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The original was posted on /r/fedora by /u/GoastRiter on 2023-07-16 19:50:18.

I was working on creating game mods for a game that only runs well on Windows, and decided to stay 100% on Windows to see what it felt like being 100% immersed in the Windows experience, and what I was “missing out on”. These were my experiences as a developer and power user who actively uses tons of applications simultaneously, and needs quick access to files and development tools:

1. The first thing that stands out is… Windows is so slow. Menus take forever to load. I search something in start menu, and sometimes get instant results, but most of the time it stays FROZEN for 5 seconds before results come and then takes another 5 seconds to open the app after I click it. It’s a far cry from the instant results I get with Ulauncher and GNOME Overview on Linux. (I will edit because several people kept asking about my computer: It’s a Ryzen 3900X 12-core, with 64 GB RAM, 12 terabytes of 7000MB/sec PCIe 4.0 SSDs, RTX 3090, and AMD X570 motherboard. So no, it’s not the computer’s fault that Windows is slow.)
2. You can no longer drag files onto taskbar applications to open files in that application. Microsoft removed that feature in Windows 11. Which is insane. So instead, I have to tediously alt-tab to the application, line up the File Explorer near it, and then drag the file onto the app window instead (which may or may not work in all applications). Absolutely insane usability regression. Why did they think this should be removed?!
3. Application windows on screen are a huge damn mess to try to manage. The alt-tab “window list” really, really, really sucks. It’s just a long list of windows in jumbled “most recently used” order. On GNOME, alt-tab switches between actual apps and alt-tilde switches between windows of the active app, so it’s extremely fast to switch to another application and find its windows there. On Windows, the experience of finding open application windows is a damn nightmare. As a developer who has to constantly switch between 10 open windows, it’s been incredible torture trying to find the correct windows on Windows…
4. Applications that open brand new windows often place them at the end of Windows’ alt-tab list, or somewhere in the middle, which makes absolutely no sense and makes it hell to get to the newly opened windows.
5. Workspaces (extra desktops) on Windows is a clunky mess. They’re slow to open and slow and laggy to switch between. Compare that to GNOME, where workspaces are an instant, beautifully smooth transition and are effortless to move windows around and organize things.
6. The file explorer sucks. It’s such a messy file explorer. Feels archaic and bloated at the same time. The right-click menus in it are a total mess (they tried to simplify it in Windows 11, and it’s better but still meh since you frequently have to access the full legacy menu to find features).
7. The apps suck. They are ugly and kinda “German” looking. :D You know, function > design. Everything looks boring and archaic. That’s typical of MS style though. It was never a beautiful OS. Compare it to GNOME’s Libadwaita apps, which are clean and elegant. I feel like I’m suffocating when looking at Windows. Most apps are a giant mess of boring and cluttered design.
8. The constant popups are unnerving. Constant notifications about applications that want you to manually download updated versions, or want to tell you “news” about the application/store/company, and each application uses its own way of displaying the notifications. Nothing feels cohesive. It’s still very rare that applications use the native Windows notification list. Almost every app designs its own popup notifications, which ranges from “corner of the screen: please upgrade me”, to full-on popups that suddenly appear and cover the entire monitor.
9. The amount of stuff running in the system tray to have a functional system is crazy. Tons of vendor tools for controlling gaming mice, keyboard controllers, water coolers, game launchers, antivirus, NVIDIA control panel applet, etc. Each application uses resources and adds themselves to auto-start without asking. They are also the main reason for the constant popups with things like “please update” or “please buy our other product!”.
10. The amount of bugs is crazy. I use the exact same Realtek 2.5G ethernet port on Linux, and have never, ever had any issues. On Windows, it randomly loses the entire TCP/IP stack configuration once or twice a week and requires that I go into Windows Troubleshooter, Networking, and let it scan for errors, whereupon it finds a “gateway error” and fixes itself. And as usual on Windows, you can Google the error, but all you will find is endless people with the same bug and no solutions. Because Windows is a black box of mystery with random error codes and no clear solutions to most problems. Just a bunch of stupid, low-tech advice like “reboot the system or reinstall windows”. Idiotic.
