Pedantry: it feels like false balance.

Windows is fine, that's it. I use it every day, but it's got so many weird quirks that (that I can't do anything about, being the difference with Linux) it seems ridiculous to call it "great".

I'm in the other room from my windows laptop. It's late, there's almost nothing running in it, the lid is closed, surprise surprise I can still hear the fans.

> I can still hear the fans.

I could not deal with that I’m sorry. I’d have to turn it off.

The only way I could make Windows usable day after day in a previous job was to shut it down every night, and then I had the BIOS configured to start it up again and iterate through my extensive startup list before I got into work. Was quite effective like that.

My Ubuntu machine is also noisy. I’m fairly certain it has nothing to do with system activity.

Fans are probably either a rogue service you can find in the task manager or hardware problem (maybe it needs some new thermal paste or a good air blow to remove dust).

That has usually nothing to do with the OS itself.

Recent Windows releases are notable for not running software without the consent or wishes of the user :)

And what about rogue services that come with the OS itself? Things like Windows Update, Windows Defender, the Phone app thingy, diagnostics policy service, the Xbox game bar or whatever it's called, the .NET optimization thingy and a dozen other things that like to wake up randomly and start consuming resources whenever they feel like it. Most of these things you can only disable temporarily, if at all, without resorting to dubious 3rd party tools.

Counterpoint: I bought a System76 laptop last year. As it came, the CPU fan was never off for longer than a few seconds, even when there was no load at all. The fans are not very loud, but the coil whine just before re-enabling the fan was disturbing.

The motherboard's firmware is open, however, so I rebuilt it with a slightly adjusted "CPU fan curve." After flashing it, the fans now go online when there's an actual need, which is to say - rarely. The coil whine still happens, but hearing it once or twice a day is much less irritating than hearing it every 10 seconds.

So it's possible the problem is on the OS side (I think we can agree the firmware is part of the OS) and it's sometimes possible to fix the problem in software... as long as you have control over it.

> That has usually nothing to do with the OS itself.

More often than not this mystical rogue service ends up being something internal to windows.

> From that moment on, unix followed me through all stages of my life: the toddler phase of keeping up with the cutting-edge Ubuntu releases, the rebellious teens of compiling custom kernels for my Thinkpad T61p and emerging the @world on Gentoo, the maturity of returning to Ubuntu lts and delaying upgrades until the first dot one release, and to the overwhelmed parent stage of becoming a happy macOS user.

I started off as a Linux zealot and followed a very similar trajectory. I think it’s a sign of maturity to realize there is no absolute “best” in engineering, just a best solution in a particular problem space, and Windows is the best for a large number of users for a reason.

I started as a Linux enthusiast a long time ago, these days in my own time I use macos and I don't miss Linux that much, as long as I'm in the terminal I don't feel a difference.

At daily job I'm forced to use Windows, the only thing that's keeping me from changing jobs is WSL2. I'm just not productive with mouse based tools, I need a terminal and powershell doesn't do it for me. Everything feels alien and less usable to me even after years, fonts, window decorations, file manager, UI inconsistencies between different tools. Everything seems slightly hostile and out of place.

Windows 2000 was great IMO, and peak Windows!

XP was peak if hardware compatibility is important.

Then it went downhill slowly. UI decisions and telemetry and now needing an internet connection and a MS account to install and now Win11 refuses to install on perfectly good but older hardware.

Microsoft cloudifying Office ironically makes going to Linux as a normie fairly easy as Office is the only thing I would miss. And mainly due to it’s dominance rather than it being great.

Windows dark side is a shame as MS as a developer’s company is really good. VS, VSCode, Typescript and C# and F# are awesome. And also some changed to Windows are good.

Occasionally I have to help my father with his windows computer and each time it actually gets worse. Edge. Suggestions.

Like I am sure the actual fundamentals of the OS are fairly high quality but holy shit it sucks to use.

