He was also really good at Microsoft Word, unironically - he made extensive use of custom styling and could format an assignment paper in like 30 seconds. He was super useful in group projects.
I used to laugh at the LaTeX masochists in college spending 15 minutes just to put a picture where they wanted the picture to be. They had to add like four 1-character modifiers to the "insert image" command, each of which meant "yes, really here", "no, don't move it to the next page" and "nono, really really here".
MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic. Has great referencing tools etc, fantastic formula editor and so on. And, well, you can use ultra modern human-machine interaction technology such as a mouse to choose where a picture goes and how big it is.
(They might've enshittified it since; the last paper I wrote was in 2010 and Word was pretty damn decent back then)
MS word also has character styles (like a CSS style on a <span>). IMO you should use instead of bold or italic.
(There are three more types of styles: linked, table and List. See https://office-watch.com/2022/word-five-types-styles/)
But yeah for layout, ie headings and the likes, only ever use the styles, never "bold, bigger bigger bigger". Don't touch the line spacing button, etc etc.
IMO Word could do with a mode where those buttons are simply hidden. Want a bigger, fatter heading? Edit the heading style. There's no other way.
I'm pretty much still on the same setup now, Win11 plus touchscreen. You'll pry my touchscreen out of my cold dead hands. How will I rage-close a "try chrome" popup without a touch screen? You ever try to rage click something with a touchpad? Total non starter.
They're not like a car enthusiast who loves their MX5 out of its sheer beauty and feel, but rather they love their SUV because of it's big boot and because it gets them where they need to be, and thus are perfectly happy to tear out the old radio and uncomfortable seats.
The only difference is that car enthusiasts have many more options to choose from, while in OSes, if you're stuck with Windows, you're usually really stuck with it. Linux is certainly an option, but not one that is universally practical to apply.
For most people I'm sure computers are a tool not an identity.
These days whenever I use Windows I install bash and use a terminal so I don't really care about the window management, other than maximizing windows.
And then I use my touchpad to switch between virtual desktops and the jerky animation reminds me why I prefer to run non-game Windows applications remotely from a Mac.
That said, for work I've switched to Linux full-time years ago. Native containers are a killer feature for me, and the different UX and driver/dependency/repository issues aren't significant enough to make me want to go back to virtualization in Windows.
You could even do a lot of kernel-level shenanigans with relative impunity thanks to its layered design. You could do some amazing stuff.
As an example, SWSoft released container ("lightweight virtualization") support for Windows in 2005, before containers were even a thing in the mainline Linux. They did that by adding a layer of redirection on top of the kernel objects without having access to Windows source code.
That’s… weirdly agressive. What about me stating I’ve never met a fan of X feels bigoted to you?
I share their sentiment, it's like discovering that there is a group of people who are Internet Explorer fans, or avid listeners of the generic no-name pop songs specifically made to be unremarkable background music they play in my gym to avoid paying royalties. It's just surprising since I haven't met anyone who doesn't just treat it as something to either put up with or replace with alternatives before.