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by mixedCase 3735 days ago
st3v3r mentioned two valid points.

On top of that I will add "It's propietary". Because it is. It's a security risk, it means I have to buy it and I have to manage every license I buy. No need for the Stallman pasta here to express clear reasons why it is unacceptable for me and many others.

Other reasons:

- Bloated by default. Comes with many things I do not need, and some I outright despise.

- Resource hungry. It's gotten much, much better with the last few versions, but I can take my Linux set-up to a lowly Chromebook, a discardable netbook or a cheap SoC like the RPi and barely notice a difference for most of what I do. I cannot do that with Windows.

- Not POSIX. I could switch to OS X or BSD tomorrow and barely notice the difference for most of my computing. Not on Windows.

- Carries a particular culture of everything having to be done on the GUI. And what a bad GUI it is.

- Security wise it's terrible, you can't simply brush off the threat of malware as I do on Linux.

- No first class package management. The App Store is a joke.

- It is a completely different system from what I run or would run on my servers anyway.

I could go on but I think it's enough to justify why Windows is not a good option for me (me, as in, me, not someone who's really happy now with Windows).

1 comments

> And what a bad GUI it is.

IMHO every GUI (Win, Mac, Gnome, KDE etc.) is bad compared to any decent CLI, if you are trying to complete non-trivial tasks. The real problem is, on Windows you don't have a simple way to switch from doing things in the GUI to doing them on command line. You can, but it's sort of second-class citizen.

> you can't simply brush off the threat of malware as I do on Linux

Uhm, as a former Linux-only user (for about 2 years, circa 2011-2012) I would advise you not to brush it off completely.

Did you have a lot of bad experiences with malware on Linux?
No but TBH I didn't with Windows 8/8.1/10 either. In either case, you should be aware that malware exists for any platform (Linux too) and always apply the right level of caution.
To be honest my last malware experience on Windows date from years ago, when I was still naive and clicking on popups in a browser. Haven't seen a malware in a long time, if we don't count as malware the nuisances like the Java installer, Java updater, flash updater, iTunes updater, Adobe updater, all of which either install malware or open popups regularly to nag me to update or install things.