I've been using Linux exclusively for about 8 years. Recently I got frustrated with a bunch of issues that popped one after another. I had a spare SSD so I decided to check out Windows again. I've installed Windows 11 LTSC. It was a nightmare. After all the years on Linux, I forgot how terrible Windows actually is.
On the day I installed the system and a bunch of basic software, I had two bluescreens. I wasn't even doing anything at that time, just going through basic settings and software installation. Okay, it happens. So I installed Steam and tried to play a game I've been currently playing on Linux just to see the performance difference. And it was... worse, for some reason. The "autodetect" in game changed my settings from Ultra to High. On Linux, the game was running at the 75 fps cap all the time. Windows kept dropping them to around 67-ish a lot of times. But the weirdest part was actual power consumption and the way GPU worked. Both systems kept the GPU temperature at around 50C. But the fans were running at 100% speed at that temperature on Windows, while Linux kept them pretty quiet. I had to change the fan controls by myself on Windows just because it was so annoying. The power consumption difference was even harder to explain, as I was getting 190-210W under Linux and under Windows I got 220-250W. And mind you, under Linux I had not only higher graphical settings set up, but was also getting better performance.
I tried connecting my bluetooth earbuds to my PC. Alright, the setup itself was fine. But then the problems started. My earbuds support opus codec for audio. Do you think I can change the bluetooth codec easily, just like on Linux? Nope. There is no way to do it without some third party programs. And don't even get me started on Windows randomly changing my default audio output and trying to play sound through my controller.
Today I decided to make this rant-post after yet another game crashed on me twice under Windows. I bought Watch Dogs since it's currently really cheap on Steam. I click play. I get the loading screen. The game crashed. I try again. I play through the basic "tutorial". After going out of the building, game crashed again. I'm going to play again, this time under Linux.
I've had my share of frustrations under Linux, but that experience made me realise that Windows is not a perfect solution either. Spending a lot of time with Linux and it's bugs made me forget all the bad experience in the past with Windows, and I was craving to go back to the "just works" solution. But it's not "just works". Two days was all it took for me to realize that I'll actually stick with Linux, probably forever. The spare SSD went back to my drawer, maybe so I can try something new in the future. It's so good to be back after a short trip to the other side!
I have an ongoing irritation with windows (use it for work, Linux at home): It steals focus from the window you're using if another window opens.
Drives me nuts. I'll be typing my password and pop! Oh look I just typed my password into something else that popped up because IT requires this program to run on login today.
KDE is much better about not stealing window focus like that.
Mac os is pretty bad with that bullshit too
The sad thing is back in the Windows XP days Microsoft had the focus stealing thing pretty much solved. Well okay - I remember you had to install some of the PowerToys or make some registry edits to get at some of the settings. But once setup pretty much nothing could steal focus away from the current window, which was a welcome change from where we had been. That started to break again in Windows 7, and has gotten worse with every release since then.
Admittedly XFCE isn't perfect either, but it's much better behaved than modern Windows.
What windows are you having randomly pop up? That might be width investigating because that shouldn't be happening.
Automated command-line jobs, in my case, which are technically not random but still annoying, because they don't need to show a window at all. Interestingly, the one thing I can get to absolutely not pop up any window ever are Perl scripts using Win32::Detached . . . which means that it is possible, but Microsoft doesn't bother to expose such a facility.
Say I print something, and it’s going to take 5 minutes, I go and work on an email or something, and the save dialog pops up and what I’m typing for the email starts going into/overwrites the save name. Hate it.
I'm not trying to be difficult but I genuinely don't follow. I print and write emails at work all the time and cannot relate.
Maybe I should have specified print to PDF.
It sounds like you might have some network places set up for windows to use but that are no longer reachable (or something along those lines) because that shouldn't be taking so long so you might have things timing out in the background.
Or your internet is slow and it's taking a long time to communicate with one drive or send its screenshots of your document to their creep department.
Or maybe a print driver that no longer exists still has an orphaned entry in the registry and it spends some time trying to locate it.
Or malware has set up hooks for any new window that pops up but the print to pdf dialog is set up in such a way that it churns very inefficiently on that window specifically.
I joke but any one of those might actually be what's going on.
Heh thanks, but it’s just that I’m printing 2000+sqft of high res pdfs from many gigs of files at a time.
They're things like drive mapping scripts, stuff like that. They're definitely normal for our setup. Just not sure why they have to interrupt me!
The fact that Windows devs seem to not know how to run tasks hidden and in the background always bothers me. I’m sure it’s the fault of Windows itself, but Linux doesn’t open jack until I tell it to. With all the extra helper programs needs in the tray to run all the proprietary hardware, I about lose it with all the shit popping up to yell at me.
It's very easy to run things like scripts in the background. Showing a command/powershell windows because of a drive mapping script is amateurish (and very annoying). Usually scripts like those are run on logon.
We have an automation server at work that runs a bunch of scripts for all kinds of stuff. It just uses task scheduler. Hiding the script output is as simple as telling it too. We have a lot of servers at work that run important production shit interactively. So someone has to logon the server and start the problem.
It's utterly disgusting. I recently introduced them to NSSM which can run simple programs as a service, which entirely solves the problem. But it's bizarre that no one else has suggested that before, or found some other solution.
Fortunately, I'm not responsible for prod applications running on those servers, it just really fucks with our patching procedures.