After mastering *nix userland, Windows is suffocating. Not having ads slipstreamed into my start menu, or not having the calculator take 10sec to start due to telemetry, or not having my CPU/HD/RAM hammered by Cortana no matter how many different ways I disabled it, or not having updates+reboots forcing themselves at the absolute worst time, or...

The advantage over OSX is commodity hardware: easy upgrades/downgrades/repairs, & lower cost. Swapping HD in my macbook involved ordering special screwdrivers & prybars, then at least 30min worth of disassembly/re-assembly. Last linux/PC upgrade consisted of slapping the old HD into the new PC and powering on--10 minutes max. Aside from that, OSX is nice.

> "...not having the calculator take 10sec to start due to telemetry..."

Calculator fires up in 2 seconds even on my elderly Intel m3-6y30 machine.

Not to pick on the parent poster, since I've seen far too many on HN say the same thing, but if the person who started this topic wants a prime addition to "unpopular opinions here that should not be", it's that those who aren't skilled enough to use Windows properly are also pretty much guaranteed not to be skilled enough to use other operating systems which expose much more complexity to the user, like Linux, properly either.

> due to telemetry

Not a CPU issue, but a network timeout one. Disconnect from ethernet/wifi, try again, report back. Circa 2016, it took 5-10 sec before it would give up on phoning-home & finally open. I put wireshark on it & timed it myself. No idea what it does now.

Just tried it, same 2 seconds. Perhaps it was changed sometime afterwards?

With Windows, who can tell? And that's the real issue. Is it a bug? Is it Micrsoft telemetry? Is it Microsoft being underhanded (which happens!)?

I've noticed that Windows programmers are very quick to work around what they perceive as bugs in underlying library code, and opaqueness in both code and motives is why.

For that particular case, the source is available: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/148

Aside from that, amen. "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" is a breath of fresh air compared to MS documentation. The situation has improved--if only because we can go to StackOverflow and ask Jon Skeet for the answer--but in the bad old days (where you might as well be on a desert island with your MSDN DVDs) it was pure pain.

Software development, particularly for large-scale computing environments.

I have been writing software for 26 years. The first ~16 I used Linux exclusively, then Linux and Windows, and recently Windows exclusively.

There's absolutely nothing I'm unable to do on Windows 10, but there are a lot of things I wasn't able to do on Linux.

Oddly, I've had pretty much the opposite experience. Windows is so full of quirks. The irregularities keep me from doing things.

Each cat his rat I guess.

That doesn’t sound very general purpose.