Its disguised as “news” from affiliated links.
Honestly haven’t seen any, but like @Exard3k says, may be they’re there and I’ve just self conditioned not to see them.
1 Like
You’re going to have to be a LOT more specific about that because I can give you a list going all the way back to Windows 1.0.
(Yes, I’ve used it. It was a competitor to the Norton Commander at the time.)
Windows antimalware screener or something.
I’ve found it to magnify CPU usage by a factor of 1.5x to 2x. It’s stupid.
Also, while we’re at it, Windows Update is horribly slow.
All those thumbnails on the right can easily be disabled. I’ve also not seen any ads in my start menu. Though I usually press the windows key and start typing. But even so, I’ve not seen any ads looming between the folders of apps when I did scroll through. And I do have the latest Win10.
2 Likes
I’m more young for pre windows 95 stuff, and trying to use Windows 2 on hardware that was made for it just made me hate it, so I swapped back to dos prompt, and I forget if I had midnight commander-esque file manager on it… Feels weird XD
1 Like
That it’s Windows.
> Buggy slow mess.
> All the GUI is integrated with online services.
> You can’t use the search option in start menu without searching the internet.
> No separation of search between programs and files, so it searches everything, which is slow.
> Mostly forced into using an online account, used to be fine with Pro, now with 11 you are forced into it, although supposedly there are ways around it.
> Every once in a while, Windows updates delete files for some users, thankfully never happened to me or people around me.
> Ever increasing system requirements.
> Ever increasing hardware requirements.
> Settings always get moved around.
> Stupid desktop integration with online stuff, like all kinds of garbage widgets.
> It’s absolutely proprietary.
7 Likes
It doesn’t make sense that this is opt out for a software you have the buy the license.
I agree. But at least it’s there. And to be honest, it’s the reason I won’t be upgrading to Win11 anytime soon.
Its still hard for many people to try anything thats free,
In case any of us old farts remember, shareware.
Early shareware was a gamble because you got it for reasons that windows either didn’t have it ,or if it did it was way too expensive for the average user.
So resorting to shareware you had to deal with less than convenient or attractive gui.
Constant nag screens about paying for the less than ideal solution.
And often expiration dates that came all too quickly.
So when they hear free the first thing that comes to mind is the old shareware syndrome.
And often it takes more time to ease them into linux.
Todays linux os’s are a lot easier for a new user than they were 20 or 25 years ago
Today there are hundreds more variations to choose from.
Its an evolving process for them until they find a comfortable standard.
I know i distro hopped a lot until i settled on peppermint 10 and debian ham radio pureblend.
But in in all fairness unless a user is ready and willing to change, its often useless to try.
2 Likes
I want my computer to “just work”. I don’t want to have to spend time removing default spyware, disabling telemetry, waiting what feels like eons for system updates to complete, etc.
It’s funny, because at points earlier in my life I chose Linux because of all the customization and Windows at that time definitely fit the “just works” bill better because Linux still had much more rough edges. And in some cases, it still does. But in most cases, Linux is now the “it just works” OS.
(I used Windows 10 for work for a year or so in 2021, after using Linux at home for 15 years.)
The thing that bugged me most was the scroll bars. They’re far too wide and MS took away the setting that set their width. But worse, the scroll bar thumb has little contrast with the rest of the bar; I can’t remember the figures but the thumb and the bar are both grey, with the thumb about 65% and the bar about 50%. On the work laptop they were very hard to tell apart. (Browser extensions let me fix this in browsers, but one can’t do everything there.)
(I worked out how to put Windows in a VM (to run a few work windows-only apps) on Kubuntu, where QtCurve sets the width to 7 pixels and the thumb to highlighter yellow, #c0ff40, on a dark grey.)
Currently, it is the same for me, Linux becomes the „it just works and does what I want“ for me. I am running Steam OS on Steamdeck and getting unsupported games running is actually pretty easy thanks to bottles and Lutris. Soon or later I‘ll switch to Linux on my main Desktop.
1 Like
lol im the other way round… on kali the scroll bars aint wide enough…
i had to switch theme’s to get a wider one that still isnt wide enough … but sitll better than trying to hit 5 pixel wide bar on 2, 2560x1440p screens.
That’s why I love KDE. Customization to the last pixel, including scroll bars.
Well yeah Windows is moving away from being a great desktop OS towards a Online service.
It´s just a big pile of garbage and it won´t get any better.
The thing is that the desktop OS Windows isn´t profitable enough for Microsoft anymore.
So pushing Windows as a services and tiding everything to the cloud makes sense.
Data mining is the new interest of making money just like Google OS,
Windows will eventually end up the same way.
3 Likes
Windows sales is still a big profit for MS, but selling something once doesn’t make sense when you can give it to people for free and make infinite amounts of money by harvesting data. If MS would give Windows for free tomorrow, they’d be hit pretty hard. Unless they can gather as much data about people as Google can, but their ecosystem is not there. Very few laptops come with GPS and even fewer are used for looking up on maps.
Microsoft used to have some very good maps when they acquired Nokia together with their maps, I don’t know what happened to that. I really liked using the maps on both my Lumia 635 and on my x86 tablet.
The other problem MS is facing is that people don’t always interact with their PCs, with many people choosing to do things on their phones. In addition, there aren’t as many PC users as phone users. So the only way they can make up is to both sell a product and harvest data.
What grinds my gears about Windows 10/11 is the following…
-Windows auto-installs random crap may it be a clean install of Windows or setting up a new PC, it makes you wonder how much money they’re getting for Candy Crush and other stupid games to auto-install.
-Microsoft Edge launches itself every quarterly Windows Update just to say “hey Microsoft is improving their browser”… keep nagging me like that, I’ll treat it like Internet Explorer(ignore it as much as possible).
-Windows 11 Start Menu being more like ChromeOS of pinning up to 10 applications on the menu for quick launch, if you expect me to type program names to launch them I may as well just fill my desktop with shortcuts to launch said applications.
-Windows 8/10/11 frequently uninstalling “recent” drivers and installing older ones during Windows Updates, had this happen with Intel IGP & Nvidia drivers.
-Bluetooth support on Windows just sucks, how does Linux & MacOS handle using two bluetooth devices without having latency spikes… on Windows you can’t use BT audio without having bluetooth input devices being a lag prone mess 
It’s multi-monitor support is horrendous. Things opening at random positions on random displays, things launching with the title bar off screen so it’s a pain in the arse to position it (no Alt/Meta+Drag like Linux). If you did have multiple monitors connected but don’t anymore (like, say, on a laptop) things launch on the monitor that ISN’T EVEN THERE ANYMORE.
NTFS is absolutely archaic. We need 3rd party drivers and bios hacks to get things like SSD caching because Windows hasn’t caught up with 2012 where people had a small fast drive paired with a large slow drive. Microsoft does have ReFS but refuses to make it available for most people.
Package management. Linux is gradually moving away from this and moving towards the Windows model with the likes of snaps and flatpaks which is an absolute travesty, but a package manager updating all of the software on your machine together is so convenient. The way you open some software you need to use on Windows, and instead of being able to get on with your work you’re hit with a dialogue box to update, and then you’re taken off to their website, and then you have to install. The way Windows handles software is god awful.
Oh here’s one that I experienced the other day: fonts. The process for installing fonts on Windows is batshit. Control Panel, appearance and customisation or some bullshit, fonts, then dragging a font you downloaded into the box. In openSUSE I just searched to see if the font I wanted was already in YaST (it was).
Speaking of Control Panel, how many different ways of administration do we need!? How many settings menus and control panels are necessary? Because Windows is a UX disaster in this respect.
1 Like