this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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I can list the biggest one without having to look: Because the most popular alternative has progressively gotten worse for the past 12 years, and what was once a quality OS (sure,it had its faults and flaws, but I'll concede that Win7 was objectively a good OS) has now morphed into a combination of spyware and adware.
Microsoft being uninterested in Windows Desktop and focusing on Saas and the cloud is indeed the first bullet point.
I get the sense that Microsoft doesn’t care about their desktop users and as much as views desktop as another small side market.
MacOS only runs on their particular hardware, so Linux is free to gobble up market share limited mainly by user technical know how and the general shift to most web traffic coming from mobile.
Users aren't finding it out. The distros just actually got usable and stopped being super elitists.
Also the updates situation has caused many to dislike Windows.
Linux is a perfectly viable OS at this point, it's not just for tech geeks. I did have a problem with my USB Wi-Fi adapter during the install but other than that everything was just as smooth and less creepy than Microsoft.
The last objectively good Microsoft OS that didn't have any significant user-hostile features was Windows 2000, IMO. Windows 7 -- specifically, before invasive "telemetry[sic]" started getting backported to it from 10 -- was just the last version before the hostility got bad enough to get me to switch.
Hard agree. Windows 2000 was rock solid, reasonably lightweight and had no shenanigans going on in the background. It's EOL (edit: actually I think it might have been a specific version of directx only being supported on XP maybe) was one of the things that pushed me to Linux.
That and the native Linux Unreal Tournament 2004.
Besides the backported bullshit from windows 10 (which could be removed, admittedly, you'd have to know it was there, and which package to uninstall..so not exactly newbie friendly), what was hostile about windows 7?
I used it from release day until EOL and I found it to be the best version of windows ever and the pinnacle of the platform, before it started taking a hard drive with Windows 8 and fell off the cliff with 10/11.
Windows 10/11 is why I'm on linux now, and on linux to stay.
"Activation," same as XP and Vista. That's why I said 2000 was the last "good" version with no hostile features at all: it was the last version (except for ME, which wasn't "good") that didn't require activation.
ROFL
Okay, let me rephrase: to the extent that any Microsoft OS could be described as "objectively good," Windows 2000 was the last one of them.
Okay, let me rephrase for you: in choosing which of Microsoft's stinking piles of shit was the least stinky, some people chose Windows 2000. However, most people just left the stinky area and didn't look back.
You do realize I was conceding your point, right? You don't have to be a jerk about it.
Windows 2000 was a good operating system by any measure. It was rock solid, capable, well-supported, could scale from desktop to large enterprise deployments and everything in between, reasonably secure compared to their previous operating systems, etc. I never did like Microsoft operating systems, but Windows 2000 was actually good. It was a breath of fresh air at the time. We had NT 4, which was stable and reliable, but was limited by a lack of DirectX and became cumbersome in large deployments. Then we had Windows 95/98/ME, which was the garbage that crashed all the time.
ROFL
10 was bad. 11 is... awful.
I'm running it on my daily driver / gaming rig to learn its flaws and how to work around them, because work may be moving that direction. My hardware, my license, not like they can stop me.
I've never had more problems with any OS than 11 on day to day stability issues. Vista? At least it had direct X 10. 8? Yeah, a total design fuck up, but even supporting it professionally I never had this many problems.
Looking back on it, Vista got a lot of hate but I don't think my experience was that bad. It was really annoying with user account control permissions but honestly as a proto 7 it did okay. Compared to 11 I kind of miss it.
That's 1. point in the article
"How about subscribing to your own computer? Not now? Ok, see you in a bit." Even the Windows fans are full of resentment that they have to know which magic numbers to type under which registry entries to actually disable the constant ad screens. And then Windows restores the nag on updates.