Microsoft Windows 10 reached its end-of-life date 11 days ago, on October 14, and that means most of you who are NOT on Linux right now, have absolutely no choice but to upgrade your machines and/or install WinDOZE 11.

This is a much worse deal than you might think. Microsoft has a long history of doing incredibly dumb things to its user base, and it thinks it can get away with that, because everyone is basically locked in.

Or at least, that is how it used to be.

For all that I intensely dislike Microsoft – though I will readily admit that its Xbox platform is generally pretty great – I will concede that Windows 7 was a fantastic operating system. It was, in my view, the best OS Microsoft ever made. It did basically everything right, and had pretty much the correct balance (more or less) of usability, flexibility, compatibility, and stability. This was at a time when Linux was still struggling, to some extent, with device compatibility and graphics – back then, gaming on Linux was mostly a non-starter, whereas you had to have Windows 7 to play the latest PC games and maximise the power of your hardware.

But, as Microsoft has historically done, it followed up a great operating system with a terrible one. It has done this ever since the release of Windows 95. It habitually releases one decent OS, and on occasion even a great one, with a nigh-unusable one.

The follow-up act, WinDOZE 8, was an abomination, because it replaced all the great stuff that worked with its predecessor’s user interface, with a tablet/mobile-ready “tiled” approach that made it basically unusable. For some reason, Microsoft skipped right over “Windows 9”, and jumped to “Windows 10” instead. But they course-corrected quite well with Windows 10, and made it a mostly usable, mostly stable, and generally pretty good system.

The biggest flaws with the system, though, have always remained.

Microsoft has never treated its user base like functional adults with free will. Your operating system is not your own. You cannot customise it to look exactly the way you want. It updates itself when Microsoft decides you should update it, not when YOU want to update it – which is why, back when I had a Windows partition on my current machine, I would often find myself in the middle of an epic HALO 4 campaign mission, only to end up screaming into my screen, because Microsoft chose THAT EXACT MOMENT to install a bunch of “upgrades” that required an immediate restart.

For all of its strengths, Windows 10 was still quintessentially a Microsoft operating system – bloated, crufty, tied down with all sorts of unnecessary junk, and demanding on your hardware, especially memory and video card.

Now, if you know anything about software development, you would think that the purpose of that profession is to improve your product. Au contraire, mon frere. This is simply not true. And nowhere is it less true, than at Microsoft.

That is not merely my opinion. It is the opinion of former Microsoft engineers who understand the product at a very deep level. WinDOZE 11 is far, far worse than you might realise, because of Mr. Softy’s insistence on ramming Abominable Intelligence into every single aspect of the system:

The result is an operating system that is becoming profoundly unusable, that treats you – the paying customer – like an idiot slave, spies on you by default, and insists on putting up an extremely intrusive AI “assistant” to “help” you, whether you like it or not.

(I am old enough to remember the days of the infamous “Clippy” in the Office suites of yore. Like most people who had to deal with that nonsense, I developed a reaction to that which bordered on homicidal rage.)

This is not good software. It is a trap.

Fortunately, there is a better way. Actually, there are SEVERAL better ways. My personal favourite, of course, is simply to install Linux and have done with it. There are now numerous Linux distributions that are more than capable of filling in 90%, or more, of what WinDOZE can do, and which do so better, faster, easier, and – best of all – FOR FREE.

Take, for instance, the testimony of this chap, who noted how easy it was for him to operate Linux on his former WinDOZE PC a year after making the change:

Now, there are certain practical considerations to keep in mind. For a start, those who want to get into Linux are often hugely confused by which distribution to use. This is the natural outcome of having literally THOUSANDS of options to choose from – the fact that the Linux code base is essentially free, allows any man and his dog to setup a spin of Linux that suits himself, as long as he is willing and able to put in the effort to maintain it.

For my money, the best distributions to use, in terms of ease of installation, hardware compatibility, user-friendliness, and range of end-user applications, are as follows:

Debian-based:

Exceptional stability, vast array of applications and software available, high degree of hardware compatibility

• Ubuntu – the “daddy” of user-friendly Linux distributions
• Linux Mint – Ubuntu-based, but with a much nicer front-end that is highly familiar to most Windows users
• Elementary OS – Ubuntu-based, more of an Apple OS X look and feel to it via Gnome, with a dock
• Zorin OS – Ubuntu-based, with a really pretty GUI

Arch-based:

Bleeding-edge package repositories allowing access to the absolute latest versions of software, huge array of documentation to help with installation and configuration, probably the best for gaming on Linux due to ability to use the latest drivers – but not the most user-friendly, especially for new people

• Garuda Linux – optimised for gaming
• Manjaro Linux – designed for simplicity and (relative) stability for consumers and businesses

Fedora-based:

Lots of history due to its continuation from the old Red Hat project, which gives it rock-solid stability and power – but not nearly as easy to install as Ubuntu and its derivatives, and much more of a stickler for open-source drivers than Ubuntu

• Fedora Core – uses the Gnome desktop environment by default, but you can use others if you like
• Ultramarine Linux – kind of “just works”, and should install easily

I have tried and tested ALL of these distributions in one form or another – usually in the form of a virtual machine – except for the very last one. Once you get used to the differences in design philosophy between Linux and WinDOZE, though, it is all really kind of the same thing.

