HN Reader

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal.

Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.

If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.

If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.

Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?

This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, and I couldn't add new users, one program told me to use the other program which brought me back to the original program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make it work. I just went and installed Linux finally. I was on POP_OS! for a good year, but been on Arch Linux for one year plus now.

I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.

Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

I came to rely pretty heavily on Docker and WSL(2) in Windows. I was an insiders user for a bit over a decade, and worked with .Net and C# since it was "ASP+" ...

I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back to my windows drive...

I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and results etc. on the browser.

Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.

I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect, but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now seems to regularly.

Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done" and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting worse.

As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these:

* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers.

* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.

* Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.

* Audio filtering is a pain to set up.

> You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent.

This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update.

Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.

Every month more and more people switch to Linux and I just love it. I'm tired of one company controlling the core operating system of 85% of desktop computers and users being at their whim.

You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!

My story is simpler. Microsoft dropped the support for Windows 10 and gave me no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently.

So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine.

Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.

But, “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU” forced me to adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.

There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds’ famous “you don’t break userspace”, something along the lines of “you don’t break the upgrade path”.

I'm still surviving on Windows but only because over the last four years, as each new annoyance and regression arose, I made the mistake of very gradually, in tiny increments, sinking the time into invoking the arcane incantations necessary to tame each one.

15 minutes to deactivate an entire branch of notification pathways, 20 minutes to (mostly) restore the Right-Ctrl key they hijacked into a CoPilot key. 10 minutes to restore Win10 functionality to the Win11 taskbar with the wonderful ExplorerPatcher. $5 spent on Start11 to sidestep the whole start menu train wreck. And little 3 to 5 minute fixes with WindHawk (an amazing store-like platform to discover, install and manage open source Windows GUI patches).

I'm the stupid frog who didn't leap from the gradually heating pot. I acclimated to the boiling. And it's... okay. At least for now. But I know someday soon, the thousand faceless product managers at MSFT will break something unfixable. Somehow exceed the considerable abilities of the large community finding clever hacks and patches to keep the harsh Win wasteland livable for hardy souls.

While I greatly appreciate Linux philosophically and deeply respect it architecturally, I still really liked what Windows got so close to being - right before MSFT shifted biz models, simultaneously de-investing and turning it into a promotional platform for their other business. When that day comes, it'll suck to leave behind the wonderful third-party tools like Everything search, Ditto clipboard and AHK automation that streamline my day.

The thing I don't understand is why MSFT refuses to just make a version of Windows that's a Product again. I'd gladly pay them $100/yr for an upgraded "Windows Ti Super+" that just wants to be a good operating system for advanced users, instead of a strategic moat or monetization flywheel.

I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now (over a decade, started with 8.04). Linux still has it's fair share of bugs but I'll take having to deal with those over running Windows or MacOS any day.

For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some things like updates that you have zero control over. It's the same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but you're still at the whims of Apple's design choices every year when they decide to release a new OS update.

Linux, for all it's issues, give you absolute control over your system and as a developer I've found this one feature outweighs pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates don't run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn't upgrade unless I tell it to. Even when it comes to bugs at least you have the power to fix them instead of waiting on an update hoping it will resolve that issue. Granted in reality I wait for updates to fix various small issues but for bigger ones that impact my workflow I will go through the trouble of fixing it.

I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I'm quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually ran Linux because Windows/MacOS just worked but I see more and more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have become.

Its was a good read until at the end ...

> For the remainder of 2026, Microsoft is cooking up a big one: replacing more and more native apps with React Native. But don't let the name fool you, there's nothing "native" about it. These are projects designed to be easily ported across any machine and architecture, because underneath it all, it's just JavaScript. And each one spawns its own Chromium process, gobbling up your RAM so you can enjoy the privilege of opening the Settings app.

I'm a little tired of people junking on react native when they have no clue what they talked about (And I'm not even react native dev but iOS dev). React Native doesn't spawn any chromium process. This is not electron. React Native doesn't even use v8 engine. All UI views and widgets are native. Platform SDK is native, Yoga Layout is native C++ and even faster than UIKit layout. Majority of RN code is Native - go have a look at github at languages section. JS is only 19% of codebase, everything else is C++, Obj-C, Obj-C++, Kotlin, Java.

The problem AFAIK with startup being laggy was making http requests to downloads those ads.

Shhh! Don’t tell anyone.

Years ago MS depended on Windows. It was the profit center. Everything MS did was a moat to sell more seats. Even MS-Exchange was just a ploy to force enterprises to stop deploying any other operating system.

That all changed with Azure.

MS realized they could make billions in Windows or trillions with Azure.

They changed the org structure. Now Azure is at the top and everything else is a moat or a way to draw people to Azure. They changed the sales commission (your multiplier doesn’t kick in unless you’ve sold enough cloud services).

Windows is no longer a profit center. It’s a cost center.

Anything that scares people away from using Windows is a benefit.

Let those other suckers spend money developing operating systems. As long as it runs on a VM in Azure, Microsoft will profit.

Windows being worse and worse isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Apple forced me to switch to Linux!

Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!

Still reading the article, but early on it says:

"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.

That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?

Like the author says:

> Linux is the preferred platform for development

Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge

As an Ableton user myself, I’m pretty surprised that this musician could just… switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to show how dire the situation was I guess.

I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.

How likely is a future where Microsoft

(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,

(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,

(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again,

(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?

It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.

(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)

With Windows 10 EOL, I had to decide whether to upgrade my laptop to Windows 11 or Linux. I've been a Windows user for decades, but with all the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft and the degradation of performance on Windows 11, I decided to go with Ubuntu instead.

I'm still on a Windows 11 desktop for the time being, but seriously considering switching there as well. The main thing stopping me is the undeniably better ecosystem on Windows for professional video editing and music production, with no comparable open-source options. I've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on high quality virtual instruments and effects plugins. But if I can manage to run these under emulation on Linux or find equivalent Linux-native versions, I will happily abandon all Microsoft products at this point.

I switched from Windows (11) to Linux (Xubuntu) back in November, mostly because of all the AI stuff I didn't trust. While Linux is working ok for me, I can see why people complain about its not being user-friendly, particularly if you're not a Real Programmer. I've had to go to forums too many times to figure out why this or that doesn't work. The latest is the fact that 'apt update' has stopped working today for Vivaldi--it worked ok yesterday, but I have not been able to get it working after spending an hour or more. (If you're interested, there's a thread here: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/115133/public-key-is-not-ava....)

Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap', and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While I think snap is updating automatically, it's hard to tell; some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.

Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?

I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard, particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)

I guess there are distros that are better about some of these things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months later.

So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to Windows. But Linux sure could work better.

Linux since 1996! In chronological order: Slackware, SuSE, DLD, LSF, Gentoo, Ubuntu (starting with 04.10!), eventually Debian 12, now 13.

Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D

Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.

I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.

One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer provided by them, I quickly said, ‘No, thank you,’ and left. The faces they made were truly priceless.

Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted Windows 10.

Linux user since about 1998, leaning towards BSDs today. Network engineer + R&D + software dev. Daily driver (desktop) about 2002-2010 - work made it too difficult later. Very occasional gamer. Corporate world will give you a Windows VDI or web cloudy things if need be. Win10 on my laptop out of habit, mostly using terminals + WSL and a browser. Lightroom user, but flexible. None of the other gear I own runs Windows, and the numbers are significant (racks). I run my laptops until they die - the current one is 10y and hasn't died yet but won't run Win11 without going through hoops. Next laptop will not be running Windows outside of a VM.

Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.

I was away from Windows for the past 12 years. Recently we bought a desktop and had to install Wondows on it. I was just shocked by the level of shittification that happened. I can't even find a Solitaire game that is not littered with ads.

I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud, office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built by Gates.

