Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

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

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.

I take tremendous umbrage at "femboy Thinkpad enjoyer."

A wonderful writeup.

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.

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."

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

-- Napoleon.

> my first computer was a Windows 98 machine

The moment your Commodore 64 made you old.

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

Made my day! :-D

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Ubuntu since 2011

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Would be great to switch except I need Visual Studio Pro

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.

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

Microslop must be stopped, absolute cancer of a company

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.

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

Ubuntu since 2012

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

For a creative, why not macOS?