With Windows 11, although I mostly like the UI (rounded corners on a high dpi tablet also with rounded screen is amazing), it feels absolutely gross, in the corporate soulless sense. It feels mentally heavy top operate. I constantly had to battle it to get it to work the way I want it.
These days all my devices are running Fedora with KDE, which is just the best. You basically set it up once the way you like it, and it won't change by itself for months. It is a buttery smooth experience and have had zero need to go back to Windows yet.
If anyone want the same level one-ness with your computer like back in Windows XP & Windows 7 days, give KDE a try. Fedora is pretty simple distro to get used to if you want a good starting point.
That’s… not a good sell at all
Promise me a decade and I’ll bite. (Joke’s on me, I’ll need to get out of this windows shithole asap)
For servers, we just use containers.
I mentioned to a friend recently that W11 is so difficult to use compared to Linux like Mint nowadays. He didn't understand it, though he tried Mint a decade ago but kept using Windows 10, upgraded to 11, continues to have driver problems with his laptop, some weeks network card stops working some weeks his sound card drops out completely. He uses usb dongles intermittently, it reminds me how I used on laptop Linux 20 something years ago and even then it wasn't that bad. I feel preaching Linux is almost counter-effective, but I'm tired of being asked to solve his hw problems caused by bad W11 drivers.
I get the same feelings whenever I am near an interface that looks anything like NT4.0.
As someone who lived through Microsoft’s actions in the 90s, I really don’t agree with your sentiment there.
There’s a reason many of us old greybeards still refuse to use anything MS even 30 years later.
Windows NT what ? Microsoft was always the same.
And the stunts they pulled to kill other IMs.
Or how they crippled the web for a decade due to killing competing browsers, building Windows lock-ins into IE (eg ActiveX controls), fragmenting Java, and then leaving IE to die themselves.
Or how they lied about Windows 98 requiring IE4.
Or how they didn’t give a crap about OS security until halfway through the life of XP. Leaving literally millions of people vulnerable to a plethora of different forms of attacks from malware to direct hacking on open Telnet ports.
Or how they tried to land grab IRC with their comic book GUI. Which, in fairness, was a novel app. But unfortunately it was another embrace, extend, extinguish play.
Or how they tried to kill ODF with their own faux-open document format: OOXML
Or their constant stream of FUD messaging about Linux being “communism”.
Yeah, MS were really noble in their goals to create a good OS. /s
It’s a pity they couldn’t even manage to do that well given every iteration of Windows has been bloated, buggy, and years behind the competition in terms of performance and capabilities. Windows was never a good OS.
In fact I’d go further and say Microsoft have never release a good OS. Even their versions of BASIC sucked compared to the competition.
Microsoft have always been good at negotiating with businesses. It’s why Azure is used in governments, why Windows is the “business platform”, and why 9x beat the competition in the 90s despite being consistently the worst in class for basically every metric you could think of.
Windows didn’t succeed because it was good. Microsoft succeeded because Bill Gates was ruthless!
They won because they were first mover, not because they were the best because they weren't and they aren't. This is why they are so hell bent on copilot everywhere. They want to build an installed base again so they can milk it. But they're hardly the best. In fact what they are selling as copilot isn't even anything they made. It's just Chatgpt. Another interesting parallel with edge by the way which is of course just chrome.
Microsoft didn’t even have an OS when they made that deal with IBM.
Hence why I said they’re good at negotiating with businesses.
Being first to market is actually less important than people think it is. It’s just history tends to remember the victors so everyone assumes they were first to market.
It was full of vulnerabilities though. I used to take a laptop with some specialist software to clients and in the end I started running it in a VM so I didn't have to deal with my machine becoming infected from my clients dodgy networks.
Get a VM of Windows 9x/2k/XP to experience what "good Microsoft" was like.