Poor workflow. Switching applications is horrible if you have 4 windows open in one desktop. Even gnome is far better at that.

Because it makes doing the things I want to do with a computer difficult and annoying.

Warning, no technical stuff, only creed:

I don’t hate Windows in and off itself. For me it represents my first contact with a computer and influences my choice of UI to this day.

I hate what it stands for, which for me is something I call “gated computing”; a restriction of access to computational power and abilities. It turns a machine with near limitless potential, like watching cat videos, sharing how to best build bridges or calculating the bygone cycles of the moon, to a machine that maliciously distracts people while giving a selected few the power of watching over them with ever changing objectives as to why they watch them.

Windows, like few others, eased people into thinking that that was the right way to use a computer all along.

That is why I hate it.

Because it’s a tool by one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, corporation ever made. It’s nothing more than a way to lock-in users deeper in an ecosystem of extortion and learned helplessness.

Through Windows, computer users discover that they have a black box at work and then at home. It is NOT their computer. It is a computer that they are allowed to use a certain way. This then is extended in a myriad of ways, through other tools, e.g mobile phone, and services, e.g Office360, reinforcing that behavior. It becomes a second nature to the point that computer users dare not even imagine HOW they want to use a computer. Instead they buy whatever they are allowed to consume.

I do not care for Windows as an OS, I absolutely do HATE it though as a vehicle for cognitive enslavement. I do so keeping in mind the history of the company that made it. It is not a repeated random process, it’s a strategy. This is what I find disgusting.

sudo su is a bad idea. sudo -iu is better for ACLs and avoids the potential security gap.

Because my experience is always the exact opposite of yours. Windows has never been convenient for me, it always does random shit, and stuff just suddenly stops working because fuck you that’s why. For example, I have a Windows computer at work to build and test the games I work on, this week it decided that it won’t use more than 20% of the CPU for building the latest game, there’s no other bottleneck, temperature is stable at 60°C, disks have space, and most importantly, other games compile just fine, it’s just the one I’m actively working currently that doesn’t. And it’s not an issue in the code either since I’m the only person in the company experiencing this. And, this is the important part, I can’t do anything about it, because no one knows why Windows decided to do that, so there’s nothing anyone can do. On Linux when you have an issue there’s an explanation, and someone with enough experience will find it quickly, on Windows you can be the world’s expert and still the OS will just decide to nope the fuck out.

A few things (disclaimer, I‘m both a Linux and mac user. Linux on my gaming machine, mac on my work machines):

• Privacy is a big factor. Microsofts track record is bad, even among non FOSS companies.

• Bloatware and Ads. Microsofts insistence on pushing OneDrive, Edge, 365 and bing are annoying to say the least. Why do they think I’m going to change my mind about that after a minor update?

• The UX is less than stellar. Why does the OS have 4 different UI styles for different programs that sometimes even do almost the same thing but not entirely, so you’ll have to use both versions?

• It’s almost impossible for me to keep my desktop tidy short of not using it. I’m dependent on macOS stack feature. On Linux I never had enough random files for it to be a problem.

In short, Windows just annoys me. While Linux and macOS go out of my way and let me just do my stuff, Windows just constantly pulling my attention away from what I advertised want to do and that was even when I was using my PC solely as a gaming machine.

Edit: formatting

I don’t think the ability to destroy your entire system by one command is a good thing for a desktop operating system. On Linux random program with root rights can bring down your entire system by one poorly written script, but Windows at least has multiple mechanisms in place to prevent that.

I don’t hate Windows for work. On the clock, I am balls deep in their ecosystem and I can’t say that it’s not working. However, that’s probably because I get it mostly set-up by IT!

Casual reminder that on Windows, it’s the norm to go fetch packages from the fucking internet using a web browser and give them root access to your system, including drivers…
A lot of settings are still scattered as well, with stuff randomly hidden away, completely unconfigurable or named so it’s not at all clear what it even does.

For everyday stuff like browsing, I totally do not see why people would want to use Windows.

If it wasn’t for (some) ((multiplayer)) games and other Windows-only software, I wouldn’t recommend this OS to anyone at this point.

