Well, I gave up on Windows 11 after an entirely too long 90 days…
I installed it as my home desktop OS on October 6th, fought with it on and off over the holidays, and finally dumped it this afternoon in favor of Linux.
What really sealed the deal was the news that came out this morning about the next major update for Microsoft’s OS, which was pretty much nothing but what services and applications Microsoft has managed to shoehorn their pet AI “Copilot” into.
Microsoft is all-in on their AI… I mean, Microsoft is making all of the OEMs replace a key on the keyboard with a new one just for Copilot:
Meanwhile I’m just not interested in offering up more of my personal data to the Machine God. And given that MacOS is now nothing but a glorified iPhone interface the only option left was FOSS.
Not that this is a ‘bad thing’ really. I’ve used POSIX compliant operating systems pretty much since POSIX was a thing – which was 1988 if you’re curious… The difference is I’ve not really used a desktop version of UNIX/Linux since the late 90’s, preferring my command-line operating systems to remain command-line.
So, it’s been a pleasant surprise to see just how far the Linux desktop has come in the last 30 years. For example, I plugged in my backup data drive and dropped to the terminal to mount it – only to discover that it was already there – and the distro I’m using understood all of my bleeding edge hardware without me having to compile anything…
Now, Linux still has some issues that prevent it from being the every-man’s OS – namely that there are still 1×10^32 ways to install a piece of software – and all of them more or less expect you to figure it out. And while there are very few applications that you can just double-click and make go, it’s better than it used to be! (see the above comment about not needing to compile anything)
Overall it took about five hours to get Pop!_OS (a distro from System_76 – a local Linux hardware manufacturer) installed and configured with all of the stuff I need / want. This included Photoshop CS6 – which I’ve been trying to get installed somewhere all year to get off the Adobe SaaS model, Second Life, World of Warcraft, my various office apps, work apps, development tools, music stuff, and other compu-cruft. And three items on that list are Windows apps running in WINE, which required some fairly advanced fiddling to make them work.
All in all the new OS is pretty nice and I’m enjoying the figure-it-out-ness of it… Keeps my think-meat limber.
Listening to "Saved By Zero" by The Fixx