The Windows Epidemic

So, as I’m sure most of you have heard numerous times over by now, Windows 10 has reached the end of its service life and will no longer receive security updates and patches (except for those who register with a Microsoft account and apply for the now-supposedly-free Extended Security Updates, or ESU, program). On the topic of the ESU program, I’m sure this is just a counter-move to try and slow the mass-migration of fed-up users to Linux, or perhaps even older versions of Windows (as there has supposedly been an uptick in Windows 7 installations since the W10 EOL became official). Yeah, how about that? People have started to decide that if they’re going to use an insecure OS, they’re going to make sure it’s got a good UI, solid performance, and one that was written way back when Microsoft actually cared about making an Operating System and not just a vessel for data brokerage.

Now, one thing I can’t quite wrap my head around is the masses ranting on about how this is the “worst thing to possibly happen” and how they don’t want to give up their “beloved” Windows 10 for a worse experience with Windows 11. Look, I’m not out here to defend Windows 11 by any means, in fact, quite the contrary. I just find it astonishing that it’s taken so many people this long to come to the realization that Microsoft doesn’t care about making a good OS, or how their customers feel about them, or anything else that actually matters to the end-user. I realized this way back in 2015, when Windows 10 first hit the market, after I had been anticipating the launch since I heard about it (in fact, I was excited enough to become one of the first beta testers for W10 when the first preview release hit the public development channels). Let’s just say, it’s been a letdown since before day one, and I don’t think that’s gotten any better as the OS has aged.

Windows 10 came in like a storm and forced full-screen update ads littered all of my family’s beautifully performing Windows 7 and 8 machines. One by one, I watched as once-decently performing computers got absolutely crippled by an Operating System that didn’t even have a trace of Windows Aero anymore. You know, that beautiful, polished UI that was introduced with Vista and refined in 7? The one that made Vista’s launch so terrible, because Aero Glass, among other refinements, caused lesser performing machines to perform horribly. Yeah, so getting rid of that somehow made the OS more bloated and crippled my Windows 7 capable hardware that once ran with full transparency?? Make it make sense, Microsoft! Sure, you could claim that virtual desktops, perhaps the new start menu, and some other changes brought greater overhead, but I’ve been running multiple virtual desktops on far lower-powered machines since Ubuntu 9.10 was the latest release, and a lot of these “refinements” had existed in Ubuntu for years without performance issues. Oh, and Ubuntu did have a certain level of transparency, especially with the Unity Desktop Environment, along with a very aesthetically pleasing dash and a much better search than Windows ever had.

Now, I’ve been dual booting Windows since I started using Ubuntu 9.10, and usually used both about 50/50 until 2015. But once I started watching computers go from being able to play Deus Ex Human Revolution at 60 FPS to not even getting past the loading screen without unplayable framerates, along with crazy long boot times, app loading times, and all the rest? That was the moment I dived straight back into the world of Linux, and not too long after, my distro-hopping search began.

Prior to 2015, I was fairly content with Ubuntu as my main distro, but ever since 13.04 released, I’ve become more and more put off by it. The OS generally started to feel less stable (I mean, you can’t even boot a fresh installation without seeing a “system problem detected” error, which is honestly ridiculous. Now, while those errors were harmless and related to a broken reporting process, I still found it astounding that this was allowed to continue for so long, and last I checked, it still hasn’t been fixed over a decade later). I was also starting to feel as though Ubuntu was becoming less true to its open-source roots and started to introduce some changes that I fundamentally disagreed with. So I jumped to Linux Mint, which was decent, but it still didn’t feel like my thing, then I tried Elementary OS. I really did like this one, and I actually used it when it was still in beta as version 0.3 “Freya”. I tried Zorin OS for a bit, but it wasn’t totally my thing either, so I hopped to Xubuntu, then Manjaro (although I did like Manjaro, the Arch architecture did mean that a lot of things would break with updates, requiring a fair bit of maintenance and patching, and although it was fun and I learned a lot, I do like my main computer(s) to be both stable and secure, and simply not updating because I was scared of a stray update breaking part of my system was not the answer for me, as I value my security and privacy as much as I do my time). I hopped to Pop! OS for quite a while after that, then Kubuntu, eventually back to Pop! OS again, those two were my top picks for quite a while, then Debian, and eventually, my top favourite, Rocky Linux, which is RHEL-based, very mature, stable, functional, and even allows me to easily install just the updates that keep my system secure and patched, while opting out of some feature updates that may not be totally necessary to maintain a stable OS.

