I stopped using Windows in 2008 (juggling between a mixture of Linux and Mac OS). One of the reasons, is that at that time I thought Windows was legitimately a mess.
Over time, I thought it got a bit better when seeing it on friends’s computers.
Due to laziness, Windows 11 got installed on my office computer (which I use 1% of my time) and I thought it was honestly pretty good (as in, I never thought about switching back, but it was fine to use it when necessary).
Now that they plug in ads, I’ll certainly want to switch back /s
“Publish or perish” is an expression that’s been around since forever and it’s well ingrained into every researcher’s mind so…
What did society expect?
(Not so) Fun story: when a friend of mine was doing her PhD she was trying really hard to reproduce an experiment published on Nature by two Harvard postdocs at the time. She was so frustrated because she couldn’t reproduce it, so she approached one of the authors during a conference and he candidly admitted the experiment was utterly wrong, since after publishing it they realized they made a fatal mistake in interpreting the result which invalidated their claims.
They published the original paper honestly, since they were not aware of the mistake at the time, but they willingly decided not to retract it since a paper in Nature is always a paper in Nature and the citations piling up were too important for their career… How about that for the intellectual honesty that scientists project having as an aura?
Anyhow, this nearly killed my friend’s PhD, but luckily she switched to something related she managed to understand and graduated…