I get you, but relying on Microsoft not doing any anticonsumer decisions is like hoping Adobe will suddenly respect their users… It won’t happen and even if it did it’ll be short lived, it just won’t get you anywhere.

Learning any OS isn’t a trivial task, but that’s something people seems to forget a lot.
But I get why people would say “just use Linux”, because if by chance you have the means to switch then why would you stay locked to a tool made by a company that doesn’t care about you or your needs ? It would be counterproductive. (Also getting more Linux users would be beneficial for the Linux community, it could even be beneficial to everyone if that number is big enough to make Linux a serious competitor but that’s more a distant dream than a close reality)

Yeah I did not expect to dump so much text 乁(•ิ◡•ั)ㄏ

I did my best to shorten it and tried not being too vague but it’s hard with all the stuff I’ve tinkered with. Keyboard issues have been the weirdest and funniest experience I’ve had of them all I think, while printers are one of the worst.

This one is more a case of «it didn’t work on windows for a reason but worked on Linux for no reason» : More than a decade ago, I got my first Graphic Tablet (yeah another one), it was from a dead brand, their drivers were still online but not supported anymore. But the tablet still worked out of the box on windows 8, only… windows wasn’t able to detect pressure so it looked like I was drawing with a mouse, Linux didn’t have such issue. At that same period my laptop (wich was the first that I owned) turned half dead after an update, wasn’t as tech savy as now but at the time all that I knew was that the disk had some issue that I could not fix…windows would not work on it anymore and that’s how I tried daily driving Linux for the second time, I lasted with this half dead pc under kubuntu until windows 10 came out (mostly because by then I got my first desktop and proton wasn’t a thing for games).

Sure :

• My worst/best personal one : had a Huion Graphic Tablet that would just refuse to work on my windows 10 pc, either with the drivers given to me on a small disk, or with the ones on the site, had to contact the company for help (eventually they did)…thought it would be a nightmare on linux…couldn’t be more wrong, it worked straight freaking up, even had the luxury to install Huion drivers that actually worked…or just a bunch of non Huion stuff to calibrate the thing if I needed to…although none of it was necessary…like how ??

• More recently I got a Switch Pro Controller knockoff, thought I had to install some packages to make it work on Linux but no, worked out of the box wirelessly and plugged in, when I wanted to play with a friend who uses windows, had no choice but to plug it in with an awfully small cable (the only one my friend had at their house, didn’t bring mine), bluetooth refused to work whatever we tried…

• Some years back I helped a friend to buy a decent microphone (don’t remember the brand)…only to have them call me the next day because windows didn’t detect it…the mic was your usual usb plug and play thing…spent an hour on the phone playing customer support. When I went at their house later, I plugged it to Linux for the fun of it and it just worked…

On the more usual stuff there is the great classic of printers not working, that must be the thing people asked me for help the most, didn’t try Linux on most of them, but some (friends, family) I had to and never had an issue…and the comical thing is, for our printer at home I had to install some drivers through the AUR to make it work and even with that it’s just awful (making it work on windows is even worse but it works a little bit better). I also got called for webcam issues, keyboard issues, usb, drives… That’s the device part.

Regarding hardware, it will be hard to be specific because I helped a lot of people with pc stuff over the years, it something I do on my spare time. What I can say is, each time I am called for something big like a pc (mostly old laptops) not working/dead, or some drives dying, or refurbishing some antiquities or part of them, I always bring my Linux laptop and a bootable usb stick with a bunch of distros on it, because I know it’ll be more usefull than using windows. I remember the nightmare of trying to reinstall windows on some laptops (that had windows, that are still within what should be compatible)…to no avail. Trying to get files on a dying disk to no avail, etc, etc. The only time I ever truly needed windows for this kind of stuff was to unlock an Iphone using Itunes.

Tbh it’s just dead easy to give examples because with windows, manufacturers or whoever have to make their product work on the OS, and the drivers are not always up to date, so old they aren’t supported anymore, or can just be a pain to get or configure…while on Linux it can be a community effort, and a lot of stuff is already within the distro you installed so you often don’t have to do much. I am sure people can have the opposite experience though and I know some stuff just doesn’t work on Linux, but really my point is : a lot doesn’t necessarily work on windows either.

Not what you asked but on an OS level, I could also mention people encrypting their pc by accident with bitlocker, windows breaking stuff, update issues, partition issues, and so on… when you spend time on other people issues you really start to notice how much of a mess it can be, far more than people seem to think.

Each time I go back on windows I realize it’s worse than I remembered, even though I never liked it. One thing I quickly realized after getting constantly asked for help about issues on windows : people tend to be greatly biased about how reliable it is, mostly because it’s all they’ve known for a long time.

People often talk about compatibility regarding Linux, but are somehow oblivious to all the devices and hardware made for windows that somehow fails miserably to work when it has no good reason to…while Linux, despite most hardware and software not being made with it in mind, can sometimes somehow work wonders.

Windows only «just works» because it’s made by a monopolistic monster of a company, with a ton of software and tools and stuff made for it because of how widespread it is, and despite that their OS is just plain garbage…

And people get offended when I say we’re better off using forks…

Sorry to break it to you but there is no defining art without disqualifying ai, the subject is so old it’s hardly an opinion at this point. Even the most imaginative mating rituals animals can do barely qualifies… And mind you, these have emotions and cognitive capabilities, so something as barebone as the kind of “ai” we make now… nothing more than a joke art wise.

I never said that, actually just said exactly what you did : that Google pay them to still have a competitor.
But that’s a big problem, because that make them competitors just in name, and using their browser won’t change that sadly. Another problem is the lucrative part of Mozilla that have made a number of bad decisions over the years with firefox, and are partly to blame as to how it fell out of favour.

To be clear Firefox is far from being the worst browser out there, it’s not what I am saying, and it can have forks, we can also edit most of the crap out of it wich is great. But it would be silly to consider it a spotless software run by saints. That’s all I am saying.

I would even go back to it or (better) a fork of it if I could get the features I use in Vivaldi without using countless and broken (or non savy) extentions, because I’d still find that better than using something based on chromium (even if there is a dedicated and seemingly good intended team behind it). But I would still not find it ideal, not without that lucrative side of Mozilla hanging onto firefox and that damn Google pay.

No need to support firefox, they get 1/2 a billion dollars each year from Google :D

We’re at a point where most of the browsers are just rotten sadly, now it’s just a question of what is less worse than the others. With the coming of manifest v3 I don’t know if Vivaldi will still be worth it to me, I hope it will because even if I’d really like to use librewolf or another good fork of firefox…it’s just so lackluster compared to what Vivaldi offers, especially since I use a lot of its features.

Wtf I missed that too !

I swear, I live in France and I only discovered this on lemmy, this is insane…