Someone told me that it’s the people we love the most that make us the most angry. Apple products are unreal (both software and hardware). People get really frustrated with little annoyances all the time and get quite heated. But, ask them to switch, and the answer is “hell no”. Bugs should be fixed for sure, but still minor in the grand scheme of things.
I understand this perspective. I understand why people think that Windows is a hot mess, I has earned that reputation and them some.
I haven't had Windows do stupid shit in over two years. Updating it is a habit once in a while, possibly barely more frequently than it forces (unless I hear about a big vulnerability on HN). I'd probably be annoyed if I didn't understand how important updates were and kept postponing them (until it forced me to apply them, and it really does).
That's the only real complaint people really have of Windows these days. Then there's my complaint: Privacy.
Especially concerning Edge, that Microsoft keeps doing. It hasn't happened to me. Maybe because I have both FF and Chrome installed? Or some group policy I forgot I applied? I have no idea. During login a few days ago it asked for consent on a bunch of things that were previously opt-out, annoying for 2 minutes, but honestly healthy in the long run and a needed change.
Apple wins the privacy war any day of the week, but Windows really is Apple without the little annoyances. If you configure it like I did (and I couldn't tell you how).
Good god, I agree about privacy, but as somebody who does .NET dev for her day job, how did you get rid of the annoyances?
Some of these are little stuff but, off the top of my head: I can't understand the different between these smart "locations" and folders in explorer (documents vs my documents, why everything is under desktop in some file pickers, why C:\ is so hard to get to these days) even after using windows for going on two decades, the system makes me confirm I want to delete something twice (first it asks me if I want to move something to the recycle bin, then it asks me if I want to empty the recycle bin. you only need one! the whole point of having the recycle bin is so that deleting isn't dangerous), the win10 start menu is cluttered and has ads in it and I don't want to spend so much time mucking with tiles, usage of menu bars is utterly inconsistent, and there are seemingly no strong UI conventions for third-party apps. There are at least three and probably four layers of control panel these days, and the newest one almost never has the feature I'm looking for. Search is still bad, and finds what I don't want far more often than what I do.
That being said it has yet to BSOD on me after a couple years of use and that's more I can say about any other version of windows
Use Classic Start. I get it through Ninite. It's perfect.
Shift-delete removes the recycle bin portion. If you access the recycle bin as infrequently as most people (read: only when the drive complains about space), you won't really be concerned about an extra confirmation.
Smart locations are pretty frustrating but I don't remember the last time they weren't just folders under the user directory, similar to MacOS and Linux. My Documents is a legacy shim, Simba. You must never go there.
I think the UI conventions thing is a matter of personal preference. I really like applications that use a UI convention that suits the application. PowerPoint and Google Chrome are different apps for different purposes, so they should have different UIs.
The Settings app/Control Panel is unforgivably broken. That said, if you search for what you want in the start menu, it's usually pretty good at finding it. But yeah, the ODBC driver connection dialog from 3.1 is still in there somewhere.
You can also open an Explorer window and then enter the location that you want to go to into the location bar. <Win+E><Ctrl+L>C:<Enter> takes you to C: and <Win+E><Ctrl+L>Control Panel<Enter> takes you to the "old" control panel, instead of the confusing new "Settings" UI. <Win+E><Ctrl+L>Network Connections<Enter> also works and is often useful because all the newer network configuration utilities are useless. <Win+X>A gives you an administrative prompt. While in an open explorer window, [<Ctrl+Space>]<Shift+Menu>S will give you a regular prompt in the current folder.
These are the small quality-of-life tricks that I use daily. I am not going to claim it makes it enjoyable, though.
Windows hasn't required confirmations for deletions in years. And the Documents vs My documents folder makes me think it's your organisations setup that is to blame for much of this.
Don't use classic start either. Just remove the pinned stuff from the start menu and it's like your using Windows 2000 again.