You know what's funny about this article.... Back in 2012 I had the same problems with Windows Update and that is what forced me to go to a mac. I've never looked back.

I think I might be the only developer left on this forum, and maybe on the planet, who still uses Microsoft OS daily (for over 30 years). I rarely have issues with it, find it incredibly stable, and have made a lot of money using it.

Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.

Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.

> Actually, scratch that, I think it really started with the non-consensual updates

MS in general have idea of consent of an average rapist.

Yes/Remind me later is basically norm in their dark UI patterns, it bothered me for months to add copilot button to teams

Right now I'm running a setup with Fedora on my work machine, CachyOS on my laptop, Windows on my home battlestation gaming rig and a Mac Mini M4 I bought for a educational discount. I basically run 3 different kernels, and I feel the same with the author here.

Windows 11 is such a mess that Microsoft thought that they are Apple, so they want to enforce Microsoft Account just like Apple enforces Apple ID to some extent, except this time Microsoft is staking in higher than Apple -- Any active "exploits" that bypasses Microsoft Account got patched not so soon after they are published, and that is what finally intrigued me.

Unfortunately, some of my games runs on Easy Anti-Cheat, and to my knowledge, the Linux switch is opt-in rather than opt-out, most game developers simply didn't put the Linux as a matter on the table even with the introduction of Steam Deck and Steam OS.

I'm planning to wipe my PC after settling some scores, and I still have to go for Windows, but except I will be rolling back to Windows 10 IoT LTSB. Chances are, if I have another drive (which is slowing going into the unobtainium territory, just like RAM)

But, long as I settled that dust, I will bring another PC back to my home. I'm planning to get another CachyOS on that.

I’m getting closer and closer to making the same decision.

I have a Surface Laptop 5 that won’t enable the AI cruft so I got somewhat lucky there.

But the copilot business is AAF.

And now that I use Claude Code in WSL or my Ubuntu server, I’m pretty much done with visual studio development.

Not sure what’s left.

Satya Nadala will have single-handedly destroyed the Windows ecosystem.

I don't understand why he thinks all users will use WSL in Windows. I have never ever touched it, and I've developed on Windows for decades (C++/C#/JS/web). It seems like trying to make Windows non-native or some semi-Linux.

I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).

Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).

I've been using Linux as my main system for ~25 years, but always kept Windows installed for games. On my latest computer I've build 3 years ago, thanks to Steam with Proton, I no longer have Windows and have been happily playing Windows-only games without major issues.

Between using macOS at work and macOS at home, I really only had my Windows 10 PC for running games in Steam (and I don't even really game very much. I had originally built it with all new parts for Flight Simulator 2020) so its behavior was already becoming annoying whenever I went to use Windows such as the nagging and lack of consent implied with the "finish setting up your PC" window having "continue" (in a bold button) or whatever and "maybe later" (in a tiny link) as options, for example. (The linked article also pointed this out.)

So after making sure I had everything I wanted to keep copied off that computer, I was going to try out Bazzite, but something made me try out the plain old SteamOS steam deck installer first. To my surprise, it actually worked, but only because I had the exact type of system it expected:

64-bit Intel or AMD CPU. (I have AMD.)

AMD Radeon graphics.

NVMe SSD primary boot drive.

UEFI BIOS support

Even the wifi worked. Well, it didn't work the first time, so I thought it wasn't supported. So I hard wired it with Ethernet, but then I saw the Wifi was working. It's possible it updated something or maybe it just needed a reboot.

If it hadn't worked then Bazzite or something similar would have since it's designed to run Steam but with more driver support.

So my complete Windows history is: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP (set to the classic GUI mode), 7, and finally 11, skipping all the others. Windows 7 was peak.

> All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises.

Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)

I had the same story but 15 years ago. I was so happy with XP, but Vista was terrible, so I put Ubuntu on my laptop. When 7 came, it became my OS on my desktop. But then it was 8 time. Couldn't bare it. Now it's Linux everywhere, including my sister, parents, grand parents, girlfriend, brother. Linux Mint is perfect for non technical people BTW. I heard good things about Zorin OS as well.

There’s a lot of odd things said in this article. Like “no more file explorer hanging”, “no more waiting for the start menu to open” - is this something that actually happens to people? Perhaps on very old hardware I could see it, but it’s not my experience at all. Lots of weird emotional and very biased parts to this article.

But it’s just gonna take off here anyway because it’s a switching to Linux article which is like offering HN users free coke.

Had a similar experience in around ~2017 and switched over to Linux. At the time I didn't have the time to build my own and bought a mid-range System76 laptop.

Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year

My Windows 11 installation broke down after one of the updates. Now I get "Please reinstall Windows" warning in Windows Update settings. And some error hex code which doesn't really help. I've installed like 5 different apps on this machine and never ran any "tweaking" scripts or apps.

I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.

I am thankful that so far Microsoft hasn't removed local admin capabilities of Windows, but I dread the day that happens (mainly because it remains the most consistent ways one can deny windows updates).

Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers, where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1 versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU, disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic driver update in an obscure setting.

Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the kernel.

Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I can rollback.

He doesn't get into why he didn't switch to Apple. Kind of a middle ground - it's still got the maddening things about being from a corporate behemoth, but it's closer to Unix and you can run your audio software there. (I would be using Linux instead of Apple yesterday if it weren't for a single music program I can't live without).

Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device [0], so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again. You might think that in 2026 you shouldn't get BSOD, but here we are.

So I am now very wary of any Windows updates, including a Out of Band Update [1], which it is claimed that it resolves some issue. However, since it's never mention whether the Out of Band Update will solve mine, I'm very hesitant to update.

[0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358

Microsoft has always been crap. It's success is contributed to hostile business practices and familiarity not quality of product. IBM and Gates partnered to have an OS installed on its computers to gain customers. With no actual OS Gates bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson and partnered with IBM. This created a direct competitor to Apple. Then Gates partnered with all other PC manufacturers to do the same. This paved way for Microsoft to dominate Apple because they weren't tied to any specific hardware. Then came Active Directory to solidify business use. The businesses rolled with it and users learned Windows which deepened home PC use. Every app "just worked" BECAUSE of the popularity and developers directly targeted it since most people used it, not because it was a good product. Their file system NTFS is crap. Their registry is a mess. Everything about Windows is just awful.

Ah, the Microsoft "updates".

After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).

The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.

It's not going to get any better. Microsoft's problem is tech debt. Copilot doesn't pay tech debt it creates it. It will only get worse faster.

I think Linux is not quite there as gaming system. Simply due to games' compatibility (and I don't play latest and hottest titles, more like Cities-Skylines/Transport Fever/Anno/Satisfactory etc). Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.

But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.

For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.

That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.

Worth clicking for the "Microslop" logo alone!

Shortcut: https://www.himthe.dev/img/blog/microslop/4.png

I never advocated for Windows, but I always used it because it "just worked". At a certain point, I realized - as OP had - that I was spending just as much time configuring Windows as I would be spending configuring Linux.

I've moved to Kubuntu and haven't looked back. Proton support is amazing, and Claude Code fixes the doc-diving problem that used to plague Linux. In fact, with Claude, I was able to get such a buttery smooth setup on Kubuntu - Wezterm auto-saving and restorable sessions (even with multiple windows), a working fading background switcher with history, automounting drives and vhdx images on startup - and these are all relatively simple things, but they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday. I love it and would recommend anyone who is on Windows to reconsider.

Everyone are very unhappy with Windows 11. They kind of were OK with Windows 10. It's continuing the same old cycle. Windows 12 they will make hopefully things tolerable again..

I use Windows to play some games. I remember dual booting on 2000s -- my grub entry for Windows was called "WOW Client".

