In the ten years that I have spent hopelessly tied to over five computer configurations, at least twelve plus Windows installations (especially becoming familiar with four Windows versions and now getting comfortable with my fifth), hundreds of programs and games and thousands to ten thousands of hours staring at a god damn Start Menu, I have messed with a lot of the internet in my life.

And in all those ten years, I could never learn to settle down, and walk away from an idea if a developer never got it right. Which would lead to me to repeatedly google the same fucking application idea that I want, over and over.

And that hate has manifested itself. So, here's a massive tech rant about how nothing has improved for power users, and how basic tweaks don't work as they should. Expect a long read. I'd get comfortable for this one.

A problem of minimalism aggravating a maximalist

This is a problem that won't matter in the long run for a lot of creators, however I am not "a lot of creators". I am a uniquely generated person by nature's pickings, and I happen to be special in a very obnoxious way. So, let's pick down and pluck all of the Windows programming team's design choices.

Windows has many system applets, that while work for the average person, is HORRIBLY designed for somebody who wants to be a power user.

I'm in no position to complain and bitch, considering that I am a niche market that hasn't been tapped yet. Lightweight maximalism has no place in the modern programming space unfortunately, with frameworks like Electron, Tauri, Modern .NET and Windows Framework Platform having its hold on application designers right now. So I'm asking quite a lot for an app in QT or GTK, or really any lightweight framework.

Though, as somebody who is a niche, I need to rant about my niche. And I need to explain how minimalism is everywhere, in a polite way. So, here's my best shot.

Explaining how it feels like with volume

Let's talk about Windows' approach to system utilities. Mainly: The volume slider. It assumes you just change the volume of your games one by one of course, or by app, and for some that's okay, but there's a problem with that. Nobody can agree on mixing.

The logarithmic scale, if you are not aware, is a volume handling scale (a "type" of volume slider, if that makes it easier to understand), that is for nerds; basically just multiplying instead of adding. Instead of going from 1 to 10, the high end of the scale can take you up all the way to a hundred million (a hundred million labelled "100" at least,,, it makes sense if you try it; basically the middles are more extreme, and increasing a bit is NOTICABLE for once), and the bottom end is nice for fine adjustments.

However, it becomes really problematic, when everything else uses a linear scale (the volume slider type you're used to), and it becomes impossible to perfectly set it to the volume you want. It's even MORE annoying, when you set the volume to a low number like 10, and it's impossibly quiet. Then you set it to 50, and your eardrums are falling off, and it's still empowering the sounds of your friends on call.

The default volume, be it for games, music players or whatnot is incredibly loud. And the fact that nobody has figured to at least try to even turn them down on first launch, or make it a part of the onboarding process, is actually insane. ULTRAKILL does this wonderfully, if you're playing for the first time then one of the calibration steps is literally to adjust your volume. That's awesome; but why aren't others doing that?

The linear scale, in all honestly, is horrible. You're trying random, specific values in hopes it works. Sometimes, you even have to use SINGLE DIGIT volumes(!!!) to get the result you want. Single digit! Why is everything so loud?!

And when you have to deal with this all the time, you tend to get real sick of it.

Everybody wants to be the saving grace

It is already really dumb how Microsoft tries to create a "power toy" for power users. It should really be part of the system as a whole. YES, it's better than nothing, and yes, we absolutely did deserve to get it. However, what people fail to mention is that Microsoft Powertoys is about a gigabyte in size, practically bloats your Windows install a little bit more and the applications use up quite a bit of memory. Not enough on a good system, but just enough to feel they didn't really optimized.

It's a little insulting to make a bunch of power toys that use frameworks that aren't known to be lightweight (or maybe they are; I should revisit powertoys), and powertoys personally feels super clunky. But it's even more frustration that Powertoys occupies some space in the system tray. We'll rant more about that later.

At least we're not stuck with PowerToys. A lucky thing about Windows, is that anybody dedicated enough can easily "make" the solution they so desire, with enough time on their grubby hands. This is true for Linux too, however we're only going to talk about Windows for now, because I plan to save Linux for it's own post. Feel free to recommend, however.

Many people have tried to replace essential Windows applets and features that are lacking. The volume slider, Windows Search, file explorer, the start menu... And many of them often do not come close to being pleasant.

There's a seltzer among the rotten radish

Before we can talk about the bad, we have to talk about the great. The utilities that do it right, and while lack in some places, they're nowhere 'essential'. You have to credit the pioneers, before you can credit the arsonists.