I hate windows 11, because it’s bad. Installing drivers is annoying, removing the ads and de-bloating a PAID operating system is just ridiculous. It’s also unstable, random crashes galore, uses a ton of system resources and sleep doesn’t work. As you mentioned yourself it’s also a privacy nightmare. But that’s not all of my reasons for hating windows…

• Horrible CLI experience, can’t get any work done without needing to go through 15 different menus to find some arcane setting to adjust simple things like global variables. Powershell also has the habit of randomly forgetting that certain commands exist, I am aware it’s probably me doing something wrong there, but I do not care enough to figure it out, to me it just doesn’t work.

• Horrendous laptop experience. 1:1 touch pad gestures? Smooth animations? A workflow that makes sense? Not on windows! And yk, sleep doesn’t work.

• WORSE gaming performance on AMD graphics cards. Yep, this has been the case ever since I switched to AMD a few years ago and despite all their driver updates, I still get a much better performance in games on linux through wine. This is just ignoring the fact that radeon software on windows is a piece of fcking garbage that likes randomly crashing and then uninstalling itself.

• Virtualization is bad. No KVM = bad for me… It’s just slower on windows and you can’t do fun stuff like GPU passtrough.

• I can’t even fcking install windows 11 without doing ridicuous hacks to bypass the secure boot/TPM/other garbage.

• No app store/normal package manager. Winget sucks… it just does. Yes, it’s better than nothing, no, it’s not good… Same goes for chocolatey. It’s nice, but it’s just not that good.

Fundamentally, there are many reasons… A lot of which I’ve listed, to dislike windows. And I’m not a Linux elitist, my main work machine is a Mac, I just use what works best and windows just… doesn’t. It’s been enshittified beyond belief and even ignoring the enshittification, there are things that fundamentally prevent me from liking/using windows for anything more than a piracy machine… As that’s the one thing that’s easier on windows.

Because windows is inconvenient for me.

Nothing works as I expect it, terminal takes ages to open, everything lags like shit, annoying popups everywhere, every setting is hidden behind ten thousand menus, subpar packaging system, explorer crashes every so often, PATH is hard to access and modify, takes a PHD to install a raw compiler without visual studio, you can forget about shortcut system cus even with autohotkey it’s a pain.

(Talking about permissions) Why do I have to write names of users from the ground and then click button “check if it actually exists” in a fucking gui? Couldn’t there be a drop down list?

If you ever want to modify the windows iso image or make an automated script without using online services you’re just done mate. There’s nifty surprises like special software which name I so conveniently forgot (God bless) that can open the file image contained inside the iso image, but if that inner image has wrong format you have to spend time converting it. Then you’ll see some fucking insane shit in front of you, where you need to drag objects from a drop down list into different categories that have random ass names and not at all simple to understand even after reading official documentation. Oh you think that’s all? You can drop same objects into different categories and they will do different shit. I took TWO WEEKS WORTH OF CLASSES to work with that software and I ALREADY DONT REMEMBER JACK.

Then there’s utterly long startup times even on ssds, colemak dh mod basically doesn’t exist… And that’s all I could remember out the top of my head.

The only redeeming quality I’d say, is having a very simple setup for Japanese and Chinese IME. On arch KDE it took me awhile to set up fcitx with mozc the first time around.

Because the only redeeming quality of Windows is the fact a lot of software works on Windows and only on Windows, which is also exactly the problem with Windows. It’s great WINE can exist, but not all platforms support WINE, and as an OpenBSD user first and foremost it means I can’t play many of my favorite games on my preferred platform.

Ultimately, Windows sucks and is a standard because our society puts corporate greed and thieves like Microsoft above superior projects; and even if Microsoft were firebombed off the planet tomorrow, they’re just a symptom of the problem, and it’s only be so long until another thief steps into Microsoft’s position and ruins everything again.

Great answers already, I’ll not repeat them. One thing I want to mention though is the interoperability of the Linux applications. Things work together well. With Windows (up to 10 at least, I haven’t used windows much in the last years) applications are mostly their own silo. In KDE it’s quite fluent. E.g. gwenview, the image viewer offers to open an image in krita, gimp, etc. It also offers an option to add a folder to the “places” list in dolphin (the file manager). Dolphin lets you quickly (F4) open and close a terminal at the current folder within its window. Small things like these make the system feel coherent.

The other big thing for me is the plethora of great apps you have out of the box. And the ease to install new ones without worrying whether you are the product.

Proprietary software is a security risk, especially for US companies that can be legally served NSLs