Windows is giving week old bagel...

Full disclaimer- Just because a bagel is a week old does not automatically make it useless, people learning what a bagel is for the first time can study it easier than a bagel dough that may or may not lose its form. With that out of the way… this is satire, my experiences involve pushing Windows to its limit beyond what most people will do.

Inspiration

Basic Things

1. Launching an app, which fails to start and gives no indication anything went wrong
2. Moving a file, which will take much longer than it should thanks to the file system moving each individual bit
3. Using any non-native terminal function (or native terminal function)
4. Basic resource management (“___ has stopped responding”)
5. Google chrome

Thankfully, you can AMPLIFY the dumpster fire by adding complimentary gasoline such as:

1. Node JS
2. Node JS (Electron)
3. Node JS (Electron but now in PWAs downloaded from the Microsoft Store)

“Now there is a kerosene powered cheese grater.” - Ewaler

Go go gadget foot gun

Before switching to Linux, I had to factory reset my Windows computers various times to fix normal issues involving extremely specific low level system components like the TrueType font system corrupting due to an undocumented Adobe font sync error.

The worst issue I've encountered involves Windows service servers being completely unreachable (which prevented my system from receiving important security patches). Even after factory resetting my system and wiping the drive, it STILL wasn't able to update properly.

These issues are low enough on the stack that properly troubleshooting them is not going to happen with a normal customer support agent, but also rare enough that it’s unlikely any higher up will ever take a look.

It’s important to stay positive though, the funniest aspect of this whole situation is that through some analysis with wireshark I found the Windows update service was pinging AWS, not Azure (which is used to run Linux in the cloud by the way for all the WSL fans reading this).

I believe most issues I have with Windows stem from how it continuously builds on itself without modernizing older components. Windows 11 is more or less Windows 10 with more telemetry, which is Windows 8 with more telemetry, which itself is 7… I think you get the idea. Open up the registry editor and grab some news year champagne because we’re celebrating 1999 all over again.

Not to say old systems don't work, but Windows wasn't build to be extended in ways people need it to extend for modern development, hence why many apps edit system files causing things to break down the road.

In order to support more performance intensive tasks and extend with non-native apps more effectively, low level systems need to be brought up to date for developers to integrate with, and user access to system settings should be simpler.

You shouldn’t need to go through four levels of hidden menus in order to disable a faulty touchscreen. The end result is that you need to build workarounds into your workflows, which inevitably come back around and break something else later on. Heck, sometimes just running normal system updates can cause a system to slow down and break after a while, which should not be the case and is not normal.

I’m going to say this out loud to people in the back.

SO DIRRRRR

Hey, we’re talking windows here, give the week old bagels some credit. The windows terminal is extremely inconsistent and the PATH variable has broken for me multiple times between updates. Bagels don't do that. These days I usually run commands against actual executable files (eg, go to the file with the executable, then run ./file.exe [command_params] instead of relying on the terminal to put two and two together, which is expected on Linux.

Many developer tools do not work consistently for me on windows, I run into issues with Node JS, Python pip nuking itself and then throwing “oops no admin” before failing to reinstall itself leaving me pipless, CLI tools like Prisma can't be found, and I can't figure out why it is so difficult to interact with terminal apps.

Sure, you can launch a CLI .exe on windows as a dedicated app (mentioned before), but then it’s less accessible and more difficult to navigate between files.

It's all okay though, we have been gifted powershell. Long live dir.

You can’t touch grass.png

Touch doesn’t exist on windows. You can’t just make a file out of thin air, which I chronically miss. You need to use type nul > your_file.txt to create a zero byte file instead.

At least it runs Adobe

See “___ has stopped responding”. This does not get better testing things on a $10,000+ system, the issue is Windows mismanaging resources, not the hardware. If you want to edit, I recommend looking into a Mac.

At least it doesn’t run Adobe

If you’re looking for an upside, we found one! You can enjoy this and other features on Linux too! Just switch, please! You can even keep the activate windows watermark after you switch!

Ice age continental drift

Want to move a document from /desktop to /document? I recommend starting that now so you can come back to it in a few hours (or after reading this article).

Using Linux, if you copy a file from one location to another it simply changes the reference to it in almost an instant. Windows on the other hand will painstakingly rewrite every single bit from one place to the other.

Your keyboard does almost nothing

Except for WIN + SHIFT + CTRL + ALT + L to open Linked-In in your default browser, of course.

You can actually configure your keyboard to save a lot of time, so even if you don't end up switching to Linux I highly recommend investing time in configuring system hotkeys.

Also! if you're in Chrome hit CTRL + SHIFT + A to search every tab you have open across every window, it's really helpful.

It has Windows™

So.. you would think it would organize them well right? And have workspace support? And make it so you can switch workspaces and snap windows into place in those workspaces effectively right? Haha

✨Tiling window managers ✨ let you open apps instantly with keybinds, manage multiple different workspaces (desktops), and move between them all seamlessly, you can run multiple browsers, IDEs, terminals, games, and other tools all at the same time without them crowding each other out, and trust that the compute resources you have will be managed effectively. It sounds complicated, but after a short time it becomes instinct and the computer becomes an extension of you.

It has Office™

So do I.

It's like a cat but less cute and I don't like it

It can't find anything you ask it to in the file explorer but randomly shows up with dead birds (OneDrive has an update!!!!!!!)

Also just like cats, it is incapable of achieving legal /home ownership. Enjoy your quick access tab full of files you've never heard of.

Linux is easier to fix

Once you learn how the system works, you have way more control and therefore are less prone to having things break beyond your repair, I’ve both been able to fix things through direct code editing and repaired some of the hardware on my laptop, when something breaks it's transparent and almost always well documented. Nothing is above running into a bug, but Linux systems give you the trust and tools to fix it.

Developer tools work better

1. Docker has better support and runs much smoother without needing WSL
2. Updates happen in your control without immediate reboots
3. Separate user and root partitions mean you can back up or switch distros without losing data
4. Legacy support, any system, any model, any year. You can run a form of Linux on it. Don't start with Gentoo.
5. Swap space means you can swap memory into a partition and run more memory intensive tasks, as if you literally downloaded more memory
6. VM pass-through
7. BASH or ZSH exist and are infinitely better than the default Command Prompt and Powershell which was made to mask how bad Command Prompt is (it has ls) /j

Satisfaction possible or your bagel back

While windows may give off week old bagel vibes, it’s still stuck in the late 90’s in more ways than one (now with added telemetry!) But at the end of the day, it still works for a lot of people and has made computing much more accessible as a whole. If you would like to try something new I highly recommend messing around with a virtual machine.

If you become more serious, you can try dual booting your system, which installs Linux next to windows allowing you to switch between them freely, and if you don’t like it, no worries! I recognize that having the time needed to throw at Linux to both learn and operate a more DIY distro is a privilege, but overall I feel that the entire space of computing is both wasting potential in older hardware which is still perfectly good, and the potential enjoyment you can find in building and maintaining a computer of your own, which is truly one of a kind.

Anything as long as it means I can get away from dir.

I’m switching to an all fruit diet from now on, screw this. I’m going /home.
Er, maybe back to /articles.

Update from about a week after the CroudStrike outage...
yeah