It seems to be, for most users who switch, that the driver is if they are primarily a consumer or creator. Unix systems have always been a preferred platform for some creators, but this effect seems to be multiplying as the focus for Windows become less and less creator friendly. Yeah, if you are a gamer and watch YouTube videos, then your path to least resistance is Windows; but if you are a software developer, web developer, music editor, video editor, et al... the ability to control, easily automate, and flexibility of your environment (not to mention the reduced system resources) become a huge advantage. There are reasons why MOST creators are moving away from Windows... and most consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with tablets and Chromebooks.

My main operating system is Linux since 2005 or so, or actually late 2004. I still use Win10 on my laptop, for various reasons; in part to test java code and ruby code on windows, in part due to elderly relatives.

Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.

I remember reading an article many years ago about product management being like being a parent, and there being a latter point where you need to let the product go and admit it's done. Windows is clearly there, and Microsoft are doing a terrible job of it. Yes, it's less relevant than it's ever been, but it's still vastly widely deployed, earns money, and delivers other cash cows (like Office) - all they have to do is do the basic stuff to keep it going and not mess it up, but somehow that is not what's happening. Wild.

For a while when I bought new computer (recently Intel NUC), I'd just keep the Windows installed there in case I needed it and I'd dualboot into Linux. More recently I just reflash the whole ssd with Debian and I haven't looked back. Interestingly enough I also have older Macbook Pro from 2015 that I also installed clean Debian on and it's been working amazingly well too. The only thing that would need any patching is the camera, but I don't use it. Everything else worked out of the box - keyboard backlight with nice UI controls in GNOME, LCD brightness, sound, bluetooth, etc.

> Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video acceleration, laggy at times), but functional

That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.

Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.

For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.

The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.

He's a musician, he's switched to Bitwig. Ok, but what about VSTs? I have a collection of instruments I can't leave behind, many are NI, so I'm currently forced to use Windows or Mac.

The only tools pinning me to Windows were photo editing apps (Capture One, Adobe), and some music apps (Reason, a whole bunch of other apps) that I barely used. Cut over to Debian about 4 years ago when my laptop started having thermal issues and Covid encouraged me to buy a tower desktop machine. Haven't looked back, it's been so much more productive. The strange and toxic-to-me design choices in the Win11 UI helped motivate the rapid transition.

The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.

When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.

Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.

Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.

It's still not quite there yet, for me. A lot of older games (which I'm a big fan of) won't run well or at all - and support for Nvidia is still not great.

If I could get within even 10% of the performance I get on Windows, and know I could safely choose to play some old 2000's game or something that just released just fine, I really wouldn't mind. But it feels like a roulette wheel and some important game I wanted to play just may not work, or may run terribly.

"All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises."

This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services, because if you for example want to do a download of email or files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating system, plus they get users.

Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.

Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years, unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.

And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually, terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again, whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.

I switched my parents to linux during the gnome 2 days and have given them a consistent environment ever since (kept them on mate).

It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).

Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.

My wife was complaining about her Windows 11 laptop crashing. I tried everything and even did fresh installs. Still crashing (and honestly pretty slow). I gave up on Windows and installed Ubuntu and Chromium for her. She can instagram, facebook, save her memes, and its all fast. No crashes. She's a happy camper now. I think a lot of (even) non technical people would like Linux a lot more than they realize if they gave it a shot.

I'll copy my comment on another article here:

2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:

- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11

- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux

- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting

- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month

- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months

- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was

- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them

In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.

>Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?

Only weird because you were only 6 years old. My first computer was an IBM XT clone, with the full 640k of RAM, a 30 MB harddrive, 5 1/4" floppy drive, Hercules graphics and the amber-colored screen. Also had the turbo button that took it from 4.77 MHz to 10 MHz. Ran DOS v3.3 for a while but eventually upgraded to v5.0.

I take an adversarial approach to Windows. Which started with Windows XP and its supremely annoying zip-files-as-folders approach. Sorry, but I didn’t want that, and I still gleefully rip it out of every Windows install I touch.

And then things started snowballing with every version.

Plus, I have elderly clients that got hopelessly lost on any UI after XP, so I had a lot of hacking-and-slashing to do there for not only them, but also myself. Like, just give me the option of a traditional XP-style start menu, goddammit. Thank goodness for StartIsBack.

But what took me about 6-8hrs of directed work with XP is now about 24-48hrs of work with Windows 11. Honestly, I am at the point where I just want to create a highly opinionated one-click configuration app that does everything for me.

And I would, if I still did as many installs as I was doing even half a decade ago.

Hmmm… as a DotNet developer… anyone interested in a spyware-eviscerating, copilot-extracting, settings-preserving app that allows you to retain a mostly-XP style look, and which remains resident to alert you of Microslop changing settings back?

They lost me at Vista lol

In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)

That is exactly why I ditched Microsoft for Mac thirty years ago. I’ve never looked back or regretted leaving MSFT during my "formative" years; in fact, I’m glad I did. That said, it’s great to see Linux stay the course and build a real alternative for PC users.

I’ve always wanted to try running Linux on one of my Macs, but I never seem to find the time to actually explore it. One of these days...

I just want to mention that most apps that would be laggy on Wine just work via https://flathub.org/en/apps/ru.linux_gaming.PortProton. Install PortProton double click .exe install app and off you go.

- xTool Studio - for laser engraver - ProppFrexx ONAIR - professional radio station

I tried to make this shift, but managed to somehow brick Linux Mint, so now I'm back on Windows for now...

I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?

But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.

Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.

Past week I got to know about InputActions [0] so I installed Kubuntu 25.10 to test it, and it is very promising. Linux never had a proper mouse gesture support, and I won't go into details, but this was one of the three dealbreakers for me. The other one was a Windows-only app which ran so sluggishly on all previous tests I've made over the years, but with Wine 11 the app is just as good and fast as on Windows. Though I first need to populate the registry with an icon set. But now with AI this can be easily automated (letting it write a script I then run). The third is some custom electron-based launcher which is heavily Windows-customized, which I will need to migrate to Linux, but also this should be easy with AI.

For the first time I feel like there is a real path for me to switch to Linux, and it's about time!

[0] https://github.com/taj-ny/InputActions

I have always used Linux personally, only work made me use Windows and Mac (controlled endpoints) for the past 20 years. For 4 years I have my own company, 100% Linux.

I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.

I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.

I had a different issue with Windows on my old daily driver but similar experience. The whole system began crashing randomly, but only occasionally, and only when not under load. It never once crashed while being taxed. I tried everything. Reinstalling the OS, reseating everything, tweaking memory timing, frequency, voltage, installing new firmware. Nothing fixed it. What did fix it? Installing Linux.

I still don’t know what was wrong. I have to imagine there was something with my exact hardware configuration that Windows did not like.

The two things I find unacceptable are no local accounts and non consensual reboots. The latter may need legislation. They don’t even notify you that it happened. They try to restart apps and put things back the way they were but you can still tell that your house was broken into by the missing data that wasn’t saved.

I finally installed Windows 11 last year so I could use Wifi 6E. Other than that, it is certainly a downgrade. With some debloating and ExplorerPatcher, its mostly the same as Windows 10 now, but I'm praying that an update wont brick my install. Thankfully the latest forced feature update didn't affect me.

One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the systemd unit settings that are usually in /usr/lib somewhere, the app settings in /etc or the personal configs in ~/.config. For packages that I am unfamiliar with, I usually end up trying all three locations until I notice that my changes seem to stick.

The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.

Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.

>"If you're always finding the next reason not to switch, you're not looking for solutions, you're looking for excuses to stay complacent."

No, my friend. It is not the reason. I have over 50 apps installed, many of which are corporate applications, such as Teams and other Microsoft products. VMwaresing VMWare and WSL foLinux distributionsnux distros. The other things that Linux is missing are ShareX (has flameshot I know), no WhatsApp (PWA might work, but it is a hack). Google Drive that I use to share my KeePass databases (no GDrive on Linux afaik). And gaming is not 100% with linux becuase of anti-cheat (author mentions it).

