Linux, Windows, Windows, Linux

So, operating systems, neat things, right? A kernel, a file system, task scheduler, and depending on your choice of operating system, a lot of bloat that you may not want (or maybe you do, I don't know you). Operating systems are quite central in today's day and age, obviously, as without them we wouldn't be able to use our computers in the way that we do, we wouldn't be able to look at the silly cats in cat.basil.florist, play videogames, make videogames, write blogs that few people will read, and so on. We need operating systems, and we have them! Plenty of them, in fact, some may say that we have too many, and that choosing becomes hard, but rarely can we choose, most of the times that choice has been made for us, and that choice is Windows.

But is that a good thing? Eeeeehhhh I don't think it is, I think it's good that there's an operating system that the masses can use, but I don't like that Windows ended up as the chosen one, or well, the forced one, forced by OEMs and forced by Microsoft themselves at times, offering incentives to said OEMs so that their devices come with Windows pre-installed, and because most actual people won't bother to change their operating system, Windows ends up as the operating system that most people have, so most software is made mostly with Windows users as the people to consider, and everyone else can eat the scraps if they like. This has given Microsoft quite a bit of power over the market, more power than they should have, especially when you consider their recent moves and their push for Copilot, Recall, their endless war to get you to have a damn online account on your local machine, and many other things that serve to push their interests forward, at heavy cost to the user.

For starters, I want to talk about Windows 11, 10 and my experiences with them, both in the past and in the present. As an introduction, this is how my desktop currently looks under Windows 11:

I keep it clean, I don't need to have shortcuts on my desktop, as this is not really a productivity machine, and even on my laptop, the supposed producitvity machine, I also have a clean desktop, but I'll get to that when I get to that.

So, first off: The photograph in the background was saved as a TIFF file, why? Well, it's because if the resulting PNG is bigger than 25MB (I think it's what it was), then my desktop will default to a solid colour wallpaper. This makes no sense, and is a limit carried over from older times, when we didn't have as much memory on our systems, but it's not needed anymore, it'd be more sensible for my system memory for me to have a PNG over an uncompressed TIFF as my desktop wallpaper, as it is vastly smaller in file size, but I am also the only person that I know with this problem, so I genuinely don't know what it is, but I've had it in two different computers. This to me is largely inconvenient, as I have to have copies of my photographs in different file types, for use in the website and for personal use, and it's not fun.

Already started with the complaints, and I haven't opened any programs yet, this will be a pattern. But other than the wallpaper woes (using wallpaper engine is not a fix for anything, mind you), the Windows desktop is fine, and I would be concerned if it wasn't. The start menu is not good, it uses React for the recommendation system, which, it's ridiculous that Windows FORCES a recommendation system onto the user, when one already barely goes to the start menu. Tell me, when have you ever gone on to the start menu and thought for longer than 10 seconds about what program or file it is that you want to open? What sense does that make? Why can't I fully turn it off without butchering my operating system? If I try to turn it off then the only thing that I see is Windows reminding me that I can turn them on, which I don't want to do, because I willingly turned them off.

Now to Linux: Pictured here is Arch linux, with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment.

See that desktop wallpaper? Yes, aside from it being a photograph that I took, again, it's a PNG, not a TIFF! A miracle of technology, I know, welcome 2025, it's been far too long. Pay no mind to the size of the bottom panel, it's simply my laptop having a lower resolution than my desktop. The start menu itself is fine, nothing to complain about as it doesn't use React, so as far as I'm concerned it works fine, nothing to complain about.

Next up, searching: It's horrible on Windows, unless you tweak your OS to get rid of Bing suggestions, it's borderline useless, and it used to be worse back on 10, somehow. Now, tweaking your OS to get rid of Bing, it works a bit better, I was trying it now as I was writing this and found myself to be surprised at how yes, it did find the files, but nothing that is on an external drive, so again, still not great.

Meanwhile, on Linux, if I want to find a specific thing I go to the terminal and simply type: find / -name "something.file" 2>/dev/null, and I find whatever it is that I want to find, it's better, look here:

I don't have much else to say here, it works, it finds my files, they're right there on my computer, I love my computer, it has all my files, and Linux finds all my files.

Moving on, the settings page: On windows it's fine, if a bit confusing, but still better than what it was on 10. Control panel, however, is a lot better, because it's no nonsense and it's the same as it has ever been, it works, it's great, and I hope that it stays here for a while more, because the regular settings page does not suffice, it is not that functional, and most of the times I am in control panel anyways. I also don't like the settings' page insistence to remind you about your account and your email, it makes sharing my screen a bit annoying, given that people don't really have to see it.

KDE Plasma's settings page? Genuinely horrible. It has everything you could ever need, but the layout is the worst I've ever seen, it's cluttered, it's claustrophobic, it has too many sub-menus and everything is far too scattered. It's good that that many options exist, but the way of showing those options has to be fixed, as as it stands, that menu is nigh-unusable and finding what you want to find is very, very hard.

