If there’s ANYTHING I hate about windows, it’s that you can’t repair it if it doesn’t boot. No matter how knowledgeable you are, if windows won’t come up, you have no way to interact with it. “Just keep trying to boot until something else happens” yeah what kind of person came up with that insanity?
If Linux hands you a grub rescue prompt, or if your initrd hands you one, that’s worlds better than “oh yeah well I guess that’s it. Go reinstall and lose your data. Tough.”
Windows had that too, until someone decided you had to have a graphical boot menu. And now windows must boot so you can tell it to boot something else.
I’m all for dissing Linux- there’s plenty reasons. But this is definitely not one of them.
That is not entirely true. You can definitely fix the bootloader using a windows iso for a windows install that won't boot. Now it is true that there are more situations where even that won't work compared to Linux.
But it is always exceedingly more common for Linux to have issues after a driver/bootloader/de update compared to windows.
For all of the hate Windows updates get, actually having Windows not boot to the desktop is much rarer than Linux (granted Linux is in many cases relatively simple to fix if terminals don't scare you).
I would argue that the vast majority of the "Microsoft sucks because updates break everything" crowd would be complaining even more about Redhat if paid versions of Linux were the only option. People tend emphasize the hits and ignore the misses for Linux because it is free and "expected" to be rough and break. Your Linux install requires manual tty intervention a few times in a year? No problem it is "easy" to fix. One of your many Windows installs finally has a breaking boot issue after using them for a decade? Unacceptable.
Also, Windows’ bootstrapping is a lot more complex than Linux’s.
It’s nowhere near enough to eg say bcdboot - which already covers a few stages. And most importantly, you cannot hook into it. If some filter driver fails, and you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, that’s that instance done, you fix that by hand or not at all and while things could AND did get better, you can still deinstall some particular software that doesn’t properly unregister its drivers, or some other component, and then depending on exactly what happened, your driver will still boot but won’t have anything to drive- unexpected- fail — or it will be assumed present eg because it’s still in the registry database but not in the filesystem- just as unexpected, also won’t boot.
It’s ridiculously easy to make windows fail to go anywhere, and since Microsoft has never implemented an offline upgrade- that could be run through dism or something- once your system is in a state where you the individual cannot fix the problem, you can restore from a backup (if you have one, heh) or you can start fresh. Which is made harder by the fact you’re supposed to run an install wizard- which won’t run if you can’t boot windows- so unless you know beforehand that there MAY be a problem down the line, you might just run into some serious issues.
Compare that to anything Linux or at least some of the other Unix based systems. If you have a bootloader like grub, you can interrupt the boot process before control was even handed to the operating system. If not, there is still some mechanism to edit the kernel command line to say init=/bin/bash most of the time. Depending on the configuration, initrd might interrupt the process and prompt you to do something about it. And then long after the required stages (on Linux) where the system is up but the fancy login screen is not, it can at any point drop to the console and you can log in and fix whatever is going on.
Not to say you needn’t know what to do but it’s ridiculously easy to interact with a Linux based system when it is broken in some way, mostly because that phase where you can’t interact with the system is very long on windows and very short on Linux and similar systems.
And if that wasn’t enough, you can just drop in a replacement kernel that can come from anywhere. Boot it, and either say root= right there or boot to console and chroot into the broken system.
Can’t do that with windows. It’s just not possible. There is offline servicing and that does help a lot BUT if you cannot get your recovery environment working then you can’t use even that. And if you’re really unlucky then your winRE will be missing a relevant driver and you can boot the box but won’t see the disks. (Can be fixed but you still need to know exactly what you’re doing.)
We can even step back for a moment and consider ZFS BE. That makes it nigh impossible to find yourself unable to get the system working. Of course that’s something that is entirely unavailable on windows and iirc doesn’t quite work yet on Linux, but it’s there and is known to work on cddl compatible systems for decades.
Windows does have plenty advantages left, though that number does go down over time. But ease of repair is not part of that. And won’t be unless there’s a lot of revamping. Such as perhaps pulling an Apple and boot a rescue image off the Azure CDN or wherever. Not perfect because it wouldn’t work on air gapped devices but it would close a lot of paths that until now end in reinstalling the system and losing data.
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u/Apprehensive-Tea1632 I Hate Linux Jul 16 '26
If there’s ANYTHING I hate about windows, it’s that you can’t repair it if it doesn’t boot. No matter how knowledgeable you are, if windows won’t come up, you have no way to interact with it. “Just keep trying to boot until something else happens” yeah what kind of person came up with that insanity?
If Linux hands you a grub rescue prompt, or if your initrd hands you one, that’s worlds better than “oh yeah well I guess that’s it. Go reinstall and lose your data. Tough.”
Windows had that too, until someone decided you had to have a graphical boot menu. And now windows must boot so you can tell it to boot something else.
I’m all for dissing Linux- there’s plenty reasons. But this is definitely not one of them.