And they are right.

The enshittification of windows is by far the most egregious example in modern software.

Windows is disgusting. The start menu is disgusting. The bloat, slowness, lack of design cohesion and flakiness has real consequences.

Its not "you suck" it's "windows used to be better" and to me it seems objectively true that it used to be better

I think people who do this think that people who use Windows perceive that the Mac experience is smoother, and may have some sort of Mac envy.

The end of the video gives this away: it's the Think Different font. It's a direct callback to the _idea_ of Apple vs Microsoft, not the reality today of Apple vs Microsoft.

I know many devs who use Windows exclusively, but they are in two camps:

a) Super old-school: still maintaining Windows desktop apps; that's what their career has been and there's no need for anything else.

b) WSL-based, VSCode-using devs who are one step away from just using Linux. These are the folk who fifteen years ago would have been using what was then still OSX. But these folk don't use Windows as Windows: they use it as a semi-Unix.

The whole purpose of Raycast is to improve productivity and UX, be that under macOS or Windows. It'd be a pretty shitty launch announcement if the blog post didn't mention the problem that they're trying to solve.

Edit: I'm not sure if the post was edited after my reply, but ATM there's no mention of BSODs - the closest I can see to a dig at Windows is:

> You know the feeling. Search that can't find your files. Apps buried in menus. Simple tasks that take too many clicks. Your computer should be faster than this. It should feel like everything is at your fingertips. That’s why we built Raycast.

All the ridicule is well-deserved IMO. There is an alternate universe where Microsoft would have continued Windows in the 2000/XP/7 tradition and it would be a solid operating system, serving the user, underpinned by a very good foundation (after all, the original NT people were stellar engineers that worked on VMS before).

[1] Earlier NT versions were also quite good, but most consumers didn't encounter it.

XP was the golden age and this is just a play on nostalgia to when Windows was actually useful.

I’ve been off of Windows for a few years now and any time I need to use a Windows system it’s just a constant reminder of how terrible everything is.

I know more about both Windows AND Linux than most Linux Systems Administrators that I encounter. I know more about how making them work together in an enterprise than any Linux Administrator. I understand more about literally every underlying protocol AND how to manage those items on Linux and Windows, from DHCP, DNS, Networking, etc.

For all intents, I could be a pretty bad ass "Linux guru"--and for the most part, I hold my own quite well. I know how to manage SSSD, understand integrating Linux and Windows environments into harmony with each other. But my peers often see something in Windows they dislike, or a single thing that Microsoft hasn't really bothered to improve, and holy fuck in their minds the sky is falling and it's the absolutely worse thing they've ever had to do with a computer.

So I keep one foot outside of that world because these people are just fucking insufferable to work with and around.

Though yeah, bit farfetched maybe but also somewhat fitting.

Because of that, I've found it difficult to even give Raycast a try, let alone switch over to it.

Perhaps you could offer your best argument to persuade me why it would be worthwhile.

https://www.voidtools.com/

That’s surprising to me, since it’s not how it works in the mac version of Raycast.

There you just type the extension name to trigger it, which you can also set an alias for, so I have it set so that if I type “c” then press space I see my list of vscode projects which I can search. “f” goes into file search (I think that’s the default even)

While we don’t have all features on Windows yet, we see this a nice uplift.

I agree with you on PowerToys - that's also a first install. Raycast is really PowerToys for Mac... But now on Windows, perhaps for the people that started on Mac and have to use Windows, rather than the other way around.

Not even if it's Everything? IMHO the best file search for Windows. Does one thing and does it perfectly.

And I forked Switcheroo to accommodate how I want Alt+Tab yo behave: https://github.com/coezbek/switcheroo

Alfred isn't the shiniest thing anymore but it's stood the time remarkably well, something I value very highly for tools as central to my workflow as Alfred.

raycast.com/pricing