And those differences are fundamental, by the way. I’ll give you one simple example. In WinDOZE, you have different drives marked by different letters – so your main drive is C:, and then any extra partitions, network drives, or physical drives that you attach, will have different letters (D:, E:, F:, etc. etc. ad infinitum). This is because Microsoft, in all its wisdom, decided to treat drives and files as two separate entities – which creates endless problems for any programmer trying to figure out absolute drive paths for specific objects. Anyone who has ever tried to plug a USB stick and an external backup drive in at the same time, knows full well that the drive letters can easily change depending on what order you plug them in.

Linux, by contrast, follows the original UNIX philosophy, which says EVERYTHING is a file – including drives of any kind.

This makes mounting drives a complete doddle. The paths are consistent and constant. Life is easy and simple.

There are other idiosyncrasies between the two systems that require some adaptation and understanding, but none of this is beyond the ken of mere mortals. With Linux Mint, in particular, the system “just works”, to the point where you can basically get on with life as you see fit.

Now, there ARE gaps in capability between Linux and WinDOZE. Linux still does not have a true equivalent for Microsoft Excel, for instance – or PowerPoint, for that matter. However, for (almost) every such problem, there is a solution. LibreOffice Calc does almost everything that the vast majority of Excel users will ever need – only if you are a power user (like me), who knows how to program in VBA, routinely uses Pivot Tables, and knows how to use and manage the Excel Data Model and Power Query, will you find Calc to be significantly limited.

And if, for some godforsaken reason, you insist on wasting your life on slideware – for the love of God, what is WRONG with you??? – then there are open-source online tools that do what PowerPoint does, but prettier and faster. Canva, for instance, is in many ways superior to PowerPoint for graphic design, including for slides.

(I should admit at this point that most of my life at work is consumed with building and producing PowerPoint slides – which is my least favourite part of my job, by far. I have only half-jokingly said to the senior partners that I want a line item in the budget specifically for a PowerPoint lackey who can build all my slides for me, which would then free me up to do all the interesting data-driven stuff that I actually care about, and which only I can do. If I never have to build another PowerPoint slide for the rest of my life, I will be a happy man.)

The only area where I think Linux continues to lag, is in gaming, but even then, if you have a computer with an NVIDIA graphics card, you can easily download the proprietary drivers for your card, along with the Steam application, and get up and running on Linux with most (though not all) games. The top multiplayer games can have serious issues with their anti-cheat mods, which prevent them from running fully and correctly on Linux, but if you have a reasonably modern graphics card, you can run most of the good stuff without too many issues.

Have a care, though, because you do genuinely need a good graphics card – NVIDIA RTX or GTX series, preferably – to run games well in Linux. My Lenovo T14 Gen 3 from 2022 has an MX550 2GB GDDR6 card, and that really struggles at times even with HALO: The Master Chief Collection, which is, to put it mildly, far from the cutting edge of gaming.

Even so, because most of what I do is online in some form or another, I can meet 95% of my needs with a Linux-only machine. I used to have a WinDOZE partition on my laptop, specifically for playing HALO, but once I realised that I could play most of the same stuff on Linux directly, I simply deleted out that partition, and have never looked back. (Only HALO 3 is a real pain to play on Linux, for reasons that I have never quite been able to figure out – everything else, including HALO Reach, and especially HALO 4, works pretty well.)

If I ever need WinDOZE for something specific, I can simply boot up a virtual machine on Virtualbox, which I can run in parallel to my Linux machine, and flip back and forth for what I need. If, for instance, I want to run Excel or PowerPoint, I can easily do that in an isolated virtual environment – and then hook that up to my Linux machine through a shared folder between the two.

The point of all this is that you no longer HAVE to submit to Microsoft’s endless abuse. That has been true for years now – I have personally been using Linux as my daily driver at home since about 2008, and I have never regretted that choice – but in the last few years, things have gotten far better, due to the exponential growth in support for open-source projects from all the money flowing out of AI projects. The top LLM models in existence today, derive much of their capability from originally open-source models that those AI companies have now closed off and develop on their own – but that also means they help fund a lot of the open-source development that has enabled the rapid growth of the industry.

So now, let’s say you’ve read through all that – and you decide that moving away from Linux is not for you.

If, for some reason, you decide to stay with WinDOZE, and you do not want to shell out a lot of money on a new laptop or computer that is compatible with the onerous system requirements of Win11, then there is a hack around that too. You can install a small-footprint version of Win11 that gets rid of all the idiocy and stringent “security” requirements of the new OS:

This is the version of Win11 that Microsoft wishes it could make disappear forever. It is not possible. Intelligent hackers will ALWAYS find a way to get around these artificial restrictions, because the rest of us value our freedom and autonomy.

Ultimately, you have the right to choose what you want from your computer and your operating system. Microsoft forgot that and insists on treating you like a slave. It is up to you to choose whether you want to live with that treatment. You do not have to do so. There are better ways.

So come and join the dark side – we have penguins.