I've seen promoted links in Win10/11, but never anything that harmed my productivity. Most importantly, the OS just fades into the background. I never think about it.
Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.
I usually try to avoid discussions of the OS, since it's such a terribly boring topic. However, this is quite an extraordinary claim that is made without any details. Perhaps you could elaborate. As someone that has used various Linux distros for nearly twenty years, I don't think I could construct a scenario in which someone doing the usual things has to open a terminal to "fix or change something" on a daily basis. It's probably less than once a year that I have to fix anything on my Linux desktop computers.
Did you build your own Linux distribution? Were you running IT at a company with 50,000 Linux desktops? Were you testing the development version of a desktop environment?
Even giving up on that and disabling sleep on lid close requires using the terminal. Sure the Gnome Tweaks tool has a setting for that but it's not installed by default and check the comments here, it doesn't actually work.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/15520/how-can-i-tell-ubuntu-...
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz/000179566/how-to-di...
Pretty much every sleep issue I've encountered in the wild is due to the hardware manufacturer's shitty implementation.
The only reason some features "just work" with Windows is because they only care if it works with Windows.
Ultimately it still sucks if it happens with your hardware, but you should direct your frustration to the right party. Maybe one day people will care enough and interoperability can become the default.
And sleep doesn't always stay slept. We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty³.
So sleep/hibernate not working right is hardly a significant difference when comparing Linux to Windows. In fact one of the laptops I had trouble with did sleep and hibernate properly when Linux went on it for a while, so at least sometimes the difference is not in favour of Windows.
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[1] the couple of times that happened to me, the machine would still work via RDC and other such so an orderly restart could be arranged if I had another machine on the same network, but if I had no such machine available like when travelling a hard-reset had to be forced
[2] I'm told you can force it to be available again, but I assume the removal is an admission that is doesn't work properly so enabling it is risky
[3] being in a bag isn't great for cooling airflow!
This, on a machine that you can buy with Linux.
I had great experiences with Windows in the past, but not anymore.
Many, many hours and late nights figuring out how to turn off telemetry, Edge and more. Multiple Group policy editor settings to force it to do what is asked and no more. For some reason updates and uninstalls take forever and uninstalls can’t be batched. (A powsh I found didn’t work) I could go on…
“Fades in the background” my ass. :-P
lmao, not because I don't believe you really think what you write, but because how user hostile everything in Windows seems to me, if you only want to change a single setting. It will be hidden behind 3 level deep settings dialogs and a "material design" flat links connecting those setting dialogs, so almost no visual indication, to make things stand out. It is horrible UI design. Basically any modern GNU/Linux DE will offer more feedback and visibility in their settings dialogs and windows.
Whenever I have to change any settings on Windows, I get a feeling of dread, because I know I will be searching for that setting. And never is the search any help, because they will name things different than I expect or it simply will not find the settings dialog I need to change that setting.
It is almost like they intentionally hide the settings ... Windows feels like a system that protects clueless users from themselves.
I know many power users of Windows that bring up their terminal frequently as well.
What were you using if I may ask? I use manjaro with plasma and.... idk I really don't have to use the commandline much if at all when i'm not coding. Last time I was forced to was a few months ago in fact with an old niche wifi dongle that didn't work without some tinkering but this now works out of the box as well.
As an example of such a behavior on Windows. My customers (too often) complain that my console-based program suddenly stopped and they tried everything and can't make it to restart.
The problem is that they don't realize that selecting some text in the window blocks the stdout and the program won't continue until they remove the selection.
So for a more experienced user it's nothing, but for someone new to terminal behavior it's a huge obstacle.
On Linux you have much more traps like that.
I strongly disagree with this. When I am forced to use windows, I am constantly fighting with it to not be obnoxious. It takes many seconds to do something as simple as bring up an explorer window. I can't count the number of times I have had to dig into menus to disable this or that ad panel or other bloatware. In linux, I occasionally have to figure out how something works and fix it, but there are generally many months between those events, when everything just works and gets out of my way.
Several seconds sounds like an exaggeration, but it never seems anything but sluggish to me.
One UX delay that irritates me is the time it often takes between hitting Win+R and the run dialogue finally being ready for input. Regularly the first few characters of what I type after that ends up going to the app that originally had focus. That used to be instant, on much older kit.
I've mostly used OS X and Linux the last 25 years, but have been forced to use Windows at work and recently on my gaming computer, so I'm not really defending Windows here. But honestly, I don't have any big problems with it. It works OK for the most part.
I cannot list any of the bugs I have had with Windows off the top of my head, but I can with linux. Driver issues, Pulse audio randomly playing static, updates breaking my system, fractional scaling not working, I could go on.
Configuring Linux is fun, so yes, I've done a reasonable amount of playing around with it. But I chose this. There was always the option of picking a "batteries included" distro and just running that with no playing around. I've never encountered a situation where I had to open a terminal to fix or change something that I didn't cause.
Windows repeatedly gets in my face about updates, often at inconvenient times. It's just generally a worse experience, in part because it seems so condescending compared to Linux. The tone is always "are you sure you want to do this?", "these are super-advanced settings that we don't think you should be messing with", and so on. I'm always swearing at the bloody thing to just get out of my way.
This is my experience as well. To use a power tools analogy, Windows is the DIY line of equipment: moderately powered, relatively easy to use, if it breaks/wears down you buy a new one. Linux, on the other hand, is the professional's choice: much more powerful, harder to master, but it's user servicable and infinitely better customizable for each use case.
Really? What kind of things do you have to google for Linux to work these days? The opposite is true for me in Windows, I am not about to relearn how to use the Windows terminal.
There's also been a fair amount of googling for how to set up X in Linux to do Y only to find a trail of half-functional or abandoned packages. Getting global menus set up in your DE of choice for example takes a surprising amount of twiddling and even at its best doesn't work with a lot of software. Getting everything functioning as expected with a minimal WM setup is also a surprising amount of work (e.g. laptop volume keys not working if some daemon isn't running). Admittedly it's not as bad if all your want is a Win9x-type or iPad-type desktop.
And is one click and works with all apps in Windows ?
