Warning, no technical stuff, only creed:

I don’t hate Windows in and off itself. For me it represents my first contact with a computer and influences my choice of UI to this day.

I hate what it stands for, which for me is something I call “gated computing”; a restriction of access to computational power and abilities. It turns a machine with near limitless potential, like watching cat videos, sharing how to best build bridges or calculating the bygone cycles of the moon, to a machine that maliciously distracts people while giving a selected few the power of watching over them with ever changing objectives as to why they watch them.

Windows, like few others, eased people into thinking that that was the right way to use a computer all along.

That is why I hate it.

I like being in control of my computer.

Windows and Android have this attitude where they decide how you want to use your device and block customisation. And the fact that they feel entitled to be able to change how your device looks and feels without warning or permission is something that’s deeply uncomfortable to me. There’s also this feeling of not knowing what my device is actually doing, and how much of my data it is actually collecting.

With Windows, there’s also a lot of small papercuts that make it annoying to use (and that my Windows friends don’t seem to understand):

• Lack of middle click paste.
• Lack of the ability to drag windows using “alt”.
• You can’t turn off the window previews in the task bar.
• You can’t disconnect from a wired network connection from the connections list.
• Sometimes the computer just restarts on its own for fun.
• Finding settings is a pain because they keep adding new settings menus.
• Whatever garbage the start menu is doing nowadays.
• Installing software and drivers is a pain.
• The attitude that you have to download (or buy!) third party software for core features that should be included in the OS.
• It doesn’t support my keyboard layout, and the editor for making new layouts is terrible.
• The bitlocker password entry doesn’t respect your keyboard layout. Or clear the entry when you get it wrong.
• Windows licenses are a pain to manage.
• Managing the bootloader just sucks.
• The registry just kinda sucks compared to dconf and/or text config files.
• Font rendering is ugly, imo.
• I don’t care about edge, fuck off with that shit.
• I can’t change the volume by using the scroll wheel.
• Launching a pinned app on the task bar causes all the other pinned apps to shift around so I misclick.
• Device letters are not stable if you add or remove devices.
• It just resets settings sometimes, because why not?
• It can’t be installed to a partition that isn’t the first partition on the disk. This is not mentioned anywhere, nor is the error useful.
• It’s just bad for developing on, due to lack of tooling.

… Whew I ranted for a while there, didn’t I? Yeah, I dual boot Windows for the games that either don’t run under protonwine or the devs want to add a rootkit to.

I started “hating” Windows more recently. I was never a very technical user but I was always someone that could find myself around system configuration and they just keep hiding ways of letting you customize things.

When I started learning programming I was still trying to use only Windows but at some point I got extremely tired of fighting how clunky environmental variables can be. Installing things such as gcc and python was extremely annoying.

Then I did dual boot for a few years, then I started using WSL. WSL is… Awful, lol. It will never ask you if it is okay to stop what you are doing to reboot, I lost count of how many times I was working on something and suddenly my Linux environment was dead.

This year the amount of clutter they are adding to Windows and the existence of Proton just kicked the bucked for me, everywhere you look at Windows is busy and full of stuff I don’t want to be there and like I said previously, you either can’t remove it or it is difficult because they just want it to be.

I might need to figure out how to run a Windows VM if I need to run something (hasn’t happened yet) but that’s it, I don’t need to deal with all the bs anymore and I can customize things as I like. I love it.

I wouldn’t say I hate Windows now, I just kind of despise it after so many years. I wish I heard my professors that kept shitting on Windows so many years ago.

Linux is great, and does a lot of stuff right… however…

I just don’t get the people around there sometimes. They’re okay with spending 1000+ hours jumping between 30 different Linux distros and customizing their DE, dealing with Wine / virtualization crap. BUT they aren’t able to Windows 10 Enterprise and read the manual to get a clean usable system in 1/1000 of the time and effort.

How ironic.

Hate is a strong word, i don’t feel strongly enough about an os to really hate it. I still use a Windows 10 pc for my music production since all of my vsts work there and continue working there even after updates and whatever else.

