The great escape (from Microsoft)
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I am free from Windows completely. Gawd, has Linux come a long way since I used it over a decade ago. Everything worked out of the box, no custom script creation, didn’t even need terminal once, and my games work the same thanks to Proton. I’m still gobsmacked by how easy it was!
Now I actually did read up and that included changelogs, and I researched which distro rather painstakingly (Bazzite, Cachy and Drauger were on my short list). I also voluntarily used terminal a few times to save some steps. That said, Nobara (Fedora 42 rolling + KDE Plasma) has been totally painless on my all AMD rigs and my Intel laptop, preloaded with basically everything I use daily.
No more Microsoft spying, no more required sign in, no more forced changes to my settings, no more pay to play licenses, no more Cloud, no more need to wait with a claw hammer to alter every service update, no more nearly mandatory AI. Why spend time disabling and bypassing such artificial problems only to have to do it all over again each update? And as a bonus, so much free handy software on Linux! I even found great overclocking and resource monitoring software!
If you were thinking about changing, there’s never been a better time to make the switch!🥲
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While I’m very much in a similar boat and 99.9% of my time is spent on Linux of some description, I do want to offer a warning to those who are tempted to make the switch:
Many games with an online multiplayer component rely on kernel-based anti-cheating software, which often doesn’t work on Linux (it could, but many devs don’t bother enabling it… it’s a big discussion point on Linux reddit). So if you’re big into your online multiplayer games, double check whether it’ll work before you go to the effort of moving everything over.
ETA: If you want to check compatibility between your steam library and Linux’s Proton, you can link your steam (or simply enter your steam id) here: https://www.protondb.com/profile and it’ll spurt out your Steam library and ratings of compatibility (including those impacted by the aforementioned anticheat problems).
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@Pavel Great note, and I’ll add www.areweanticheatyet.com has a running database of which anti cheat options have been made compatible with Linux while requiring no login. Cheers!
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I’m still with Windows, but at least I’m not part of the Apple ecosystem like my partner and almost all of my coworkers.
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Strangely, because of my job, I will always be on all three. I have a Windows machine, a Macbook, and two Linux systems (one on Debian and the other currently being used to test Omarchy.)
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@MisterBoring Academia? I had to do that when I was a Chemistry major. The Physics department’s computers, which we had to use for some thing, were Macs, we used Microsoft, and the computer the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine was hooked up to ran on Red Hat Linux.
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@Ominous No. I work in IT and have to be knowledgeable about all three major OS environments for work, so I slowly have collected a trifecta.
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Aw yis a topic near and dear to my heart.
Ever since I found Copilot in Notepad, that was it. 2025 was the year of Windows going from “passable” to “steaming manure”. All the adware and telemetry and forced AI and bunged-up local search reminded me too much of using Internet Explorer 5 instead of an actual operating system.
In July I got a new SSD for my boot drive and was able to set up Linux Mint (Ubuntu for cowards like me, if you believe the internet!) for dual-boot. I say “dual-boot”, but I haven’t booted into Windows ever since I got the Linux distro up and running. I genuinely haven’t needed to.
The worst issue I’ve had on Linux is one that actually ate up a few hours last night, where my wifi card decided after a kernel update (which didn’t resolve on rollback, itself a super-easy process) that it would make one connection total, and if you tried to swap SSIDs it’d just kark it and NetworkManager would crash. That led into a deep dive that taught me a lot more about how NetworkManager works, the joys of
wpa_supplicant, and why my excellent crash-hot infinitely-tweaked tri-band router configuration was more of a hindrance than a help. Fixing that, and accidentally making the household wifi a lot better, I feel like I learned something.Had that been Windows, I never would have known it was a problem, and it would have been “wait for a patch”.
When it comes to gaming, praise be to Gaben our lord and saviour for Proton. The only game I’ve found that was more than plug-and-play was Bannerlord once you start installing mods, because those need a few Windows dependencies which are easy enough to install with Protontricks once you do some research. When it comes to Anticheat, I’ve found most of the stuff I’ve played worked great out of the box. The only exception is, to no surprise, EA, which is actively preventing Linux machines from playing their games because “omg piracy lol”.
A lot of this pontificating on my part is because Linux works for me. My day job is DevOps so I’m always writing BASH and spinning up containers and virtual machines etc. I will absolutely dig into an OS to get it running to my specifications and I will constantly prune things that I don’t need. For the average user who may well use the AI more than my blistering hatred permits, who doesn’t care about the telemetry, who isn’t fussed about localhost suddenly being inaccessible, yeah Windows is fine. I wouldn’t tell my wife to stop using it. But for myself, I really like how this stuff isn’t being (re)installed now with every update.
If you’re looking for a change, willing to get into the weeds, and bothered by what Microsoft is doing, I recommend at least investigating swapping the OS. If you’re a daily user, then to be honest you don’t lose much if anything by staying on Windows.
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If you can’t escape Windows, but want to escape Copilot, you can use Group Policy Editor to disable Copilot permanently. (Microsoft is required to leave this setting in their OS by the many many many companies that either don’t want to deal with AI stuff at all, or have contracts with other AI firms for their AI nonsense, so it’s just a part of all versions of Windows.)
Just run gpedit.msc, find User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Copilot. There’s a policy called “Turn off Windows Copilot”. Enable that, and voila, no more pesky Microsoft AI on your system.
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@MisterBoring And because Microsoft is… well… Microsoft, you may have to check/update this setting every few updates or so. I’ve definitely had to chase up stupid settings changes that updates have made counter to my desires.
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A post after my own heart. I’ve been working on ditching Microsoft and Google, but it’s a PROCESS.
I have a side laptop I’ve been tinkering with as a way to dip my toes into it, but I think as a side effect of being easily 10+ years old, this thing runs like a fridge. It has Debian (LXQt) on it now, but tends to freeze and crash.
Windows ran fine on it but I do wonder if it’s just so old that it needs something more lightweight. If you know any distributions that are particularly well suited to ancient shitboxes, I’d appreciate a recommendation.
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@Juniper Lubuntu is apparently quite good, and if you’re into tinkering then I can highly recommend a lightweight Arch install – but you do have to contend with people who smugly proclaim their particular strain (like a virus) of Arch is the best whenever you’re out there seeking help.
