Fuck Windows. *

Published 2021-12-27

* Legacy blog.

Windows has been seen as the major mainstream OS since it's inception in 1985, basically becoming an overnight success, only growing in popularity and usefulness with each iteration. This was, at first, deservedly so; Windows 95, 98 and XP were all widely used operating systems, making the once arcane world of computing accessible to a new audience, whilst not skimping on useful features for experienced power users. And all was good for this period of bliss.

And then Vista hit.

The release of Project Longhorn, released as Windows Vista, is the first in a long, long line of baffling, annoying, and downright stupid decisions from Microsoft. Upon release on January 30th 2007, it was immediately lambasted for its instability, its high RAM usage, and general propensity to dick the user about with widgets and other such additions that were enabled by default. And these additions were predicted to work on less than 5% of Britain's PCs prior to release, despite Microsoft being adamant that "nuh uh! It'll totally run". The blatant lies told, hilariously, landed them in court wherein a Microsoft product manager stumbled on his words, effectively proving that the 'Vista-Compatible' sticker was a load of old bollocks. Pair this with the frankly absurd pricing points, and it wasn't hard to see that Microsoft had shifted from being "that company what gave me Weezer with my '95 install disc" to yet another money-grubbing corporation who wanted money, and wanted it without concern for the end user. This would unfortunately mark the beginning of a slow, gradual death of a once-prosperous OS, and it's transformation into a glorified bloatware bootloader.

What's with these homies dissing my girl?

Fast forward a few years to the release of Windows 7, on October 22, 2009: finally! A return to form following the prior three years of bugs, bluescreens and bollocks. It was bliss; it had a sleek, new look, including many features which we now take for granted being introduced (such as the ability to pin programs to the taskbar), a complete performance boost, a retooling of the Aero framework, and generally, it was an upgrade. Windows 7 was a frankly amazing step up from the dogwater Vista - so much so that back in yonder days, I took the plunge of learning how to make a boot USB of the OS and installing it on my shitty Toshiba Satellite M305D-S4829 laptop, at the ripe wee age of 6.

Man, even back then, I was a fuckin' nerd.

Either way, point is, 7 was (and frankly still is) a stellar operating system. Unfortunately, this was the last good OS made by Microsoft, as a mere 3 years later, on October 26th 2012, Microsoft released Windows 8. Hahhh, God, they sure fuckin' released it, in the same way one releases a turd from their arse. Sorry, I'm just employing the same level of crudeness in my writing as Microsoft did with this... whatever the fuck you want to call it. Not a desktop operating system, that's for bloody certain. What happened here?

Windows 7 was wonderful; it was simplistic, yet still had the power user features, it could be themed and skinned, you could actually use the fucking thing without it telling you to install Candy Crush every five goddamned seconds.

Windows 8 was a turning point for Microsoft. It was a pivot back into the stupidity they had promised to no longer indulge with Vista, having all of it's hallmarks, such as its over-use of RAM, annoying widgets and instability issues. But! Most wonderful at all, was the entirely unnecessary re-invention of the wheel!

"My computer is not a phone... what is this shit?"
-Vinesauce Joel

Yes, the feature that everybody knows and is extremely fucking confused by at the very least, the Windows 8 Start Menu redesign. I shouldn't have to explain exactly why this is a problem, but allow me to break it down somewhat. This is a needless implementation of touchscreen design philosophies on a desktop OS, presumably made due to the fact that it would be easier to cross-integrate with the new Windows Phone 8, which had switched to the same kernel as the desktop-based version of Windows. And instead of putting effort into simply having similar visual languages with optimizations and tweaks depending on the device you were on, similar to Apple, they decided: "why bother?" Why not just use the same huge fuck-off tiles you'd see on a phone that make using the Start Tile system a complete chore because you have to drag your mouse 15 miles across to hover over a different app? Why not make the window captions humongous? Why not integrate our own new Store so that we can make even more money? Ooh, actually, whilst we're on, why don't we use that Store in the Start Menu in order to push the user ads every time they boot their PC? That way, we can get lucrative advertising money!

And that's all this ultimately boils down to; money. Corporate greed. The rich wanting all the dosh in the world. And all of it without lifting a finger.

They had already bounced back from a similar situation with Vista; release the darling XP, then take a shit and rake in the dough. The trajectory was set to be identical here - release Windows 7, the ultimate Microsoft OS, and then release Windows 8, one of the worst desktop operating systems, second only to.. fuckin' TempleOS, I guess.

