If you want a computer where you basically have to reinstall the OS every 2-3 years to correct inevitable config drift due to its use of a centralized, uncorrectable binary-format config registry/state store, get Windows.
I always wonder how this happens exactly (apart from obvious bogus downloads containing malware), any insight? Anyway I have seen way more machines which do not have this problem and run ok after 10 years.
I remember those well--took up a whole shelf on my bookcase in my cubicle. But even they only taught you how to program against the Mac Toolbox, not directly at the OS level. In 1999 I actually was told by a project manager in Adobe during a hiring interview that it was impossible to bypass the Toolbox, and that I did not know what I was talking about when I said that I routinely did so in order to support old, slow, Macs with software used by high schools. After about 5 minutes of trying to convince him otherwise after I picked my jaw up off the floor, I basically called him an idiot, then went down the hall to his boss and told him the guy was an idiot and that he was lucky I didn't punch him out for calling me a liar. Needless to say, I did not get nor did I want the job. 2 months later I was offered a senior developer role through a contracting agency for Adobe that would have put me at the same level he was, at almost double the salary of the position I'd interviewed for. I still turned it down, although I did consider how much fun it would be to rub it in. No wonder their software is so damn bloated.
I have been going through hell and back with my everyday laptop in the last few weeks.
First, it started to cook all the time with CPU maxed out. I would bring out task manager and the process going crazy was "Microsoft Content." If you google everyone says it is related to Microsoft downloading an update or something. Yet checking Windows update showed nothing.
Then the search indexer started to go at it at the same time. Now I had two cores running like mad, laptop heating up, and so slow it was hard to get anything done.
...
Thought to vent a bit here and dispel any notion that I have any love for much of the software from my ex employer.
Long Term Service Channel.
It's basically the desktop version of the server releases. No windows store, no bundled apps or advertising, and just security updates.
MS makes it a PITA for individual to actually buy a copy though.
One theory is that programs don't uninstall fully and leave registry entries, DLLs and other dependencies lying around and this slows the system down. However, I don't really buy this, i've been running this PC for over 4 years with beta versions of Windows 10 & 11 and hundreds of installs, upgrades and uninstalls over this period.
Windows 10 runs so much smoother if you use the LTSC versions.
They are de-bloated from the start.
I started by playing around with the QBasic game Gorillas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)
Long Term Service Channel.
It's basically the desktop version of the server releases. No windows store, no bundled apps or advertising, and just security updates.
MS makes it a PITA for individual to actually buy a copy though.
In the world of modern software, we're all beta testers.Remind me again, there's the pre pre beta folks, then the beta, then some fast track nonsense, then some ring, then this long term thing. Bah..
Every year I actually forget how many of these update channels they have, and everytime I see the number or the version of the update, I am reminded "of course I can't recall, because they can't even make the udpate names and numbers make sense, let alone all the different kinds of channels for updates".
Remind me again, there's the pre pre beta folks, then the beta, then some fast track nonsense, then some ring, then this long term thing. Bah..
I personally have been using Windows with little to no trouble for some reason. Yeah some times something like that happens.
Indeed, wipe and re-image is the quickest solution to bring user happiness back on track *provided* [and I'm talking within an enterprise setup] user and data storage are separated entities. Still annoys me that I can re-image an equivalent sized Linux in ~3 minutes, sometimes less than 2 minutes, but it always takes much longer to do the same with a Windows box. As they say on the 'Miranda' TV comedy series "Such fun, such fun"It's not that it slows the system down - it's that a non-transactional global state store for the whole operating system that you can't revert back to a safe baseline (aka Windows Registry) is a design flaw that promotes entropy, increases the odds of the system getting into an uncorrectable state, and is by nature something you can't fix without wiping the OS and starting over again.
Windows Registry was a bad design decision, and honestly kidding aside is the single largest contributor to system entropy in Windows.
It's the one thing you cannot fix without wiping the whole shebang and reinstalling (hell you can even fix the bootloader, the BCD table, etc without reinstalling!), which makes it the weak point in terms of system stability.
If you don't believe me, you can take it from a Windows sysadmin