Looking back at my transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

Summary

I am a computer professional that helps the public with technology. I have been troubleshooting computer problems for over 25 years. To find out more about me, visit my home page. In August of 2023, I wrote about my switch to Linux as a Windows-centric professional. I’ve dabbled in Linux as a daily driver in the past, but it has always ended in some form of defeat. Eventually returning to my abuser, Windows. It was a hard road leaving it behind, but determination can work wonders when flying the freedom skies. Starting with the release of Windows 11, Microsoft’s shady tactics increased to the point where it’s no longer a viable option for an operating system, unless you don’t mind that your desktop is used as an advertising platform, or being forced to allow Copilot, Recall and OneDrive abuse the relationship to your data. Much of the commercial software industry invested into proprietary applications have descended into chaos in the least five years. Recently an intense feeding frenzy for control over the user experience rose to an all time high. Subscriptions replacing purchases of software products is the biggest example of this. In my previous article I was worried that I might give up, and switch back. Did I make it this time? Yes! Yes, I did. It’s been two years now. I finally weaned myself off of Big Daddy. I do everything in Linux now. Obviously, there are still some pain points that I have a hard time with, but isn’t that true with any operating system? As a survivor of that dependency, I sometimes feel that I am making the problem worse by installing and supporting Windows 11 for my customers. A new violation of trust is always just around the corner, even though I work very hard to remove or circumvent these hostile features. OneDrive even silently reinstalled itself and moved one customer’s data to the cloud, all without consent. One day their data was on the local drive and the next it became online-only files that had to be downloaded from Microsoft’s ...