Personally I think that Windows is a piece of shit joke of an operating system, unsuitable for anything but games. Even though the DLL hell is largely a thing of the past, there are still myriad ways of getting and updating things.

Microsoft Online Account

The Windows installation now requires you to have Microsoft online account. That is a huge red flag right there - I’m not trusting Microsoft with my privacy at all, in the same way I don’t trust Google, Facebook nor other businesses designed to sell your data as a product. Even Apple allows you to bypass login - and even if this would be required, it is acceptable for me since Apple’s privacy policy is acceptable.

Luckily the MS online account can be bypassed: the Shift+F10 and OOBE\BYPASSNRO worked for me.

Unfortunately, Windows Defender seem not to be working without the Microsoft Online Account - or maybe it does, I’m not quite sure. I personally don’t really care - I only use Windows for gaming with Steam and Battle.net, and (hopefully) there are no viruses there.

Bloatware

Windows comes with shitload of bloatware. It’s not as bad as Samsung Android phones where you have multiple app stores and shitload of bloatware apps which you can’t uninstall because they’re marked “system” - I’ll NEVER EVER get a Samsung phone. At least, on Windows, you can uninstall the bloatware that comes with Windows: the Office 365, the McAffee Antivirus bloat (!!!) and shitload of other crap I don’t even remember. As I said, at least you can uninstall that shit.

Programming

The default cmd.exe is a joke; maybe PowerShell is better but I’ll never know. If I have to use Windows, I’d set up Linux Subsystem and work there.

Updates

Updates in Windows is the same clusterfuck as it used to be, even though things are getting better as apps are moving to AppStore. Still, in order to update stuff:

1. Windows Update
2. Nvidia updates via its own app
3. Firefox and many others update via AppStore
4. Rest of the apps update via their own built-in updaters
5. At some point you’ll install Chocolatey which has its own updater
6. You download installers from the internet and you have to have antivirus software.

Compare that to Linux or Mac:

1. On Linux, you install and update everything via apt and/or snap. No risk of downloading virus accidentally.
2. On MacOS, you update system and all drivers via System Update, you update software via App Store.

WSL2

WSL2 boots Linux in a very thin VM, however on Windows 11 Home the VM is slow as hell. Building Karibu-Testing on AMD Ryzen 7 7435HS takes 73s on WSL2 Linux, while it only takes 53s on a Linux running natively, which means that WSL2 incurs 30% overhead, which is just laughable.

Conclusion

Personally I think that Windows is a piece of shit joke of an operating system, unsuitable for anything but games. Hopefully Steam+Proton will enable gaming on Linux boxes so that I can get rid of Windows entirely.