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 (
Why in god’s name does it rearrange the order of programs on the taskbar?
Nowadays it’s the online account centric shite and all the privacy implications that come along with it. But even before that it was annoying to just trying to do the thing
Doing the thing on linux: command that does the thing
Doing the thing on windows: click here, click there, click some more, second tab, submenu, click advanced, type in the info, save, ok, “yes I’m sure”, click ok, click apply, close 626254 windows, rebootAnd most people still seem to prefer that because terminal bad.
Keep your files safe with One Drive, are you sure you dont want your personal home files on our cloud?
Please sign into your account again, to save time, you can always stay signed in on this device (Lie)
Your mailbox location has moved, you can use a temporary mailbox, or work offline.
We need more information from you to setup phone-sign in. Sorry, an error occurred, please contact your administrator
Welcome to the New Microsoft ___!
I am so tired and this is only my 4th year.
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.
‘contact your IT admin’
Great suggestion when you are the IT admin, lol
- 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!
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.
Clicking on a URL in a non-browser app? Surely you want to see that in Edge and not your default browser.
Yeah and every file type opening in edge for some reason? Annoying.
I’m so sick of this. Didn’t they catch a lawsuit over this the first time and have to make it so you can uninstall it?
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.
Copy not working is becoming a frequent issue
windows.h without NOMINMAX be like
“hippity hoppity words min and max are my property”
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
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.
To list a few:
- Onedrive deleting my files
- Very slow
- ads
- ai bullshit
- updating is a pain
- recall
Notifications, suggestions, and just generally having make the OS get out of my way so I could do what I needed.
When they’re not installed correctly, you can get air leaks that make it massively more expensive to heat or cool your home.