The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux entirely is that I must find a way to port all of these without compromises. Reinstalling Windows is one thing; changing OS types is another. We all want to be Mr. Robots, but reality is different. It is like moving to a new house. Exciting but sucks.

I switched to Linux circa 2010 when I needed a word processor but didn't want to go to the store to buy Office (was pretty young and poor at the time). After some Googling I found LibreOffice and Ubuntu. I had used Suse Linux years earlier when I was a kid but it definitely wasn't ready for use (2003) so I was also curious about Ubuntu and the current state at the time. I installed Ubuntu, used LibreOffice for the thing I needed, and never looked back. Linux was a breath of fresh air and it did all the things I needed. I went to university using only Linux (2012-2016), opened businesses, did all sorts of things, all 100% on Linux. Nice to see everyone else finally catching up.

Also has always been interesting seeing people whine about Linux the whole time I've been using it problem-free, across 4 PCs and 16 years.

> I installed CachyOS, a performance-focused Arch-based distribution

Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.

The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"

For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.

Now? CachyOS. Yikes.

There was a post here a while back saying that Microsoft will eventually switch to Linux instead of maintaining Windows. Given all the negativity around Windows this seems more and more likely (I haven’t used Windows myself for over 20 years so I have no idea what its like now. Last time I used it, it was XP)

Many years ago before I stopped using Windows and switched back to NetBSD (I had originally used it on the VAX), I used Cygwin and later MSYS on Windows in the process of moving back to UNIX

I was not interested in graphical programs, I only wanted a UNIX shell and standard UNIX utilities

I recently received a used computer with pre-installed Windows 10 Home for personal use so I will be experimenting with it offline^1

I used Windows Services for UNIX ("SFU") on work computers back in the day to compile programs I wrote for UNIX. I am curious about using "WSL" in a similar way

NetBSD is still favorite OS but I use Linux the most

1. I can boot this computer from USB stick so I will also use it to run NetBSD from RAM

So happy to see so many new Linux users as a long time user and developer for the platform. I want to welcome anyone and PLEASE feel free to use AI to make awesome stuff or solve problems. The FOSS community is still adapting to the new influx of developers and tools, vibe coders, etc.

Be cautious with running commands or making package changes based on suggestions from AI tools. Ask clarifying questions and it may realize doing so would either break your system or be attempting to vastly modify it.

My advice is get Docker installed and do most of your stuff in there. If you mess up and expose a Postgres container it will get hacked, but not escape the container, whereas if you install Postgres as a system package and make that same mistake you will be fully owned.

Just saw a video on YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDwt9AiItqU - starts at 3:25) that talked about the windows experience in the present day and I totally forgot about booting up and magically having software appear I never asked for due to some partnerships Microsoft made. I've been on Mac for 16 years/iPhone for 10 years and have never looked back. The most annoying thing about Apple is when the OS updates and suddenly you have a different experience like liquid glass. But like all things I usually get used to it after about a week and most of the times I see the benefits (in this case, even more screen real estate).

I made the same switch but all linux always feels slightly jank. I think Macos is the best premium decoupling from Winblows, but that comes with its own ecosystem lock in. I use all three equally daily and it just drives me insane. Lots of games on Windows ONLY work on windows due to anti cheat. Ie BattleField 6.... MacOs Gaming is non existent and any attempt with say wine/parallels or whatever brings you back to windows.... Linux / PopOS / Cosmic is so close to being there but the gaming restrictions takes you back to Windows.. I tried the whole WSL2 but lots of apps need so much tuning to work properly.. Ie android studio needs to be specially configured to use the WSL2 paths and it gets broken fast.

I really wish linux had a decent answer for DRM-protected VST plugins. Yes you can run stuff in WINE but I need to be able to use iLok and the bullshit DRM systems for about a dozen other publishers.

I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.

I can't believe how many times I have to click "decline" now to install Windows 11.

Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?

All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.

I think Linux adoption will rapidly grow with the adoption of LLMs.

Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often with just a few cut and paste commands.

This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible users.

Kind of interesting after using Manjaro recently, I had stayed away from Ubuntu for a while and started researching to see if it had gotten any better. I found a bunch of blog and reddit posts about how Linux sucks so bad and how much superior Windows and MacOS are.

Only to see this article today. lol

I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.

I'm an Apple guy through and through, but I am in Georgia Techs OMSCS program. For some of the classes, you need to use a VM that doesn't play nicely with Apple Silicon. So I went over to Microcenter and picked up a cheap PC with Windows. I loathe using it, even if I am in the VM the whole time. I'm amazed at the amount of ads that pop up and for a while, sound just didn't work. Like not with headphones or just out of the normal speakers until eventually a random update fixed it. I get not wanting to be in the Apple ecosystem, but at this point in time I don't know why you would want Windows and not go for Linux.

I'm not against someone's preferences, but this looks like an anecdotal story. Windows, as much as it's hated here, still works fine for the vast majority of people. What's more, you have higher risk of having problems when running Linux.

I think Windows 11 would have had much more consumer buy-in in the early days if they would have at least extended non-OEM support back to the Skylake generation, if not further, which it looks like it would have be easy to do, since it ran just fine on much older machines. I didn't object to them making TPM 2.0 mandatory for new OEM builds, just to the making it mandatory for people wanting to upgrade to it.

Of course, then the ads and other broken-ness got a lot worse. But people might put up with that more if they had upgraded to Windows 11 years ago instead of just looking at doing it now that Windows 10 support has ended.

For literally decades we've hoped that Linux will get like Windows in some crucial areas like sleep and hibernations support for laptops, supported first-party drivers, correct and reliable multi-monitor setups, games, etc. Never ever could I imagine that Linux parity, which I'd like to argue is closer than ever before, would be reached by Windows getting worse in exactly those areas we, the Linux freaks, got told to get Windows for -- sleep not working, graphics drivers bringing whole systems down, incoherent configuration etc. Only games got better and we have to thank Valve for that.

Gentoo forced me to switch to Apple.

jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.

I always like to chime in on these things that I've been a delighted Arch user for about a year now, for similar reasons. Took a lot of setup, but it's dialed now and just works. My computer belongs to me again for the first time in years.

I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.

Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.

Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering culture there seems completely broken and clueless.

I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.

For me I made the switch in 1998 when Windows Me was so terrible it was unusble. I went to CompUSA and found this cool box of cd roms with a lizard logo - suse linux and I was done with MS forever (except at work).

I just hope that more people are forced into this! I understand that the transition, learning path can be daunting but once someone's head gets the mindset on a Unix OS there is basically no turning back.

Speaking of "Content Creation", I'd also like to add the Affinity Suite. I don't particularly like it after being bought by Canva, but it works almost flawlessly on Linux.

You can even download a ready-to-run AppImage (no need to tinker with Wine settings) from here: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer/release...

I just wish Affinity would release a native port, but in the meantime, this works really good.

I have been using Linux as a desktop operating system for what I believe is almost two decades. Recently(?) I see distro named like CashyOS and Bazzite being thrown around. Am I missing out on something?

My main machines have been running Linux for years now, but there are still some things that are really bothering me. For one, I think dealing with virtual machines are still somewhat painful on Linux. VM managers continue to be clunky (I believe KDE is working on a new one), and GPU acceleration, let alone partitioning, isn’t really a thing for Windows guests which is something that works out of the box on WSL. Another frustrating part is the lack of a proper alternative to Windows Hello that allows you to set up passkeys using TPMs.

