705
submitted 1 year ago by mastermind@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Having the highest market share doesn’t mean that windows uses logical conventions, it just means that lots of people are accustomed to the conventions that it uses. The vast majority of professionals that I’ve interacted with strongly dislike having to work on a windows machine once they’ve been exposed to anything else.

Off of the top of my head, the illogical conventions that Windows uses are: storing application and OS settings together in an opaque and dangerous, globally-editable database (the registry), obfuscating the way that disks are mounted to the file system, using /cr/lf for new lines, using a backslash for directory mappings, not having anything close to a POSIX compatible scripting language, the stranglehold that “wizards” have on the OS at every level, etc. ad nausium. Most of these issues are due to Microsoft deciding to reinvent the wheel instead of conforming to existing conventions. Some of the differences are only annoying because they pick the exact opposite convention that everyone else uses (path separators, line endings), and some of them are annoying because they’re an objectively worse solution than what exists everywhere else (the registry, installation/uninstallation via wizards spawned by a settings menu).

For basic usability functions, see the lack of functional multi-desktop support 20 years after it became mainstream elsewhere. There is actually no way to switch one monitor to a 2nd workspace without switching every monitor, which makes the feature worse than useless for any serious work. In addition to that, window management in general is completely barebones. Multitasking requires you to either click on icons every time you want to switch a window, or cycle through all of your open windows with alt-tab. The file manager is kludgy and full of opinionated defaults that mysteriously only serve to make it worse at just showing files. The stock terminal emulator is something out of 1995, the new one that can be optionally enabled as a feature is better, but it still exposes a pair of painful options for shells. With WSL, the windows terminal suddenly becomes pretty useful, but having to use a Linux abstraction layer just serves to support the point that windows sucks.

I could go on and on all day, I’m a SWE with a decade of experience using Linux, 3 decades using Windows, and a few years on Mac here and there. I love my windows machine at home… as a gaming console. Having to do serious work in windows is agonizing.

[-] The_Mixer_Dude@lemmus.org 1 points 1 year ago

Lol I guess you haven't used Windows in a very very long time

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

I use windows for ~10 hours per day, 5 or 6 days per week because my team is currently maintaining a legacy .NET framework codebase. I’m sure there are people on earth who use windows more than I do, but I think it’s extremely unlikely that you’re one of them.

this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
705 points (96.8% liked)

Asklemmy

44149 readers
1296 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS