Windows is getting me down

**WARNING – this is a very niche rant**

I’m quite a tech nerd. I enjoy gadets, and phones, and even writing software and addons. A big part of this is that I just generally enjoy interacting with my computer’s operating system to get stuff done. I’ve been firmly embedded in Windows most of my life, but using it is really starting to get me down.

The problem is, there’s nowhere to turn to.

I do too much with Nvidia cards (mainly photogrammetry, but also CUDA related stuff like NERFs, and gaming, where DLSS is just way beyond the competition), so that rules out MacOS, where Apple and Nvidia had a little falling out and now don’t speak to each other.

Meanwhile, IT services at LJMU have hard locked email so it can only be accessed via outlook on mobile or on desktop (or MacOS Mail), so that rules out Linux. This is a massive pain in the arse, to put it mildly. I also like and use OneDrive and Office 365, which aren’t available on Linux (I know LibreOffice exists, but it is awful in comparison, and doesn’t help with the OneDrive bit). Plus, while gaming has gotten significantly better, it’s still not quite there for everything.

So that means I’m completely stuck with Windows (for now), and it’s genuinely, literally, starting to get me down. It’s not just, or even primarily the ads, which I’ll get to later. It’s the deep and total lack of polish on everything.

Animations and transitions are, in totality, unfinished and broken. Switch virtual desktops with a four-finger swipe on your touchpad and you’ll see the taskbar flicker. If you’ve got different wallpapers set on each virtual desktop, the whole thing jerks around. Now go do it on MacOS or Gnome Desktop, where the transition is smooth as butter, following your fingers and not hitching at all. Same thing with ‘overview’ or three-finger swipe up. On MacOS windows move gracefully to get out of the way, moving with your swipe. On windows, it’s a binary on/off that doesn’t follow the finger (this transition has got much better over the last year, in fairness).

Some animations follow the finger with touch – start menu, action centre, and notifications (though the latter two pop-in after a moment). Other gestures are binary – the widgets panel for instance, which both appears and dissapears with the same left->right swipe. Bonkers.

File explorer takes half a second to open, and again to open large folders. File explorer – the core way of finding and opening your stuff. Half of it has been upgrade with new UI elements, half of it is still stuck in 1995.

System wide we see white flashes when opening programs in dark mode. File Explorer got fixed in a recent beta, but Edge still does it. Even more fundamental than that, changing between light and dark mode is a buggy, laggy affair because of the mix of old and new technologies driving different windows.

The appalling proliferation of web-apps instead of proper native apps. Yes, I know that this technically means an app can be written once and run anywhere, but a) there’s no where else to run them since Microsoft binned windows phone, abandoned their own android device, and don’t use them on MacOS. b) they are basically just MSN webpages in containers. They had a solid video editor as part of the old photos, but that got replaced with a webapp called ‘climpchamp’, which is both a deeply shit name, but also has the fun effect of when you ‘export’ your video, it actually downloads it to your downloads folder.

Which brings us to Outlook. Microsoft are replacing the excellent touch-friendly mail and calendar with an abomination of a web-app they are calling outlook, which has precisely zero optimizations for touch (I use a Surface, but see below), can’t be used offline (on a plane or train, tough, can’t read your emails), and is generally as slow as all heck. Weird, weird design decisions like dedicating the whole left sidebar to office webapps (word, excel, etc) even if I have the desktop versions installed. Why? WHY?

Ok, on top of all that lack of polish, let’s talk about the ads. These don’t bother me as much as they bother others – icons for not-yet-installed apps in the start menu aren’t the end of the world to remove, and a quick toggle in settings should stop most others appearing in the notification centre. But Widgets can go die in a fire. Why do I want a bunch of celebrity news (or any other tabloid BS) next to semi-useful things like a weather widget, or CPU/GPU performance monitors.

The Operating System has been trashed in the name of trying to increase traffic to Microsoft websites. Surely that can’t be worth it?

But, as I said at the start, I’m trapped. I have to have Outlook and Office for work and for my own usage, and they’re not on Linux, neither is Reality Capture (I might be able to get email working with some sort of WebDAV hack, but is it worth it). I need to use Nvidia GPUs and they won’t work with MacOS.

So here I am, stuck on Windows. At least the hardware is good, right? Well, yes, but for how long? I really do like my Surface Laptop Studio (I intend a long-term review of that soon), but it’s sounding more and more like Microsoft are going to gut Surface. Panos Panay left, reportedly because Microsoft were cutting back on the experimental side of Surface. That modern Surface Studio I was pining for? A monitor-only version? Some cool dual-screen device? All gone. There is a second Laptop Studio, with a desperately needed CPU upgrade, but it’s £3000, and that’s a lot of money for something that still isn’t top of the line. Macs, if they do what you need them to do, are by far the better value for money.

All those niggles (and major problems) mean that just interacting with my computer has become depressing – little reminders every time I do anything that the people that enable that interaction don’t give a shit. I’ve been a Windows Insider for years, and even that is showing less and less hope for the future of Windows (and I’m witholding judgment on what AI is going to mean for all this).

I know Microsoft are all about enterprise, and don’t give two hoots about the consumer, and that’s fine, whatever gets your share price up, right? Except eventually this has to come back and bite them – If using a Windows PC becomes a reminder of how slap-dash Microsoft are, then it starts pushing consumers out of the ecosystem. If I can do what I need on a Mac, I’ll move to MacOS. Then I’ll stop paying for onedrive, and pay for iCloud. Then I’ll advise family, friends, and colleagues to move across, etc, etc.

I’ve been a Windows proponent for a long time, and it’s just sad to see it in this state. So sad, I needed to rant about it here! There are good things – window management, particularly snapping, is vastly superior to MacOS (which doesn’t have it natively at all) and Linux (which isn’t quite as good). Windows Subsystem for Linux is phenomenal, and really does offer something fantastic (though I discovered OrbStack last week, which does something similar for MacOS). The store and particularly WinGet are good, though nothing more than MacOS and Linux have had for years. Touch and pen are far superior to competing desktop OSs, even if they lag behind ipadOS (which is fine, I’m a big user of touch+pen+mouse+keyboard, so the synergy of all of those on Windows 11 is good for me).

I imagine many people agree with this post, so next time I’ll present a very unpopular opinion that 2013, and specifically Windows 8.1, were peak personal computing. But for now I’ll keep you on board 🙂