>If you dig through Windows enthusiast communities
TIL those exist (genuinely).
I’ve never met anyone who likes windows, just people who put up with it for work/gaming and people who doesn’t care about the whole thing enough to move from the default (which is totally understandable).
There are people like this, although very small minority. I've met one at university - he was probably the first person to have Windows 8 laptop with a touchscreen, showing off to everyone how cool is was (at that time).
He was also really good at Microsoft Word, unironically - he made extensive use of custom styling and could format an assignment paper in like 30 seconds. He was super useful in group projects.
Wow it sounds like you're describing exactly me. All the way until the touchscreen laptop with Windows 8. Scary shit!
I used to laugh at the LaTeX masochists in college spending 15 minutes just to put a picture where they wanted the picture to be. They had to add like four 1-character modifiers to the "insert image" command, each of which meant "yes, really here", "no, don't move it to the next page" and "nono, really really here".
MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic. Has great referencing tools etc, fantastic formula editor and so on. And, well, you can use ultra modern human-machine interaction technology such as a mouse to choose where a picture goes and how big it is.
(They might've enshittified it since; the last paper I wrote was in 2010 and Word was pretty damn decent back then)
> MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic
MS word also has character styles (like a CSS style on a <span>). IMO you should use instead of bold or italic.
(There are three more types of styles: linked, table and List. See https://office-watch.com/2022/word-five-types-styles/)
I'm aware, but Word's notorious "I clicked one button and it ruined the formatting of my entire document" stuff doesn't happen if you mark a word as italic or bold here and there in the middle of a sentence. The whole point of only using the style rules is to prevent it doing that.
But yeah for layout, ie headings and the likes, only ever use the styles, never "bold, bigger bigger bigger". Don't touch the line spacing button, etc etc.
IMO Word could do with a mode where those buttons are simply hidden. Want a bigger, fatter heading? Edit the heading style. There's no other way.
You can turn almost all of those buttons off in the settings and save it as a template. The only complaint I ever got was from somone who wanted to use the highlighter instead of the built-in comment management system.
Did you also have a windows 8 laptop with touch screen?
Yep! Sorry I just edited that in. Win8 is thoroughly underrated to me. The file open/close dialogs were shit but the start menu was very good. I quite liked the fullscreen apps and am sad they got discontinued. Fullscreen IE browsing with full touch support (eg swipe for back/forward, no window chromes in the way to mis-click on etc) was very cool. It made every website feel like a fullscreen app. It almost made the terrible browser engine (it was still IE after all) bearable. Almost.
I'm pretty much still on the same setup now, Win11 plus touchscreen. You'll pry my touchscreen out of my cold dead hands. How will I rage-close a "try chrome" popup without a touch screen? You ever try to rage click something with a touchpad? Total non starter.
LaTeX is probably annoying as a Word replacement however RMarkdown with embedded LaTeX saved me sooooo much time on my economics homework in university. Being able to put code, equations, graphs generated by said code, etc... all in one file then simply generate a PDF...
I'm in the camp of liking Windows and having had to put up with Linux and MacOS for work. Inertia and familiarity does play a role, but as a dev there are things I really like (ETW + WinDbg immediately come to mind) & really miss on other OSes. I'm not there yet to join an enthusiast group though. ;)
I'm not sure these people like Windows as much as they like what it does for them, but they are willing to put in significant effort to remove the normal Windows roadblocks and annoyances, and thus are willing to hack and chop it to bits to get them closer to their end goals more quickly.
They're not like a car enthusiast who loves their MX5 out of its sheer beauty and feel, but rather they love their SUV because of it's big boot and because it gets them where they need to be, and thus are perfectly happy to tear out the old radio and uncomfortable seats.
The only difference is that car enthusiasts have many more options to choose from, while in OSes, if you're stuck with Windows, you're usually really stuck with it. Linux is certainly an option, but not one that is universally practical to apply.
Why yes for me an OS is just something that I use to launch games, browsers and programs... Is that so strange? There is no Windows cult unlike Linux.
For most people I'm sure computers are a tool not an identity.
I would genuinely enjoy Windows (with WSL) if Microsoft didn’t go to special efforts to make the experience horrible by shoving useless AI functionality, or advertising down my throat.
There are so many Windows users that even if the percentage of enthusiast users is only 10% of that of Mac, it's still quite a lot of people.
That's honestly more narrow-minded by you, than those "not moving from the default". Maybe you're the one that never went deep into the rabbit-hole of what's possible, or actually properly learned to use the OS?
I was a Windows modding enthusiast until I tried Linux and the modding there was superior (and then compiz appeared).
These days whenever I use Windows I install bash and use a terminal so I don't really care about the window management, other than maximizing windows.
As of Windows 11, window management is one of the few things Windows does better than macOS or Linux desktop environments out of the box, thanks to the Windows+Z tiling feature.
And then I use my touchpad to switch between virtual desktops and the jerky animation reminds me why I prefer to run non-game Windows applications remotely from a Mac.
There are probably more Windows enthusiasts than there are Linux enthusiasts in absolute numbers.
i can confess discovering XP back then made me actively like Windows ; that was a long time ago though and with each new version my liking has been reaching new abysses
I was thrilled for new Windows releases between 3.11 and 8.1. I'm still reasonably fond of Windows for personal use. For now I can still de-enshittify it enough to get back the experience I'm used to, and it's comfortable and convenient. But I'm not sure if that will last for long, given the current trend.
That said, for work I've switched to Linux full-time years ago. Native containers are a killer feature for me, and the different UX and driver/dependency/repository issues aren't significant enough to make me want to go back to virtualization in Windows.
I mean not everyone cheers for the currently best soccer team either, it's partly about what you're invested in. If I had spent many years in Windows dev land I'm sure I would be arguing that side too.
I loved hacking Windows back in 2000-s! It was super-hackable and had PLENTY of very thorough documentation (Petzold's "Programming Windows"!).
You could even do a lot of kernel-level shenanigans with relative impunity thanks to its layered design. You could do some amazing stuff.
As an example, SWSoft released container ("lightweight virtualization") support for Windows in 2005, before containers were even a thing in the mainline Linux. They did that by adding a layer of redirection on top of the kernel objects without having access to Windows source code.
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>Is that a problem for you? Do you also act with bigotry over people who don't eat the same breakfast cereal as you?
That’s… weirdly agressive. What about me stating I’ve never met a fan of X feels bigoted to you?
How is it bigotry? I've never met anyone who likes, say, "Baby Shark" (well, anyone with an age in double-digits). I'd be surprised if many -- possibly any -- exist. But if they do, well, de gustibus non est disputandum. None of my business, and I bear no ill-will towards them.
not sure how OP is acting with bigotry against windows users just because they were surprised that there are people who are enthusiastic about windows.
I share their sentiment, it's like discovering that there is a group of people who are Internet Explorer fans, or avid listeners of the generic no-name pop songs specifically made to be unremarkable background music they play in my gym to avoid paying royalties. It's just surprising since I haven't met anyone who doesn't just treat it as something to either put up with or replace with alternatives before.
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Cereal is literally grass seeds so you may need to find a different analogy.
So in your mind there is no difference between Frosted Flakes and grass? Okay.