I need to vent about Windows. I want workplaces to use Linux.

Our work is the opposite. As soon as a new machine arrives we go straight to BIOS at boot, switch the settings and install Linux immediately. Windows never sees the light of day. I do feel for you as we do do sales calls and in the middle of sales calls the people that we are calling have their computers reboot on them, do an update, or I've just got to restart and on restart it does an update and huge amounts of time are wasted on those people.

Windows probably costs the world millions a day in wasted, for time for shit like that.

I’m no Windows fanboy but I have to use it quite a lot, at home and at work. I don’t know what versions or settings you guys have set up but I’ve never had a Windows update I can’t postpone, ever.

Windows also used to show me the ugly face of Trump in the start menu even if I didn't ask for it. That was more than 4 years ago. Recently was accidentally hovering over some 'copilot' button in Edge of a friend. And again - pop-up with Trump. So yes: fuck Windows, fuck Microsoft

Windows fr thinks that getting updates done is more important than getting work done.

I unplugged my company issued Windows 11 Dell laptop from its charger yesterday so that I could go ask a manager a question in their office, and the entire computer just shut the fuck off despite having full charge. I'm so glad I moved all my personal stuff to Linux.

I recently had a spare machine sitting around doing nothing and was feeling a bit masochistic, so I decided to install Windows 11 on it just to see what it was like. I've used Windows 10 a tiny bit but essentially haven't touched Windows in years. A couple of the fun things I noticed:

• After installing, I was going to set a new wallpaper. I double-clicked on a jpeg file and instead of opening it, it popped up with a window asking me what I wanted to do with this apparently unknown file type. I literally said out loud, "what do you mean, it's a fucking jpeg." Then it did the same thing for a .zip.

• I also made a restore point once I had all the basics installed, so I could roll back when Windows inevitably fucked up doing an update. I then did the first big update and it fucked it up. "No worries" I thought, "I made a restore point!" I went to restore it, and discovered that for some unknown reason Windows only saves one restore point. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that Windows had decided to fuck itself up, and then automatically overwrite the manual save point with it's own save point from immediately after it fucked itself up, leaving that as the only thing to restore to.

I then quite sensibly formatted the drive and went back to using Linux.

Go get drunk. You deserve it.

I agree.

I find the Teams app works great on Ubuntu. The Microsoft apps work OK in browser, until you have a lot of collaborators.

I rarely need to switch to windows, so when I do switch I expect to spend an hour doing updates.

You want to use Linux and yet you don't know what a newline character is?

I'm assuming the windows machine is a work PC and the Linux is yours right?

Because what you describe doesn't sound like a "windows" issue but rather an IT management issue.

You can put off updates and reboots a very long time. And always be able yo postpone them.

Applying updates on boot daily sounds dumb to me. But I'm also figuring your IT dept has poor (or no) sense in managing their inventory well. Most updates can be applied silently at a scheduled time.

Also, your machine sounds old and/or poorly maintained the way you describe it. If its more than 5 years old your company is just cheap.

I'm all for griping about Windows but this seems off to me.

"Tell me it's Friday without saying it's Friday" ;)

But to the point, yeah, my current job tried to convince me to switch to Windows. I tried, it was miserable experience, it broke in 3 days and all that was even before the current Windows ludicrousness

my boss told me today if we moved to literally any non-microsoft platform or software, i'd be out of a job.

and he's right. most of us only have careers because microsoft can't push out a software that's more than barebone functional - and everyone use them even if there are far superior alternatives out there literally only because of familiarity.

i'm not planning to stop giving microsoft shit of course. they should be criminally prosecuted over their exchange service even and how it's blacklisting competitors to force businesses onto the platform a la microsoft classic tactics. but eh.

luckily i can wipe my work laptop and install linux (for now, there are discussions about not letting unmanaged devices on the network at some point...), but what annoys me is seeing how much tax money we send straight to microsoft. i work in the education sector in europe and the majority of the company's funds comes from the government, to send millions of that straight to the US, especially with the politics going on right now, seems like a horrible idea. and SO many others are doing the same thing, i swear if we invested just 10% of it into FOSS the world would be a better place already and we'd all save money.

