I know people like to make fun of niche operating systems, but for the five years I was at Microsoft I used Windows (10 then 11) as my daily driver. It’s much less stable than a professional OS, but it does kind-of work. I wouldn’t say it’s ready for the desktop. The UI is inconsistent and changes randomly between releases, a load of common software is basically useable only in a VM, it lags and freezes periodically (unlike an OS designed for interactive use, random drivers run a load of things directly in interrupt handlers, so you get latency spikes that you wouldn’t see in a more mainstream desktop OS) and the update process can hose the system, so it’s mostly of interest to people who like tinkering with their machines than people who actually want to get work done. Oh and a load of random bits of the OS have ads, but that’s what you get from a free ad-supported system instead of one developed by an active open-source community.

I don’t think I’d recommend anyone use it as their daily driver or in a work setting, but it’s not totally unusable. It’s not at the level of maturity than you’d expect from, say, Linux or FreeBSD, especially not for client workloads. If you do have to use it, I recommend that you install FreeBSD in a Hyper-V VM for real work. That’s what I did and it works quite well.

@david_chisnall how do you even tinker with Windows?

@wolf480pl @david_chisnall

This happens by itself if you try to use it as daily driver.

Most of the time, doing simple tasks like e.g. finding a string in a file requires you to search the internet for a program that supports this special purpose, then install it.

When that more or less works, you can get into the advanced stuff: Finding and trying out drivers until you find a combination that works for you.

I think one major problem is that those Microsoft operating system people try to solve everything with a GUI, making even simple tasks needlessly complicated.

@wakame @david_chisnall
right, but none of that changes how the system works. I heard there aren't even config files, instead there's this weird global persistent memory-mapped data structure called "the registry" where different components of the OS store their configuration. But I haven't heard of any documentation for it, or any heuristic to find the settings related to the part of the OS you're interested in - most guides online seem to be just magical strings someone guessed?

@wolf480pl @david_chisnall

Yep, that happens when you have a bunch of teenage developers who think that documentation is "not cool".

And this "registry" is simply "singleton pattern, meet god object".

@wakame @david_chisnall
I'm usually not deterred by lacking documentation - most of the time you can just grep the source code for the name of the config option and quickly find what values are allowed and how they affect the program's behaviour.

But I couldn't find any official source packages for parts of Windows, and I couldn't find those strings on github either (except for some scripts that people use to modify the registry).

Does Windows have its own gitlab / forgejo or something?

@wolf480pl @david_chisnall windows uses a complex and largely undocumented database you can change through a legacy tool called regedit
this gives you access to a multitude of settings and system properties that are not exposed to users, even with administration privilege
then there is another even more cursed layer of control called policies that can change behaviours and permissions
finally, dedicated people have made replacements for parts of the subsystems, like I remember having intalled a desktop manager called blackbox that was originally developed for linux
it made the desktop actually responsive and I was enamoured, but it is no longer updated, so even on windows 7 it's no longer an option
@efi @wolf480pl @david_chisnall but regedit is documented!
Yes, but worse than a middle schooler would document on their high school earth science lab report homework.