I switched back in 2022 to Ubuntu 20. I barely knew JavaScript at the time. I had zero problems doing so. Maybe my use case is narrow enough--I just use it for dev work and web browsing--but it was the least daunting process ever. Everything worked out of the box basically. Learning bash and unix changed my life. I don't understand how one could complain about Linux unless they've never even tried it

That said, I threw NetBSD on a P4 tower and it took me half a day just to get a GUI and an internet connection. Was kind of fun,though.

I want to switch to Linux for my EOL Windows 10 originally-built-for-gaming rig. It was “new” in 2016, so I hold out hope that there will be few compatibility issues. My biggest concerns are being able to play my library of steam games on it. Overall the problems I have are that last time I tried to put Linux on that machine I tried a dual boot system, and at the time UEFI did not play well with dual booting. I don’t know if it’s gotten better, but as of now I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway so conceivably it wouldn’t be an issue.

Well, Linux reached ~5% market share in 2025. Imagine the incremental market share they have. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...

My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.

This seems to historically have been a pattern. There was a period where Windows Vista was forced on everyone and downgrading to Windows XP until Vista was better was forbidden.

Lots of people jumped to Mac or Linux at that time. There's article floating around that the Macbook Pro ironically was the best laptop to run Windows XP on via dual boot because it was so intel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

Give it a few more years and Linux will complete its inevitable evolution into Microsoft, same consolidation, same gatekeeping, just with better slogans and a smug sense of moral superiority.

Just do it.

I bounced back and forth for a few years. Now? Not even dual boot, not even a VM. Maybe Linux did not get better than Windows, opinions differ. However, Windows certainly has gotten worse than Linux.

Still to this day I don't understand how people manage to do software development on a Windows PC. I started with my first secondhand MacBook which was one before the unibody, and then upgraded to unibody and never have left ever. The only reason I was forced to use Windows was for clients that didn't have support for MacOS or Linux. The only thing I need Windows for is rootkit enabled games... which pains me, otherwise I'd have Linux on my desktop

I only need Windows for a few programs, mostly licensed EDA programs that [dumb] companies didn't manage to port to Linux. Most engineers who use EDA tools are into linux so having to run a few things on Windows is a pain. The 'A' in EDA stands for automation and Windows is not the OS for that. I installed a standalone WIN10, then enabled the TPM and installed WIN11. Seems pretty solid but I had to guard against MSFT repeatedly trying to lead me into servitude.

I understand the frustration when things don’t just work. Also I find it kind of funny when people act like Linux just solved all their problems, despite recurring driver and dependency issues, compatibility problems, etc. These all get hand-waved somehow because it’s not Linux’s “fault” I suppose? Good for the author but the opportunity cost of moving to Linux alone is prohibitive based on the comments I see here, my own experience notwithstanding…

You've sold me. Does anyone have a lightweight guide or something of a no-nonsense tutorial on how to do this without causing an even bigger headache than using windows?

I was a big fan of windows and I am still currently using it but recently, I am getting weird problems, crashes, frozen laptop etc. So right now, after 23 years later, I decided to switch MacOS. I've used it before but couldn't adapt because I was efficiently using windows with no-alternatives tools in MacOS. But anymore, Windows is no longer usable, it's unbearable.

Ah 3d is fine with Maya and all the real VFX running on Linux. And we haven't had problems with game dev for years on Linux. Agree otherwise good to see another join.

> Basic operations are so much faster on Linux. Opening directories,

The fact that "opening directories" is something specifically mentioned as a point of difference hints to me that there is something terribly wrong in Microsoft / Windows -land.

If "opening directories" isn't a solved problem in any Operating System that's no longer in beta, never mind one that's been around for 30-odd years, there's something rotten in the foundations.

My CPU can run Windows 11 fine, but what I don't tolerate is full-screen ad pop-ups on my desktop.

When Win10 popped up an ad for Win11, I moved fully to Linux the next day.

Sort of funny that Nadella quotes Steve Jobs from 35 years ago with the "bicycles for the mind" quip. Given enough time, MSFT's marketing will eventually catch up with NeXT's marketing.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...

The whole upgrade to Windows 11 was forced on me by Microsoft, basically using trickery. I opened windows update and it said there were some updates… Did not make it clear at all that it would be taking my system from Windows 10 to 11. I thought it was just installing security updates. I would’ve had to change it anyway when 10 support ended, but I still had about four months and wanted to wait.

This post is so 2001

Arch is great. However, I would never recommend Arch (or an Arch derivative) to a first-comer to Linux.

Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.

Forced? It's been a delight. I'd say if anything, I've only ever felt forced to use MacOS or Windows, never forced to use Linux.

Windows 11 was bad before AI. Press the Start menu? Wait. That much latency was never acceptable and Windows should die like desktop Java did.

I’ve asked before but the answer keeps changing before I get around to implementing it:

My kid wants to upgrade their PC from Windows 11 to Linux. They have a recent-ish Nvidia card. I’m very technical: I don’t mind doing whatever arcane thing needs done. They are not, yet.

I haven’t run Linux on my desktop in a decade and I’m completely out of date here. What should I steer my kid toward to run recent games?

I switched after running basic dev tools became genuinely unusable (randomly freezing for minutes, start menu just didn't work, crashes all the time) despite being on good, new hardware.

I never wanted to switch before because I just wanted an OS that worked, didn't require babysitting, and was compatible with apps. But clearly, Windows has dropped the ball on this.

It is quiet sad to see Windows deteriorate that much over the years because of the decreased investment and lack of care and craftsmanship for the quality of the software being pushed out.

Thankfully unless you're running a few specific applications that only run on Windows, you can use any other operating system. It will do the job, with much less frustrations.

If you were primarily targeting a Windows market for a desktop application, but want to develop under Linux, what tech stack would you choose?

I think I'm pretty much there and just haven't made the switch yet. I'm going to give Mint a shot on my old PC soon and if its a good experience I'll switch on my desktop as well. Every time I have a bad experience in Windows lately I wonder why I'm sticking with it. Everything has been solved, its only momentum keeping me going.

> my first computer was a Windows 98 machine, with an Athlon XP 1900+ (Palomino core)

Off topic, anyone else think Windows 98 is too old for this machine? At a similar era I built an athlon t-bird 1.0GHz, I was mostly using Linux by then but if I did Windows then it would have been Win2k, maybe by the time of Athlon "XP", Windows XP would have been a thing too.

I used https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat on a family member's new Win11 install and it actually works reasonably snappy. I wouldn't be want to caught dead with it, but I couldn't convince this one to go for macOS.

I'm not sure that "multi-compose" chrome bug is a windows-only thing though. I use chrome on Linux (slackware) with an nvidia card, and I get that issue all the time if I try to open more than one chrome WINDOW. Multiple tabs are ok, and SOMETIMES multiple windows are ok, but more often than not, I can only have one chrome window.

> You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user.

The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.

Microsoft forced me to switch to Apple AND Linux.

Upvote for Arc Raiders :D

I was running win11 up until three weeks ago. Just a gaming rig, a steam launcher. A used behemoth tower I got for a song via CL. Installed Bazzite and have been incredibly impressed.

Also ty to the author for the link to the nvidia sleep fix. That’s been the only hiccup, and it sounds like I’ll have it sorted before bedtime.

It's bad it really is, I got fed up and rolled back to windows 10 when I tried downloading a file and the whole UI locked up until the file finished. On my own personal high performance desktop with tons of memory, cpus, etc etc. Never saw this in Windows 10. Certainly never saw it in modern Linux.

I just have to figure out how to play a few of my games on Steam and I can move over. Unfortunately, a few titles are still PC only so I can't make the switch. I very much would love to, but I basically need a $600 PC at all times to play a few select titles that will never come to Linux due to anti-cheat.

My work-issued dev device is a Surface Pro 10. I can't use WSL2 for various regulatory reasons. I will never, ever work on software like this again. Worst development experience of my life because of what a miserable dev env windows is.

I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand experience supports it to the extreme.

