Having to use windows at work makes me appreciate my desktop Linux experience at home.

What a big pile of shit software, I swear I'm just gonna quit because of this ass smelling garbage.

Today I discovered that C:/Users/MyUser was silently an alias of C:/Users/OneDriveBullshit/MyUser only in the explorer. So I just figured out why some documents were often disappearing for months, I'm just working on a multiverse were depending on the application the same path don't lead to the same folder.

Earlier this week I unzipped a file and couldn't remove resulting files without administrator privileges.

I've never lost so much time for any fucking software, let alone a paid one. And don't even get me starting on the fucking ads they put everywhere even if you unchecked the 154 options in 42 different menus.

Software neutrality in the entire public sector should be a law. Leverage of proprietary software and media like professor published book scams are criminal extortion.

My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.

I'm consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.

Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.

I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn't connect to anything and the tray app wouldn't pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.

Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?

Windows on the other hand... Lets just say there's a reason I push updates at the end of the day.

You can control what programs open on boot in the task manager. Teams was one of the first things I disabled.

Yeah no, the experience really is ass.
We use Lenovo IdeaPads at work, a model with an i7 and a Nvidia GPU, and Windows constantly chugs and has weird UI issues, even though the machines are not running heavy software and are on a pretty fresh install.

• Sometimes when I wake the laptop from sleep, it sits and the lock screen showing my wallpaper and NOTHING else.
  Clicking, typing does nothing, I just have to sit there and wait like 2 minutes until it finally decides to show the input field and let me login again.

• The Network/Sound/Battery tray flyout frequently stops responding. Only goes back to normal after restarting explorer.exe

• The internal display has scaling while the external doesn't. So every time you drag a window across it "snags" in between them while the application flickers and struggles to switch the scaling.

• Switching between virtual desktops is so sloooow, if you use a different wallpaper on each you can literally see Windows struggling to swap the wallpapers in time.
  It's impressive how a native OS feature feels like a third-party kludge.

Great work Microsoft.

We have Linux workstations at work.....and these can only be used to access a remote desktop of a Windows 10 virtual machine. 👍

As an admin who manages windows devices, it’s not only a pain for the end users. I will readily admit that the management tools are quite extensive and somewhat easy to use, but they’re damn near impossible to debug when they don’t work, and that’s quite often. Gpo’s often refuse to apply without reason, those ads on the Lock Screen? You can remove those if you pay for enterprise or education edition. Running pro? Nope you get ads.

@maxprime same lol. Somehow the whole os feels like one gigantic advertisement... That is trying it's best to not let you use your computer

TL; DR
My experience between Windows and Linux is not much different with how often I have issues. But given the choice I much more prefer my Linux experience.

I hate Windows just as much as the next guy, but this comment section smells a little of confirmation bias.

From my experiece (web dev in a mainly MS branded stack) Windows mostly just works. Yes there are horrendous design, UX choices forced upon me, but I can usually force the OS to do what I need and how I need it.

Now comparing it to my home Pop setup it also mostly just works. There are occasional freezes that require a restart and such, but I wouldn't say it's much more different from Windows.

Now what does differ a lot is that I don't need to fight the OS to do shit. It's way better productivitywise, when I know what I'm doing. Which is deffinetly not the case everytime.

My main gripe with windows is that it's gradually turning to adware/spyware after MS decided to go for that sweet data collection revenue. That also means a shift in the focus of the development of the OS, as it's not being developed for the benefit of the users anymore.

That, and software development processed are more tedious. Although today I'm sure I could find a workflow that works with WSL or vcpkg.

Edit: Oh, and everything turning to webapps on the desktop. Love staring at white canvas while it waits for a server response.

As someone who has a good windows laptop at home, windows at work is actual garbage. We had a month where you just couldn't use the search function, because the act of typing in the search bar caused enough problems it would close the search bar.

Odds are your home computer is somewhat competent and your work one is a steaming pile of trash not fit for purpose.

I feel the same way about having to use Mac for work and going back to a Linux PC at the end of the day. God damn I hate Mac's UX. From the entire UI, to the CMD key, to the fact that END functions as PGDN and goes to and of page instead of end of line.

We’re being forced to move everyone to W11 by the end of the year. It’s gonna be hell.

It is basically http://mail.office365.com in an electron shell. I'm pretty sure all the non 'classic' apps are this way now. I'm currently trying out Thunderbird to see if I like it.

I have to use SharePoint on a daily basis.

I spend a lot of my workday looking at windows that have turned white and "not responding", or clicking on things and waiting a minute to see whether the click worked, or waiting for the Start menu to allow me to type, or waiting for the indexing service to spare me a little bit of my computer for my own use, etc. Then I come home to Linux and remember how computers can actually be fast and satisfying to use.