After all, if I said every tool sucked and so did the developers, that would be total bullshit, because some people have genuinely saved my time. There is always a positive to balance a negative. So let's talk about it.

StartAllBack, a sweet heaven

Not to be confused with the Windows 10 equivalent StartisBack (which sucks but does its job), StartAllBack is a WIndows modification that allows basic start menu skinning, custom start menu button designs (called "Orbs", based on the fan term for the Windows Vista & 7 start menu button), and custom spacings for tray icons.

StartAllBack's Windows 10 version feels much clunkier, has menus as ugly as StartAllBack, and lacks several features seen in it's Windows 11 counterpart, so we'll skip over it. I cannot believe I'm giving Windows 11 praise here (this wouldn't be the first time!)

StartAllBack, for a price starting at 4.99 (stacked per computer, up to 11.99 for 3) is a program that forcefully skins the Start Menu, search and other elements to resemble Windows 7 counterparts, optionally also able to be skinned to loosely match newer variants of Windows. It takes notes from ExplorerPatcher features such as allowing Windows 10 variants of widgets (such as the Clock menu, Action Center, volume slider etc) and adds new features, such as changing the spacing of tray icons, and taskbar icons.

While paying 5 dollars to get back a taskbar that kind of represents Windows 7 can be considered scummy, especially considering the licenses are implied to be one time use, I do have to give credit where its due. It appears mostly stable (aside from sometimes being flagged by Battleye, which is harmless and isn't that big of a deal), it does what it says on the tin, and I have not encountered issues yet.

So I can at least raise a glass to this one.

The void has tools, and it's everything I need it to do

Voidtools Everything (often shortened to just "Everything") is a Windows Search alternative that uses a cached Database rather than live searching. It does not rely on MFT (like WizSearch), is faster than Windows Search because of caching (making searches instant, even when typing!), updates live and is in general a better option than anything else out there.

...Saying that Voidtools Everything is better than Windows Search does not mean too much on its own. Don't get me wrong: Voidtools is an amazing search tool, and I'd happily recommend it. But you have to keep in mind that it does not "replace" Windows Search. The handy search button is still going to use Windows to search for your settings, and while there are other applications that can sort of add it back, they aren't very good. So we'll brush along away from it.

You can also install Everything as a service. In testing, it did not actually improve start up times, but it is convenient, and might make it start faster when you ignore the caching it has to do. And while it doesn't improve the caching times by enough, Everything is still a free tool, and a beta is coming out soon enough. So maybe it'll get better.

It's already a miracle how it works so well. That is a blessing to not forget.

The opus of directories, unstable and not legacy focused, but still serviceable for now

Directory Opus is a paid tool that allows you to partially replace Windows File Explorer. You can browse folders, FTP servers (though not as well as Filezilla or WinSCP) and use a Commander-like file explorer, all while double clicking folders can open Opus instead of WIndows's version.

Windows File Explorer is very terrible. It is infamous to me for being unstable, slow and getting buggier by the day, a sentiment that I seem to share with others nowadays. It's artistic to know I'm not the only one to suffer with such an awful piece of shit, and I'm even more glad such a nice alternative exists, even if they want to suck me of money.

DOpus has saved me countless hours of time with Windows' awful file explorer. From the increased stability to the tabs, I genuinely cannot go back anymore. The stability is simply amazing, and it saves me time. Not to mention is much nicer to use, compared to XYplorer and Explorer+. Explorer+ often feels identical to Windows at times. XYplorer navigation is confusing, and the UI gave me headaches. Opus is perfect.

Directory Opus is far from perfect, however. Among the issues include thje main window refusing to respond when Opus is doing something with files (i.e copying, moving, extract), freezes when activated from 7Zip (i.e extracting a folder by dragging it), horrible compatibility with QuickSFV... You can get me, I'm sure.

But these issues are niche. My issues with File Explorer are unpredictable and so common on certain systems, it's a joke. So Opus gets a good point here.

Inform me about my system

System Informer is a hacker tool and a total replacement for Windows Task Manager that includes features such as reducing processes's 'Working Set' (sometimes cleans programs using memory but not always), permanently set CPU affinity and process priority, optional user notes for processes, and a bunch of other stuff.