Now time for something more important: The terminal, it's not great under Windows, I don't even use it because of how pointless it feels, as it was made without terminal usage in mind, which is both good and bad. It's good because it means that it's accessible to more people, but it's bad as the people that would genuinely benefit from a good terminal experience are cheated out of it. Another problem leading to an uncomfortable terminal experience in Windows is its file structure and how most files are sorted by default, always being more cumbersome to navigate your directorries on Windows when compared to linux, so as it stands, I am not all too encouraged to use the command prompt, and so I don't. /*I also can't seem to be able to change directories onto my D: drive, which is an issue*/ Yes, so, update on this: I am an idiot, you can change your directory to another drive on command prompt, and you do that by typing the letter of the drive, instead of doing cd. You can change to your D: or any other drive on PowerShell via cd, however.

On the other hand, using the terminal in Linux has genuinely changed the way that I work (whenever I am working under Linux anyways), and I find that it's for the better. It's much more comfortable to download packages with pacman (I know I can use scoop on windows, but it's not the same) than it is to fetch an installer from someone's website, it's a lot nicer to work with gcc and make in Linux than it is to do so with Windows or PowerShell, using command line utilities also feels a lot more natural. You can even see in the search section, I searched my entire system using the terminal, and it's really quick at finding what it is that I want to find (though it also helps that my laptop doesn't have too many files on it). Its usage is encouraged, with the file structure even supporting its usage, given that navigating directories is a lot easier than it is on Windows, which also means that you better understand your computer, rather than simply viewing it as a black box that does things for you while it offers you a shortcut to a downloads folder. It also made me addicted to running fastfetch every other second, but I don't view that as a positive.

Memory usage, as I am writing this I am listening to music while typing in vscode (I don't like vscode, it's only used for making this website), and Windows is consuming 15.4GiB/31.2GiB (Fun fact: Windows reads and displays GiBs, but writes GB instead of GiBs), when I am not doing anything remotely memory intensive. And when I look at my processes I find myself scratching my head, wondering where has the memory usage gone? Does it really add up to half of my total system memory?

Meanwhile, under Linux, I don't think I've ever gone past 6.5GiB/15.2GiB when performing the same tasks that I perform under Windows, with those tasks being compiling code (usually simple code due to it being mostly codeforces code), looking at my university site, checking outlook (hell), neovimming (I love neovim), it never uses too many resources, which is right. Some may say that unused memory is not great, because it means that some things will be slower, but I'd argue that if you don't need it, you shouldn't use it, keep your hands away fom the memory, glutton.

As we all know, Windows is also a lot heavier than Linux is, which means that it's even worse for use in laptops or other portable devices, like laptops or handheld PCs, especially handheld PCs, there are many benchmarks showing how much better SteamOS handles battery life, as opposed to Windows, which had uniformly poor battery life. Battery life really is one of the reasons as to why I rather use Linux in my laptop as opposed to Windows, I don't have to worry about battery life at all, and the best part: the fans barely have to start spinning, because system resources are always barely being utilised in my usual workload.

But that's the thing, my usual workload in my laptop does not include something which, for now, would make Windows preferrable for me, and that something is gaming. I do a lot of gaming, ranging from flat-screen, to VR to some sim-racing with friends from time to time, and not everything works under Linux. For example, I can kiss Call of Duty goodbye, which, while the quality of the games has gone down, it's still a series that I hold near to my heart. Battlefield, the F1 games, Apex and Destiny 2 can also go. You may say that those games are not worth playing, but that's not the point, the point is that they are games that I play a lot with friends, which to me matters a lot, in fact, I still haven't transitioned my desktop to Arch Linux because I am waiting to do a raid with a group, since we've agreed to do it and are simply seeing when we'll all be available. The point is, there are some compatibility issues with gaming on Linux, deliberate or not, it doesn't matter, what matters is that I can't play the games that I want to play with my friends sometimes, which sucks. VR is also in a wonky state, I got it to work on my laptop somehow, which made a friend of mine randomly ping me in discord and saying "congrats on making vr run on linux fucking somehow", which I feel conveys how much of a hassle it can be, or how much of a hassle it can seem like fom the outside, because all it took me was installing ALVR and I was off to the races. But, ultimately, I don't worry about any of this when I use Windows, it simply works right out of the gate, and it's the one time that I find Windows works better than Linux.

I feel like that's about it for this topic, and if I don't finish writing now I may just not finish it, so, without proof-reading and spell-checking, here is a short summary of my thoughts: Linux is for work, Windows is for gaming, but Windows is only for gaming for a limited amount of time, and that time is fast running out, and I know that it's very close to running out for me. So on you Linux, once I swap over, my gaming will go down and my hours in Neovim will go up, which may be a worthwhile tradeoff.

Good morning, afternoon, evening or night!