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by switchb4 2123 days ago
Windows is reliable for general public.
1 comments

People don't want to hear this but Windows in 2020 is probably more reliable than desktop Linux.

Windows isn't what it used to be in 1999. And desktop Linux QA standards are nothing to write home about, unfortunately.

Hmmmm.. yes it is probably more reliable as a desktop with equivalent features. When running a simple tiled WM Linux is solid.

If you look at the wider eco system, Windows doesn't look so hot. I've just moved from a Linux based work place to a Windows based work place. The number of times the main file server has to be restarted because it's doing something weird is crazy. This never happened at my old job. The Linux servers were only turned off for hardware changes. They didn't require constant restarts. If something went wrong I was able to trace the problem down and prevent it from happening again. In windows everything is opaque. Some unexplained regedit is suggested for every problem and no one seems to know what those edits actually do.

Yeah, but you're talking about Windows server and I was talking about Windows desktop :-)
Too true. I guess I'm still going through Linux withdrawal and wanting to cheer for my lost friend.
They have improved a lot, but there are still the forced restarts, as well as the poor document recovery of the office suite. Together this is a bad combo as I'm constantly worried I might have lost some data in the documents I work on.

They have improved the document recovery quite a lot in the last two years, but they still manage to make the process rather confusing, so sometimes I accidentally save the version with the lost data instead of the other.

OpenOffice had this figured out some 15 years ago. I never lost data to OpenOffice, and I was running it on a laptop (essentially) without a battery.

The forced restarts are a bit annoying but you can schedule them and for the Office part, you can just run LibreOffice on Windows.
I cannot even configure a printer on Windows 10 reliably. Out of ten ways to set the color mode only one correctly reported that it was overridden "somewhere else". I still do not know where that "somewhere else" is, as a result it only prints black and white when you access it from windows. I tried to uninstall the printer, install the most recent drivers (which only added cloud services) and went through all dialogues and settings I could find. Never had that much hassle with a printer on Linux.