Being based on Process Hacker, holy shit what a helpful thing. It's not the most stable application considering I've witnessed my fair share of crashes with it. But it feels more 'system engrained' than Process Explorer does, and looks a load better. It also is much easer use compared to Process Lasso, and while it does expect you to know a bit about what you're doing, that's okay.

It's practically been my "nerf resource intense programs and set games to high priority" silver bullet. It's so nice to put comments on processes, and to put pins on thoughts for later. It's not for everyone, but it's been much of a help on my journey, and I wish I tried it earlier.

Nobody wants to end "bloat it or go home"

We established some nice programs, let's now establish the main problem: everything being a huge flaw and unacceptable compromise.

I am no programmer, and I am no designer. So what I say past this point, you should really take with a grain of salt. But, I'd like to overdramatize how every angle is horrible, and most tools suck. Let me explain.

I have noticed a VERY big trend in a lot of chosen software. Now, I am very influenced technology wise and have developed opinions from mainly being hardware constricted (and still partially am; I wanna save as much RAM as possible while its too expensive!) and very opinionated on how a program should run on my system. So by all means, do not take me too seriously here.

However, the lack of optimization and perfection is something that deeply pisses off my inner perfectionism. If I was to stack together every tool I want together, say: PowerTools, EarTrumpet, All seven of the game launchers that developers think is worthy of being started on startup, two task managers, application launchers, system function replacements, memory reductions...

Hey, look at that, we're supposedly using over 50% memory idle! Normally it should be closer to 30! Congratulations, you became an example of what not to do when making a lightweight problem.

Of course, you're not supposed to run everything at once. However, when developers automatically assume you want everything to start automatically, it really tends to overwhelm you and your screen. Right?

This kind of sets in stone how 16 GB is getting out of date really quickly. But you can't exactly fix that when RAM, graphics cards and hard drives cost a fucking fortune right now, can you?? You already barely can play some heavy games nowadays, even when you don't open a web browser. And I'm supposed to just buy more, when the RAM I need costs almost a thousand dollars? Yeah, no thank you, please stop focusing on CSS.

If you can't tell, I hate Electron.

The spiral spins for every application in circulation

This problem can, and will exist for every basic and essential menu you use on Windows. Every functionality, from navigating settings, to changing the volumes of apps, to uninstalling said apps. Searching, file exploring, opening the start menu. ALL of these things, are usually very unoptimized.

Having better hardware "fixes" the problem, sure. But It does not fix the core problem that Windows should not run like I'm playing a Raytracing enhanced game on a 660, by force. It should be a human right to have a system that runs, especially considering everybody is ripping you off right now with thousand dollar GPU-less laptops with crappy CPUs and a lot of RAM.

But no, let's be superior to others and push every solution as shilling thousands of dollars on new hardware. That'll surely do it!

Not to mention, buying new hardware doesn't fix the actual problem, it just only makes the system run faster. You can "fix" bad optimization by letting faster hardware deal with it, sure. But faster computing does not fixed unoptimized programming. It's a band aid. Get off your ass and rewrite your dogshit code.

Nobody can really do the system utility right. There's areas of Windows that could be improved that both Microsoft, and curious programmers have not touched yet. Either you use Windows' implementation, which is not fit for somebody who likes their power shortcuts, or you use a developer's implementation that will always have caveats, and potentially stop working as intended in a few months.

Turn down the rage!

Like come on, the volume hack space is full of bullshit. Volumey is 3 years old, outdated and requires a dependency of .NET that has been discontinued already. Volume2 is in a similar boat but can actually be installed. At least, until it disallows me to turn the volume down in games. I'M SORRY, YOU'RE TOO LOUD, CAN YOU LET ME TURN THE VOLUME DOWN?!

That leaves the only other alternative I know, EarTrumpet, which requires Chocolatey or Microsoft Store download. I used to have plenty of issues, though as it's better fork BetterTrumpet keeps improving, my issues are a little less nuanced.

Though, again, this is a BAND AID fix. Not a PERMANENT fix. This does not PERMANENTLY fix everybody and their GRANDMOTHER from fucking up volume balance. When Borderlands is too quiet, Team Fortress 2 is too loud and my music is being spoken over, there's still work that needs to be done!

PLEASE STOP MAKING ME NEED TO YELL OVER YOU TO HEAR MYSELF TALK

Update: BetterTrumpet is garbage

After I wrote this segment, BetterTrumpet proceeded to release their newest update, 3.3.0.

