I recently partitioned the hard drive of my gaming PC and installed Pop!_OS alongside Windows 10. Spent the last few weeks beating Resident Evil Requiem, entirely on Linux.
I wouldn’t have installed Linux if not for Windows’ behavior the last few years. Desktop Linux has annoyances, but the delta between it and Windows has shrunk. Hell, Windows might be more annoying.
Consider the upgrade nag for Windows 11. Sometimes when I open my computer, it implores me with a full-screen message to update to 11. 10’s not supported anymore.
But I threw my gaming PC together out of spare parts. I don’t have TPM 2.0 enabled. The aforelinked support page claims most motherboards can enable it. Not sure if mine can. I might be able to skip the check, but that process looks tedious.
I dismiss the Windows 11 nag, every time, with no option to stop it from reappearing. It, in its own small way, is a perfect example of what bothers me about Windows. The 11 modal is unstoppable, yet unhelpful. It does nothing to help me get onto a supported OS. But, Microsoft put it in Windows 10 because some number of users will be able to upgrade to 11. They’ll click upgrade, and that click will get recorded in a database somewhere. Come yearly reviews, the Microsoft employee who designed this annoying, disruptive modal can point to the exact number of people who upgraded because of it. It will be viewed as a success.
No matter I, a mere end user, hate the modal and its intrusion into my PC. It might nudge some number of people into goosing the right metric. A Microsoft employee I’ll never meet will be promoted for making my computer worse.
Once you start looking for annoying designs, you see them everywhere in Windows. Windows Search opens results in Edge instead of the user’s default browser. Ads are in the Start menu. Everything saves to OneDrive by default.
The Windows team claims to be listening and “improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows.” They’re even removing Copilot from Notepad.
Such changes, while welcome, are too little and too late for me. Windows is so annoying, I’d rather put up with Linux. Pop!_OS has flaws, but it knows its place. In the two months I’ve used it, I have seen no:
- Copilot buttons
- Ads in OS UI
- Nags to update
- OneDrive promotions
- Links opening in the wrong browser
I love that Linux has no aspirations. It wants to be just an OS, not a wholistic software platform intent on selling me things. It doesn’t feel the need to change constantly. It understands if I want AI tools, I’ll just install Claude Code. It doesn’t subvert my decisions. It supports my hardware.
An operating system should be stable and effective. It should get out of the way and do what I want, quickly. My beef with Windows is I stopped trusting it to do that.