Sorry for a rant against Windows in a linux community, though this feels like best place to rant.
I recently started work on Windows, and I expected everything to just work well. After all, that’s the point of Windows! It is the first-class citizen, where things work out-of-the-box.
Yet my experience wasn’t so great.
- Printers, the bane of IT. HP has dedicated drivers to it, which they should support well. It should JUST work, right? Right?? No, it randomly fails to detect printers, says a printer is off, reports missing papers when it has enough, fails to print a normal document while being able to print test pages. It also seems like driver-OS communication is not quite great, as they often give different status.
- While in a zoom meeting, I plugged in my earphone. Then, zoom froze. Really, how can plugging an earphone cause a freeze? Even quitting zoom and re-entering did not work. In the end, I had to turn my computer off and on again, and couldn’t use my earphone. It has been quite embarrassing and enraging experience. What a disruption from something which should work out-of-the-box…
- PuTTY and WinSCP is way more clunky than ssh in terminal. I don’t like the GUI with decades old visual, with confusing settings here and there. Each app having separate terminal turns me off as well.
- Windows 10 does have multiple virtual desktop support. Yet funnily enough, clipboard contents are separate for each virtual desktop. Who thought this is a good idea??
Basically, hardware support is still hit-or-miss with Windows (I thought this was linux-only issue), and connection to linux server is not so stellar. How can people love these?
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All Operating systems get more complex release by release, including the applications and all the different hardware platforms and peripherals. So there will be problems.
The “It just works” catchphrase came from Steve Jobs back in 2003. It didn’t exactly mean things were perfect but that regular people/non experts should not have to struggle with technical mumbo jumbo to use a computer.
If somebody is selling hardware and not distributing working drivers for it, that’s just a dead product.
If you’re used to Linux though, install WSL2 to get a native shell you’re familiar with.
Windows feels less stable today than it has been for a long time. I spend so long, on every Windows computer, waiting for windows that have turned white and say “not responding” in the title bar. I use Linux for almost everything, partly out of principle, but largely because the Windows experience is so slow and frustrating these days. For the most part, the friendlier Linux distros do a better job of just working.
Windows was never oriented around “just works”. That was Mac. Windows’s main selling point is that it never becomes incompatible, and that has largely stayed true. You can still to this day insert the disk for some proprietary application from Windows 2.0 and it will still install and run. Try that with another operating system!
This has absolutely never been my experience. Many people actually say Wine is a better choice for running legacy windows games and applications.
I dislike Windows as much as the next guy, and recognize this is just a rant. However:
- Might be more HP’s fault than Windows
- Might be mire Zoom’s fault than Windows (though Windows audio is a gongshow)
- Just use OpenSSH from Command Prompt or Powershell. It should be preinstalled I think but if not can be installed through Programs and Features) in Windows 10 and above.
Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.
My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.
Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.
After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.
No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.
I thought windows had ssh in the terminal by default?
They have their own thing I believe. Have to use Putty for SSH.
It does. OpenSSH 9.5p1 on my desktop.
Which is kind of weird, because that version is a year and a half old. 9.9p2 is current.
What you should have posted was nothing.