This. If updates are SO important, then Windows can do it while it's shutting down.

because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot

What kind of PC is this? Does it have an SSD?

Your complaints are certainly valid, but the IT of your company should be applying Group Policies to address some of these!

Enterprise version is also more stable than the goddamn "you are the guinea pig" spyware Home and Pro versions. O&O ShutUp10++ for those... Hilariously, they are a Microsoft Partner according to their website; some partnership that is when an automatic update from Microsoft can undo anything their software does. 😂

I'm by no means an expert but a power user... I saw the writing on the wall years ago and now have only one Windows machine explicitly for some hardware that have no Linux drivers but is otherwise very nice and useful.

I've only worked at one software company where devs where allowed to install Linux as their OS. It was awesome... except when there was an update and then you had an urgent request from management while you where fixing what the update broke

Then come up with a better alternative to office 365.

Windows isn't keeping Microsoft around. Its their office software. (and azure)

I actually would really prefer for companies to just provide us virtual machines and I can connect to vpn and then to the work hosts. This way I can use my own setup.

funny how with sooooo many updates, Windows are still very vulnerable. You buy a Windows PC, you better equip Antivirus software too; it is like bread and butter. On Linux and also Mac, you never need to worry about these things.

I also use Windows at work, and it is driving me insane. The updates can be annoying, but it is mostly just how fucking slow it is. Directories routinely take mulitple seconds to load, and I don't understand why. I also just prefer Gnome in general, but I do think the Window's user interface as a whole is pretty good when it works. I will say, WSL works well for the things I want to run "in linux", and it integrates very nicely with VS Code.

I can actually install Linux if I want. They provide instructions for how to roll it in to Intune etc, and I will probably try it, but keep a dual boot to Windows available for when I really need it. The problem is that my job is married to Office, which doesn't have native linux support at all. We ues OneDrive, Outlook, Teams and collaborative Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Most of these probably run okay enough in browser, but especially for big Word documents where we need to make sure formatting is okay (a nightmare in Word even without multiple users editing the document at once), I am not sure if it works well enough. Rclone can be used to sync to OneDrive. For now I just try to avoid making office documents whenever possible, sticking to markdown, latex and csv files etc., store as much as possible on our i.e. our GitLab instance instead, and hopefully it will it will be easier to switch over time.

I also wonder what would happen if Donny wakes up one day, decides he wants to invade Europe or something and all our Office 365 licenses suddenly stop working. We would have a lot of other bigger issues of course, so it's not the most critical issue.

I have a channel on my team's Slack were I just vent off on these kind of situations 😬

#windows-is-the-best, inspired from #gitlab-is-the-best, the chan were everyone vents off when the CI refuses to pick up workers 😅

If you’re stuck with Windows for corporate-issued computers, the next time this happens you can abort shutdowns in Windows.

Command Prompt:

shutdown /a

Saved me several times over the years.

Too many times I've been at the very limit of failing to deliver an assignment. I used to have classes from morning to night (used to get home at 23:00) and sometimes I did homework at uni and scan/upload in my computer since camera-scanned documents don't look as good, so I had to deliver them ASAP, but Windows would take a LOT of time to load Teams and sometimes it started applying updates at startup, so it would be SLOW AS HELL.

Just some days ago it happened again (the homework was assigned a day before) so I booted up windows and what a surprise (/s) it started applying updates, so Teams wouldn't even open. I had to send the files from there to my linux computer (I love you, KDE connect!) because I still had to add some things to the document and Teams for Linux loaded in a second lol

At work we have everything windows. When getting my work laptop with windows, I just intalled PopOs on it. I do have the problem of not able to use AOVPN, so I can't work from home. But since I need to go close to work, why even work from home.

Paragraphs...

Fuck Windows and Microsoft really.

🙏🙏🙏 testify, brother.

