raven

Sorry if I misread but it seemed to me like you were the belligerent one first. Maybe I was just poised for it after the first comment in this thread.

The biggest hurdles I run into are relating to software management. People expect to google up a .exe and run it.

What ever happened to those "download in ubuntu software centre" orange buttons I was seeing around? That was a damn good idea to bridge the gap while bringing users into the fold by making sure apt is aware of the program being installed, and that it's installed via official channels.
Does Mint still ship gdebi or whatever it was called?
Oh and don't get me started on snap. I always tell people to disable snaps from the software centre if they're installing a *buntu.

How should windows handle that, and how would adding an X button to the popup make it more intrusive to you in that scenario?

I don't really understand what you're saying. How would my proposal differ in that regard from what windows is doing in the OP? Should it just say "sorry you can't open that"? Why would you be renaming a file that "isn't meant to be opened"?

It clearly isn't a me problem since the OP has 100 upvotes Where are you microsoft defenders coming from anyway? Why do you care?

I don't necessarily want to start over if I want to do something in another window for a moment though do I? Desktop OSes are supposed to be multitasking.

I'm not a trillion dollar company or anything but I can imagine a much better and more intuitive way to do this. How about an attached popup window with a cancel and/or x button (because that is what users are expecting), which displays a list of installed programs you can open the file with, and at the bottom an option to open it with a non-installed .exe (Opens file manager), an option to "search for a program in windows store", and a checkbox to always open files of this type with your chosen program. If you click outside the parent window on another window it should stay put, and if you click inside the parent window but not on the popup, it should be dismissed. Microsoft knows this would be ideal and choose not to implement it this way.

They aren't presenting the user with a visible option because they're trying to funnel you into their web store. Evidenced by the fact that OP didn't know that you could click elsewhere, and being a trillion dollar software company you cannot convince me that was just an oversight.

Anecdotally, when the program that spawned the popup crashes behind it I can't close it.

Someone should do some testing where they sit down with a few dozen windows users and have them "playtest" linux to figure out what the snags are for onboarding, and what is generally meant by "make it work like windows" to them. Certainly there are some things linux objectively does better, even if it isn't immediately intuitive coming from windows.

Why are you defending a 3 trillion dollar company from perfectly valid criticism?

It isn't just programming. There are literally hundreds of desktop environments to choose from which let you customize things much more in depth than windows can.

XFCE for example would let you put your task bar dead center in the middle of your monitor if you wanted to, no programming required. Another reply links to a guide that requires no programming.

It forced me to sign up so my brother could play minecraft bedrock. I had had it disabled but had to reenable it because windows threw a tantrum that I was using a non-microsoft windows account.

It doesn't for me. I just have to alt-tab around it until my next reboot if I'm stuck using windows.

That's the beauty of Linux, it isn't "they should make" it's "you can make"!