While I understand that much of this is because your average end users are idiots who refuse to do anything that's asked of them, or that's required of them to maintain their device, I also understand that they don't want to lose said "useful idiots" because they are a great source of revenue for Microsoft and their industry bedfellows. So rather than promote educating your users - what's easier, and makes more sense in reality? Just authortatively strongarm them into doing what the operating system thinks they should do.

This has a side effect, however, of making the processes to be carried out like a power user such as myself, to be very draconian at times. It also requires so much more complexity in the Operating System to carry out, and I'm a big fan of KISS principle - not having more bullshit running or doing something, than you actually need. The more complex something is, the more likely it is to break, and Windows breaks - a LOT. Maybe not to the extreme degree that it used to that lead to a complete reformat of the system. But on a Windows system at home, I find I'm constantly having to clear out caches, delete old crap the O/S no longer needs - some of it not even found by the tools provided - and when it is found it's some new thing that could have just been put into the old *cpl/msi/exe that would have worked just fine as/is probably. It's really discerning when I'm having to use DISM and sfc /scannow a few times a year to fix up corrupt system files or restore system health.

While I understand change is a good thing, needless change is not. The constant shuffling of interfaces post Windows 95 never went over well with the user-base in any way. And that's why 11 really drove me away. I lived through Windows 8.x - while working AT the mothership - and while it was great on touchscreen devices, there was a lot of things about it I HATED in an enterprise environment. I always feelt "at risk" jobwise because a default, corporate install using Enterprise edition still found my "start screen" filled with Facebook, instagram, Twitter, Candy Crush Saga, Netflix, and YouTube. This bothered me professionally because it gave easy access to slackers to slack off, as well as made our fresh installs of Windows look like we were making these machines for playing around. All it would take is one errant mouse click to open an application in the background at some point, and the next thing I know I'm getting asked via a NOC audit of my system why I have had Facebook open all day when I was not even aware it was open while getting used to the new interface - as it had been minimized the whole time. And given Microsoft's track record of unreliably pulling data from anything....I just did not like that design idea. Change is good, when it grants improvement - change is bad or wasted when it grants nothing or worse yet, causes setbacks.

Another gripe I had was that Obsolescence problem Apple has. With Windows, at least you hav ea good 10-15 years before things are deemed" obsolete" and things just won't install. Apple tries to make it more dramatic reminding you daily your Line6 HD500 drivers are out of date and you need to harass Line6 to update them. Most apple products have - at best, 7 years of life, before they become so obsolete, that you might as well put Linux on it if you can. This was exactly the same in the vintage PC realm too. Owning an Apple is like owning a Mercedes - it's a nice car, very nice, and well built, but EVERYTHING from the drivetrain all the way to the nuts and bolts - are special, and cost more than normal.

Gaming on this platform was a royal Pain! Somehow, despite being *nix, they don't have Proton for it. So no Five nights at Freddy's, no Monster Truck Destruction - and even then, if it WILL try and run it, because of the restrictiveness of the Macintosh platform refusing to run anything 32-bit anymore, you can't run it anyway - not without an emulator. So I need to further ruin the machine's performance by being forced to only run 64-bit code - great!

First off, this thing has updates every day like Microsoft does. That is true. The difference though is it does not piss me off as much because it's not forcing me to reboot one minute, and then hanging the same update in the background for weeks at a time instead. But it is irritating that we live in a world so full of bad actors that we need to be changing security stacks almost every other damn day regardless what O/S the device has.

Upgrades can be a bit difficult because sometimes they come in the form of a update package that you just select, type in your superuser password, and install it, but other times it requires a whole shebang of terminal commands to make it happen, and hten it does not fully complete or go through. This inconsistancy is a tad bit minor though.

While the software you get through the Software Portal is free, it is a mixed bag of quality and upgrades. You have mixes of software for "Flatpak" and "System" - i'd stick with systme releases if I were you. Some of those flatpak releases left me feeling like I was using an old application for Red Hat Linux 6.1 Cartman.

There's no Linux native Garageband, and finding software for certain products and funtions that revolve around commercially released stuff, sometimes leaves you being forced to use another O/S - through emulation or otherwise. Lucky for me, I still had a Windows XP licence for my guitar effects processor. But even that stuff is tricky because Linux is mostly a userbase of computer nerds looking to mine cryptocurrency and host their own media servers or clouds - not a lot of musicians on Linux trying to connect a 7 year old guitar effects unit up to it to edit it via software. This meant getting a crash course in Linux in a way that kinda' opened the whole enchelada for me thankfully....

Microsoft Windows Plusses

Installation was a breeze and very fast even on the 9 year old laptop I installed this on. My iMac is even slower and it installed on the iMac in about 35 minutes. The only install that quick in my house is putting MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11 on a 486 DX4 system. It was clear, concise, and was great at asking your skill level so you can control fine parameters. Me being advanced, it felt like I was finally being treated like I deserved to be, not like some idiot kid trying to bail the water out of his ill-gotten boat with the Skipper yelling in my ear the whole time about what an Idiot I am.

Boot times, while great but nothing to write home about, it is nice to press ESC and see what the darned thing is doing. Neither Mac OS nor Windows have this feature. Being a tech type, I like to know where or why my system is taking so long. Is it just cleaning the filesystem, or is there a serious issue at hand. I like being able to troubleshoot, and the core of troubleshooting is gathering data, and you can't gather data when your only option is to sit and stare at a progress bar or the Windows anal beads spinning on screen for 10 minutes while you just give up and go make yourself some coffee like it's 1995 and hope it's gone when you come back so you can terminal/powershell your way through a bunch of ardious troubleshooting with tools that may have already been changed/replaced in the last update.

The desktop is fully editable to make it a workable experience for me. I don't have to rely that the "development team" made the "right decisions". Instead, I can use various menus and options to tailor it to what I want - which is a start button, start menu, firefox, screenshots, file management, and terminal pinned to the taskbar, and bluetooth, updates, wifi, audio, and battery all listed in the tray. And it's nice to finally have a clock that can show the date and time, and do so with the seconds appended.

The biggest pro though, is cross-platform support. I can run Mac OS Applications from a Hackintosh VM in VirtualBOX. I can run my odl Windows apps from various Windows VMs in the same. Wine can be used for some Windows applications that will run properly that way, and other stuff - the game from Steam mostly - can be run via Proton! I also have DOSbox, SCUMMVM, and Exult to work with too for DOS games. So all in all, I can have my cake and eat it too with Linux.