My daily driver is running pop os. my main reason for switching was just a personal disagreement with the direction windows was going back around 2021ish when they were talking about integrated advertising in the file explorer. Linux was always something I wanted to get to learning so the timing just seemed right to switch over.

I think hate is really too strong of a word, dislike at most for me.
My biggest issue with Microsoft is a lack of trust. Apart from that, I just like my Linux setup more and find it easier to use.
Stuff I want to do works how I want to do it and how I’m (now) used to it.
Regardless, I use Windows at work, manage Windows Servers and Azure. It’s just how it is.

Windows forced me to update to a version that has advertisement in it. It has built in network calls in the start menu. I would have to pay a licence and make an account, something I avoided for years. Sharing file on a private network is insanely hard to do and very buggy.

Now I’m not a Windows admin, but I’m a Linux admin, so there are many, many things I know how to do on Linux and not on Windows.

This made me realize that there is a bias: when something doesn’t work on windows, the something doesn’t work, or you only need to find how to hack it to work. But when something doesn’t work on Linux, it’s Linux that doesn’t work. That’s a double standard. The same kind of work or problems on Windows is ignored.

There are so many things today to help people use Windows, like classes, professionals, help desk, it’s everywhere, for everyone, yet it’s somehow considered easy to use windows. BTW any organisation that made the move did saw it happen. I mean that many organisations moved to Linux and gave the support and formation for it to work, and it worked.

It isn’t hate. It’s disgust.

But it’s everything. The intrusion, the quasi monopoly, the shitty anti,consumer choices, all of it.

Since either Linux or win 7 do almost everything I need, I’ll never use anything higher than win 7

I swapped away from Windows about a year and a half ago. The last straw was them sticking ads in the OS. And from everything I’ve heard, they continue to boil the frog; they continue to add more and more telemetry and unasked for “features” and bloat the system more and more and more with every update. Even my own parents are growing tired of Windows; it’s a clunky, poorly optimized operating system that’s positively frustrating to use.

I will concede that not everything that runs on Windows will run on Linux. It’s true. But I severely disagree that Windows is “easier to use.” Of course, when you grow up on Windows, Linux has a learning curve. It’s different OS. But once I got past that? Nah, Linux is far easier and more intuitive in most cases.

Installing programs? Open your software manager and click a button.

Playing video games? Open Steam or Lutris and click a button. Occasionally you might need to tweak things, but you have to do the same on Windows sometimes, especially for older games!

I could go on but those are the biggest two examples that come to mind immediately.

As to another point you made, I personally gave up almost nothing. Destiny 2 and League of Legends don’t work, but I quit league before fgsh added Vanguard and neither of these games want me. That isn’t my fault, and it isn’t a short coming in Linux’s fault, it’s the devs being assholes.

In spite of this, I do acknowledge some people would have to give up more than me, and for some people that’s too much, and that’s valid! I hope one day they truly get a choice.

Well I really dislike updating my computer (and on this topic, Windows Update is inconvenient and slow as balls!) and finding some new BS from Microsoft on it.
One day it’s Copilot, which I could just use on the browser if I really wanted to, the next day it’ll be Recall, which just… no.

Know what I mean?

Poor workflow. Switching applications is horrible if you have 4 windows open in one desktop. Even gnome is far better at that.

Back when I first used a computer we were told if it has ads and pop ups constantly then you have installed a virus. Try using a fresh install of windows…

there are too many little details to point out but windows just controls your experience too much. for example on a widescreen i don’t want to be forced to have the taskbar on the long edge. and up to including w10 the taskbar placement could be chosen. in windows 11 it’s forbidden… i installed a software to hack this but of course then explorer.exe breaks every 10 minutes.

the spirit of computer technology is a universal tool. Microsoft strongarms the user to be a tool. so no thanks

They killed Clippy! Those bastards!

Because it makes doing the things I want to do with a computer difficult and annoying.