This update was a fucking disaster. Not only did tabbing to Privacy to disable their phoning home (not anything dangerous; i just did not want to be shown in their statistics following their msedge webview 2 adoption, which bloats up the all) cause an error loop, their new settings page didn't even work.

The 3.3.1 update fixes this, however I will not be updating any further than 3.3.1, and may actually consider downgrading over this. Congratulations, BetterTrumpet. You sold me a solution I liked, then ruined it after a year of updates. Good night.

System Facelifts & Application Launching

Volume is unfortunately far from the only place where this problem has taken hold. The issues have extended to the application space. Specifically, file exploring and launching! Yes, really.

File Exploring: Explorer++

First of all, there is the Explorer++ project, which I used before Directory Opus to circumvent Windows File Explorer's absolute rancid performance. Safe to say, Explorer+ was even more unstable than Explorer, and froze just as much as explorer did, and to this day has not been updated for over two years on the stable branch. Big yikes.

It didn't really feel like a file explorer... It had the stability of an Alpha project, and almost presented uncanny. Like, it looked off. Kinda ugly.

The Taskbar: ExplorerPatcher

Well, we do also have ExplorerPatcher. I have more mixed feelings than I do hate, so sorry in advance for dogging on this tool. But I did want to bring it up.

ExplorerPatcher is a project for modern versions of Windows 10 and all versions of Windows 11 (latest best supported) that reimplements the Windows 10 taskbar and offers the option to access some hidden, older system segments that aren't normally accessible.

It is a cool project, I can say that much. It's neat, and it does provide a look that most people are familiar with. But there are a couple of problems, mainly because of who it targets. Frankly, the settings are overwhelming and a lot to look at it, and even to navigate. I found it quite a headache, and it loses points for that off the bat.

There is also the fact it is new and unstable. It basically hooks into Windows, which seems to have caused incompatibilities and side effects with some other programs. It's fine, and it is quite neat for a free project, however I feel that StartAllBack is a more customizable project that has suited my needs far better right now.

Program launchers before keyboard: Asuite & Quick Access Popup

Speaking of fun, let's talk about program launchers. ASuite is an old program launcher from 2020, built on the ancient Pascal. It's really neat, but it's effectiveness... Ehhh, debatable. It does its thing, but configuring new entries is confusing and a pain in the asshole. It's nice, and is the kind of program I want, but a little too old.

Quick Access Popup succeeded it for a while, and while it was much more robust... Ehh. It was not open source which was pretty sad, but it also made me realize that while I love having a solution, I absolutely hate designing and maintaining it. Like a lot. So, I ended up giving up on that model and going for the Keyboard typing approach. That's how I got to Flow Launcher!

A quick and (un)honorable mention to Process Lasso

Let's throw in PL real quick. Process Lasso is a program that aims to permanently save CPU affinity and a bunch of types of process priorities, similar to System Informer.

It also, quite frankly, sucks. The UI was overwhelming on first use and even then it didn't get much better, there were a whole bunch of 'priority' modes that I didn't understand when all I wanted was just priority for the 'process', etc... Not even comments for processes.

So, back to System Informer it was. It was freemium anyway.

The problem is Windows. It always was.

Now, here is some food for thought... I've mentioned at least ten programs since the start of this blog post. Ten! That is ten apps that try to do what Windows does, but better.

And I can hear the obvious question: "Why not use what comes with Windows? Why can't Microsoft do this?", and the question is that Microsoft not only invented these problems, but it's what keeps their pockets flowing with money.

And yes, I do see you over there, Linux... But that's not what we're talking about today.

It was designed to be terrible

Windows, in general, has MANY problems.

It is just a nightmare to deal with. It is infamous for having failing updates and loads of technical nightmares, on older hardware it magically performs poorly overnight, updates infamously break everything overnight, the said updates Microsoft pushes has done things from causing bluescreen loops to massively accelerating SSD failure rates...

Oh, I never said updates were the problem, they are just one of the many things Microsoft has fucked up in their lifetime! How about forcing people to make a Microsoft account, on an operating system that never offered you the option until 2012. The compatibility with older games getting worse every day? GameHouse games from 2005 being unplayable now? The absolute JOKE that is system stability on Windows?

Eleven more problems.

It's like they purposefully designed Windows to be horrible. And that's just Windows 10 we're talking about!

