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Windows and Linux are both easy to use... Provided that everything works out of the box.
Once you have to actually start solving problems, Windows really starts to fall down because you have to spend ages looking through settings and perhaps installing tools like bcd editors. Like seriously, the number of places you can manage your microphone settings are insane.
At this point, I think the only people that say Windows is easier are those that have never had to reinstall it or who have been using it since the XP days and haven't realised that it is all learned knowledge.
I certainly think Linux tooling could be improved (a graphical fstab editor would be nice), but I struggle to see how troubleshooting in Windows is any easier than Linux.
Linux applications often give you some descriptive error that you can paste into an internet search and usually find someone who had the same problem.
Windows applications just stop working and say "UNEXPECTED ERROR" or smth. Like thanks you literally didn't help at all.
That's potentially my biggest issue woth Windows. You aren't actually made to understand what went wrong. Linux will give you lots of information. It can be overwhelming if you're just used to seeing "This app stopped working, wait or close it?", but once you're used to it, you realize that info usually give you all the tools you need to fix your problem.
but once you’re used to it, you realize that info usually give you all the tools you need to fix your problem.
That's the thing right? I'm very much a non-tech person. But Linux error messages are nice and informative to the point that, even if I don't personally know what the fuck they are saying --
-- I can just copy them to my browser search bar. Oh look, someone else had the same issue. And someone who knew what they were talking about presented a solution. Nice, now I can get back to work!
And even when I am forced to troubleshoot on my own, the error messages and terminal logs often give enough of a clue that I can trial-and-error my way into making shit work.
What... you don't like the smiley face and QR code that leads you to a dead link on a rando microsoft website? You sure you need more information other than "Critical Process Died"?
The first time I saw a sadface bsod I legitimately said out-loud "Are you JOKING?"
The memory dump it does is useless... like anyone is ever gonna take a look at that memory dump. Disable it, it just wastes disk space.
My cousin had an old Dell that had an HDD with that "optane" crap, you know a 16GB NVMe "cache" that allegedly did anything. I was going to pull that out, put in a proper NVMe drive, leave the old hard drive in there as additional space, and install Windows 10.
There are apparently BIOS settings that need to be altered for this to work, and Windows would throw "UNEXPECTED ERROR 0x1C4B332AFE943CE2C4 or something to that effect and wouldn't finish installing. Mind you, you don't get a usable Windows environment, so you have to copy that long string of text by hand into another device to find...nothing. Nearly no results out there.
After awhile of trying to get a functioning Windows install media (which is difficult to do from a Linux machine. Way to go burning that bridge, Microsoft) I eventually decided to put Mint on this thing, which also gave an error. This error read something like "Unable to install, probably because there's a problem with the NVMe storage settings, you may need to disable TLVRQ (or whatever the generic term for Optane was) and try again. See this page in the Wiki for more information." And it gave a link to that page, because of course we're booted into a fully functioning live environment with internet access and a web browser, and it also gave a QR code link to that same wiki page so you could view it on mobile.
Microsoft isn't even trying anymore.
Never ever buy combo shit. Remember the DVD reader/CD burner combo crap back in the day? They were good at neither reading or burning anything. Thank god the fully featured DVD burners went down in price and these things died.
Unexpected error, let's hope that the application writes into eventmgr or has some other logging system.
(and in most cases it doesn't. It just dies and leaves you in the dark as to what the fuck happened :3c)
Windows 7 was usable. The ten different places to hide settings started with 8 iirc. But I haven't used Windows in almost a decade, so I might be wrong.
No, you're on the money here. 7 at least had a consistent UI. It wasn't super pretty if we're all being honest with ourselves (the control panel is an ugly and clunky way of doing things compared to KDE's settings menu, for example), but it was all very functional, fairly well organized, and generally there was one setting for everything, in one place. And to be fair, KDE and Gnome were a lot clunker back then too.
The problems started with 8, because they had the idea to rework this old, ugly UI, but completely half-assed it, so rather than totally replacing every old UI element they just built new ones and ran them in parallel with the old ones, and any settings that didn't seem super important or useful to most people got ignored because hey, it's still in the old UI, people can just go there. And this problem has persisted right through into 11, albeit with gradual improvements.
My guess is, they had to run it in parallel. So many things relied on the old UI, not to mention run/cmd commands (
printui,netplwizto name a few), that simply just putting modern replacements for those things would have broken every single printer share, user credentials manager, etc., there is out there. So, they decided to run them in parallel. Smart choice if you ask me, since they own most of the desktop market share, if they decided to make a 180 turn on this, that would have cut a significant portion of their user market share... not to mention companies that heavily rely on MS products being pissed AF.
They were transitioning to the new Metro look, that's why the 10 different places for the same setting.
And seeing how slowly Control Panel is being transitioned to the new Metro Settings app, I'd have to guess that that thing is so deeply intertwined in the OS and so many things rely on it, that moving to something new is painfully slow.
Agreed. Linux troubleshooting is easier for sure, assuming you know your way around a terminal. Many beginners tremble in fear when they see it. In windows nearly everything is labeled and clickable... removing the need to memorize commands.
And that is why I use fish. Well, one of the many reasons, lol 😂.