Hey , i am a Web developer and a full time Linux user for about 8 years .

Recently i had a change in my life that requires me to do a lot of traveling, So i bought myself a Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 14 Ultrabook . Obviously it came with Windows 8.1 Pro installed on it . My plan was to wipe it out and install a Linux system instead. But when i turned it on and had a chance to interact with the system for couple of hours, i decided to stick with Windows for a while and make some Windows Phone apps ( as i got a windows 8 phone recently ).

So here i share my experience with Windows 8.1 after 8 years of Linux only :

First thing i have installed Visual Studio 2013 Community edition , but the installer was crashing for some reason . In addition to that i have noticed that the computer is full of Lenovo software/drivers that pop out every couple of minutes asking for updates and popping out various notifications.

I have a 30GB 3G internet plan with my mobile phone provider so it was a pain to disable all the automatic updates of about 12 software packages.

The bottom line , the computer was full of crappy Lenovo and other brands software that just gets in my way and i don't want to use. Even worse after about 2 days some of the bundled Lenovo apps started crashing once in a while. I know this issue is not related to microsoft, and i am not blaming them for this.

So the decision was to install a clean Windows 8.1 system . ( Good luck with that ... )

When i came to my office i have downloaded a Windows 8 Installation media from this page . ( btw i was amazed by the fact that i can download an official Windows version from Microsoft ).

When i got home i started the Setup process , but it asked me for a product key . As i have found the OEM license model has changed in Windows 8. If you buy a Windows 8 pre-installed computer, you will no longer see a sticker on the back machine with a product key printed on it. The key is now embedded in BIOS and can be retrieved automatically during the activation process in Windows 8. With a help of my phone i have found some pre-installation keys on the internet and the setup has continued . In the process i have wiped all the partitions i had on my drive because Lenovo had setup a restore partition as really don't want to restore this bloated version ever!

Windows 8 Setup was finished and after couple of questions my clean Windows 8.1 Install was ready . But hey .... ! What is going on?

i have no internet access! Device manager shows me 8 Question marks with unknown hardware and my WiFi adapter is part of that list.

This can't be happening! i am on the go and i have no internet .. can you get the picture ? no internet ! and i have a week left until i get back to my office.

I'm so lucky that i have internet access on my phone , so i rush to Lenovo support site and find the drivers i need , 230mb WiFi driver ! What ?!

Well i have no choice, i am trying to download that, but my phone says to me that exe is not a supported file type and refuses to download it !

At this point i don't care supported or not, i just want to download it and transfer it to my laptop via usb cable , but i am out of luck.

I try to find some downloader application in the store but every one of them has a limit of 20mb over cellular connection. Now i am really frustrated and i cannot understand why this should be a hardcoded limit and why can't i disable it if i need. I starting to feel that the whole ecosystem is trying to get in my way.

I decide to leave this stuff for tomorow and just install a Visual Studio from an ISO i have downloaded earlier, just to make time go by . Visual Studio is installed , i start a new Windows Phone JavaScript project, trying to test the code on emulator and bam! it tells me that i cannot start emulator without a verified developer account. Now i am really pissed off, i don't want to waste my time any more and i go to sleep.

In the morning i get on my bike, drive to an internet cafe , download a Live USB with Ubuntu 14.04 , return to my place and Install ubuntu on the whole drive.

Guess what , Everything works like a charm , WiFi is working , i am able to access the internet , touchscreen and gestures work as expected , all the function buttons do what they should i feel back at home . I start Subleme Text , download some npm packages and started writing code.

All of this took me no more than 40 minutes.

This can't be right , a modern operating system with a 4GB install media has no minimal support for a modern workstation laptop? I remember when the things where the other way around when i just started using Linux , modems where not working, video drivers where some black voodoo you need to mess with, but windows had it all working. Well maybe its my carma after using Linux for 8 years, but for me it was a very frustrating experience and i think it is unacceptable for an OS vendor like Microsoft.

I don't expect Windows to be Linux, but hey this is just too much.

This makes me really happy that Linux ecosystem has evolved so much , i have no doubts that

it is a perfect match for me and it never holds me back. So if once i thought about making

some apps for windows store, now i can say : definitely no windows store apps from me.

Had to get it out ...

Thanks