When it comes to installing stuff, I’m very trigger-happy. So, from experience…
Installing stuff on Windows (safely)
- Hope it’s on Chocolatey (
choco install) - If not, search for the website online
- Scroll past the AI slop and suspicious Softonic downloads
- Click the website
- Find the correct download button
- Download
- Scan with MalwareBytes (don’t want an STI)
- Run setup.exe
- Verify PATH and wanted feature set
- I do not want to bundle Candy Crush or McAfee
- skim the Privacy Policy to see if they’ll grind my bones to dust
- Install Microsoft C++ Redistributable 2014-2018 (wtf? I already have 4 of these)
- Wait
- Sort the installation shortcuts into my folders
Installing stuff on Linux (safely)
paru some_software- If on AUR, skim
PKGBUILD - If not packaged at all (rare),
git cloneit and either skim theinstall.shor Makefile - Done
- Hope it’s on Chocolatey (
Eroding / taking away user agency. It’s always little bits they chip away but over the time those chips amount to a huge cut off edge of things you cannot do anymore, or only through very convoluted and potentially breaking third party tweaks & tools. Every Windows installation ended up with a growing shit-list of things to do. Disable this, tweak that, download tool X, Y & Z just to further disable & tweak shit, and whoop-de-doo several hours have already passed when you’re finally “done”. Then, in the middle of doing shit, Windows update! “No! Go away!” 10 minutes later… “Hey, I think you forgot about me?” - “NO, I UPDATE WHEN I SHUT THE DAMN PC DOWN, NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS! GO AWAY!” … “BUT HAVE YOU HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, THE WINDOWS UPDATE?! OH AND BY THE WAY, WE RE-ENABLED OUR SPYING OPTIONS AGAIN AND WILL SEND ALL THE UNSENT DATA BEFORE YOU CAN DISABLE IT AGAIN!”
At some point I just realized that using Windows became more of a hassle than using Linux. And when you finally do the switch, you suddenly realize how fucking awesome it is that your OS is not constantly nagging you, not constantly spying on you, not constantly fighting you, not constantly changing its configuration to re-enable the things you purposefully disabled. I finally have an operating system again that does what I want it to do, a system that respects my privacy, as well as me as a user.
It gets to a point where it doesn’t feel like you have control over your own computer.
For me, a big one was how it would constantly wake from sleep for no reason or to update. If put it to sleep and most times it would wake before I even s stood up from my desk. And there are settings you can change to stop that, but Windows will just randomly reset them.
And this is a really small one, but Windows 11 dropping features that Windows 10 has. It’s very stupid that Windows 11 won’t let you have a vertical task bar.
I’ve been a Windows user for 30+ years and always loved that OS until recently. But now I love Linux. An OS that truly lets me own my computer and do what I want.
Ads in a purchased OS.
Forced Edge openings that, as far as I can tell, can’t be avoided.
This is not the kind of forced edge I like.
- The search in the start menu searching the fucking web with bing instead of my computer
- Accidentally hitting F1 and Edge immediately opens with some “help”
Try MSEdgeRedirect, friend. It won’t stop it from opening a browser, but at least it won’t be Edge.
I switched to Linux Mint, it helped as well!
Why in god’s name does it rearrange the order of programs on the taskbar?
‘contact your IT admin’
Great suggestion when you are the IT admin, lol
To list a few:
- Onedrive deleting my files
- Very slow
- ads
- ai bullshit
- updating is a pain
- recall
Having to use the wrong slash everywhere
Have you ever tried just using forward slashes anyway? It works more or less some of the time.
Yes, except where it doesn’t, which you have to remember, which makes it just another annoyance.
My solution is to run everything through msys2 😅
I’d actually like it if it was backslash for local paths and forward slash for remote paths. But if you connect to a cifs share, it still uses backslashes, so the whole thing seems pointless
Ctrl+c not copying on rare occasions. Even if it’s my keyboard’s fault, it could be avoided with some visual feedback to confirm to me that ctrl+c was registered ans clipboard was updated, so that I’d immediately know that it didn’t work after pressing ctrl+c, rather than later when i switched to a different window/tab and pasted the wrong thing
The fact that i can’t route audio between apps (without 3rd party closed-source apps). Why is something so basic not included into the system?
