On 10 right now, but honestly have had enough of the whole Windows ecosystem. (Like today I ran across a look at these exciting Windows 11 September updates! woo! aren’t you excited! video, and it was almost all embarrassingly cosmetic. Except for the part where they’re finally adding native support for archive formats (.7z, .rar, .tar) that everyone else has supported for decades: how fucking charming am I supposed to find that announcement after all these years of using 3rd party apps, when the probability of the native support being buggy as hell is very high? And that was just one example; there’s a full list in the description box.

No thanks. It’s clear they did all this just to be able to simultaneously slather AI hooks all through the OS works, free for now but not forever, and I’m just not interested in that either. Nothing against AI, I just don’t want it integrated into my OS. I also like my privacy, believe in keeping my own shit on my own computers, and enjoy not having a significant portion of my hardware computing load dedicated to the collection and sale of my data.

But MS isn’t the only game in town anymore. I tried some hardware-light Linux distros on a 13 year old MacBook recently just to see what the fuss is about, and was gobsmacked at how well they ran with 4GB of RAM and a slow (by today’s standards) processor. Holy shit. So I did a bit of hardware upgrading so I could run even more, and yesterday I installed Fedora 38 with KDE Plasma on that same MacBook with 16GB of RAM and a 1T SSD. It picked up every bit of that hardware on its own, too; I didn’t have to configure a thing.

It’s almost too easy, lol. It’s Linux so I thought I was going to be overwhelmed with command line shit, but no, not at all: the few times I needed the command line, the exact syntax was a web search away, with plentiful discussion, documentation, and even demo videos to choose from.

And if I don’t like it, I can try as many as I like off USB drives until I see something I like and decide to install that instead, and there are literally dozens, if not hundreds of distros now.

So Microsoft can keep that AI-ridden ad-ware Windows 11 shit. I’ll keep 10 for now (installed on a 7 license, lol) until I’m fully comfortable with Linux, and then that’s that.

Put it this way. I now have a screaming fast machine that runs on 13-year-old hardware where every software I could want for it is free, open source, and backed by a gazillion gurus both pro and amateur for whom no question is too arcane; why the hell should I give that up for the baggy, bloated, slow, privacy-invasive advertising delivery service that is Microsoft Windows?

I know there will be issues with Linux as I get to know it and use it, just because there are issues with every OS. There may even be things I find I can’t get past, and if that happens I try other distros or suck it up, lol. But fuck MS if they think I am going to pay actual cash to help them serve up my privacy while they deliver unwanted ads to me every time I boot it up.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk, lol.