I think shortly we may see "Apple forced me to switch to Linux" because of Tahoe and subsequent releases.

"Video playback works flawlessly, with hardware acceleration even" not really, especially on Netflix

Anyone have a recommendation on a decent cloud-based file sync tool ala OneDrive? I use OneDrive extensively but there is no official client for Linux and the unofficial one has some major stability issues. I'm willing to change providers but not willing to put in the effort to roll-my-own.

I'm in the opposite position. Been a Linux user exclusively for 16+ years.

But I wanted to build some desktop apps and look at arcGIS so I finally installed Windows 11 on a laptop my first Windows in nearly 2 decades.

This was a month ago and I haven't opened the laptop since. But I'm going to soon maybe!

I'd be happy to switch to Linux, but my Macbook with M processor is a real work horse. First of all, everything works (bluetooth, headphones, camera, etc). Second of all, ARM based processor is a beast. Until someone release an ARM based laptop, I don't see myself switching to Linux.

FWIW for similar reasons I nuked my Windows install and installed CauchyOS. My main reason for not doing it earlier was concerns about game compatibility but so far the games I want to play either are working without any issue or work after enabling Steam's proton compatibility layer.

For 3D modeling (assuming you want to do CAD), Onshape is a fantastic alternative to native applications.

Ironically for me Linux has become the obvious default for casual use - web browsing, entertainment, paying my bills etc. I only boot Windows when I need to do some weird nerdy stuff, like checking updating SSD firmware with some proprietary software available only for Windows.

>No more waiting for the Start menu to decide it wants to open. No more File Explorer hanging when you need it the most.

I ran XP in a VM on Windows 10.

The start menu opens instantly. After one video frame.

Windows explorer opens instantly. One video frame.

If they had literally done nothing for 20 years, it would be like 50x faster now.

> Windows is now also too much work.

Most people overlook that. I only ever see comments complaining about time spent to set up Linux. It's not the only variable, and for Windows it's the constant maintenance that's the issue. You are never just done setting up Windows.

Since most application run in the browser nowadays, the OS becomes less meaningful and more of a layer between browser and hardware.

If you see your PC as a tool, not a gimmick to consume, Linux is the only choice. Even MacOS crappifies over time and becomes a Windows copy over time.

Regarding high-quality commercial Linux software: SideFX Houdini offers a relatively affordable Indie license and is fantastic for most kinds of 3D work, compositing, and post-processing tasks. It’s also fully procedural and scriptable, which really makes my brain buzz.

I haven't even touched a Windows PC in years at this point. Don't know why you'd do that to yourself. I was hanging on to a gaming PC, but it broke during a move over 2 years ago now. I decided that was the last windows box I'd own at that point.

I could talk about things better in Linux whole day. But besides popularity (so being preinstalled, proprietary software availability, being presented from childhood) is there a single reason to use Windows? Backwards compatibility, accessibility? Maybe?

It's worth noting that if someone has the skill to install and run Linux with games, they probably have the skill to use massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts and ask AI to help bypass to install a local Windows account. And that probable takes less time.

1. Install Win 11 Pro

2. Install O&O Shut Up

The behavior you're describing is not normal

I've been using Linux on my devices for quite some time now. I was pleasantly surprised when I had to start 4k video editing work and could just use Davinci Resolve. 2026 might not be the year of the Linux desktop, but it's getting better day by day.

Also, just to DISH hard on Microsoft's engineers - How could they make it throught the job interview the loser who wrote add / remove programs it takes so long to load and they are not even embarrased.

** Embracing the Dark Side here **

It was a very entertaining read. I am just wondering if this one may be actionable:

"And worst of all, you're like a pit bull that has lock-jawed onto OpenAI's ballsack, and you're not letting go, not matter how much we tell you to."

I also recently switched to Debian + KDE after decades on Windows. I cloned my previous workflows in a few days and now have a very smoothly working desktop that I can still game on. High DPI and refresh are also working OK.

I switched to Arch last Summer and I'm quite happy.

Even Steam games work, I was quite impressed.

Why is opening the taskbar right click menu slower on Win11 than on Win95?

Why is there a gap between the menu and the taskbar?

I used to have muscle memory to quickly close windows rightclick taskbar -> leftclick “close” but this stopped working. Why??

I know we keep hearing about how their share holders are forcing this change of focus in order to monetize ai. I just fail to see how alienating developers and the gaming community in the process will ever help achieve that.

For me the only reason to keep windows 11 is Clip Studio Paint doesn't work yet in Linux... I use it mostly on my Android tablet BUT I want to have an alternative in case something is easier on a computer

At work, my employer is still running Microsoft products for the desktop environment. At home, assuming I'm using Microsoft products at all (rare), it's from inside the Chromium web browser on Linux or BSD.

Audio latency on Linux was already very low long before PipeWire, thanks to JACK.

My parents paying for One Drive when they didn't need it is why I finally moved them off Windows as well.

I saw the amount of ads they were getting on their laptops and One Drive was even advertising to them on Samsung Android phones.

The only thing keeping my secondary / gaming / file-server computer on Windows is Backblaze. The main obstacle to me switching from macOS to Linux is Office 365 (doesn't work on Wine).

There is a negative Moore's law for software, valid when the one for hardware stopped: with constant CPU speed, the speed of software decreases as its version increments.

EOL of Windows 10 forced me to, but I'm not mad - Desktop Linux is Great!

It's definitely the superior OS for modern development and general system admin, WSL/Docker always felt like an uncanny valley kludge.

FWIW, On Reddit, I am seeing more and more discussions on the Linux subreddits or people getting fed up with Windows and switching to Linux. Usually, it's the Windows 11 upgrade that finally did it.

If only league of legends was playable in Linux. And a few other games.

My main reason for getting into Linux, forget the version or distribution maybe Slackware or RH at the time (later loved Debian the most) was that windows in that era was horribly unstable, BSOD etc

One of my favorite recent KDE features: Press Meta+t to design a custom window layout, and later hold Shift while you drag a window to place it in a slot in that layout.

> my first computer was a Windows 98 machine

The moment your Commodore 64 made you old.

I switched during windows 10 and I had several friends switch after win7 wasn't supported. In hindsight I should have spent the few weeks to learn linux and switched back then too

I did the same on my laptop and PC. Unfortunately, my sound system receiver doesn't support Linux but I'll survive. And the speed of my machines more than makes up for it.

I take tremendous umbrage at "femboy Thinkpad enjoyer."

A wonderful writeup.

Don't worry, microsoft is putting its rust all over open source.

"Like digital herpes, I just couldn't get rid of it."

Made my day! :-D

Wow gun to head and everything. Glad he survived the transition.

More seriously, editing is either a lost art or click bait headlines are more important than ever. The title is very immature.

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

-- Napoleon.

That Ableton Flicker: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ev3vENli7wQ

The one thing holding me to M$ Windows is visual studio.

Yes, I am aware there are alternatives that others think are as good or better. No, I have not personally found that to be true.

If you thought we were getting bad bugs before, just wait until the 90% agent-coded PRs start landing. We're gonna have multiple crowdstrike-level blowups.

Any suggestions for photo-editing, sharing, album management process for linux?

Its really the only thing on macOS + iOS that I use. Otherwise I am so over the mac lifestyle.

I just switched to Linux as well on my Windows laptop. 10 was getting so hard to run and I had no clear/stable path to 11. Ubuntu runs great for me!

I've had a similar path, and I always recommend KDE with its taskbar on Ubuntu, it made the transition smoother for me in terms of preserving workflows.

I haven't driven a Windows box since 2010 (and even then it was just a few months at work) and I'm perfectly happy! Except I'm on a Mac and have been at every job since 2006 when they came out with the Intel-based ones. I of course run Linux on VMs at work, but my daily driver has been and likely will forever be a Mac. I don't miss installing/tweaking video drivers or registry settings. Things just work 99.99% of the time for me. No one is perfect and Apple has made mistakes, but for me, I'm 100% satisfied.