Windows 11 gives shit as much as it gives gold. Yes, Windows 11 made many improvements to WIndows by introducing Auto HDR, Windowed Optimizations and opening the door for utilities like StartAllBack. I do in fact agree that they are much necessary, and that Windows 11 over time has gotten better. At least, 22H2 has.

But the thing is that it has fucked up just as hard. Remember the SSD killing thing? That was a Windows 11 update. Not to mention I've repeatedly experienced issues updating to Windows 11 from Windows 10 (and even 10 to 10) with context menus being broken and busted, with no amount of basic maintenance fixing it. Who the hell wants to install Windows from scratch?

This is not even including their UI design. I think their graphic design was so terrible. They wanted to be the next Mac OS, and they managed to fuck up UI navigation by doing so. Running loops, dogshit UI design you cannot turn off without extra programs, missing UI features (like showing the song that's playing when you pause!!! yes, really!!!) that have been present since WINDOWS 8...

I don't know what kind of crack they smoke in Microsoft's office. It must be some heavy weed, and I need that weed, because I have never something so fucking BROKEN and awful before. Really!!!

And nobody has in their life created a solution that fits the masses. If you aren't a home office user, or a basic user, you can go fuck yourself as far as the world's aware!

The tray, my personal enemy

Don't even get me fucking started with the tray design. It has been horrible since as far back as Windows 95!!! AND THE BIG PROBLEM HAS BEEN AROUND AS LONG AS WINDOWS XP!!!

Let me tell you a story that you've probably heard before. A nerd installs twelve programs to clean up Windows. Eight all make tray icons. Only two let you hide them, one can be hidden by doing clever Visual Basic shit to hide the verbose window instead...

I'm sure you can just hide it forever...

And that's it. Five icons remain on your Tray forever, to no avail. You cannot get rid of them. You cannot remove them, ever.

Really, look this up. Google "windows completely hide tray icon", and Google's Gemini will hallucinate that a special little windows setting will hide it. No really, try it.

You tried it yet?

Yeah, well that didn't delete the icon, did it? It hid it into its own menu.

No, you cannot

This, small frustration, is the root to all the hate I have for Windows, and programs in general. When everything creates a tray icon, an artificial intelligence hallucinates a non-solution, all the solutions don't work, and there is no compromise. Either you spill all the garbage in view, or out of view. There is no cleanup. Nobody is giving you a broom and dustpan.

Oh sorry, did you mishear me? Let me say again: there is no good solution to fix this problem. The closest I ever got that compacts a million tray icons into one is MinimizeToTray... An autoit program that is falsely detected by Windows Security, runs like shit and does not resolve the core issue. If anything, it is unstable and fucking dogshit.

Everything else, you guessed that right... Adds a bunch of icons to the tray for EVERY app you minimize to tray. From RBTray, to the generic bullshit.

Who the fuck wants a menu full of shit you don't wanna use? I'm sorry, but this is not Windows XP days, where opening the tray menu would spill all the icons out all onto the taskbar. I'm sorry, but when I need a million programs to do the bare minimum because Microsoft cannot accomodate me, I like to at least have a nice drink before you decide to FUCK ME.

Psychological warfare for neat freaks

Who the fuck wants to suffer this SH?? This is like psychological torture, being forced to live with the clutter or being forced to take ten times as long to perfect volumes, file exploring, and searching files... Who the hell wants to wait 10 minutes to find one file?

And it's not like it's impossible to fix this problem, and developers have the perfect reason not to. Many apps already do this. Hell, Music Presence, Directory Opus and Flow Launcher let you disable the tray icon while still happily running in the background. Sunshine server lets you do it (while it's better fork Apollo does not; what the fuck?!), even SYNCTHING works without a tray icon!!!

These apps just say "Hell yeah, brother! I'mma go over there, and I'll see you when you need me!", and everybody else just rolls their eyes, drools a little and goes "uhhh no, you don't need that, lol". Yes, we fucking do..? It's a fundamental problem nobody but me gives a fuck about??

There is the second wave of developers that say they need time to focus on it later. You are all saints, but please maybe notify me when you resolve this... It's so frustrating.

Solutions that create more problems.

This issue, by the way, extends far from just the system being dogshit. This issue is also with developers having no hindsight!

Let's say you're a gamer. Games run like ass, because nobody knows how shaders work. An online forum tells you to fix the game performance by turning on the 'shader cache', a sort of folder full of files that make games run faster by loading those instead of doing intense work to remake them every time.