I figured out in 2015 what it appears quite a few people are only seeing now. My issues with Windows 10 were not just limited to low-spec hardware either. I did upgrade, and when I built my gaming rig, I did keep a dual-boot system. Windows 10 needed to be reinstalled more times than I could count. So many nightmare-level updates would just break the system, and it was well-documented in the news, every week, with wide-scale issues. Things like having all your icons disappear on you, rebooting to a corrupt user profile that needed to be rebuilt, rebooting to a black screen of death (aka: no login screen), and so many countless issues that just re-shaped my view of Windows as being a “toy” operating system while Linux was my mature, adult OS. From that point forward, I became a UNIX-man. Only booting into Windows for programs that I simply couldn’t use natively in Linux. Mostly MS Office, Adobe suite, games, and some other Windows-only software.

Eventually, this led to buying my first Mac Mini, which in-turn led to me buying my first MacBook Pro. Since Mac OS supports a lot of the same niche applications that I used to lean on Windows for, I can instead lean on Mac for those cases. Since I already have a powerful rig with both Windows and Linux dual-booted, I could get away with lower-spec Macs, allowing me to save costs when purchasing those, while still allowing them to fill roughly 90% of the gap of my computing needs. Being UNIX-based, this effectively means I am a UNIX-only person now. While I do still use Windows occasionally, it’s moreso to keep up with the latest changes so I can stay sharp professionally across all major Operating Systems. I also use Windows for some of those edge cases where some things just aren’t supported on either Mac OS or Linux. I do still keep Windows on one of my servers, dual booted on my desktop, and an instance running in a VM as a jump server, for those edge cases, as well as to stay current with the latest changes to Microsoft’s OS, but by and large, the majority of my server stack is Linux-based and only running Linux (no dual-boot, even though they technically can support Windows 11), all of my Windows computers are dual-booted, and I’m leaning more towards exclusively using Linux and Mac OS in my day-to-day. I’ve never been more satisfied since, and the move to UNIX-based computing is likely the reason I still have a strong passion for the tech industry, and why my desktop hasn’t tried to LARP as a bird, out the nearest window. Honestly, the only times I really use Windows anymore is usually when I’m connecting to that jump server using Linux, Mac OS, iOS, or Android as a remote thin-client, so even when I am using Windows, I’m usually not using it unfiltered or leaning exclusively on it.

I've said it before, countless times, and I will say it again. This time, preserving it in writing. Nobody can sell you a Mac quite like Microsoft does. No Apple ad campaign, no WWDC event, not even influencers can sell it like "Microshaft" does.

I feel this is the best way to approach computing, as I am in a state now where I am no longer bothered by Microsoft’s pursuit of idiocracy and chaos, especially when it comes to them retiring an OS that I wish never got pushed into my life in the first place. As for my thoughts on Windows 11? At least they’re going with a design language that actually looks halfway decent now, and not just some hacked-together UI with conflicting design elements that literally made Windows 95 look futuristic by comparison. I’m also glad to see that the flat UI is starting to retire and we are getting some semblance of Aero back in the form of Blur, even if it isn’t anywhere near the same thing. Windows 10 may have hit EOL, but in my personal life? I’ve felt absolutely zero impact, since I’ve already long-since moved on from Microsoft’s Stockholm syndrome, and I no longer even own a machine that still runs Windows 10, or has within the past few years.