this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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I haven’t used windows in so long, the only thing I know about it is the incredibly high volume of complaints regarding it.
Same here. I can’t figure out why anyone uses based on what I read.
Yes, the most popular OS on the planets used by the most people on a daily basis, also has a high number of memes about it. Shocking. What information you've gleaned.
It's barely the second most popular OS, after Android. iOS is pretty close behind it. And yet the amount of complaints Windows gets seems to be far higher than that of Android.
Fair point, I would argue that it's not e entirely fair to compare a mobile OS that basically eschews backwards compatibility, for a desktop OS that can still run 30 year old applications, but it's not entirely unfair either, they're still both OSes and lots of the complaints have nothing to do with the burden of legacy support.
Does it still run 30 year old apps? I was under the impression that a lot of DOS and Windows software from the 1990s ran better under Wine than on Windows.
This is true, especially for games. But for some reason, even though some compatibility features have been removed from windows, others still remain. Hell, if you look into System32, you can still find the dialer app from windows 95 (still with its original icon, btw!), or Windows Vista's "bubbles" screensaver, and they still run.
Edit: this is not a windows praise, it's a critique. Those parts are dead weight, and windows isn't even that good at offering compatibility for old software
I have an app built for Android 4 running on my Android 15 device. It looks ugly but it works. Of course other apps will not be so lucky, but some backwards compat is absolutely there.
Not really, Microsoft is steadily breaking old stuff. For example lot of 10-15 year old software that was doing something hardware-related would be broken now due to driver signing changes/restrictions (e.g. WinRing0 things).
For what it's worth, just because something is popular does not mean it's perfect, or even better.
I think a lot of the complaints about Windows 11 are overblown, but a lot aren't. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
Oh I don't think it remotely is. I just find it irritating that someone sees lots of complaints about the most used thing and takes that as an indication that it's bad, and ignores the indication that it's not (it being the most used thing).
Lots of complaints about something popular literally means nothing on its own. The content of those complaints have validity, but there's nothing to learn from their metadata.
Actually lots of complaints has meaning. It means lots of people have problems with it. It doesn't mean anything else but this.
Yes. But if you have many complaints from MANY MANY users, it may not mean anything serious, it could still mean a very small fraction have problems. Absolute number means very little without context. That's the purpose of the previous comment. Please note how it doesn't say anything about qualities of Windows.
The percentage of users complaining is the same thing. If your software has 100 users that means 1 complaint, if your software has 1,000,000 users that means 10,000 complaints, for the exact same software.
Being the single OS that has had a chokehold on the prebuilt computer industry for ages doesn’t mean it’s popular. It’s also used in tons of workplaces where people don’t have a choice. High number doesn’t automatically correlate to “popular.”
I didn't mean like people's choice popular, I just meant most used. The more something is used the more memes you'll see about it's issues.
Yeah, that makes more sense. More users automatically means there will statistically be more complaints due to sheer numbers.