11. The internet connection’s download speed sometimes randomly throttled itself to around 1 mbit (while upload speed remained 250 mbit). Only on Windows. No other devices in the home are affected. Just… windows. I could fix it by restarting the TCP/IP stack each time, showing that there’s probably some queue congestion or “stuck” algorithm going on…
12. The control panel, where I go to fix the networking issues, locked itself and froze randomly. It was impossible to close the window. You could not even kill it via Task Manager. Only a reboot could get rid of the stuck Control Panel window.
13. This other bug is unfixable: When dragging windows on the screen, you will see two mouse cursors and the window will lag behind like jelly. It’s a bug that has existed for 4+ years, since Windows 10 days, and has still not been fixed. It’s permanently like that for me with all windows I try to drag. Here’s a video someone made of it (and tons of people in the comments with the same issue, and it’s also mentioned all over the internet): https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/ot3n54/window_dragging_lag/
14. Alright onto productivity again: The file searchability on Windows is the worst of any operating system. Try searching for files in Windows Explorer’s search field. It’s a nightmare. It’s extremely slow and takes several minutes or doesn’t even find the files. I literally have Git Bash (Mingw based Bash port) just to I can open the folder there and run the Unix find command instead. On both Linux (GNOME) and Mac, searching for files produces all results in less than a second.
15. I constantly need various programming/development tools. But it’s such a nightmare to install development tools on Windows. Total mess. Lots of struggle, where you go to obscure sites and have to find zip files and manually unpacking them, or installing a tool via Chocolatey “package manager” but seeing that it’s not available after install. Stuff like that. Makes Windows extremely unpleasant to work on.
16. The terminal is an absolute nightmare to work in. PowerShell thought things like “ls” to list files was clearly too easy, so they decided to invent their own crazy language with the most verbose style imaginable. For example, on Linux you’d get the hash of a file with “sha256sum <file>”. On Windows it’s “Get-FileHash <file> -Algorithm SHA256 | Format-List”. Seriously. You need to memorize that.
17. Configuring things through the registry is a giant mess. It’s just a bloated spiderweb of garbage, built on very flaky 1990s foundations. They should scrap the whole system, but everything depends on it, so they’re stuck with that garbage. Compare that to Linux where all your configurations are in simple config files either at the system-level or user-level.
18. The operating system’s error messages… Oh my god. Whoever thought “E19238268” is a good way to tell people about errors is an idiot. On Linux, the error messages end up in the syslog and are so simple to understand that you can usually see the solution directly in the error message itself, such as “no write permissions to blabla file”, or at least they’re detailed enough that you can very quickly find the exact answers online. On Windows, all you find when googling their stupid error numbers is other people with the same inscrutable number error, with zero insight into what the actual error means. “Thanks, Microsoft.”
19. Windows Update doesn’t respect you. Even though you tell it not to update the system, you’ll still wake up to a blank login screen after it forcefully rebooted itself at night. Even though you disable automatic Windows Update reboots via the Group Policy Editor, it still does it (this is a well-known and hated issue). I’ve lost work several times because Windows thinks I need to update “right now!!!” and thinks I am too stupid to do the reboot manually when I have time for it later.
20. Windows Update is slow as hell, taking an incredibly absurd amount of time to install updates. And sometimes they roll back themselves due to failure to install them, but will work if you retry a few times. Their system update technique is extremely shoddy.
21. The style of the whole operating system is so ugly. It feels old, boring, “corporate” and lifeless. It just has absolutely no taste. Steve Jobs was completely right about Microsoft. I recently booted an old version of macOS (10.13) and even though it’s half a decade old it still looks and feels a million times better than Windows 11. 22…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/151cls5/i_spent_50_days_in_windows_after_having_been_100/