Windows has been called a virus and the slug of operating systems, not without good reasons. Here are thirteen reasons, in no particular order, why it frustrates me and wastes untold hours of my time when I'd be better off getting to grips with (and using) GNU/Linux:
- Resource Hog: It's not just slow. It consumes at least 60-70% of my newish laptop's CPU and RAM, before I've even started any applications or services. (This is despite the fact that the machine has a 10th/11th generation i5 and 16 GB of RAM.) It also starts and runs so many services that I don't necessarily want or need to be operational all the time. Also, a lot of them only have
SYSTEM
permission, which means I can't change their start-up type to "manual". - Automatic Updates: I can't turn them off or disable them, can't even schedule them for a "convenient time", since what that is is variable. Besides, they don't run in the background and have minimal impact, like those of GNU/Linux. They kick off whenever they're ready and waste hours of my time, when I am trying to get work done.
- Dead on the Starting Grid: The "start" menu is bloated, clunky and ungainly to the point of being unusable. I cannot navigate through it without difficulty. I also cannot modify or reorganise the program groups, unlike in prior versions (9x-7). This is annoying, since not all programs that create shortcuts here offer the ability to choose a parent directory (or even to not create shortcuts).
- BSODs: The error messages are not at all helpful or informative. In the past, you could get at least some idea of what went wrong and why. Now, you just get "Something went wrong" and a sad emoticon, which is of no use to anyone.
- I've got a GUI app for that: The only way to interact with the system is through a GUI. This introduces unnecessary bloat and overhead for tasks that are better done through a CLI. (The only time you might need a GUI interface is for working with multimedia, not for editing text or interacting with directories and files. Even then, libraries like
caca, ncurses/pdcurses, notcurses
andurwid
are pretty good at providing TUIs for those who want visuals. Caveat:urwid
doesn't work on Windows, because the kernel doesn't support I/O control like *NIX machines do.) Not just that, but the GUI is both resource-hungry and ugly. i3, LXQt and XFCE might not win awards for aesthetics, but they certainly don't look worse and they are far more lightweight. My sixteen-year-old laptop is running a four-year-old GNU/Linux distro with LXQt and it outperforms my newish laptop (~2 years old) most of the time! - Task Manager has become Unresponsive: Where is your god now, Steve? Killing processes that freeze/hang/lock up the machine is a frustrating and error-prone mission, thanks to the over-reliance on a GUI for doing everything.
- Anti-Competitive Practices: Try as I might (and I did, for the better part of two days), I could not replace Windows 10 with a GNU/Linux distro. Even getting to and changing the configuration to allow booting from CD is a mission!
- It doesn't have a proper shell: Yes, PowerShell exists, but it's really just a poor attempt to reimplement
bash
in .Net. Besides, you can't boot into it. - It doesn't have decent package management: Sure, you can install Chocolatey (through PowerShell, bien sûr), but it leaves a lot to be desired. (Often, it doesn't correctly/fully install packages and ends up leaving them in a state where it is unable to remove or repair them.)
- As Fun as Kicking a Dead Whale Down a Beach: Windows is not developer-friendly! Finding, downloading and installing development tool-chains will take a lot of time and frustrate you with how much fiddling you have to do to get everything configured and working.
- DLL Hell: Windows does not have any sane way of centralising where it stores shared objects/resources (such as DLLs). Every time you install something that uses Gtk+, Qt or Python (or a combination thereof), each application bundles its own libraries and places them in its installation directory. (I've lost track of how many copies of Python 2.7 and Qt 5 exist on my laptop.)
- Get A Life: It requires an MS Live account (and Internet connection) just to be able to create a user account. Given how MS Live is using an ableist antibot check in order to complete the account creation process, this is a problem.
- Ease of Use: If you actually want to do anything useful with it (such as work), you have to use WSL or set up an account and remote compute instance with Linode.
Thumbnail image: Photo by David Peinado on Pexels