NTFS is by far the worse filesystem commonly used nowadays. Even Apple has a better filesystem.
When using Windows the thing I miss the most is instant copies. Everyone else has them and they are incredibly handy.
In fact, with a CoW filesystem Microsoft could even circle around the disaster that is Windows update without needing to remake their entire OS.
Windows had a fantastic UI but I despise the changes they have made to it.
A bottom bar showing all your windows? fantastic! windows are such a core component of the OS that it sure looks like the OS was named after them right? So why in the world would closed programs, with no windows appear there? why would multiple windows fuse into a single icon???
I was fine with just not pinning programs and setting the task bar to “never combine”, but they literally removed the option with Windows 11. I really don’t understand why Microsoft is de-emphasizing the ‘windows’ part of Windows. Apparently ‘never combine’ is coming back at some point to 11, so that’s good.
Now, I’m not going to compare the Windows UI to Linux DE’s since there are many alternatives that may or may not fit someone better.
As for hardware compatibility, I would say its a mixed bag on both directions. I moved my laptop from Windows to Linux when it started bluescreening when waking up from sleep. It works fine on Linux.
Sure, you have some WiFi cards that don’t work out of the box on Linux. But they don’t work out of the box on Windows either, you need to install the drivers on both OSs manually so its not any better.
Then you have some computers where Linux works like ass and can’t sleep, and you got some computers where Windows works like ass and can’t sleep.
The only solid arguments against Linux nowadays is
Well so can you install Linux on Windows, Windows on macOS, Windows on Linux, macOS on Windows and macOS on Linux.
From that point of view, all OSs are identical (and to be fair, they pretty much are, nearly everything runs on a VM called ‘web browser’ already).
Nowadays with WSL Windows is pretty good. Pretty much anything you can do on Linux you can do on Windows.
Now, not being worse is not really a point towards Windows. For developers its absolutely not worth it tanking the horrible storage performance, preinstalled ads and handing your soul to Microsoft for the privilege of not being worse than native Linux.
I’m personally waiting for utf-64 and for unicode to go back to fixed encoding and forgetting about merging code points into complex characters. Just keep a zeptillion code points for absolutely everything.