Or "let's finish setting up your PC" full screen on a 4 year old system. Then you click through just to find the only options are 1) share more data with Microsoft, or 2) make Edge your default browser. The day I find a decent note taking tablet running Linux, windows is dead to me.
The best part is still too come, clicking through the 10 or so questions, where the preselected option is the always the bad one regarding privacy, and the "good" one is a compromise at best.
It's horrifying what data harvesting engines most OSs have become. I remember being so outraged when I learned that Ubuntu's default MOTD phones home with a couple of pieces of hardware info that I switched distros (the ever growing use of snaps was also a factor). Windows seems like it needs a complete medical history just to "offer" a sign in prompt.
When the MOTD became just advertisements was enough for me. I get that it's all within the ecosystem, but my terminal is not a space for you to advertise...
One of our customers has a Lenovo with an i7 10th gen and 16gb of memory. Booting up takes about 5 minutes on an NVMe drive and using our application, based on Microsoft Access, takes literal years to save an entry.
I have an E495 with an SATA SSD, a cheap one at that, and it takes Arch (btw) about 5 seconds to get to SDDM login and about 7 seconds from login to usable Plasma desktop.
I used a VM to install Windows 10 the other day and the installation process alone was enough to remind me why Windows 10 will be my last Windows, Navigating 20 questions then having to uninstall about 30 apps some of which will reinstall at next update, Infuriating tbh. I seem to have settled with Mint Cinnamon, It's been working perfectly.
God, I just did the set up new laptop process on Sunday; I completely forgot how insanely long everything takes to set up, update, configure, etc. Linux SBC, maybe an hour end to end; install, update, all my configs neatly in a file, ready to be copied over. Regular Linux: two hours end to end at most. You just do not appreciate the beauty of apt update/apt install quite as much as the moment you are confronted with a new Windows install.
Windows? Pretty much most of Sunday afternoon and evening. First the Dell updates, then the driver updates, then the pre-installed program updates, then the Windows updates (though not in that order and not all at once, because predictability what is that). Then I could actually start adding my programs and configuring it, and oh boy.
Just my base configuration for Office--that being each individual program in the suite, God knows--required a hunting expedition and a lot of googling to track everything down in multiple locations and I still had to do a lot of it manually; putty and kitty required copying bits of the registry; calibre I gave up as it was less work to do it myself from memory; firefox was the only thing I could just copy and paste a folder and be entirely done. That part was nice. Every other program I needed I had to track down and install separately then hunt up configs in multiple locations and Windows kept interrupting the process because oh, we forgot, here's more updates and one to three restarts. Why?
And Windows 11's start menu is just insulting; talk about salt in the wound.
Not to be a downer here, but after a couple minutes I just hold the power button down and make it go to sleep. Linux has given me similar issues too and I also hold its power button down. My bigger reason for switching is all the privacy invasive stuff and bloat.
5 minutes is about as long as it took to download that mammoth 2MB jpg from this struggling Lemmy server.
Seriously though, I can download an ISO, flash it to USB, boot up and do an entire system install in less than 15 minutes. The only limiting factor is the speed of the internet.
Honestly one of the biggest reasons I can't go back to Windows.
Something breaks? Here's a cryptic error message, your options are google and hope someone knows a registry hack, or just deal with it and let daddy microsoft dictate your computing experience.
Linux? Here's an error message, error code, logs upon logs, crash dump, forum of people who can help, and stack trace...
*Definitely not in the business field, here! Haven't seen one of those sexy things since my old Gateway laptop in the mid 2000s. Miss those little guys, glad to see they're still around
Edit: ***I AM
I am not in the business field! I'm not saying anyone is wrong.