To any future potential employer that comes across this blog while researching links I put in my CV: This is a ranty blog, and I do not apologize for it. I just really really dislike Microsoft practices. The only place I ever touch Windows now is in a VM, and at my job. So don't worry if you're considering me, and are afraid I'll rant about Windows at workplace too. I mean I might, just not to this extent.

Windows? More like L-dows

So, Windows right? Or as I like to call it "Losedows". No wins in there since XP. A little huge market leader OS (just shy of being called a monopolist, shy, yea right, thank the lobbyists) that used to be this nice gardener who tended your plants and watered azaleas, but now he's squatting your house and treats the place like he owns it. And all because we let him.

The final straw

My personal fun fact: Windows 11 made me switch full time to Linux. I drove Kubuntu for a year, and now my daily driver's on Arch (you see I like to live dangerously). Windows 10 was balancing somewhere on the line between shitty company practices and having a decent and coherent UX. Especially after the fiasco that was Windows 8/8.1 (we were just not ready for it yet) UX wise it took the best things, like tiles which my Start menu was full of. Then Windows 11 came in, the lovechild of Windows X for Surface Duo prototypes and some executives that wanted to push out a new OS out of the gate before the end of the fiscal quarter. A progress in a way, but backwards. Yeah Mica is cool, but having the taskbar anywhere you want is cooler.

The goddamn taskbar.

That was the final straw.

That and the Start menu.

Don't get me started on the 11 Start Menu.

Swit-

No fuck you I'm gonna go on on the Start Menu. You know how 10 brought back the Start Menu in style of 7 since 8 bombed so hard somewhat because people missed the little bugger? And then supercharged it with Live Tiles? That. Was. My. Shit. My start menu had 3 columns full of tiles in different categories and folders. Want to launch a game? Press the Windows Key and click on the game. It's right there. Word? It's in the Office folder. Wireshark? Believe it or not, also there. The tiles can be so smol they take up almost no space. I love Cities Skylines, so the game tile was bigger then others, obviously. It's such a good UX.

Ofc not without a fault. The only reason I cared for my collection of tiles was the dogshit of a search engine. On Mac I would just go CMD+Space, type 2 letters of program name and poof there. Windows 10 (and 11 to an extent) is like type 'E' and it shows 'Energy Saving Options', type 'EX' and it shows 'Explorer', type 'EXP' and it shows 'Search for EXP on the web with Bing'. Just straight up unusable.

But the 11 Start Menu.

Ohhhhh giiirlllll. Now that's unusable.

You liked that Start Menu could show hundreds of tiles? Fuck you you now get 15 shortcuts at once. Don't worry, there are pages. But no continous scroll coz fuck you we live in the year 1995. But don't be afraid. Our recommendations that take up half of the goddamn Start Menu will help you out. Sure, the recommendations that show random files I haven't touched in any way will help me. Instead of you know, having shortcuts.

Live tiles died for this, don't let their sacrifice be forgotten.

Owning shit

And that's how we go into the 'you don't own shit' aspect of the Windows 11. You see, I wanted to put the taskbar on top, since I've always had my taskbar on top. But Windows 11 said fuck you only bottom (damn it kinda knows me well I guess). So I did the reasonable thing one often does when faced with corporate decisions like this and I've edited the registry, since of course you can. But all was broken, no surprise. Taskbar on top, but no previews, and where the Start Menu would pop up was random. Somehow even less useable than the default.

I've tried my things to 'fix' the decision made by executives for me, but in the end the root problem wasn't that I needed my taskbar on top, rather the fact that some boring guy in a suit made that decision for me. This got me thinking.

Now that I'm writing this down, I think it's unreasonably normalized that drastic changes can be done to the UX, and you as a user can't do anything about it. It's excepted even.

Take a look at macOS. The jump from 9 to X and from Aqua to whatever the fuck milk glass UI is called. These are general changes made by designers and executives based on what they think you should use their computer like. You pay for a computer/OS, enjoy it, get used to it, then you get an update that changes everything, you don't like it, can't do shit about it, get used to it, rinse and repeat every major OS version. We think it's normal. We expect it. We hope it's not as bad as the last time (it will be).

But holy shit just using Linux for 1 day taught me it doesn't have to be this way.

Now it is me who chooses what I want my OS to look like, to feel like, to work like. Sure, it's a bit of work to get it there, but now I don't have a multi-billion dollar company telling me what to do with my computer.

Other aspects of you not owning shit

Windows Update

If you ever were enamoured by Linux and tried to run both OSes at once (dualbooting) you might have encountered the less known issue of not owning your PC—the Windows Update.

This terrorist of a piece of software not only forces you to update (your OWN FUCKING MACHINE), but also will, because not might, but will, break your dualboot setup. Nice boot partition you have there. Aaaaand it's gone. Like, what is your fucking deal, stay on the drive you have and don't touch anything. Also fuck kernel level anticheats. What the fuck is Riot Vanguard doing in the fucking /boot? Explain yourself you unnecesarry helicopter parent of a piece of shit software. I really hope there is a vulnerability in Vanguard that allows for RCE or some shit so that people will finally see what a dumb fucking idea that is.

Others

Damn I kinda don't know. There's so much in the Redmond operating system pushing me away from it, I can't really name it all here. I'll add more examples once I remember them lol. But also, like, I only use Windows now inside VM for Ableton Live, so nowadays I don't really use it that much at all.