(I'm probably going to regret posting this, considering some of my previous interactions with FOSS people. This post is not asking for help. I will block you if you reply trying to ""help"".)

Over the past five days, I've been forced to use Windows because of school. Now that it's winter break, I have the choice to go back to Linux because I don't have school for a few weeks, but I don't think I'll be doing that. Not even in a dual-boot setup.

A bit of background

I've been a Linux user basically as long as I've used computers. I didn't use it because of privacy, I used it because I was familiar with it.

A few things that I like about Windows so far

One thing that I really like about Windows is the UI.

A screenshot of the Windows desktop across two monitors. Both have a wallpaper with the time and day of the week, and the first monitor has 5 icons on the left of the desktop and 2 on the right. The notification center and calendar is open. On the second monitor, Apple Music is open and showing the lyrics for a song.

Everything feels so perfect and polished. The blur effects for software feels nice too, but I don't have a screenshot on hand for that.

But the main thing that I like is how everything just works. Some things work slightly less (i.e. Minecraft being slower), but more things work overall. And for the rare Linux-only tool that my workflows have depended on for years, I can use WSL or SSH into my server running Fedora.

For a while, I used the Apple Music web player to play music, which worked. The main issues I had was that it was rather slow, and didn't support lossless audio. I also had to scrobble all audio from Firefox. On Windows, I can use Apple's official desktop app, and set my scrobbling client (Pano Scrobbler) to only listen to media notifications from Apple Music.

Another thing that I've been doing more of recently is playing games and using Discord calls. I always use push-to-talk, which on Linux is a huge pain. I have to alt-tab into the Discord client, hold down on the push-to-talk key, then alt-tab back into the software I was using.

Discord also has an overlay similar to the Steam one for games, and it doesn't exist on Linux. I haven't used it much, but so far it's made the experience while streaming games a whole lot better. (From my understanding, there's no way to technologically do this on Linux currently.)

Auto-updates work too. On Linux, I had to run the update command for two package managers every time I wanted to update anything, and on Windows almost everything is automatic.

Another cool thing is Wallpaper Engine. There is a KDE plugin for it, but it manages to make KDE less stable somehow.

When I occasionally do design stuff, I either use Figma or Affinity v3. Figma is web-based, so it works the same everywhere. Affinity is a proper desktop app though. It runs fine through WINE, but notably pressure sensitivity doesn't work with graphics tablets.

My mouse is a Logitech POP mouse. It works on everything supporting BLE that I've tried so far, but the 4th button doesn't work. There is some software for Linux to get it working, but it doesn't have nearly as many features as the Logi Options+ app for Windows, and isn't as easy to use.

The Windows Terminal app has a nice UI too, I don't have much to say about it.

Non-issues that I see Linux users complaining about

I often see Linux users complaining about Copilot. It's really not that hard to remove. I right clicked the button in my task bar, and then pressed the "unpin" button.

The Windows taskbar context menu, with "Unpin from taskbar" highlighted.

I also see a lot of Linux users complaining about idle RAM usage. I have a lot of RAM, so this isn't really a problem for me.

Things I don't like

It took me a little while to get used to the UI font, because I've used Adwaita Sans as my font for a while. I also don't like the emoji font in Windows.


Anyways, thanks for reading my rant. I'll probably make some more about random other topics soon