Although i’ve been a linux evangelist for quite a while now, I do truly feel that something has fundamentally changed in the OS landscape. My first introduction to linux would have been around 2006 or so. I installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my Pentium 4 and I was impressed at the speed when compared with Windows XP. However, it was not very stable. Audio was a constant issue, wake from sleep was an issue, hiberation was an issue, and updates seemed to break things often. I remember following a guide on instructables how to download the iso, burn it with a cracked version of daemontools (because back then, windows wouldn’t burn and mount .iso’s and ciso’s) I downloaded from limewire.

The issues that I had with ubuntu back then were numerous, as I said, stability, compatability, and software support just did not exist back then. It was very much an amateur product, and it was pretty clear that it wasn’t going to do what I needed. Sure there were open source and free alternatives to tools I was using, like paint.net, but my printer never worked right, my USB wifi adapter never worked properly, connecting my mp3 player to it worked, but when the ipods came around, the support was iffy. My time in super early desktop linux did introduce me to a lot of cool projects. Thunderbird, Songbird (I’m still sour this is dead), GIMP, VLC, WINE, all fantastic. I still use all of them, excepting songbird, almost daily.

After one frustrating night where my wifi card decided to stop working, causing me to update, which caused my system to not boot. I gave up on linux and went back to windows. I justified it to myself with the phrase “Linux is free if you don’t value your time”, which to be fair, I felt was true.

As time continued on, I eventually went back to linux, settled on Mint, and uneventfully have been using it for the better part of a decade now as just another OS I put on some of my low end devices. In my day job, I was using Windows 10 daily, right up until the EOL date. A week or so after that, I was issued a new Win11 laptop. Some HP z-book or something, and that’s when all of the issues started. Audio stops working from the speakers about 30 seconds after I wake the laptop from sleep. Waking from sleep takes about 5 minutes, which has made me late for morning standups. The most annoying, and the one that pisses me off the most is constant, and I mean constant, daily HDCP failures. Windows 11 will some days just refuse to recognize my desktop monitors, no amount of rebooting or cursing and swearing will get it to work. On those days I end up having to work from a single laptop screen like some sort of neaderthal.

That’s just mentioning the hardware problems. The elephant in the room is that Windows 11 is slow, fat and bloated. Opening menus takes a noticeable amount of time, the bottom bar is constant attention sucking clickbait that distracts me when I’m trying to think. Copilot is shoved into every facet of the windows suite, but it is seemingly just as useless as clippy was. (for real, it can’t manipulate the document you’re working on? Why? am I doing something wrong? I don’t actually care to be honest.)

Windows 11 is unstable, updates have ALREADY caused issues with hardware, which is something that I only experienced in 7 when my laptop was approaching 5 or so years old, and this is a brand new corporate laptop. Unacceptable.

All of this to say, the point of an operating system is to provide you with a thin layer with which to get your work done. Windows 11 does none of those things. It’s fat, bloated, slow, full of ads, and most importantly it DOESN’T GET OUT OF THE WAY. Microsoft was trying to provide Windows as a product, as a software that people should notice, but that’s not something they should be doing. NOBODY should notice your OS. It should just be an implementation of the user metaphor. Any time someone needs to google “why is stuff on my desktop filling up onedrive” is a failure on the part of microsoft.

Now, contrast all of this to modern desktop linux. My current favorite right now is Debian. Throw it on a USB stick, plug it in and boot. Click a few menu options, pick an interface and that is IT. It gets out of your way. Updates don’t break anything, it works out of the box on every computer I’ve thrown at it. Completely 180 degrees from my windows experience.

It really isn’t that deep, if you think about it. Windows 11 is a dog, and desktop linux is just a better product. Another example of tortoise and the hare, I suppose.