When it comes to installing stuff, I’m very trigger-happy. So, from experience…

Installing stuff on Windows (safely)

• Hope it’s on Chocolatey (choco install)
• If not, search for the website online
• Scroll past the AI slop and suspicious Softonic downloads
• Click the website
• Find the correct download button
• Download
• Scan with MalwareBytes (don’t want an STI)
• Run setup.exe
• Verify PATH and wanted feature set
• I do not want to bundle Candy Crush or McAfee
• skim the Privacy Policy to see if they’ll grind my bones to dust
• Install Microsoft C++ Redistributable 2014-2018 (wtf? I already have 4 of these)
• Wait
• Sort the installation shortcuts into my folders

Installing stuff on Linux (safely)

• paru some_software
• If on AUR, skim PKGBUILD
• If not packaged at all (rare), git clone it and either skim the install.sh or Makefile
• Done

Nowadays it’s the online account centric shite and all the privacy implications that come along with it. But even before that it was annoying to just trying to do the thing

Doing the thing on linux: command that does the thing
Doing the thing on windows: click here, click there, click some more, second tab, submenu, click advanced, type in the info, save, ok, “yes I’m sure”, click ok, click apply, close 626254 windows, reboot

Ads in a purchased OS.

Forced Edge openings that, as far as I can tell, can’t be avoided.

To list a few:

• Onedrive deleting my files
• Very slow
• ads
• ai bullshit
• updating is a pain
• recall

Notifications, suggestions, and just generally having make the OS get out of my way so I could do what I needed.

1. The search in the start menu searching the fucking web with bing instead of my computer
2. Accidentally hitting F1 and Edge immediately opens with some “help”

The 3 days of settings adjustments, debloating, de-spyware-ing, regestry edits, group edits, service edits, power edits just have a functioning OS that doesn’t bottleneck/ruin your espensive hardware you paid for.

Annoying little quirks of text highlighting and navigation. Oopsie, you moved an extra quarter of a centimeter to the left of the paragraph you tried to highlight starting from the bottom. That means you want everything, right? Yeah we’re highlighting everything. And so on.

Fortunately I’ve picked up some workarounds over the years:

Trying to highlight text in a hyperlink: hold alt

Methods of selecting text blocks (e.g., when normal mouse-select is doing bizarre stuff):

• Try highlighting from end to beginning
• Click point A, hold shift, click point B
• Double-click first word of desired selection to highlight it, or triple-click a paragraph, then highlight letters with shift-right, words with ctrl-shift-right, lines with shift-down, paragraphs with ctrl-shift-down. You’ll see that, for example, when you use shift-down, some text on the line following the selected line is also selected, corresponding to the length of the initial selection before the hotkey was pressed. You can use relevant combos in the opposite direction to de-select this. Or press shift-end to highlight only to the end of the line where your current selection ends, and shift-home to deselect to the beginning of the line. Ctrl-shift-end/home will do the same but for the entire page/document.
• Some other useful hotkeys are available during text input – I make heavy use of shift+pgup/pgdn to extend selections, but this seems to work in Excel, Notepad++, etc., not in this web browser text input field, for example. Holding shift while clicking also extends selections as in the read-only context; holding ctrl while clicking arbitrarily adds to selection just as in the file browser.

When I was still using Windows my system would often hard crash (haven’t verified it but I blame my 5700XT’s graphics drivers). This wasn’t an issue once I switched to Linux.

Deleting old installs.

And upon taking possession of and then deleting them how aggressively the browsers I am using are collecting and maintaining files on me. It shouldn’t take 40 minutes to delete browser files from an install that only lasted 2 months.

I have to use Windows for work and the most annoying thing is the OneDrive-Sync. It makes the explorer extremely slow. When I open it, sometimes it takes more than 5 sec till I can use it. Wtf is this, 1997? Another thing is Teams with the awful performance and constant design changes.

Put my PC to sleep, then i go to sleep. 3am rolls around and my PC turns on and sits at the log-in screen.

This seems to be an issue only after windows 7 for me. It can’t be updating because there’s nothing happening when i check on the windows update, and it will do this all night until i unplug the damn thing. Then i get a couple months of this issue not appearing.

I can’t complain. works fine for me.

I’ve spent the entire morning trying to install sql 2022 and it fails on a mysterious error message. The suggested fixes don’t work.

I’ll have the same problems on Linux occasionally but at least I did not pay to have those issues.

The lack of primary selection/middle click paste. I select text, try to paste it and then have to sheepishly go back and actually copy it for realsies.

I used to get annoyed at the lack of multiple workspaces, but since switching to a multi-monitor setup, I don’t really use multiple workspaces any more.