On Dislike for Windows

It’s time to start expanding on my initial post where I wrote briefly about this new linux lawyering project. One of the reasons is that I just don’t like Windows that much.

To be fair, I get it – Windows is pretty good these days. It’s a long way from 3.1, which was the first version I loaded on some old 486 DX2 or something back in the day. I haven’t seen the BSOD in a year or perhaps even years on Windows 10/11, where it used to crash on the weekly or daily.

But Windows has still got issues, and they piss me off. Some of them are relatively minor, like with logging on. Windows makes me click the mouse or press a key to open the PIN entry, which as I understand it is the whole point of a login screen. Shouldn’t I be able to just enter the PIN straight off? And why can’t I use either a PIN or my biometric at login? Same with a password. It makes no sense to force me to click a bunch of buttons to switch from one authentication method to another. I also don’t understand why the background image would blur out between the startup screen and the login screen, or why I can’t get back to the unblurred picture once the PIN entry is on screen.

But I can shut down the whole machine without logging on. What’s that about? Seems like a security problem. (Android acts like this too, which I find even more problematic.) Here’s one to try: restart your Windows machine, and then use the power button to shut down without logging in. Windows will warn you that you might be killing someone else’s session. Microsoft wants me to use Copilot, but Windows isn’t even smart enough to know whether there are other active user sessions that will be killed by a shutdown? It’s not a compelling case. 

Or with networking. Why is it hard bordering on nearly impossible to share files on my local network? Network discovery is totally broken. Even to force a connection to my local server, I had to dig into the group policy editor to change settings about anonymous/guest shares. It’s unclear to me why a user should need to dig into poweruser stuff just to share files on their own LAN. This is really basic stuff.

At bottom, Windows seems to get in my way instead of out of it.

Is Linux better? That’s what this blog is about. So far, I think so. Debian crashes on me, yes, but I’ve been able to confirm that I’ve got a hardware problem with my system (a cheap miniPC). A new (well, used) machine is on its way so I can warranty the mini.