> That is because Windows for the most part manages itself
Windows is the least "manage itself" OS out of all OS available today. It needs pretty constant maintenance and esoteric enchantments to keep trucking.
That’s not my experience with it. I have 2 windows installations at home and they both seem fine.
I must admit - I spent about an hour figuring out how to turn off telemetry and other junk after installation. But since then, windows has been trucking along just fine.
I wonder why! Has your workplace installed weird junk on the machine which is gumming it up? Are you using some set of configuration options that microsoft doesn't regularly check?
My experience of windows is that it works pretty well these days. But I don't develop on windows - I just use it for entertainment (steam, vlc, etc). So there's probably a lot of edge cases that I'm not hitting.
It wasn't ever different when I ran windows on my personal computers, although granted that was back in 8.1. 8.1 was just bad for a variety of reasons, but it definitely still had the rot problem.
The latest in my saga of Windows being annoying is applications just randomly killing themselves when I'm not looking. I don't reboot my work computer because I have far too much precious stuff open.
But, every other day or so, an application or two will mysteriously disappear from my taskbar. Silently. I never catch it, then I get the "hey did you see this email??"
Why no, no I did not. Outlook committed suicide at some point and I'm not pocket watching the windows taskbar. My mistake.
For a while I thought I just hallucinated me closing the application, but I don't close applications, like, ever.
To put into perspective, my work has a policy which forcefully reboots windows once every 14 days. It helps, but not much, because by day 2-3 it's already breaking down. My Debian machine has an uptime of a few hundred days. I legitimately still have applications open from last year.
Maybe I use my computer like a psychopath, or maybe my expectations are too high, but I don't consider windows to take care of itself. Its the most babying-an-OS I ever have to do. iOS and Android are much better as well.
No it doesn't. I barely do anything to manage my Windows Installation. I install loads of garbage (I mostly still run the same programs as I did 15 years ago).
I don't understand why people propagate these falsehoods.
Windows rots. Even a few days without a reboot and things will just stop working or be really slow. No idea why.
But if you don't clean install once every few years you'll just have a ton of shit everywhere. Programs don't clean themselves up.
Also every program has its own update mechanism. Great... now I don't just have to manage windows update, but also a few dozen other esoteric update mechanisms.
iOS and Android are self managing. Windows? Can we be for real? Why get on the internet and lie to people?
I must admit - I spent about an hour figuring out how to turn off telemetry and other junk after installation. But since then, windows has been trucking along just fine.