Why in god’s name does it rearrange the order of programs on the taskbar?

The 3 days of settings adjustments, debloating, de-spyware-ing, regestry edits, group edits, service edits, power edits just have a functioning OS that doesn’t bottleneck/ruin your espensive hardware you paid for.

Being unable to use local accounts without a ton of headache, and menus always trying to force you to use their services

Being told I should switch to linux

Ctrl+c not copying on rare occasions. Even if it’s my keyboard’s fault, it could be avoided with some visual feedback to confirm to me that ctrl+c was registered ans clipboard was updated, so that I’d immediately know that it didn’t work after pressing ctrl+c, rather than later when i switched to a different window/tab and pasted the wrong thing

The fact that i can’t route audio between apps (without 3rd party closed-source apps). Why is something so basic not included into the system?

Registry

As a c++ dev: winapi. Right away you are greeted by windows.h adding loads of macros with common identifiers without any prefix to your preprocessor. That’s a sign of things to come for anyone who has to use it. Maybe that explains lack of open-source audio routing apps: nobody wants to deal with windows driver development for hobby - and if that’s the case i sure can’t blame nobody for that.

My default browser at work is Chrome. Microsoft Teams and Outlook open links in edge anyhow. I wonder why!

‘contact your IT admin’

Annoying little quirks of text highlighting and navigation. Oopsie, you moved an extra quarter of a centimeter to the left of the paragraph you tried to highlight starting from the bottom. That means you want everything, right? Yeah we’re highlighting everything. And so on.

Fortunately I’ve picked up some workarounds over the years:

Trying to highlight text in a hyperlink: hold alt

Methods of selecting text blocks (e.g., when normal mouse-select is doing bizarre stuff):

• Try highlighting from end to beginning
• Click point A, hold shift, click point B
• Double-click first word of desired selection to highlight it, or triple-click a paragraph, then highlight letters with shift-right, words with ctrl-shift-right, lines with shift-down, paragraphs with ctrl-shift-down. You’ll see that, for example, when you use shift-down, some text on the line following the selected line is also selected, corresponding to the length of the initial selection before the hotkey was pressed. You can use relevant combos in the opposite direction to de-select this. Or press shift-end to highlight only to the end of the line where your current selection ends, and shift-home to deselect to the beginning of the line. Ctrl-shift-end/home will do the same but for the entire page/document.
• Some other useful hotkeys are available during text input – I make heavy use of shift+pgup/pgdn to extend selections, but this seems to work in Excel, Notepad++, etc., not in this web browser text input field, for example. Holding shift while clicking also extends selections as in the read-only context; holding ctrl while clicking arbitrarily adds to selection just as in the file browser.

Deleting old installs.

And upon taking possession of and then deleting them how aggressively the browsers I am using are collecting and maintaining files on me. It shouldn’t take 40 minutes to delete browser files from an install that only lasted 2 months.

Trying to install Node-GYP. Dear God the errors

When I was still using Windows my system would often hard crash (haven’t verified it but I blame my 5700XT’s graphics drivers). This wasn’t an issue once I switched to Linux.

Having to use the wrong slash everywhere

When things go wrong in Windows at an app or third party software, stuff is often fixable. At worst you might need to reinstall the damn thing. But if the OS itself starts doing weird stuff, things often go to the headache territory really fast. Get a weird error, log says some OS component is going boom, no idea how to fix it, official instructions are along the lines of “Well if DISM and SFC are not going to fix it, looks like you need to reinstall the entire damn OS.” Which usually wouldn’t be a cause for anxiety, but blergh, muh preschus licence key, hope I won’t screw that up.

Meanwhile, I ran one Debian install for over 20 years once. Stuff is usually very fixable indeed. There are good logs. It’s rarely a complete mystery why some program is doing what it doing. At absolute worst you might need to look at the source code, which is actually rare.

I’ve spent the entire morning trying to install sql 2022 and it fails on a mysterious error message. The suggested fixes don’t work.

I’ll have the same problems on Linux occasionally but at least I did not pay to have those issues.

No touchpad gestures, terrible window management and a non-unix shell are the big ones for me with the Microsoft account AI bullshit being a close second.