Windows

Things to Hate About Windows

The following just scratches the surface of all the reasons I don't use Windows on a day to day basis. I'll keep adding more to it each time I'm forced to use Windows for something and get rudely reminded why I despise the platform. Yes, I need a life. To justify this entry I'll just keep telling myself that someday somebody somewhere will use this list in protest of some PHB's bright idea of replacing a FreeBSD installation with Microsoft's vile solutions.

Missing Functionality

The following items are things that I would expect to be included in any modern 21st century operation system, especially one with a starting retail price of $199.00!

• No Secure Shell (SSH) client or server in base system. Although admittedly, SSH access to a Windows host would be rather useless at this time, see next point.
• Although there is a CLI (cmd.exe) its complete lack of capabilities and sophistication renders it virtually useless
• Inability to mount, burn, create or otherwise manipulate ISO or other disk images
• Poor development tools. Full blown Visual Studio is expensive, only a stripped down Express version is available for free... Other platforms provide fully featured development environments that are far more versatile at no cost.
• No low-level troubleshooting utilities, ie) where is a tcpdump equivalent? Do Window admins never need to analyze network traffic to demystify otherwise unexplainable behavior? Even basics like dig for verifying DNS data is completely absent. While we're in this vein of thought, even the telnet client included in previous versions is not included in the default Vista install. Looks like they're moving backwards in this category.
• No system wide package management. Applications instead use one of a multitude of available installer systems. Each and every application, utility or driver needs to be kept up to date manually. (OS X suffers from similar limitations, so think of BSD and Linux's capabilities here).
• No PDF support. Reading PDFs requires free third party software. Creating PDFs requires purchasing Adobe Acrobat at a whopping $299.
• No ability to clone a volume from one physical disk to another. (Think of Norton Ghost and the like here). Such functionality belongs in the Operating System, not supplied by 3rd party vendors.

Annoyances

• Hopelessly disorganized file system makes properly maintaining a Windows installation an exercise in futility
• Keeping Windows running smoothly requires an entire collection of 3rd party software (antivirus, spyware removal, registry cleaners, etc, etc). An operating system so broken as to require the aforementioned software should in lieu of fixing said brokenness include such software by default.
• Changing IPv4 settings while an Ethernet interface physically has a connection causes Windows to hang for several minutes while it pretends the task given to it is in some way complicated. (At least in XP, haven't confirmed this on Vista)
• Product Activation - Users of Windows are all filthy software pirates until proven otherwise, nice!
• The inner workings of the system are completely obscured from the end user with no option to make them visible. System hangs on boot? Just keep guessing what the problem is. No verbose booting is possible.
• Cheap imitations of features found in other platforms. They tend to copy the eye candy attributes of a feature without duplicating the reason said feature was actually useful (OS X Tiger's Exposé vs Vista's Flip3D is an excellent example).
• Horrid Control Panel layout with items nest several levels deep. Many items are extremely difficult to find without resorting to a search. A little bit of thought would have gone a long way in fixing this. Instead we have the paradigm of having more then one view in Control Panel, a retarded view and an even more retarded view.

Legacy Stupidities that Just Won't Die

• Drive letters! Get rid of drive letters! They haven't made sense since the introduction of the hard disk. Assigning an alphabet letter to a volume that will change arbitrarily as new volumes are introduced or removed is dumb. Plain and simple.

Things I Actually Like About Windows

• RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) rocks, at least from a performance point of view.