I really want to like Linux but every time I try it (and I tried a lot of distros and DEs) it is death by a thousand UX paper cuts.

Once again, I don't really understand people who say Windows is easier. Take printer drivers. In windows you have a 'simple' wizard to install a printer driver. Except in my experience... it never works the first time and you have to fiddle. On Linux... I just bought a new printer, and it worked out of the box. My experience with most hardware today on Linux is out-of-the-box support while windows requires endless 'driver' installs. Even driver installs on linux are easier. Usually just drop a binary blob somewhere if you really need it and modprobe...

Again it's 2026... why is this so hard. Usually paid software is actually better and more feature-ful, but Windows is just not useful at all. The best use of Windows is WSL2

Ubuntu since 2011

Now if only "Linux" would make a good phone.

* thirteen years ago. The lost me with win7->win8 migration. I thought the cannot go lower that that, and here we are.

I've never heard of CachyOS. I'm amazed at how many Linux versions there are and how good they seem and it makes me wish I could try them all.

it's really bad these days. even the teams web client doesn't work properly and when it does it is missing the most basic features like "test my audio." i don't understand what it is about how that company is organized that the software keeps coming out with interfaces and user experiences that look like they were created by 2023 era generative ai.

I'm keeping an eye on SteamOS. I love how it's much better at running games than Windows, the platform those games were designed for.

Between all the telemetry and them separating workstation and server duties, Windows is a no go aside from a generic gaming console here.

Another problem with Windows, that has been going on for quite some time now, is that they do not have a real support channel for non-enterprise users that produces useful knowledge for the future. Almost any issue you google now has a thousand "answers" on microsoft.com that do not fix the problem because the people answering have not reproduced it and have not confirmed their solution.

In Linux forums, generally speaking, there is either a way it works or agreement that it hasn't been fixed yet. The main source of spam now is actually StackExchange, that prioritizes discussions from 10 years ago on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, rather than up-to-date questions and answers.

At this point, the only thing holding me back is Adobe Lightroom. Which even that can technically run in a browser.

> 've used Windows for as long as I've been alive. At 6 years old, my first computer was a Windows 98 machine,

this sounds like child abuse.

I'll switch to emacs if things go on like this.

Yes, did the same thing for similar reasons. Everything works well. When with Arch Linux.

Yeah my 70 year old father purchased for the first time a Macbook after being a Windows user his entire life.

It’s been so long since I’ve used Windows I practically forgot it even exists as a “thing”. @_@

Without knowing anything internally about how microsoft builds:

Product driven development and too many managers with MBAs led to this problem.

Welcome to the club. I started my Linux and BSD journey in ~1998 and I haven't really touched Windows since ~2001 except for the occasional brief interaction.

I've never missed it. Like at all. There have been instances where some piece of software didn't have a Linux alternative, that's mostly been a mild inconvenience. There have been cases where it's been a serious problem too, such as when my ever-so-wonderful government decided to start using e-ID which only worked on Windows (thanks, Wouter from grep.be for fixing that).

Mostly I enjoy how I'm in control of my machine, instead of having to rely on a bunch of untrustworthy moneygrabbers who seem hell-bent on making the worst possible decisions at every turn.

I feel Windows 11 is in the initial phase of Windows 10. Remember beginning of years for 10? Sluggy, clunky, full of bugs? And everybody and their cat was holding to 7? I was the same, I was holding down the fort with 7. This year 7, next year 7 and so on until at one time I, like countless times before, spun a new virtual machine for a client and as usual I had to put 10 in there. Except this time 10 felt faster. No more clumsiness, no more slop. 2 months later I fully switched to 10 as my host OS.

I am currently on 10 so much that I installed the LTSC version that has support until 2032. Keep hammering Microslop, they deserve it. We need to keep bugging them, throw dirt on their face until they actually fix it. Seems that's the way with them nowadays. So I don't feel any shame to call them names at every corner.

But I am still not switching to Linux. Maybe in '32 when LTSC stop being supported and they still didn't fix 11. Oh, and from my experience, Debian will be the way to go. I like a proven distribution even if their repository is not the greatest and the latest.

Timing of your post is spot on. I just emptied a drive to prep for a Linux switch this morning ( for the same reasons ) :D

If you can handle Linux, you should try Reaper as a DAW. It's really great.

Would be great to switch except I need Visual Studio Pro

Linux has plenty of video card driver issues too. Windows may suck, but Linux sucks in different ways. Windows suckage is solved by "buy a different machine and reinstall". Linux suckage is solved by weeks googling and trying technical fixes in consoles, installing different distributions and trying the same, then eventually buying a different machine.

Apple, for all its flaws, tends to not have the suckage of either. I don't like using Apple, but it does break a lot less. (One of the reasons is encompassed in this story... while Microsoft and Nvidia yell at each other, Apple makes both the OS and the graphics card, so they just solve the problem internally) Apple with VMs gives you everything without the hardware hassles.

Btw, my first computer was an Intel Pentium MMX 166Mhz IIRC, massive 64MB of SIMM ram, and impressive 8GB of disk. Trident "graphic card", Creative sound card and the ultra fast Motorola 56k modem haha

"I installed CachyOS .... It wasn't a painless process. In fact, sleep mode was broken from the start"

This is the problem with newbies into Linux world, they follow hype instead of installing a stable distro.

As it stands in 2026, Linux Mint Cinnamon is by far the best distro to use, no matter if you are into IT field, heavy gaming, video editing and 3D design, it just works.

It follows the well known stability of Debian Linux, while being up-to-date like Ubuntu but without all the bloatware, kernel panic and privacy issues from Ubuntu.

If you are following hype or those distro so called "rolling releases" aka Arch Linux, don't complain that you are having problems. They are everything but stable and "just works" lmao

Honestly Linux has been so much easier to use since Claude / codex came out. Now I don't need to remember esoteric commands or scroll old forums to fix issues, Claude does it all for me.

Been using ubuntu + regolith as my daily driver for over a year now and haven't needed to use windows for anything. Almost all games all work well on Linux now too.

Going to switch my non technical gf to Linux she is pissed at Windows 11 lately

i also vividly remember the specs of my first machine but weirdly nothing else after. i386SX with 4MiB RAM and a 10MB hard drive

Similar sentiment but I think opting for a debian based intro would have solved some of the hurdles.

To Protect yourself, this is what I did and experienced:

I set windows update service to manual, and so far the updates have not reset it, and I have been able to choose to install when I want. I feel safer, but I KNOW microsoft will fuck this over probably on their next update.

Another trick is as a super-super admin you can make executables UNEXECUTABLE by anyone. Things like Edge, etc. They do not let us remove their TRASH, but we still can lock them out, at least for now.

Another thing I had to do with Windows 11 when I had to rebuild my system because of Microsoft's SSD bug they would not cop too... They got rid of the magic trick to disable to OOBE which forces you to login with a microsoft account.... I could not find a way to work around it, but as soon as I was in I created a local admin user and it works well, they only force logged me in when I had to run FUCKING TEAMS for a job interview.

I'm heading down the linux path very soon, I almost did last year. Dual boot for a while, to see if how well my Steam library plays (literally it's the only thing keeping me on Windows 11).... Looking at Bazzite for this but we'll see.

We must UNITE to fight this tryany!

Microsoft Windows is an entitled tenant that thinks it owns the property (your computer).

> Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a blog post asking people to stop calling AI-generated content "slop" and to think of AI as "bicycles for the mind."

I can't believe Nadella stole Jobs "bicycles for the mind" metaphor without attribution.

Incredible moment when you have to ward off Windows, macOS and iPhone updates like a bouncer.