Cool, we turn it on. And that fixes the problem!

...And then bloats your hard drive full of massive files you don't need within 6 months. Your system drive, only 100GB, is already completely full. Yet, all thsoe shaders are about 80GB! Why can't we just move it to Drive Two, where we have over 20 TB free, forever?

That's the neat part! You don't!

No, really. Nvidia does not allow you to set the location of this cache. Gamers have resolved the issue with Sym links, which not only doesn't actually fix the issue, but also is pretty much impossible when you can't delete all the shaders in the folder at one time.

So now, you literally have to choose between having literally no shader cache, or having your drive full all the time. So if you're broke and you ask reddit, free bullying for you over a design flaw, I guess.

Actually, I have even MORE in my sleeve! Let me tell you all about it!

Overlays are usually worse than they are

You know what an overlay is, right? You see chat messages from your friends while playing, you know who is muted, you can press a few buttons and open a guide you need.

Cool. Now imagine them being too big for your hard drive, and their practical use being near none.

There is exactly ONE overlay that did anything right, and that is Steam Overlay. Of course, it has issues in a small set of games and there's no workaround for that. BUT for 99% of your game library, it's an option, and it works like holy water on your tongue. Plus, it's so convenient to open a web browser, type in discord.com and have a free alternative for Discord Overlay.

It's even better, because like Steam Input you can disable it per game, and it has practical uses. As I said, the web browser thing is heavenly, but it also seems to be quite light, and lets you access all of steam! So you can browse the store front.

And, with some shitty workarounds and steps, you can kinda put extensions on them and barely configure them. But don't use it as a daily driver, it sucks.

Discord Overlay is dogshit, by the way. When it comes to displaying notifications, it's great and does the job. But when it comes to OPENING the overlay, it is the most rancid horrible thing. The shortcut takes a couple of seconds (compared to Steam Overlay being literally instant) to open it, in some games it causes unbearable and eye straining flickering, and responding to messages is horrible and only reveals chat messages... Whenever it feels like, really.

Not to mention the original overlay used to be worse. It never displayed properly ANYWHERE. Not to mention, the overlay, IN GENERAL used to fuck up the mouse movement on Battlefield 3. Two completely unrelated things, that should have not been related, are..???

???????

And nobody else has done it right. Rockstar Overlay is completely useless, has an unknown file size, and constantly opens when I don't want it open! Fuck off, I'm trying to play Grand Theft Auto!

Epic Games is even worse, because it's forced in all the games I play, and I don't even want to touch Epic's turds longer than I have to. Yet, deleting it from my launcher install saves 300MB, then bricks the launcher permanently!

Is forced software you don't want a trend now, or something?

Gaming has become as divided as streaming

You know the memes, that you need about twelve streaming services to ever watch what you want? Gaming might as well be the same thing. It's like every game developer, looked at streaming, scoffed and went "I can do better! Watch this!", then immediately made a scene ten times worse than streaming.

Steam is a good reference point

I mean, really. Steam is run by a company that has lost any of my respect for their games because of the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive bullshit (which could also be it's own blog post, honestly... Just look at my Counter-Strike 2 review!), but their launcher? It's pretty good. You can move games, it's nice to use, it's run by a company known to have amazing consumer and purchasing practices, and I have a lot of respect for Valve putting money aside to make something that actually works.

Epic Games is the dogshit rival to Steam

Epic Games, on the other hand, manages to be the opposite of that in every way. It is already known they are a dogshit company, and Fortnite is more predatory than ROBLOX (at least in my mind) for not giving you free look surgery despite ROBLOX being more than capable of letting you do so.

Yet it's like they made it their life mission to fuck up everything that goes into making a Launcher act good. The resources the launcher use bloats the launcher up, the launcher size itself is bloated and overly fragmented, their overlay is permanently binded to you, moving games immediately bricks the game installs with the game being permanently unmanagable until you do a clean install of the launcher (if you're not techy enough for that; A FULL REINSTALL OF WINDOWS!!!!), horrible UI design, even more leftover legacy UI designs than windows...

This is on top of the fact that Epic just wants to get you through the door with free games, with their launcher making it a pain in the ass to get those said games. Fortnite contributes to the toxic space that has had me rant before, they are worse than ROBLOX at times, and it's almost like they're getting a sick amusement from all of this! Fix your launcher, holy fuck!

