So recently I've been hearing a lot of buzz about this new operating system that a bunch of my friends have tried out. I had a spare machine lying around, so I decided to give it a shot. And frankly, I'm deeply unimpressed.
- There are two separate "settings" menus written with two different GUI toolkits, and some applications use a third one that seems to be from a 30-year-old build. This has been a known issue for like a decade and they just... haven't fixed it.
- The hardware support is pretty good, but about 10-15% of the time I resume it from sleep I have to unplug and replug my GPU to get it to actually display graphics. Occasionally I have to do the same with my USB-C dock. And this is with the latest drivers for everything!
- Speaking of which, the process of updating all my drivers involved downloading and running four different programs!
- The built-in image editor lets you move the cursor with the arrow keys while it's open, for whatever reason. This isn't a problem... except when it continues doing that even when the editor isn't focused.
- Multiple built-in parts of the operating system still render at 1x resolution even with a HiDPI setup. I'm not talking about old third-party tools, I mean absolutely basic parts of the OS itself.
- In terms of software support, I'd say about 70-80% of the things I use on a daily basis either only have it as second-class support or don't support it at all, meaning I have to run an entire emulation layer. About the only thing I've found that it's consistently good at is high-performance interactive 3D simulations.
- Everyone agrees that every update is making it worse. I've never seen anyone actually say they like it. The devs don't listen to user feedback.
- Many of the "help" pages just open up your browser with a search query. And since they change the UI with every major update, all the results are going to be mixed together.
- Sometimes if I leave it alone for a few days it just restarts itself regardless of whether I have any applications open. I've looked and looked online and apparently the fixes for this that used to work don't any more.
- Changing my ctrl key to act as caps lock, something that's been a built-in setting on every single OS that I've used, requires editing an arcane configuration file.
Anyway, I just don't know if this "Windows" is really ready for the desktop.