By default Windows shows ads in my start menu. It also shows me ads in my notifications. I guess I could understand if it was free, but it's not.
And then there's Copilot...
never in my life have i paid for a windows license.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
- This is why I never feel guilty about "pirating" Windows. I've already paid for it!
the argument i always used is that Windows feels like spyware, and slowly seems to turn into it. showing me ads, selling my data. don't see why i should pay for this.
Windows kernel is not _bad_, but it's developed by far fewer people.
Linux also has systemd with its unified system resource management. I can slice and dice my system as I want between containers. Oh, and containers are also awesome (Windows has them, macOS doesn't).
Desktop environments are a matter of personal taste. I like my DE very minimal: status bar, quick launcher panel, and that's it.
- Respect privacy - Is integrating better AI: no invasive AI, yet available if wanted - Usability and stability of UI and intefaces
MacOS and BSD [disclaimer: big fan of BSD] are somewhat stagnated. Depending on what you want to do, many open source projects are "linux first" what can be a problem (ask me how I know!)
So Linux has always been getting slowly better over the years (I first used it more than 30 years ago) and Windows has been getting a lot worse - so Linux easily wins.
What changed is that you usually do not run a snowflake anymore which you carefully update to the next version in situ, but some amount of compute and storage. Today everything is blue-green and updates mean deploy, destroy behind a load balancer.
True, but server choice is typically made by professionals, while desktop choice typically isn't. So people measure those two by a (imo correct) double standard