"An unknown error occurred." And you spend hours trying figure it out for it to be something stupid that should just have a distinct error.

A few things (disclaimer, I‘m both a Linux and mac user. Linux on my gaming machine, mac on my work machines):

• Privacy is a big factor. Microsofts track record is bad, even among non FOSS companies.

• Bloatware and Ads. Microsofts insistence on pushing OneDrive, Edge, 365 and bing are annoying to say the least. Why do they think I’m going to change my mind about that after a minor update?

• The UX is less than stellar. Why does the OS have 4 different UI styles for different programs that sometimes even do almost the same thing but not entirely, so you’ll have to use both versions?

• It’s almost impossible for me to keep my desktop tidy short of not using it. I’m dependent on macOS stack feature. On Linux I never had enough random files for it to be a problem.

In short, Windows just annoys me. While Linux and macOS go out of my way and let me just do my stuff, Windows just constantly pulling my attention away from what I advertised want to do and that was even when I was using my PC solely as a gaming machine.

Edit: formatting

One word: Recall

They killed Clippy! Those bastards!

I own my computer. But on Windows, it doesn't feel like that...

Freedom FTW!

Cool operating system bro. Does it run KDE?

I dual boot, but I've been dreading booting back into Windows recently because I upgraded my motherboard/CPU and know they are going to make me buy another license. And I understand Windows is more convenient for a lot of people but I am not one of them.

I can't think of anything that is more convenient for me on Windows other than that I have to use it to run Studio One to record music from time to time. But "software availability" has nothing to do with the operating system itself; market position does. And a company's market position rarely drives my purchasing decisions.

I dislike Windows for all the reasons people here typically state.

Because the only redeeming quality of Windows is the fact a lot of software works on Windows and only on Windows, which is also exactly the problem with Windows. It's great WINE can exist, but not all platforms support WINE, and as an OpenBSD user first and foremost it means I can't play many of my favorite games on my preferred platform.

Ultimately, Windows sucks and is a standard because our society puts corporate greed and thieves like Microsoft above superior projects; and even if Microsoft were firebombed off the planet tomorrow, they're just a symptom of the problem, and it's only be so long until another thief steps into Microsoft's position and ruins everything again.

It is not Windows I hate, it is the people how have not idea how people want to use there computer makeing the choices with where it is going.

Windows has basically become malware. It does a fuck ton of tracking, and all of its features are about appeasing shareholders over users.

If we want to get technical: I loathe it because even in the year 2024, it’s the only operating system I’ve witnessed that will absolutely grind to a halt when a third party application stops responding or crashes. There is no valid fucking reason why the parent system should be halted by an application that crashes.

Also, ads in the start panel. Absolutely not, Microsoft. No way in hell am I allowing that to live on a computer I own. Yes, I’m aware third party apps will address that but it shouldn’t be a thing to begin with.

Oh yeah, and it decided to automatically update itself to the latest version on my ASUS ROG laptop while the thing was closed and not in use. So upon booting it up and seeing ads in the UI, I wiped the system clean and installed Nobara. Bye bye. 👋

I don't hate windows, it just annoys me. I've run linux in a VM under windows for years and about 2 years ago it annoyed me enough (I think it was something about a patch breaking things badly enough that I had to restore the system) that I said 'screw it' and switched the arrangement to linux and the few windows programs I really wanted running in wine. I've been skipping back and forth between them since Yggdrasil was a thing, so it wasn't like it was uncharted territory.

And after hearing some of win11's BS, I'm glad I did.

Back when I first used a computer we were told if it has ads and pop ups constantly then you have installed a virus. Try using a fresh install of windows....

I don't. I just like Linux.

3. The joy of "figuring it out" and customizing everything you want to the minutest details

Customization is my reason. I've got a two-monitor setup in KDE with different panels on each one. Each one is highly customized specifically to me, and the customizations can't be done in Windows.

I don't think the ability to destroy your entire system by one command is a good thing for a desktop operating system. On Linux random program with root rights can bring down your entire system by one poorly written script, but Windows at least has multiple mechanisms in place to prevent that.

Because I have to use this shitshow of a software at work because some companies use "license managers" that don't work under Wine.

