State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

I have been in the corporate environment for more than 6 year more on the administrator/ engineering side of things. Currently, I am about a year at OrgPad - a very small and quite alternative startup. Two extremes so to say. ;-)

In my experience, Windows is still the target for most specialized or business software. Most of these things also demand a Windows Server component. Typical suspects are: "Personalmanagement" timesheet software basically (accounting working hours, vacation, bonuses etc. and making sure the right receipts are printed at the end of each month and more, like when somebody leaves the company, is ill or the is "Kurzarbeit" because the union with the employer settled on this). Another suspect is software for insurance and taxes, energy management (which in a stainless steel foundry is an important piece of software and keeps at least a handful of people fully employed), logistics software (usually also with needle printers that are able to still print "Durchschlag" carbon paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_paper which is fast and handy for the drivers). There is special software for measurement and production with complex machines, ovens, mills, spectrometers, microscopes, x-ray machines etc. Oh and then there is the internally developed application, that keeps running the company and will be replaced sometime during the next 10 years with a different Windows native app if it is ever finished. And there is the MS SQL administration in addition to group policy for all the Windows computers everywhere that also is best done from a Windows computer.

People are used to Windows, older generations in middle and slightly eastern european countries (former east Germany/ DDR included) especially. There just were no Macs in any company besides maybe a top design studio in the capital or regional hub. This is a big factor. In most companies, ordering certain behaviour just doesn't work in practise.

In companies, every purchase is oriented towards "Abschreibung" or the amortisation period that is determined by "Abgabenordnung" if I am not mistaken - basically the tax. To be most efficient on paper, you have to use the device at least for the duration of the period determined by the state tax books, else you will have a bad tax audit etc. Anything that hasn't followed the rule will raise an eyebrow and somebody will have to explain otherwise you will likely pay more in taxes or whatever. I don't understand this stuff at all but I was told it works something like that and therefore you do so much accounting stuff such as inventory of basically everything that costs at least X, every piece of software, where you also get Microsoft and Oracle and other audits from time to time...

If you are not in the business of selling/ writing enterprise or specialized software in some capacity, you don't really have to care. Most things work using a web browser nowadays, even some enterprise software some companies use. Some software is just more performant or can access certain APIs that aren't available in the web browser. Also, it is very hard to support anything for 10+ years in the webbrowser. Stuff just breaks too frequently on the web, even compared to Windows 10.

In the end, people usually buy Windows, because it really is the only platform that actually works for 99,9% of things. You can spend a long time to support the CEO's Mac, because it is the CEO. Of course, most things running a web app or supporting infrastructure can be Linux or UNIX-based without an issue, but the OS on people's desks just is Windows and it will stay like that for a long time. There are few companies that have the resources to support something else on the desktop as well. I bet, these are in the software or hardware development or creative/ design/ art business and not much else.

Education is a very special market, really anything goes there. Simple things tend to win, but what simple is changes school to school. :-) There are schools that it seems don't know what to do with their money and have dedicated IT department, supporting anything Apple, Google, Adobe, AutoDesk and Microsoft is not a problem there. There are schools that cannot even equip one IT classroom and students have to share computers each with a different OS and updates barely work because the internet connection is flaky.

Man, the sheer number of times I have fucked something up because a background window jumped to the foreground while I was in the middle of typing and striking the spacebar activated whatever option button was highlighted on the pop-up is staggering.

I wish that operating systems (Windows, KDE) placed transient notifications in a "notification area" like older Windows and Android (before Android added popup notifications), where they don't cover up your work (like Windows/KDE/Mac notifications), you can see at a glance how many and which notifications are present (unlike Windows's Action Center with popups disabled), and remain until explicitly dismissed or responded to (unlike the current disappearing notifications).

Sadly, on Windows 10, the bottom-left of the taskbar is already used for app launchers, and the bottom-right is already occupied with a clock, volume indicators, a "system tray" for background apps that you can't close, etc. It's even worse on KDE than on Windows, since there are a lot more applets in the bottom-right of my screen, and you can't control the order of icons in your system tray. Perhaps with Windows 11 moving apps to the center of the taskbar, a row of notification icons could be added to the left.

Perhaps, but the standard VFIO-style passthrough methods (if you can call anything about that "standard") is still a terrible solution; it requires more than one GPU to use both systems at once, requires navigating horrifically underdocumented driver systems that brick the system when experimented with (just like everything in Linux does, for that matter), and requires at the very least switching inputs between the host and the guest even if all of that works perfectly somehow.

Sure, there might not be any more Code 43 (which wasn't the hardest thing to bypass, but you did have to hide the fact that the VM was a VM), but Code 43 was the relative tip of the iceberg compared to all the other setup you had to do to even get there in the first place.

Passing through an nVidia GPU the way that data centers do it, where you can run several hardware-accelerated VMs on the same GPU (as well as the host, on only one set of outputs), to my knowledge still requires this hack (https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock); this is specifically what I'm referring to and is really the only workable solution as it's the closest to "press button get seamless performance from your gaming Windows VM" as we can get right now.

I'd be delighted to now be wrong about my assessment of how difficult trying to set that nonsense up was, because then I could do it and stop worrying about how awful the Windows 11 experience is going to be (even GNOME, for all its user-hostility, still isn't stupid enough to ditch the taskbar labels for the full OS X dock; Windows 11 has so far made that shit mandatory).

My experience with apple has not been smooth at all, it has been one of deprecating without concern for compatibility.