>If you dig through Windows enthusiast communities

TIL those exist (genuinely).

I’ve never met anyone who likes windows, just people who put up with it for work/gaming and people who doesn’t care about the whole thing enough to move from the default (which is totally understandable).

I'm not sure these people like Windows as much as they like what it does for them, but they are willing to put in significant effort to remove the normal Windows roadblocks and annoyances, and thus are willing to hack and chop it to bits to get them closer to their end goals more quickly.

They're not like a car enthusiast who loves their MX5 out of its sheer beauty and feel, but rather they love their SUV because of it's big boot and because it gets them where they need to be, and thus are perfectly happy to tear out the old radio and uncomfortable seats.

The only difference is that car enthusiasts have many more options to choose from, while in OSes, if you're stuck with Windows, you're usually really stuck with it. Linux is certainly an option, but not one that is universally practical to apply.

There are people like this, although very small minority. I've met one at university - he was probably the first person to have Windows 8 laptop with a touchscreen, showing off to everyone how cool is was (at that time).

He was also really good at Microsoft Word, unironically - he made extensive use of custom styling and could format an assignment paper in like 30 seconds. He was super useful in group projects.

I'm in the camp of liking Windows and having had to put up with Linux and MacOS for work. Inertia and familiarity does play a role, but as a dev there are things I really like (ETW + WinDbg immediately come to mind) & really miss on other OSes. I'm not there yet to join an enthusiast group though. ;)

There are so many Windows users that even if the percentage of enthusiast users is only 10% of that of Mac, it's still quite a lot of people.

I was thrilled for new Windows releases between 3.11 and 8.1. I'm still reasonably fond of Windows for personal use. For now I can still de-enshittify it enough to get back the experience I'm used to, and it's comfortable and convenient. But I'm not sure if that will last for long, given the current trend.

That said, for work I've switched to Linux full-time years ago. Native containers are a killer feature for me, and the different UX and driver/dependency/repository issues aren't significant enough to make me want to go back to virtualization in Windows.

That's honestly more narrow-minded by you, than those "not moving from the default". Maybe you're the one that never went deep into the rabbit-hole of what's possible, or actually properly learned to use the OS?

i can confess discovering XP back then made me actively like Windows ; that was a long time ago though and with each new version my liking has been reaching new abysses

There are probably more Windows enthusiasts than there are Linux enthusiasts in absolute numbers.

I mean not everyone cheers for the currently best soccer team either, it's partly about what you're invested in. If I had spent many years in Windows dev land I'm sure I would be arguing that side too.

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