This post idea was inspired by a recent post by [email protected] in this community.
I have been a Windows user for my entire life. I recall having an iMac in my bedroom as a small boy, maybe 7-8, playing random offline games on it, but aside from that, my experience growing up was with Windows 98, XP, Vista, 8 and 10. I wouldn’t say I was ever a “power user” per se, although I could do several tasks that were more technical if needed, like locating driver files, updating .dlls, configuring compatibility settings, etc. I think being a good Googler made me seem more capable to my family than I really was, and I’m sure a lot of people here would share my experience!
With the impending sundowning of Windows 10, an OS that I “begrudgingly accepted” (rather than actually enjoyed using, as with Vista), and realizing that 11 was only going to bring more ads, force-installed applications, background processes that were nigh-impossible to disable without a lot of tomfoolery, AI bullshit and general bloat, I figured that I would try dual-booting Ubuntu, installing it on a partition of my storage HDD. Windows did not want to play ball, no matter how much I begged and pleaded and bargained, and eventually I was met at a point where I had to decide what to do going forward. My system was just not behaving the way I wanted to with two OSes (“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us”), and figured,
Oh, what the hell. I’ll primary Ubuntu and when I need to use Windows I’ll run it on a thumb drive or something.
Well, it’s been several weeks now and, even with a couple bumps along the way, I have not booted into Windows once since the switchover. How many of you had a similar experience? I was frankly a bit scared of CLI and thinking that I was going to brick my PC before I even had a chance to use it, so I kept all my personal files safely tucked away in a removed HDD until the break-in process was relatively complete. As time has gone on, I’ve gotten comfortable enough to have a backed up copy of my files on here, and every new program I go to install that I used on Windows has worked swimmingly on Linux.
I can only thank the helpful, enthusiastic people here in the Linux community for making my experience so smooth. It’s rare you encounter a group of people where you can post what is ostensibly a stupid question, and be pummeled with dozens of well-formed, thoughtful, detailed responses to the question. There’s very little of that infamous grandiosity and self-righteousness that I’ve heard runs rampant in the Linux world, and maybe Lemmings are just more prone to being helpful than the wider internet, but for what it’s worth, I appreciate everything you all have done here so far.
I feel so much more capable as a computer user with Linux than I ever did on Windows. I’m automating tasks, I’m fine-tuning network drivers, I’m getting in the weeds of file architecture, and it’s all been a real blast to learn about. I actually feel a desire to learn so that I can help others have a similar experience to what I had coming into this.
The thing is that this isn’t “personal choices”, I don’t even use most of the solutions I cited, but I happen to know a lot of people who do in different industries and that tried Linux countless times and showed me how poorly things are. I’m talking about managers, designers, engineers, architects - a lot of people with a lot of different needs that would love to be on Linux as much as you do but can’t because it simply doesn’t work out.
Do you really want a properly written comment? It looks like you don’t but I’ll give you one anyways. Just don’t complain like you did when I bluntly said what’s the reality of Linux desktop and professional software.
Microsoft has multiple versions of Windows and if you are smart enough to install Ubuntu you might as well be smart enough to read about them for five minutes and understand that you if you pick Windows 11 Pro you’ll be moderately clean and Windows 11 Enterprise will be very clean. You’ll also find out that with ANY version you can pick English (World) for a cleaner experience:
The remaining or all ads and spyware can also be disabled via group policy. When it comes to disabling crap Windows offers way better control than Ubuntu and macOS because it was made for that. There are countess companies and government agencies that force Microsoft to have group policy settings to disable all the “special features” otherwise they couldn’t use it.
Microsoft also has very detailed documentation into this (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/manage-connections-from-windows-operating-system-components-to-microsoft-services) that you can follow to disable what you don’t want. Meanwhile Canonical, Apple and others don’t give shit about users disabling the spyware and the systems sometimes break if you block connections.
So before you say unfounded and dumb things such as “impossible”, “forced” and whatnot go teach yourself about how things really work and what can and can’t be done.