Not so long ago, I wrote a post about my first impressions of Linux as a Windows user. A while after that, I booted back into Windows to get some files and oh god Windows is a terrible shock after you’ve gotten used to Linux.
To be fair, my Windows installation at home has fallen prey to the 100% disk usage bug, which means that every reboot I have to patiently wait until task manager deigns to load and I can kill processes until my computer starts working again, so Windows made a perhaps unfairly terrible first impression.
I will, however, blame Windows for their terrible update process. On Linux, I just tell the update manager to go ahead and install whatever updates it found and I go back to work while it takes care of things for me. It’s only been a few weeks, but I forgot how terrible the Windows update process is. Not only does my computer grind to a near halt while it’s installing updates, but it has to restart to finish installing the updates and it’s completely unusable while does that. And after installing the first batch of updates, it’s not unusual to find another batch that depended on the first one and have to go through the whole miserable process all over again. Ugh.
A good 20 minutes of updating later, the problem I was trying to solve (yay 100% disk usage, that’s not inconvenient at all) was still happening and I was sick of screwing around with Windows.
I guess the moral of the story is don’t go back to Windows once you’re used to Linux, it’ll just make you sad.
3 Comments
Xombie
My Wife’s new computer suffered from this right out of the box (100% CPU and DISK usage). I tried troubleshooting and even completed a reformat, but the bug persisted. Ended up returning it and getting another (Same model) under the impression it may have been a bad CPU.
With the new one I disabled several windows features (Notifications, P2P updates etc) and monitored her PC after every install of new programs and applications. This one took thankfully, but she still gets the occasional spike, mostly upon first boot up.
Another thing I noticed was the windows.old folder. This is the folder that appears when you upgrade to windows 10 from 7, 8 and 8.1 which makes me think this PC is not natively windows 10, thus they just updated it at the factory, boxed it and sent it out. Who knows what kind of bugs it will encounter (The 100% disk usage for example). But I am not fully certain about that, so perhaps it is just my imagination.
I prefer windows 7 myself, but i do like some of the Windows 10 look and feel. I enjoyed my time with Linux (I preferred Ubuntu, though I did experiment with some smaller destros), just not enough to keep me there
Mel Reams
I actually really loved the win 10 environment variable editor. They finally made it not terrible! Sadly, our test suite still takes forever to run under any version of windows so I don’t use it, but I will admit there are good things about win 10 :)
That’s pretty sad that the 100% disk usage problem is so common, here’s hoping her new laptop behaves itself.
Xombie
My Laptop handled the transition no problem. Even though its 5 years old it is a beast when it comes to specs so thank god for that. So far hers has been stable and from what i have heard on some of the forums, the Disk usage corrects itself after a few days, though really, who wants to wait a few days for what is clearly a bug.
One thing you probably already knew, but a soon to be released windows update is supposed to bring an Ubuntu based Bash shell. This could indeed be very interesting.