This sounds like a problem with your organization. I use windows at the hospital where I work, and we don't run into these kinds of issues. Yeah it is rife with other issues like goading you into using microsoft edge, one drive, and more, but updates are handled by IT.

Come work at Meta, we have Fedora Linux laptops :)

Edit: Maybe we should crowd source a list of companies that let you use Linux. I've worked at startups and straight up told the CEO "I'm installing Linux" and that has worked, but corporate companies you can't get away with that

I've been pretty lucky that I've been able to use Linux on my work laptop the past 3 jobs in a row. It really helps that we use Linux production in and when I tell them that I haven't used Windows in nearly a decade, they're usually willing to let me work with Linux.

I'm happy my company basically issued a ban on Windows without pre-authorization. We're entirely a macOS and Linux shop.

We have to use Windows at work for our high end CAD. There's no FOSS alternative.

I use Linux at home. Which is basically a, less crap, copy of Windows. But is still missing important stuff.

A month ago, a windows update made my laptop crawl to a stop. It needed 2-3 hours to respond after a restart/shutdown. It would crash saying the search wasn't initialised, I couldn't type into the search. Fucking nightmare

Some governments outside the US either already have or are ditching Windows for Linux.

I feel your pain. Aside from being slow as balls despite modern hardware, my Windows PC has a habit of occasionally locking up when I RIGHT CLICK on something T_T

Then it takes several minutes of no start menu/task bar, no trackpad gestures, no file explorer, etc before everything goes back to normal... for a few seconds before explorer crashes again. The only solution is a reboot.

I'm genuinely scared of doing anything on this machine.

The differences in sheer speed and responsiveness is something FOSS alternatives need much more publicity about. When the requirements for one product are "help the user do what they want" and the requirements for another product are "synergize the KPIs of these 53 stakeholders in our trillion dollar conglomerate, monetize our market position in every way possible, and check the minimum viable checkboxes to keep end users engaged with the brand" it shows!

Windows to Linux is of course the most significant and worthwhile. As I like to describe it, even using the most full-featured distros out there (Linux Mint Cinnamon gang represent!) any flavor of Linux is like greased lightning compared with windows. And I mean Windows 10, not even 11.

A few weeks ago I turned on an old secondary desktop PC that had been powered off for a month. It had numerous updates, everything except installing a new named version. Even the kernel. I decided to time it. From the time I opened the software update GUI -- including typing in my password, letting it download, letting it install, getting the "yo, reboot when you're ready," etc -- it was done in 5 minutes. And those were 5 minutes where the computer was totally usable. Running the current version of the full featured Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 on a PC from 2011!

My favorite recent example is the switch from Plex to Jellyfin. Now granted, fully self-hosting means more IT admin type stuff for me so that family members and I can securely connect remotely. But god damn if every single app I have tried doesn't feel like warp speed compared with the Plex versions. Did you know that watching my media using the WebOS app on my LG TV does not have to be dog shit slow? And don't even get me started on phone apps like Finamp. (it really whips the jelly's ass?)

Your workplace probably doesn't want to spend millions (depending on size) teaching their employees how to use the terminal.

I've been saying this for 30+ years, but no-one wanted to listen.

The update thing started maybe 10 years ago or was it 15. Company I worked for went from terrible patching to this BS. Why something in between was not sufficient I will never know or why it cannot hot patch.

Edit: Before the company actually did serious patching worms regularly took down the whole company for days. But why they had to go from that to interrupting presentations and calls is beyond me.

Re Microsoft in general. I had to install Powershell on Linux recently to get a work related task done. It was packaged on the Arch User Repository, so easily done.

Got the task done and went to uninstall Powershell and realised there that the installed size was 186 MB. Checked the installed size of Linux-zen kernel and modules: 143 MB. So this tiny MS command-line utility was heftier than the kernel and drivers for all supported hardware. How do they even manage that?

My company has multiple options for computers. You can choose the windows laptop. The bigger windows laptop. The other windows laptop. Or if you are a graphic designer, that one MacBook option.