> Yet, the people who use it (mostly gamers), seem to think it's all fine and the operating system is great.
A lot of assumptions in such a short sentence. I suspect there's more than a complex set of opinions around Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, using Windows for gaming, thinking it's all fine, thinking lots of things suck, thinking it is a great operating system, thinking it's a shame it does things outside of the ideal scope of an operating system.
Anecdotally, most of the time I don't see the annoying things on my primary Windows 10 Professional machine. Upon a clean install, there were some nuisances that needed cleaned up. But the vast majority of the time, it is customizable as I desire, while being rock solid / stable, rarely needing reboots to apply updates, and when I go to play games, they just work, and they run super well.
I still hate those nuisances, and I hate that a reboot risks a dark pattern trying to push Windows 11. I hate Windows 11. It currently holds exactly zero advantages (for me) over Windows 10, and lots of disadvantages.
I really like Linux Mint, but I gave it a solid 2 months on my primary gaming machine (which happens to be a laptop) and it fell short in a few key areas. It has a lot of warts, and some games were unstable, performed poorly, or wouldn't connect to multiplayer. I also had no control over the brightness of my screen while using my discrete GPU. For the purposes of gaming, Windows 10 is vastly superior for the set of games I play. And it's a shame, because I do really like the Linux Mint experience for most things, including most games, but the issues are more problematic than the ongoing issues that I have with Windows 10.
A lot of assumptions in such a short sentence. I suspect there's more than a complex set of opinions around Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, using Windows for gaming, thinking it's all fine, thinking lots of things suck, thinking it is a great operating system, thinking it's a shame it does things outside of the ideal scope of an operating system.
Anecdotally, most of the time I don't see the annoying things on my primary Windows 10 Professional machine. Upon a clean install, there were some nuisances that needed cleaned up. But the vast majority of the time, it is customizable as I desire, while being rock solid / stable, rarely needing reboots to apply updates, and when I go to play games, they just work, and they run super well.
I still hate those nuisances, and I hate that a reboot risks a dark pattern trying to push Windows 11. I hate Windows 11. It currently holds exactly zero advantages (for me) over Windows 10, and lots of disadvantages.
I really like Linux Mint, but I gave it a solid 2 months on my primary gaming machine (which happens to be a laptop) and it fell short in a few key areas. It has a lot of warts, and some games were unstable, performed poorly, or wouldn't connect to multiplayer. I also had no control over the brightness of my screen while using my discrete GPU. For the purposes of gaming, Windows 10 is vastly superior for the set of games I play. And it's a shame, because I do really like the Linux Mint experience for most things, including most games, but the issues are more problematic than the ongoing issues that I have with Windows 10.