And they want you to pay them? No, go the fuck away! You might as well buy the game again on Steam! What the fuck?!

GOG is a close competitior, but still no dice

Look, listen to me for a second. I love GOG. The games have no DRM and can be freely shared across your computers without activation limits, and the company goes out of their way to fix the compatibility of old games. it's AMAZING!

GOG Galaxy, however, really is not it. The UI kinda acts like it's trying to be the qBitTorrent of organization, and it doesn't look very pleasant compared to Steam. It's way too basic, and doesn't offer anything over Steam. The gameplay metrics aren't worth it, and counting hours is pretty useless when the whole appeal is playing without a launcher. It just... It's just peachy.

Though, despite their launcher being dogshit, the way they handle gaming and DRM is amazing. So continue buying through GOG if you can. Yeah, they're pretty expensive and you don't get the convenience of Steam. But you get what you pay for; you can install it without a launcher, save some space and carry it on a USB. It's better than Steam from a freedom standpoint.

Everything else

I'm grouping together everything else, because they're all the same.

Amazon Luna and GeForce Now sound amazing at first, but really, you're just in the streaming business all over again. Amazon is a company that is quite frankly horrible but still shopped on by millions anyway, and Luna is just... Ugh. It's Google Stadium over again.

GeForce Now is even worse, because you only get an hour of playtime at a time, wait behind like a hundred people without fail, and can't customize the graphics options before you even launch. So you're wasting time reconfiguring graphics and spending far less time, well... Playing the fucking game???

Not to mention you have to OWN the fucking game.

That's also on top of Rockstar Launcher and Ubisoft Connect basically just being their games and nothing else. Plus, they're just as bad as their competitiors! They're basic! They fucking suck!

EA is ten times worse, because it's EA, the WORST gaming company to exist! Who the fuck wants to buy a game from a company with an anticheat that is untransparent, and could never fix a game if it saved their life!

I'm going to say this with full seriousness: BATTLEYE IS A BETTER ANTICHEAT THAN EA JAVELIN, BECAUSE THEY TELL YOU WHAT BLOCKED THE GAME!!!

Other miscellaneous stuff I want to rant about

There is just so much wrong... I can't even say gaming and computing is the problem, because it's also at the web front. Web developers are inconsistent with designs. Some Elements that SHOULD be opened with middle click, don't. Mastodon is ESPECIALLY guilty of this!

Discord is a hellspace because CSS constantly breaks all the time for no reason (especially when you theme it), I can remove almost every button except the app launcher, for some fucking reason? Then on top of that, nobody at Vencord or its fork has ever thought that maybe they should make a plugin to remove them like people at BetterDiscord has.

Not to mention Vencord swooped up the mod community and now dominates the economy. Replugged and Shelter are too obscure and specific to gain any specific traction, and if you develop for plugins in BetterDiscord... What the fuck are you doing?

And I don't have BetterDiscord plugins because I hate BetterDiscord. I hate them, because it might as well be using Internet Explorer in 2026. And with no way to use multiple mods at once, you might as well be not developing plugins at al. They wouldn't have existed in peace together anywhere, I suppose.

At the core, you can say the computer manufacturers are the biggest problem

But hey, some silver lining to this. Most of the madness comes from the computer manufacturers! Laptop manufacturers create overly cheap gaming laptops that cannot be upgraded to incentivize being scammed by the market to spend thousands of dollars every 3 years on new computers, when the prebuilt market could literally SAVE you money over the long run.

Like holy shit, and it's so much worse, because often times the problems with slowness is shortcutted with better specs. Yeah, developers could get off their ass and optimize code, but who cares when you could buy a CPU twelve times faster than your last one, and bruteforce optimization by just using faster hardware? Hurray for laziness!!!

And if you ever buy another computer, stay the FUCK away from HP and ASUS. What horrible laptops and desktops. I had an HP Elitedesk that was refurbished, and two of the ram slots are now dead, seemingly. I also have an HP Laptop 15 that suffers from VRM overheating when doing more than just browsing a few super lightweight applications, that was in this state when I got it.

Oh, and I owned an ASUS FX505GT. Worst laptop ever made. Tripped up Windows' bullshit all the time, and within 2 years, the screen was broken. Froze a lot and was abused while I owned it. Slow garbage, avoid it and get something else.

...Why are you looking at me like that? I'm not a conspiracy theorist, you are! I'm not crazy, they are!!!