I run Windows 11 as my main desktop (and use Mac at work and have a bunch of servers / NAS where I run debian), and W11 is not painful at all.
I installed the Professional edition, disabled a few settings that I don't like the first time I installed it, and haven't had any issue or friction since then.
Meanwhile I'm constantly frustrated at MacOS and obviously you can't do anything on Linux without running into some sort of trouble.
Some people don't mind ads on the radio, when they're watching a show, some people don't mind pop-ups, etc.
Now, if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet? Users had had browsers for over two decades, who has asked Microsoft to mix local search, application startup and web search?
As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career. I guess different personalities here, as well.
> if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet?
This is how I launch most of my programs and it has literally never been an issue for me, it always does exactly what I expect, which is to launch the program I have installed locally.
I don't give a fuck if it makes an HTTP call or performs an incantation to the god of search in the background, as long as it just gives me my locally installed software instantly, which it does.
> As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career.
Read my bio.
Sometimes its not instant though.. sometime web search completes faster then locally installed software and because of muscle memory I accidentally opened a bing page about scrcpy (where the first result is an unaffiliated web page instead of official github page!) instead of my locally installed scrcpy
It's like when you're playing a video game and you accidentally press the wrong button and shoot a guy in the face instead of healing him.
The idea that you could accidentally open a webpage instead of launching a program is a UX embarrassment.
Nope. Today I keyboard-shortcut opened search and tried to search for device manager - no no, it starting auto-completing on browser search (luckily I'd made it Brave at least). On Android you can easily turn that off.
I ended up having to go to Run and type the .msc of device manager - obviously spelled with a shortened version that had to be googled as somehow THAT didn't auto-complete.
Windows 11 needs to be exposed for what it is, a spyware operating system. I had booted into it just to test whether a hardware device was at fault or a USB cable was, then dual-booted back into Linux.