I’ve gone over the years from Visual Studio fanboy to writing everything in vi, entirely due to software decay.

Our culture and economy can no longer maintain complex GUIs.

Love that the Favicon for the blog is the Internet Explorer logo. Will that change?

Microslop must be stopped, absolute cancer of a company

If only the streaming giants would let us stream in decent quality..

I'd switch if it weren't for anticheat breaking the games I play. I really, really hate Windows, and Windows 11 even more than normal levels of Windows hate. I had to do some really weird shit to get it to a place that feels sane.

"The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."

Fair point though :P

Ubuntu since 2012

I’ve been working at a school that uses a mix of Surfacebooks, HP Elitebooks and MacBook Air M2s (now migrating everyone to M4s!).

I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.

I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.

Literally just hit the MPO bug yesterday - what a shitshow that things like display scaling can fail with a mainstream gpu/cpu and windows 11 - like do they not have testing rigs for this in microsoft? if insiders preview is fine but production windows gets all these bugs... what are they inside previewing? The most stable build of windows I ever had (hell it's still chugging along with 1050 days of uptime...) was a windows 10 enterprise edition added to domain controller with update GPO set to basically never install windows updates automatically.

There is some serious work needed inside microsoft camp to continue with a 6 month release cycle.

Windows was the robbery of the century.

Another day another "hey guys I switched Linux" post gets pushed to the top of the heap. These add nothing except create an echo chamber about great Linux is and Windows is the worst.

"Oh you're doing work? That's so cute... we're gonna close whatever apps you had open, because we're updating now. We own your computer. You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent."

This, a 1,000 times. I hate, hate, hate this "feature". My Macs don't do that. My Linux systems don't do that. The whole, "screw you, we don't care" attitude of Microsoft is quite appalling.

Microsoft now makes it very difficult to disable this feature. After a few registry edits, I thought I was able to put a stop to the madness. But, then it went to rebooting on its own again.

Iv'e switched all but my work laptop because of well work, but the push came after they seemed to 'dumb' down the OS.

The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.

Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up with Windows anymore.

But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer market much anymore anyway.

Keep these posts coming! More the merrier! :))

My experience is more like:

"I'll switch when Linux supports X."

Linux still doesn't supports X.

"Okay, but how about my X?"

Linux still doesn't supports X.

"Well, X is still missing..."

Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.

Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.

So I have 3 computers: son's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows

wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows

my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows

I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case something would happen with my daily driver laptop).

I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work, where I could actually install it.

> If 3 years ago you would have told me that Microsoft would singlehandedly sabotage their own OS, doing more Linux marketing than the most neckbearded Linux fanboy (or the most femboy Thinkpad enjoyer), I'd have laughed in your face

I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.

For a creative, why not macOS?

haha cool post btw RN not always runs on chromium/v8

I love the poem at the end

As time goes on, I get closer and closer for Linux to be my daily driver. The ads, the Microsoft account login, the OneDrive in the explorer window, the 'recommendations' to change my default browser, etc make me more angry by the day. However, when I install Linux on an old machine, I initially have driver issues like wifi. And after fighting with that for an hour, I decide it's not worth the risk to blow away my main machine. So I accept the slop from MS and continue on.

Windows 98 did the same for me

Fwiw... I've been doing Leenucks since '92. Back when you had to install BSD first, compile the kernel and reverse engineer how to boot into the new kernel you just built with gcc. But it was cheaper than SunOS, and the developers mailing list was more active than the BSD lists. I still miss my 3B1.

Anyway... welcome to the party. We saved you a beer. Doesn't matter you came later than other people. It just matters you made it here eventually.

The author tried everything except switching graphics drivers?! That's like listening to the top 10 hits on broken speakers and declaring all new music is terrible.

Similar journey, different distro! I wanted a Linux gaming machine, but given my recent admission into the cult of NixOS, I went with Jovian.

Jovian is a NixOS module that sets up a SteamOS-like experience on top of your existing NixOS config. I was able to build & tweak the config before even building my PC. It booted first try and has since been working without hiccups. Now I am setting up emulators, which is relatively straightforward with nixpkgs :)

I did exactly the same some 16-17 years ago, when they forced windows 8 square design bullshit and announced that they'll ditch 7. Never looked back.

Windows servers are still pretty good imho.

LOL :D

1500+ points for a switch from Windows to Linux :)

It's hard to square their complaints about Microsoft's delivering AI crap when the top work project reference they have is:

> DesignVerse

> AI website builder startup.

> - Tech Stack: Next.js, Vercel AI SDK, Mastra AI Framework

> - Role: Full Stack Developer

> - Built core features (full stack) and helped implement the AI-powered editing system.

You can tell all the Microsoft executives use Macs at work.

I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration issues or hardware issues. And I still stand by this even as I've had issues over the years here or there.

I think the most recent 'production' Windows issue I've had was OneDrive failing to recognize it was syncing my data even though it was syncing. The status symbols for the files and folders wasn't showing up. But that's about it.

My gaming desktop is stable, my PC is rock solid, I run VMs on it (game servers, dev/test environments), and overall just absolutely 0 problems with Windows or my OS at all.

I do, however, have hardware issues semi often. One of my monitors doesn't turn off its backlight, for example. I've had Razer devices just flat out quit on me over the years (multiple Razer mice, at least a couple of Nagas, etc.).

I contend that most people would do better with Windows if they just didn't mess with it (don't run any of those tools proclaiming to "debloat" your OS), and make sure you read the hardware compatibility list of your systems REALLY hard. Incompatible RAM can cause significant problems, a lot of which is completely avoidable if you just read the RAM QVL.

The only thing that I wish vendors would do more is work closer with Microsoft to provide BIOS updates over Windows Update. But, most of these motherboard IHVs are absolutely terrible about doing BIOS updates anyway and require specific mechanisms to keep going correctly. This is in contrast to the Enterprise/Business devices released by HP or Dell which have a usually solid BIOS update track. And again, the only issue I've ever had there was incompatible RAM.

No to mention that the cloud-based user system that they are forcing on us instead of local accounts. So much trouble.

And Copilot crap being shoved down our throats at every turn.

Don't even get me started on Teams.

> I'm gonna go full conspiracy nut here, but I bet it's because the LLM understands JavaScript better, and Microsoft can't be asked to pay actual humans to write proper native code.

Do LLMs like Claude really excel at JavaScript than other programming languages? Similarly does OpenAI prefers Python over other languages?

AI bubble pop, when???

Marvellous, spot on. 10+ fucking points.

It's still disappointing how few folks know about gpedit and how much you can reclaim your own machine just by running through the local policies and setting them to "no, I call the shots".

Obligatory:

It’s the year of the Linux desktop!

Windows 11 isn't terrible, as long as you go back to how it was in Windows 10. Disable everything introduced in 11.

I did that years ago, at the end of Windows 7 and the beginning of the need for a Microsoft account.

I seem to have a much lower tolerance for enshitification than most people. I'm off Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Purely because they became annoying.

Microsoft is its own worst enemy.

Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and convince millions of users to use Windows.

Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could make them happy.

I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility issues, but for non–tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.

I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy windows was much more painful.

I just came here to say that is ackchyually GNU/Linux.

I’ve been using a Mac for a about three years now, but every once in a while I use my old gaming laptop to play some games and every time I am reminded of how insufferable windows has become, using it feels I’m dumpster diving and the dumpster is asking me to sign into my Microsoft account. Apple gets a lot of shit for how they do things, but no one can deny that once you’re properly established in their ecosystem, it’s a phenomenal experience.

Just run arch. (+1 for terrible advice)

Maybe it's stockholm syndrome but I still have no interest in Linux. Are nvidia drivers still bad?

I'm so glad ditching it 20 years ago, didn't look back once since.