Security flaws, horrible design, the fucking ads, the constant telemetry; it all added up to make a terrible, terrible operating system. Windows 8.1 was slated as some sort of major release, too, which.. no? The only things that it really did was let us see our desktop on login instead of the Start Menu, which is good, but not enough to warrant calling it it's own thing. Windows 8.1 was given the exact same press bunkum as 7 had behind it; "promises to address issues that users had on launch". And so, the pieces were all in play for the new Microsoft business plan: Step 1: Release the OS. Doesn't matter if it's terrible. Step 2: Watch the money roll in from people who don't know any better. Step 3: Get critically panned. Step 4: "Fix" your OS by adding features that should have been there since launch (or were in prior OSes) Step 5: Get critical acclaim back. Step 6: Watch even more money roll in. Step 7: Eventually decide to make a new money generator-sorry, OS. Step 8: Push obnoxious messages to force a user into upgrading. Step 9: End support for the older, superior OSes in order to definitely ensure the user into upgrading.

And this was exactly what ended up happening with 8.1, too; they would go on to release Windows 10, with even more telemetry, even more RAM usage (up to 4GB of idle used by solely the OS), and a new fun one - disk throttling! Yes, if you run Windows on an HDD as opposed to an SSD, your disk will throttle like mad, and it may even sometimes lead to your OS just entirely freezing for anywhere from seconds to minutes at a time! Isn't that wonderful? Isn't it great to hear that your OS is so extremely bloated, so taxing on hardware that merely running the OS by itself is enough to strain it? Keep in mind, no prior Windows versions had this issue - not even Vista. If it can ever be said that your OS has something wrong with it that Windows "watch me shit my pants" Vista doesn't, you have fucked up bigstyle, my trans-national corporate chum.

Windows 10 also brought with it the dreaded curse. You know exactly what scenario to envision; middle of a round in CS, you're about to absolutely pound the one remaining enemy's bussy with that wonderful AK one-tap you'd been practicing, you're poised, you're ready, your finger hovering over the 5 key, ready to plant just to rub the salt in the wound..! And then, just as you see the first emerging pixels of the CT peaking you, the game closes. What!? And then, your screen turns to a solid colour with white text upon it. You hold your head in your hands as your magnificent game plan is scuppered, sending an angered video message of your predicament to your team who were wondering where you disappeared to, who all relate when they, too, read those dreaded words:

Aw, for fuck's sakes!

Automatic fucking updates. I'm not even gonna write anything on this - even people who give Bill Gates gobjobs won't attempt to argue that these are one of the most annoying things to ever come out of Windows.

But, you know, there is always an alternative. There's an easier, better way. A way that allows for you to have whatever features you want, strip the ones you don't, make everything look the way you fancy, and cost absolutely nothing except disk space. If you want, you can even still play Candy Crush.

That's right, motherfucker, this is a Linux shill now! Bet you couldn't have guessed that from the URL of this post being obliquely anti-Windows.

And you, yes you, can try Linux today! My personal recommendation is Manjaro with the KDE Desktop Environment, as it allows you to have a Windows-esque interface by default, just for you to test the waters, to see if you like it. Hell, if you want, you don't even have to install it right away, you can just run it in a testing environment from the USB you plonk the media on. And? No automatic updates. When you do update, too, no need to drop everything and pencil yourself in for 20 minutes of finding something else to do whilst waiting; you can just keep using your OS. Keep using your programs. Everything just keeps going. If you're concerned for the environment, too, Linux uses a lot less power at idle times than Windows could ever hope to. It uses a lot less of everything, really - RAM, CPU and GPU usage are a fraction of their Windows competition, leaving you more resources to do whatever you want. Wanna play games? Get a load of Lutris, a launcher that allows you to install games yourself, or through using community-made profiles. And I'm sure you've heard of Valve's Proton by now - their own suite that contains a modified version of WINE in order to act as a compatibility layer between Linux and Windows. In non-jargon speak, that basically means it makes your Windows shite work on Linux. Now, of course, there are exceptions; anti-cheats such as EasyAntiCheat (e.g. Fortnite) and Battleye (e.g. Destiny 2) have minimal Proton support as of writing, although this may change with the release of the Steam Deck, as developers may choose to opt in to allow for more players to experience their games via Linux.

Basically, if you want to escape the clutches of Microsoft, take back some of your privacy (as much as you can with the modern internet anyway), and learn some new stuff, install Linux. It's free - again, it costs nothing but the disk space you install it on, and it doesn't even need to cost that.

(Also, this should go without saying, but if you use Windows, I don't look down on you or anything. Everybody has their preferences. Like me: my preference is that I very, very much dislike Windows.)