It's been a long time since I used Windows myself, however one of the big reasons for switching was the inherent instability. At once point I was developing code in Visual Studio and constantly loading/closing quite a few different programs to test things out. Windows just didn't seem to handle memory-recovery and I would have to reboot every week or two (usually because of the whole OS locking up). In comparison, I run a variety of software on my linux machines which can involve anything from testing code in multiple browsers to image editing to 3D CAD drawings. Sure that tends to drain the memory but when I close something I get that memory back. I'll frequently get down to the last 100K of RAM, close a couple programs that may be holding large caches (Firefox really hates me having hundreds of open tabs), and then I'm right back up and running again. Reboots may occur about every 6 months.

I have to support other people using Windows at work, which reminds me how much I'll never go back to it. My biggest frustration is that Microsoft is constantly changing things. Hell you can't even directly reach the control panel any more, you have to run searches to find the specific item you want. Want to check the settings of a certain printer? Good luck, that doesn't seem to be available in the right-click menu any more. It's just all these idiotic changes making it difficult to actually use or maintain Windows. Why should I have to google how to find something when everything used to be under the control panel or a right-click away?

For me the straw that broke the camels back was the fucking updates. I got so tired of Windows forcing updates, and I never could get the registry edits to disable it to stick. Besides, you shouldn't have to EDIT THE REGISTRY to just turn off updates! But there's also stuff I'd really miss if I went back (I've been on Nobara for a year now) like the package management on Linux. I love that I can choose to update on MY terms, and that almost everything updates during the process. I have a few random jar apps for Switch hacking stuff, and an appimage for R2Modman, but besides that I don't have to worry about needing to download the latest version of shit all the time. AND, having most of what you need just available on a software store is so nice. Never mind that its so much safer to not have to download random .exe's from all over the internet. These days the only thing I actually struggle with is modding certain games. Like BG3 took me awhile, but then I found out there's a Linux mod manager called lampray and it works perfectly. Then there's also the fact you have to know how to do DLL overrides for things like bepinex or anything that adds some kind of DLL. But otherwise, it just works and infuriates me less than windoze

I honestly fully believe that proprietary software is bullshit and all software ought to be Free Software. I'm not saying I don't use proprietary software, but I don't trust it. If I run proprietary software, I go out of my way to try to run it in prison. I don't let my Nintendo Switch connect to the internet except when I have a very specific reason and then I disconnect it immediately after I'm done. When I bought a robot vacuum cleaner, I bought specifically the model that I knew I could hack to not phone home. I bought a phone on which I could run LineageOS without the Google apps. (And, yes, I'm running a proprietary EFI BIOS on my main desktop machine and such. But I do take a lot of steps to limit how much influence proprietary software has on me and my devices.)

Well I really dislike updating my computer ~~(and on this topic, Windows Update is inconvenient and slow as balls!)~~ and finding some new BS from Microsoft on it.
One day it's Copilot, which I could just use on the browser if I really wanted to, the next day it'll be Recall, which just.... no.

Know what I mean?

I dual boot on my primary/desktop PC, and only run Linux on my laptop and Steam Deck.

I find more often times than not, I feel like I'm either fighting with Windows or it does these small but annoying things that when added up tend to really get on my nerves. For example, one thing that I've been running into a lot (and happened earlier today) is if I put my computer to sleep while its booted into Windows, it'll randomly decide to wake itself up for who knows what reason - flooding my room with light often times while I'm trying to sleep or relax. It does it enough where I should by now remember to just physically turn off my monitors when I put my computer to sleep, but why should I have to? The 95% of the time that I'm booted into Linux, if I put my computer to sleep it stays asleep until I explicitly wake it up, and thus I haven't formed a habit to turn the displays off.

The only reason why I even keep Windows around on this PC is to occasionally play Destiny 2 and some VR stuff with friends every now and then.

I think hate is really too strong of a word, dislike at most for me.
My biggest issue with Microsoft is a lack of trust. Apart from that, I just like my Linux setup more and find it easier to use.
Stuff I want to do works how I want to do it and how I'm (now) used to it.
Regardless, I use Windows at work, manage Windows Servers and Azure. It's just how it is.

Because for me Windows was not easier to use.

I only got my first proper computer in 2020, and comparing Windows 10 with Linux Mint 20, I found the latter much simpler to use not having used either one prior. Just having to bounce between Control Panel and new Settings, plus a lot of tutorials shown magic with registries...
Also, I had a lot of problems with uninstallers failing or not removing programs completely, and getting permissions to remove files directly was also pain in the ass, even as "Administrator". That often resulted in me booting up live Linux DVD to remove crap programs from Windows.

