Microsoft Windows? Why?

I have not been a Windows user since XP was the new big thing, and even before that time, I was not a big fan of Windows. Why? Well Windows have always had a thing where it was trying to push every single one of my buttons, which often resulted in hardware pieces (Mouse, Keyboard, Monitors, etc.) being thrown across a room. This ended up becoming to expensive, and I decided to give Linux a try instead, which have saved me a lot on hardware purchases.

But living in a Microsoft world while being the guy known to have IT knowledge, it is not so easy to get rid of Windows 100%, although you might not use it at home. Once in awhile, people you know will come to you with their Windows problems. Most of the time I tell them to use a system that I want to support, if they require me to do so. I did not switch away from my Windows problems just to take on every one else's.

But for some reason I did not say no when I friend of mine came to me to get help formatting he's laptop. I thought that since Windows is now at version 8, a lot must have changed since the old XP. A quick format and a few driver installs would properly not take up to much of my time, especially since all the drivers was stored on a USB pen drive. But just as I remember it, things are never that easy with Windows. The installation went fine, the newly installed Windows booted without issues, only a few driver installs remained. I plugged-in the USB pen drive and opened 'My Computer', just like I would do on my Linux machines, which takes about half a second to load USB devices. But Windows did not load it, instead it pops up with a small yellow driver install notification in the button right corner? Well okay. But then it fails to locate a driver? A simple UNIVERSAL Mass Storage device with a Microsoft msdos partition table containing a Microsoft Fat32 file system, fails to load on a brand new Microsoft Windows 8 operating system?

I plugged-in the USB pen drive into my own laptop, running on Fedora 20, and my file manager opened right away, displaying the content of the drive. Now which of these operating system is known for being so user friendly?

I cannot specify how I managed to get this drive working. I spent about an hour playing around in the control panel, unloading/loading drivers, plug/unplugging the USB pen drive, trouble shooting and much more. Finally at some point, for some reason, it started working. But I would really not call this user friendly, especially since this is just one small example of the many issues one will stumble upon, when working with Windows. This operating system takes to much of once time on ridicules tasks like this and it increases your blood pressure to a very dangerous level. Why people keep insisting on using it, I really don't know. I find *nix systems like Linux, OSX and such, much more friendly to work with. Use those and you might even live longer.