this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Sounds like you're just more familiar with Linux and that's fine. I use Linux, Windows and MacOS regularly and haven't had a problem with Windows honestly. The most frustrating of the 3 is MacOS, and even then it's nitpicking.
In sorry, but they're kind of right. Windows is HELL ON EARTH to support. Fixing issues is a guessing game because no one really knows what's wrong, its garbage driver enumeration system means a year down the line a users monitor/headset/dock will magically stop working, restarting is a 50/50 shot of getting stuck on the spinning circle, I could go on and on and on.
Within three months of starting that job windows was gone from every PC I owned.
In a big corporate/ large enterprise environment, I've usually had few major problems with my windows laptops. It's just always slow as balls because of all of the security shit they put on them. So these $3k laptops take forever to load or launch outlook and teams.
I always dream of a Linux laptop, but then realized they'd butcher it all to hell and make it useless with security policies and tools. I can't imagine using a Linux machine at work where I didn't have the ability to "sudo" anything.
That'd be more frustrating than windows tbh.
10+ years of Windows and I still can't say I'm familiar with it.
Linux has a steep learning curve for sure, but if I have to say one good thing about it, it's the openness of Linux.
I dread seeing the message "An unknown error has just occurred" when I use Windows. Tell me, Microsoft, tell me what the error was!
Agreed, the lack of proper (and often any) error messages is incredibly infuriating. It makes it impossible to diagnose anything, the only thing you can do is look for forum posts to make sense of the weird behaviour.
On linux, if something doesn't work it tells me why and I can just follow a chain to the root cause every time without fail.
I am familiar with all 3. Power user some would say. But I must use unix. I do ML/AI, corporations pay money for the ML/AI guys and give them windows. Like partecipating to an f1 race with a Fiat panda...
For my work windows is simply painfully useless
It's just windows being almost default OEM OS. Why should they bother to install Linux over it for you while they don't know particular flavour of Linux you like?
Because they need to maintain multiple huge servers and virtual machines with my favorite flavor of Linux, to make us doing the job very ineffectively. Because Linux does the job they need, it is needed, no escape, while windows is just for outlook and for creating issues.
I am paid enough that I really should not complain if companies waste money on the wrong tools for the job. Most of my salary pays to find solutions to problems that exist only because of windows. They have to waste a lot of money because the former accenture guy they hired as head of IT support (or whoever decides for the laptops) told them that windows is the only possible solution for big corporations. Good for them.
As said I am seriously thinking about starting my own start up, because my experience with corporate IT has been so miserable in all places I worked (outside academia, that has many defects, but at least they can manage a decent IT).
Is it forbidden to install a different OS? I'm propably ignorant as in all my dev jobs so far (N=1), I have been permitted (and encouraged) to install OS of my choice.
Nope unfortunately. Having worked in finance and pharma I have access to systems with sensitive data (and build them). IT is responsible for everything. When we set up a cluster, for instance, we say what to do, at the level of the single command line, but the work is physically done by an engineer from IT.
Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining
While it is partly true, I can't deny I spent the last 15years on linux, I have my fair amount of deal with windows in a professional setup, I can't totally accept this response then, hence the word partly true :P.
Now, explain me how any familiarity with Windows can help when a vanilla installation for windows 10 pro, used for two specific application (nothing cloudy), no game, almost offline, etc... How this system decides, randomly to not allow me to literally login in, looping forever before giving prompt, or pretend there is issue with my PIN and or my profile although I use plain passphrase and my account is local and literally nothing has changed system wise since the last session! I have disabled all the auto update shit everywhere (the obvious one and the one I know about) and no updates in between.
You could say I might no know this particular register bit field. Probably but then, we are not in the easy/just works view.
Honestly this sounds like a freak accident. I use Windows myself and work with people using Windows regularly and never heard of something like that. And I guess you can achieve an unrecoverable state on any operating system given the right conditions.
Sure for the possibility for every OSes to break but what I said was just a recent example, even though it's on a pretty pristine installation in term of alteration. There's so many other things where Windows and its ecosystems is a mess but I guess it is more or less forgiven because you can game on it and because that particular device you would use has the driver while on Linux it must be reverse engineered and written if not, never exist.
Anyway, my whole point is about the "just works" label which has been proven to be wrong more than I can count.
I have the exact same issues as @[email protected] . Every single work day contains at least 10 minutes of waiting for windows to log me in and 2 login errors without exaggerating. IT have told me on numerous occasions there's nothing they can do other than reinstalling windows since the error source is very proprietary.
At this point I'm considering switching jobs just to get rid of windows.