Registry
As a c++ dev: winapi. Right away you are greeted by windows.h adding loads of macros with common identifiers without any prefix to your preprocessor. That’s a sign of things to come for anyone who has to use it. Maybe that explains lack of open-source audio routing apps: nobody wants to deal with windows driver development for hobby - and if that’s the case i sure can’t blame nobody for that.
windows.h without NOMINMAX be like
“hippity hoppity words min and max are my property”
Being told I should switch to linux
Sometimes friends, in their curiosity, come up to me and ask me, Jordan Belfort-style, “Sell me
this penLinux.” Why do I like it so much, they wonder?And I always tell them:
"Linux is like… the vegan OS. (bear with me) Mac and Windows people don’t really care about OSes. People who switch to Linux either find they couldn’t be assed to deal with it, or they love it, and those who love it love it. Then they always tell people lol.
A good thing though: because everyone’s such an opinionated nerd, the lateral set of problems you run into won’t be ‘solved’ by random Microsoft Forums
/sfc scannows or arcane regedits, but by a nut who debugged the entire thing 30 minutes after the bug came to exist to find a workaround. True story.Buuuut Linux is more of a lateral movement in terms of problems, it’s just a tool after all. You solve Microsoft Recall and start menu ads but run into new but tiny annoyances. I find Linux problems easier to fix than Windows ones because of the nerd army thing but if your Windows setup works for you, it works and that’s really all that’s important. If you do start Linuxing though you’ll learn a lot just by osmosis."
And they usually laugh and decide to keep their routines in place. Don’t hate me vegans.
Lots of stuff and while telemetry eventually made me quit, the most annoying have always been random performance issues. Still have to use Windows at work and I sometimes get progress bars in the Windows Explorer when accessing a fucking directory on the local SSD.
it feels like the natural result of corporate agile. dozens of teams doing little pieces with one dude making each smaller part all on their own. then someone just overrides the merge rules. and now i’m stuck trying to follow the ravings of angry lunatics all talking at once. i just want the os to shut up and do what i tell it to do. and i absolutely do not want it to start pretending its alive with some stupid chat bot ai nonsense.
My default browser at work is Chrome. Microsoft Teams and Outlook open links in edge anyhow. I wonder why!
Annoying little quirks of text highlighting and navigation. Oopsie, you moved an extra quarter of a centimeter to the left of the paragraph you tried to highlight starting from the bottom. That means you want everything, right? Yeah we’re highlighting everything. And so on.
Fortunately I’ve picked up some workarounds over the years:
Trying to highlight text in a hyperlink: hold alt
Methods of selecting text blocks (e.g., when normal mouse-select is doing bizarre stuff):
- Try highlighting from end to beginning
- Click point A, hold shift, click point B
- Double-click first word of desired selection to highlight it, or triple-click a paragraph, then highlight letters with shift-right, words with ctrl-shift-right, lines with shift-down, paragraphs with ctrl-shift-down. You’ll see that, for example, when you use shift-down, some text on the line following the selected line is also selected, corresponding to the length of the initial selection before the hotkey was pressed. You can use relevant combos in the opposite direction to de-select this. Or press shift-end to highlight only to the end of the line where your current selection ends, and shift-home to deselect to the beginning of the line. Ctrl-shift-end/home will do the same but for the entire page/document.
- Some other useful hotkeys are available during text input – I make heavy use of shift+pgup/pgdn to extend selections, but this seems to work in Excel, Notepad++, etc., not in this web browser text input field, for example. Holding shift while clicking also extends selections as in the read-only context; holding ctrl while clicking arbitrarily adds to selection just as in the file browser.
I don’t think that’s workarounds, you’re supposed to use your free hand for keyboard commands to effectively highlight and edit text.
My favourite combo is ctrl+z because it reverts the last action. Works in almost every application.
Ctrl+a marks the whole text.
Yes, these are documented features and not some kind of obscure off-label workaround. What I mean is that the use of these features serves as a workaround (or, if you like, an “alternative”) when simple mouse selection should work but behaves erratically.
The mouse issue you describe sounds like a feature as well, since you can mark things off screen by simply going over the edge on the left side.
This is extremely annoying on phone, but I never had that issue when it wasn’t some webpage with multiple elements like advertising and share buttons and scripts in between.
I don’t think that’s workarounds, you’re supposed to use your free hand and keyboard commands to effectively highlight text.
My favourite combo is ctrl+Z because it reverts the last action. Works in almost every application.
The fact that it isn’t open source and costs money to use. I actually like Windows over Linux even as someone who has written Linux kernel drivers for a living, or maybe because of that but the fact that I can’t poke around the code and improve the system is annoying to me.
It’s also why I’m working on a project to develop my own OS from scratch that has a better design and programming interface than POSIX and Linux respectively and is easy to use like Windows. It’s not an easy task but certainly a worthwhile one IMO.
