It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it. And it's still a miserable experience. On the other hand, if I just install a batteries included Linux distro I get something I'm not necessarily thrilled about, but I can go pretty much straight to work. And if I spend a few days, I can set up a system that's exactly tailored the way I want it to be, eats an order of magnitude less RAM than Windows, and doesn't regularly break itself by forcing updates on me, changing settings from under me, etc.
MacOS is somewhat better than Windows(less garbage to hose off), but it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware it runs on.
> It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it.
I guess it's what you're used to. I don't find Windows decrapification to be that much more effort than Linux configuration.
> it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware
For your use case, presumably not.
The ship seems to have sailed for upgradable Apple hardware (and I expect Apple did their homework and discovered 90% of Mac Pro systems were never upgraded anyway) but I still appreciate the advantages of hardware-software integration, nice form factor and battery life, unified CPU/GPU memory, etc.
Exactly. All these exchanges of experiences boil down to people rationalising their own preferences, which are really just about familiarity. I do it too. I'm really just more familiar with Linux systems because I used it since I was 10-12, and as a main OS since I was about 14(I'm 30 now).
My view is that Windows being more user friendly is really just a myth. Most non-technical people use their Windows PCs or macs for the same 4 different tasks they always have. Ask them to do something new or do some troubleshooting and they'll struggle with it and get nowhere. Whether they're staring at a terminal window with no idea what to type or a "troubleshooting wizard" that offers no useful advice and links to an MSDN article with no useful information, is really irrelevant. They'll still need help from a technical person.
And technical people like us all just prefer what we're more familiar with too.
Sure, attempting to make Windows into Linux by “decrapifying” it is harder, but if you use Windows as intended and upload all your documents to Microsoft’s cloud it is easier for the vast vast majority of users.
Windows breaking itself with updates is less a symptom of Windows and more of a side-effect of “decrapification”. I’ve seen a pretty damn large sample size of windows users undergoing windows updates and Windows Update does really not break computers other than by annoyingly changing your defaults to Microsoft stuff “woops, by accident” but if you do stuff like use Edge as your default browser it stops breaking.
Apple forces you to use their defaults, Microsoft theirs, and Google theirs. When you accept these companies operating system is not Linux, and stop acting like they are Linux, and stop acting like you own your windows PC, they do become pretty simple to use.
If you want a PC you can own, you use Linux. Linux is great. My grandmother uses Microsoft Windows in S mode with edge as her browser. Her photos get backed up. She only uses Edge at 175% DPI scaling and maybe looks up a few family photos. It is easier for her than using Linux because she’s familiar with it and because nobody has taught her that unless she is using Windows for education without a decrapify script she is doing things all wrong.
MacOS is somewhat better than Windows(less garbage to hose off), but it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware it runs on.