The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me. For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence. This was with the install on a fast SSD. I tried a whole bunch of things and never figured out what the issue was. Then, one day, it just....went away.

I'm not trying to make much of a point other than that: anecdotes aren't going to get you very far.

My problems with linux have nothing to do with the quality of the OS itself (which I personally haven't had many issues with), but rather with software support from companies that don't want to put the engineering effort into making their linux version as good as the windows version. And I can't really blame them, but some software I just need.

>The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me.

That's not what the author said. And anecdotes are perfectly fine - in fact, they are literally are all we have to write about.

In this case, everything I've experienced and heard from others suggests that the author is correct. Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking. Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying. They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer (albeit with varying degrees of misery).

I switched to Linux again because on this PC Windows suddenly just doesn't run stable anymore. Even a complete reinstall didn't fix it, I assume it is some driver issue or something like that.

It took me a while to convince myself it wasn't a hardware defect. I had very frequent single tab crashes in any browser I used. And regular bluescreens, sometimes multiple a day. But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.

If you're unlucky, you can run into weird issues that are hard to impossible to fix as a regular user.

> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.

Funnily enough, I have that exact issue but the opposite. It takes nearly as long to shut down. Which I do often because still, in 2026, even on the Snapdragon surface laptop, I can't trust Windows to actually sleep when I close the laptop lid.

I've had less issues with Linux, even sleep, than any modern windows box, and even less issues (pretty much none at all) on my daily driver MacBook Pro (plenty of annoyances and quirks here too though)

> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.

I know you're not asking for tech support here, but I wanted to share that a friend's laptop was doing this, and the problem turned out to be a massive amount of files in %TEMP%. So many that I had to write a little PowerShell script to remove them all.

Yeah, like key bindings in IntelliJ that might make sense on Windows or Macintosh, but conflict with Linux defaults. I switched to Linux couple of decades ago, but this second class treatment of Linux desktop is one of the reasons I'm still doing most of my work in the terminal.

I'm glad it wasn't just me... the nice thing about those mysterious issues on Linux is usually you can actually fix the issue. With Windows I needed a hacky solution just to move the stupid taskbar, or wait for Microsoft to fix it.

Haven’t used Windows in a while, but I remember hating the seemingly completely random “restarting in 5 minutes for a system update.” Usually at the least-opportune time

Even if Windows didn't have those weird things, there are a bunch of intended behavior things that make Windows a more frustrating experience than the occasional weird things a Linux system may do.

Seriously! On my windows desktop, I have to let the computer sit a minute after booting before i touch the keyboard otherwise it completely wigs out and becomes partially unresponsive due to some weird issue with the AMD chipset drivers. I can see my mouse move, i can move windows around, but nothing responds to clicks and i can't open anything.