wip: ms blog post

src/posts/2024-05-25-i-hate-you-microsoft.md

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+---
+author: "Youwen Wu"
+authorTwitter: "@youwen"
+desc: "why we can't have nice things"
+image: "./images/i-hate-you-microsoft-torvalds.jpg"
+keywords: "microsoft, linux, windows, trash software"
+lang: "en"
+title: "i hate you microsoft"
+---
+
+## two terrible mistakes
+
+recently i decided to try valorant again after a 6 month hiatus (mistake 1).
+this, of course, meant rebooting into my slowly dying windows OS that remained
+dual booted and barely touched (mistake 2). i exclusively use windows for gaming
+now as it's the last frontier that linux hasn't conquered. this has actually
+been a great productivity boost for me as windows is so terrible that i _don't
+even want to boot it just for games_.
+
+## spoiled by linux
+
+at the risk of sounding too much like i have a neckbeard and fedora, linux truly
+helped me _enjoy computers_ again, after macOS and windows took that from me.
+following a brief period of time configuring [hyprland](https://hyprland.org/),
+i really felt comfortable with my desktop. i could switch around desktops,
+launch applications, and shuffle windows like an extension of my mind. without
+all of the baby-proofing and bloat designed for "casual users", everything was
+instantly snappy and responsive (even compared to apple's famous UIs).
+
+immediately upon booting back into windows and being greeted with the ridiculous
+ad billboard login screen, i immediately remembered why i despised it. even the
+login screen was janky when i seemed to overload it with quick inputs. the
+desktop stayed barely responsive for several seconds after and every single ui
+action seemed to require me to slow down and walk it through each step, lest it
+fail and refuse to register inputs altogether. it's astonishing how the biggest
+companies seem to make the most terrible sh\*t.
+
+## but this isn't a post comparing linux and windows
+
+linux vs windows has been done to death, so i won't say more. the point of this
+post is to vent my frustration with the _most basic things_ being so hard to fix
+on windows.
+
+the first thing that happened when i tried to play valorant was a vanguard
+(their ring 0 malware anti-cheat) error telling me that i needed to enable
+"secure boot", whatever that did. i vaguely remember having to disable that to
+get GRUB and arch to work. according to google, it basically forces you to sign
+all of your efi boot partitions for dubious security benefits -- in other words,
+make it harder to install free operating systems.
+
+ok, fine. i'll just re-enable this thing. surely it can't be that hard?
+
+the glorious arch linux wiki of course had an (entire
+page)[https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface/Secure_Boot]
+dedicated to enabling secure boot. while it was fairly straightforward, i ended
+up lost in what i call "linux limbo", and so after an hour of trying, i gave up.
+
+> linux limbo: a stage of troubleshooting something on linux where every command
+> seems to succeed, yet nothing actually works, and you're left without an error
+> log to work with.
+
+whatever, i'll just enable secure boot, then boot directly into windows and
+bypass GRUB.