I had a similar, frustrating experience last weekend trying to copy data from a phone to a windows machine.

Windows is trying to hide all "technical" stuff so hard that it becomes impossible to do anything.

I put the peak at Windows 7.

Windows 7 UI is like Windows XP but prettier thanks to GPU acceleration. Compared to the XP generation, it had better security, 64 bit support out of the box, it was an "internet age" version of Windows, but it could still run offline and wasn't too obnoxious with ads, telemetry, etc...

It definitely got downhill after that.

I mostly agree. But Windows 10 added virtual desktops[0]. Took them long enough!

Its dialog when copying files in nicer as well IMO.

[0] Windows 7 supported up to 4 virtual desktops, but not out-of-the-box: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/des...

> Windows 7 UI is like Windows XP but prettier

Isn't 7 UI basically Vista?

Sorta, but Vista was slow and stuttery, so they don’t feel the same.

Is Windows 7 fast on Vista-era hardware?

Windows 7 effectively cleaned up some details, and by the time of windows 7 the vendors shipping broken drivers already had to correct for NT6 changes or deal with their hardware not working.

> Windows 2000 was great IMO, and peak Windows!

> XP was peak if hardware compatibility is important.

It all started with Windows NT 4. It had its own kernel and was enterprise (and network) focused, compared to Windows 98 (which was Windows 95 (which was Windows 3.11 minus the DOS host dependency)) with bolted on network capabilities.

Windows 2000 is literally "Windows NT 5.0", and Windows XP is "Windows NT 5.1". The win95 lineage was decisively killed by Windows Me, after which the NT kernel took over the entire product line.

On the contrary, footnotes on a webpage belong in the margins. Putting them at the foot of the article in current year is like banging rocks together.

The main thing keeping me on Windows is touch screen support. I know I'm a freak for wanting it, but we all have our ergonomic preferences.

Beyond that, I treat the OS as an appliance. Most of the software that I use is platform independent.

After 20 years of using Linux on the desktop (and FreeBSD, and NetBsd) in parallel with Windows, I gave up. I don't like to always configure things, I don't need 20 different ways to accomplish a task and some of the software I use is not available on Linux. So I went Windows only for the desktop since 4 years. Of course, when I had to do something server side, it was Linux only.

Recently I bought a MacBook Pro and the experience is very Windows like. I don't have to mess with the OS and it just works.

Stick to one Linux distribution and you can have the "one size fits all" experience you want. Who's forcing you to unixhop and constantly fiddle with your stuff? I'm on Debian and never have to change anything and my setup just works.

For me at least, it's personal discipline. If I can fiddle and change stuff, I will.

> (side note: is it really a 'foot'note if it's not in the footer of the page?)

These are rather sidenotes (or margin notes).

> It's pretty rare to see such a balanced perspective with respect to Windows when someone starts off with 'UNIX'.

I dunno. I've posted some pretty balanced opinions on OSes: I've frequently criticised Windows, Macs, Gnome, Plasma and more.

They all each suck in their own specific ways. Most people acknowledge this.[1] Many people are just like me: we put up with the crap on each system in order to get work done.

[1] The exceptions are almost always Mac and Gnome users: trying pointing out that UI can be objectively bad, and the default Mac/Gnome experience fails on more than a few of the objective UI metrics, and you almost always get multiple Mac/Gnome users saying that UI is all subjective.

To some extend it is? After all, those users like that objectively bad UI that you are talking about. The fact that they’re idiots doesn’t make it any less subjective.

I'm not the Linux zealot I was as a kid, but I can never see myself going back to Windows. The particular niceties of a Unix environment are ones that I've come to rely on, and I could never go back to managing all my files and data through rat wrestling, the way Windows seems to want you to do.

That said, I can see the merits of Windows, especially for normies or video game players. It's just absolute friction town for me to use it.

I think the peak of windows was when they introduced WSL, making windows the ultimate crossplatform dev OS.