I gave it a try, but I didn't like it. Perhaps I'd like MacOS though. It seems similar enough. But Windows just feels like 2 decades of hotfixes glued together.

I started "hating" Windows more recently. I was never a very technical user but I was always someone that could find myself around system configuration and they just keep hiding ways of letting you customize things.

When I started learning programming I was still trying to use only Windows but at some point I got extremely tired of fighting how clunky environmental variables can be. Installing things such as gcc and python was extremely annoying.

Then I did dual boot for a few years, then I started using WSL. WSL is... Awful, lol. It will never ask you if it is okay to stop what you are doing to reboot, I lost count of how many times I was working on something and suddenly my Linux environment was dead.

This year the amount of clutter they are adding to Windows and the existence of Proton just kicked the bucked for me, everywhere you look at Windows is busy and full of stuff I don't want to be there and like I said previously, you either can't remove it or it is difficult because they just want it to be.

I might need to figure out how to run a Windows VM if I need to run something (hasn't happened yet) but that's it, I don't need to deal with all the bs anymore and I can customize things as I like. I love it.

I wouldn't say I hate Windows now, I just kind of despise it after so many years. I wish I heard my professors that kept shitting on Windows so many years ago.

Windows is bad and immoral but I can't say I hate it because I almost never use it. Most of the time Windows is just bad news in my feed which makes me anticipate friends asking beginner questions for their GNU+Linux install.

I stopped using Windows when it became clear it's purpose is not to do what I want unless that happens to be what Microsoft wants. It was many things that all added up but I can only remember the last straw which broke the camel's back. I was trying to get something to work and made an online account in desperation - then I struggled/failed to find a way to revert the change and make the user become an offline account again. Faced with a reinstall I couldn't go through clicking "no, don't fuck me" several times to reinstall Windows.

I basically have one primary criteria in choosing operating systems: I want the one that gets the least in my way doing the things I want to do (whether that's something productive or entertainment). I don't care that I'm using Linux, it just happens to be Linux (or a Linux distro) that's currently better at getting out of my way than Windows (or macOS, or any other OS).

I've been evaluating Linux on my desktop like once per year maybe, and until recently Windows always won in terms of getting out of my way. I was using Windows 10 LTSC IoT before (because guess what: it got in my way less than regular Windows 10/11) and it was pretty good honestly, but what finally tipped the scales over for me was that Microsoft decided to let an update add unwanted entries into my start menu and re-enable the stupid search field in the task bar.

So I re-evaluated different Linux distributions last year, eventually landed on Fedora and together with swapping my Nvidia RTX 3080 for a Radeon 7800 XT for better Linux compatibility (especially with Wayland) and also Valve's Proton getting better and better, I started using a Linux distro full-time on my desktop January 1st, 2024.

Stuck with Fedora for a few months and landed at openSUSE Tumbleweed (after some annoyances regarding SELinux and other things iirc with the Fedora 40 update). Tumbleweed or rather the fact that it's bleeding edge had its fair share of issues in the last days (with some big releases like Mesa 24.1, Plasma 6.1 and some other packages being relatively buggy). This made me think about using a more stable distro like Debian or openSUSE Leap (I know there's also Slowroll, but some issues Tumbleweed has also roll over to it), but then again I pretty much always have fairly recent hardware in my PC, which usually demands somewhat recent kernels and other packages.

If I find that Windows gets less in my way tomorrow than what I'm currently using, I'll consider switching to Windows. Or macOS. Or Debian. Or FreeBSD. Etc.

I'm typing this from my orange pi zero 3 w/ dietpi installed... aaaaaaand I don't really "hate", but more like "not care about it anymore". Sure, its privacy concerns are truly a nightmare, but eh. It's good to have options, that's all. Even if one said "options" can be more harmful than good.

Started using Linux in 2010 on a virtual machine on a Windows XP machine that was really not meant to run it and it was God awful. But I knew that it was the virtual machine not Linux itself. After that I was using my laptop for school and a Windows update completely broke it and I absolutely had to use it for the next class that I was going to in like five minutes and I had a flash drive with a live Linux environment already on it and so I just used that. However, once I was done with class that day, my first thought was why should I even go in and attempt to fix this Windows machine when Linux has been working fine for me all day. And so I just went ahead and wiped the disk and ran the installer. And I've been using Linux ever since. I do generally keep a Windows virtual machine around, just in case, but it's extremely rare that I've ever needed to use it.