A Myth About Windows' Ease of Use

An AI-generated image: anime-styled girl with pink hair and yellowish-green eyes, dressed in a white shirt with a blazerVika

Windows is easier than Linux, they say. I’m gonna tell you the hard truth: Windows is only easier than Linux until it stops working. Then the troubleshooting is A LOT harde and takes more time.

As an example: I was playing a game, then suddenly my dual monitors turn pitch black, and the part of Windows responsible for drawing fancy windows crashed. Not only that, but I was unable to reach the Start menu nor access Ctrl+Alt+Del. My only option was:

  1. Opening the Task Manager
  2. Entering shutdown /r /t 0 in the New Task prompt
  3. Waiting for the computer to reboot

On Linux I could’ve just logged in on a second VT, pkill sway and restart my desktop environment in half the time. But the game I was playing doesn’t play along with Wine nor Proton…

Additional issue is the fact that a lot of Windows user-facing system facilities only report cryptic error codes instead of describing what went wrong. Some of the text-based utilities are reporting better errors though, so I prefer using them when I know how.