MarchinBunny said:
Actually, totally not true. While windows does set itself up as an OS meant to be used for less techy savvy people, it has tons of advanced settings that can practically change anything you do not like about it. Also the great thing is almost everyone develops their software for Windows. Chances are if Windows can't do it, their is a free open-source or paid (if your willing to spend the cash) programs that can.
I am a very tech-savvy person myself, and that is the exact reason I like windows. Because if you know what you are doing nothing is really a problem. You want to change the GUI? .. you actually can and there are tons of programs that allow you to do so. It's like a video game that you can mod. So it doesn't come with features you like out of the box ... big deal. That is an impossible task because it's an OS meant to be mainstream, meant to be used by the world. That doesn't mean it can't do those things. You just need to know how to change it to the way you like, and it's really not all that hard. Google tends to be a good start and chances are there will be an answer and solution for what you want Windows to do, or not do.
It's not locked-down. It's not "our way is the only way" ... because if you knew how to use windows at all, you would know that isn't true.
Windows is very "locked-down" from a programmer perspective, the whole OS is locked down same goes with OSX It's less locked down then for example the XBOX OS, but it's still very locked-down.
Microsoft only gives you access to what they want you to use, there are parts of the WINAPI that only Microsoft and partner companies know about which they use to there advantage to fuck over the competition, obviously you can always reverse engineer and use specific functions in the WINAPI , the wine project has had this problem, API functions do whatever the fuck they want, in there own way without prediction, it's even noticeable in earlier versions of windows where if it detected a non-MS version of dos for example DR-DOS it would disable specific functions etc.
For example, lets make up a function called hello_world it's documented to print hello world, but the winAPI does something totally different to what is documented for example.
hello_world documented would do the following
print(hello_world) it appears to print hello world.
What it actually does
4 + 4 * 3
load a char of letters for no reason
print the cars in a list
hello, world.
Same goes with graphics cards and hardware, believe it or not even Intel processors and AMD graphics cards for example are very locked down, not performance wise but driver wise It's practically impossible to code drivers for a lot of hardware without reverse engineering it even than you won't get anywhere near the full performance of the card awhile back the open source AMD drivers for Linux were shit compared to the closed source AMD drivers, things have changed but from a programmers perspective even the hardware is locked down.
Programming wise you're limited to what WINDOWs can do, you can't modify any of it's source code like you can with linux and make it do things you want it to do.
Some good examples of it being locked down programming wise is the following.
You can't change things in the windows kernel, or compile the windows kernel for mobile devices or older hardware.
It locks down some of the hardware, for example in most versions of windows you're limited to how much ram or processors you can actually use. if you wanted 24 cores for example you'll most likely need to use windows server.
You can't change or modify any of the internals.
Bug fixes, for example if I find a bug in microsoft windows, I can patch it myself and submit a patch, I have to sit back and hope microsoft patches it (this is the reason why most zero days exist for many years before there found.
I'm not bashing windows or anything, but it is indeed very locked down
but to a non-programmer won't make a difference which OS someone uses.