I have to use Windows at work and am constantly annoyed and disgusted by it.
One very big annoyance is that
keyboard focus seems to frequently get switched away from the window I'm typing in, so my keystrokes are lost until I notice and switch it back. For example, when outlook pops up a notice that I've received email, I often press ALT-TAB to switch look at the email. When I'm done I either press ALT-TAB once to go back one app, or ALT-ESC to put Outlook at the bottom of the stack. Either way, if I were on Linux, I would be right back where I was with my editor having the focus, ready-to-type. But Windows? Often I end up with NO WINDOW having the keyboard focus. What earthly good is that? When would I EVER want nothing to have the focus? Worthless.
Another annoyance is that Windows has the weakest command shell, CMD, on earth. I MUST install
Cygwin to stay sane. But as a result, I work in a world with two
different ways to specify the same filepath:
C:\cygwin\home\ken\text\myfile.txt and
~/ken/text/myfile.txt. Cygwin has a
cygpath executable that simplifies dealing with this, but that means I have to write little wrapper scripts to deal with all non-cygwin executables, and I still sometimes end up with confusion. If Windows had a decent shell, I wouldn't need Cygwin, but that's not going to happen.
Another is flexibility and freedom. Does Microsoft offer any way to grep its .doc files? On Linux (and Cygwin) I can use
antiword to output just the text with no formatting crap and pipe it into grep to look for the name or word I'm searching for. I can even pipe that result into the clipboard on Linux or Cygwin and paste it into any app.
Windows doesn't even have
grep. It has
find (very different than GNU find), but it's a poor substitute. I can't get any work done without
grep.