to a family member's windows 10 PC today.

Searching for such a simple thing in the control panel was infuriating to say the least. I finally found it, random clicking in every potential places and it was in the most unintuitive place you could think of.

You would expect "keyboard layout" search to bring helpful results but it does not.

just wait till windows randomly decides to add some other layouts and mess with the switching order

WHY DOES IT DO THAT!!!?

It doesn't? I'm multilingual and always had 3 keyboard languages in parallel and never had any of those issues happen in 15+ years and 6 versions of Windows.

Most likely he was hitting alt+space by accident which cycles through them without him realizing.

Hot take: I feel like a lot of Windows issues people raise are actually user errors/accidents, then blaming the OS for it.

Systemic user error is a software defect.

How the user mashing random keys a SW defect? The SW does what you tell it to do.

Random mysterious keybinds that nobody asked for

Every OS has it's own keybinds. It's not their fault you don't know them.

I know the keybind to switch languages. I'm ok with it. I'm genuinely asking why Windows is adamant that I must have more keyboard language options than the two very specific ones I want.

If enough people are unaware that they're telling the software to do something and are confused by its behavior, then the software needs to better indicate what it's doing and why.

Could be ctrl+shift. It's easy to mistype, and there's no UI feedback. Also used to only change a single window's language (not sure if that's the case anymore, as I use win+space).

I seem to get a link to the right settings place after typing "ke" into the start menu on Windows 10. "keyboard layout" indeed does not work, but "keyboard" or part of it does.

I switched to Linux entirely (but may reinstall windows as a second OS for some games if I get the wild hair...), and while it can still be buggy at times here and there (Arch Linux, so go figure), it's usually my fault, and it can be remedied most of the time.

Still a thousand times better of an experience than Windows.

i threw in the towel as well after debloating the same win10 install for the millionth time.

switched to Arch (EndeavourOS KDE/Plasma) and life is sane again; enjoyable, even!

i do miss Affinity products, tho, which cannot even run in Wine/Proton :(

So what design tools do you use now? Browser based?

i'm not a designer, but use Krita for very basic edit tasks and Inkscape on occasion. can't use GIMP well because it's GTK2 and the UI doesnt work well for pixel-scaled (HiDPI displays), and GTK3-based GIMP 3 dev builds often fail to compile: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gimp-devel

The funny thing is that I encountered the exact same issues OP complains about (network not available = let's stall forever, insert USB drive = let's crash hard) on various mainstream distros. Especially the first one is super common and on various levels and through various protocols.

Me too. Ubuntu 22.04. It's come a long way since I last Linux in... 1999 and 2003! Haha!

Now I'm even considering FreeBSD as I friggin' love that OS. It's rock solid, predictable, and fast. I just need to make sure a few things can be made to work, even if it's via the browser, like Zoom.

I'm curious, what games would you need Windows for?

Between Wine frontends and Steam, I haven't really booted Windows for almost a year now, and I play a healthy balance of modern and ancient games of every production quality.

The only thing I miss is ShareX, which is a screenshot tool that seems to have been designed with me exactly as its sole target audience, because it is incredible, intuitively discoverable and packed with features that Just Work. Yes, Linux also has some screenshot tools, but they are at most 1% of what ShareX is. (And it doesn't work under Wine :(... )

What would the forces be that magically turn garbage into a diamond?

heat and pressure? idk

Time and pressure, isn't it? And they've had plenty of time.

Agreed but if talking about default file managers, its even worse on ubuntu. Nautilus is imo very bad compared to win file manager (hitting a key starts a global search in that folder, it crashes very often etc.). Does anyone know if they plan anything with it?

use dolphin