I requested a Windows machine at work a few years ago, because the specs were amazing, and I was getting frustrated with Mac OS. After using the Windows machine for a couple days I was reminded why I don't like Windows anymore, and returned the machine, despite its amazing specs. It just wasn't worth it.

When teams is just doing chat things, it's fine. But the fact that it's the only program that doesn't remember which monitor it is supposed to be on, and never remembers the show on all desktop settings, drives me insane. Not to mention that it seems to restart itself multiple time per day and makes me fix its location each time.

When I started my new job I got a pretty unrestricted Windows machine, so I decided to try and use that. WSL is pretty impressive and I managed to work with Emacs and some other tools installed in it until Windows decided stuff should run way slower now. Magit got especially slow doing any git operation.

That weekend I installed Linux (with permission) and it's perfect now.

Had the same issue with outlook last weeks. 60% CPU usage, doing nothing.

I thought outlook had been electron for a while

I've been using the outlook pwa on Linux for some time with no issues, maybe try that instead if it's causing problems for you on windows?

Permanently Deleted

I kinda wish more pcs shipped with linux.

My first job I was using Windows, thankfully I was able to use Linux my next 3 jobs in a row. It really helps justify Linux when our production servers are always running Linux.

The funniest thing is it doesn't even have to be this way with Windows. I've unfortunately had to go back to dual booting lately but I'm using Win 10 LTSC and I have to say I'm surprised how tolerable it is. I'd still rather not use it but eeh it's fine.

I use both but windows 11 has been generally stable and visual artifact free for me even more than windows 10. Like i have never seen BSOD on 11 yet but on 10 it was regular.

Btw did you tweak it to remove bloat and crapware? Windows will break if you do it even if the bloat removing tool call it stable.

Same

My home desktop has been on Linux for almost a decade, and a few months ago, my employer certified Linux as a choice for our corporate laptops. I couldn't be happier. If only I managed to convince my wife to take the plunge, but she is the most anti-change person I know when it comes to technology. It took her months to stop complaining when she had to upgrade to Win 10 and her 9 years old computer is slow as it gets right now, it was never re-installed and she rather not risk trying to make it better in fear of breaking something...

Debian in WSL is my single favorite thing about Windows work laptop. Real tools! 😃

I’m back on windows for work after a decade away, and all the reasons I left are still there. The tools are still lacking, the layout is non-sensical, prototyping requires expensive subscriptions, and it’s not designed to get work done.

*nixes and macOS, to a lesser extent, are much nicer. The *nixes are designed to get work done. I have my gripes, but good lord they’re small comparatively.

Going from my laptops to a client's Windows machine feels like I'm stepping back in time, every time.

Even my Win10 VM is light years ahead of Windows 'proper' because of all of the modifications to make it usable.

MS Windows belongs in a museum, not at an office or on a desk.

(hate spewed at me by Adobe Premiere)

Guh. Amen to this! I’m in the same boat. Sometimes I just bring a Linux laptop with me to work just to have a break from the work computer.

Yeah now add Dynamics to all that and you get my day. Eyeroll

You can still use the classic version of Outlook, that comes with latest Office. It is literally called "Outlook (classic)" in the start menu.

Hm. Not sure if it’s because I’ve stuck with gnome and kde. But both definitely freeze often during high I/o or intense processing times.

On multiple machines and multiple distros. It’s one of the most annoying things about it really.

For me, at work it's more MS sharepoint and MS dynamic (+oracle clod shit of course) that fk me over on a daily basis - that's possibly due to the way our IT people don't seem to know how to use them or set them up - and won't let us query(just SELECT) the dynamics tables directly using SQL for whatever reason. (i suspect we have to pay MS to acces our own data). And of course things like MS excel being used to mangle data by default all the time - yeah i know always use power query import . . . just everything takes six extra steps and the easy way is always the worst way.

W10 is mostly okay. I mean it's slow and hard to use, blasts the cpu fan all the time, is still annoying with updates, and I have to "right click open with" to open anything in the application that i want (even when there is only one native appllication for the file format). You get used to working around that shit.

That is just not true for sharepoint and other MS apps, it gets worse, and as soon as you think you get used to a workaround for one thing, something else changes or an old thing resurfaces. and dynamic has just "upgraded" the colour scheme of the status colum so that there is no contrast between the background and the text. black text on white background, good enough for every other column, but no upgrade that one to black on dark blue, thanks bill you're a F-ing-C. how do they screw up things like that as a bajillion dollar company.

So I was going to say that W10 is more or less stable and it is other MS stuff that I hate more. that is probably true. but actually sitting down and writing out the above, W10 is still pretty horrible to . . . whether it's our IT or MS itself, it's shit.

I much prefer my home linuxes, it is just as stable (for me) - and just so much easier to use - and most of all it is quieter on the fan. So much more relaxing.

W11 had better be "not worse" or i'll probably have to quit.

And here I am looking to move away from Linux after they started rejecting contributions for political reasons.