On Hating Windows
On Hating Windows
If using a computer to get something done is to swim then to use Windows is the equivalent of swimming in a swamp. The unnerving slowness of this absolutely abhorrent piece of software irks me to my core. How is it that a creation by this trillion-dollar corporation still constantly begs for more money as it shoves ads in your face while failing to get any actual work done. How is it that it continuously demands to be updated just so that it can break another driver or introduce a new day zero exploit. How is it that every generation our modern computers that are thousands of times what their predecessor ever dreamt to be fail to satisfy the glutton that is Windows.
As I failed to answer to these questions I had to switch from dual booting Linux with Windows to making sure Windows stays away from my systems.
Microsoft being acutely aware of the absolute pile of flaming garbage that they shove down their customers’ throat choose to run Linux in Azure. They tried to get the developers to their side by reinventing the terminal in PowerShell, a sad attempt to stand against our beloved UNIX style terminals but alas that was just another failure, so they did what they do best and just bought GitHub and threw VS Code in our faces while making WSL an option so that they can keep holding onto the developers that are just on the line. As OpenAI’s Sam Altman walked around creating hype and trying to raise trillions of dollars to be burned in the furnace of GPUs, the actual value was derived from all the open source code that Microsoft so conveniently had access to.
The Lost Value:
These software companies always give massive discounts to educational institutes, the idea is to get them while they are young, after all if your entire education happens on a Windows machine, when you finally get to the working age a Windows machine is what you will expect your employer to provide. This is such a cheap tactic as it results in more value being lost than created, because kids are curious, you give them a computer without internet and some guidance and the rest they will figure out themselves. Now on Linux that curiosity will lead them to find Python, something directly built into the system, they can explore and break stuff, they are not limited by the boundaries the software draws around them, while in Windows that is lost and therefore a certain amount of competency that could easily have been the standard never gets to materialise. whichWhich I feel would’ve created much higher value for society than whatever Microsoft is worth. This is not an argument about how everyone should be a software engineer, but how playing around a Linux machine a kid could know and appreciate a lot more about these mysterious boxes than just how to copy and paste. Now some of this hate is obviously personal. As a kid I wanted to program so much but I couldn’t afford Visual Studio Code, even if I could I did not have the internet to download it, and if I did my puny little PC with a single core 800MHz processor with a 1 gig of ram was already on the verge of blowing up trying to run Windows 7 let alone the piece of junk that is Visual Studio, while in Linux some command are more than enough to get a lot done. Another personal experience involves a 12 year old laptop which barely manages to boot Windows,however a live installation AntiX is as snappy as it gets, it goes from E-Waste to a completely usable machine just like that, now these are anecdotal evidences for the case of good software, and how useful it can be, something that seems to be dying out.
At this point having been a daily driver of Linux/GNU for about 7 years, I can honestly say that the experience is objectively better than Windows. It’s fast, it’s reliable, it’s secure (the xz exploit was caught pretty fast actually) and it’s FREE! (as in freedom do whatever I want with it, basically imploring me to create and participate).
Why People will still continue to use windows
Adobe and games! That’s pretty much it, all the industry standard software elsewhere like Ansys Workbench, SolidWorks etc, all of them have first class support on Windows and all of them are also rather smelly software that constantly crash or require you to sell your house in order to have workstation that can smoothly run them, point is they are the “standard” that just means that the nerds that actually do the work have higher hours of practice with these tools than any other, and that is it!
The corporate relationships
Businesses are not individuals but they certainly have relationships that are toxic for everyone around them,it is not even evil or something, it is just a smart thing to do to buy licenses from reputed software companies, as this provides someone to ask question and blame if anything goes wrong. Those thousands of dollars spent on licensing are just another business cost that can be deducted in taxes, after all keeping all that excess money just means a higher tax burden, might as well use it to buy these software licenses.
The Changing Time:
Gaming
I had stopped gaming for about 7 years ago,I could not afford a good gaming PC back in the day but I have got an alright machine now, only recently I installed Far Cry 5 and Metro Exodus, both rather old games I know but they just ran on Linux! I had an experience much better than anything I’ve had on Windows, the ProtonDB project is really something and chances are whatever game that you are fond of is just available right now. While things are even better if you are a retro gamer as tools like retroarch and Lutris are better than anything you probably have ever experienced.
Professional Software
I’ll admit that a proper competitor for Adobes’ suite is hard to find, but then again Affinities offering are much better priced options that are way better as an investment, if you are not a professional then Da Vince Resolve is an amazing professional grade software that is available for free with only minor features behind a paywall, if you use Solidworks then you wouldn’t believe how good FreeCAD is, and many other professional software is now available being made by people who really care.
The UX
I have used a Macbook Pro M1 and I have do have some positive thoughts about that one compared to Windows PC, but the UX on Linux machines has improved drastically too, KDE Plasma and Gnome are two projects that come to mind, both of them come with such a finished suite of applications and features that blow Windows completely out of the water while at least for me being even better than Apple’s offerings.
Final Words:
Microsoft is massive and so is windows, I understand that some of what I have said here might disgruntle some people who productively use Windows on a daily basis, but this is not just about hating on Windows, it’s a piece of software that defines the entire digital interaction for a lot of us, and being on the open source side I find projects that invest and care for their users so much more than Windows seem to, it is not about hating on one company for ideological reason (though it is some of that), it is more about criticizing a product that does not have many good reasons to claim its number one spot. If you are young and have not developed a particular skill set around it, then it means you have a chance to escape its shackles and considering how little it actually lets you do, you will realize that it won’t be that difficult to come back to it if you ever needed to. I truly think that if Microsoft wants to compete with Apple they need to open source Windows and invest heavily towards Open Source projects, as far as money printers go, Windows is no longer the biggest one Microsoft has, so to kill this giant which already rots in it’s core perhaps will provide a chance for a lot more beautiful things to come to life.