Longtime Readers will know quite well by now that I have a particular, special, and burning hatred of Microsoft, and with very good reason. I have been using Linux as my, uh, “daily driver”, as the kids these days insist on calling it, for… going on 18 years now, I think. I first started using Mandriva Linux – anyone remember that one? – which was basically a Red Hat derivative from way back in the day, and then switched to Ubuntu sometime in late 2008. And ever since then, I have been watching as my decision to do so, has been more and more thoroughly vindicated.

I did not realise just how vindicated it was, though, until my EWCHOOB feed got slammed, all of a sudden, over the past week, with a whole flood of videos hating on “Microslop”.

Here are just a few of the examples:

What, exactly, happened?

Well, inevitably, Mr. Softy got blue balls over its updates to WinDOZE 11. Only, this time, they have turbocharged their stupidity to truly stratospheric levels.

Now, Microsoft’s inability to get things right with its updates and patches is nothing new. The cycle of stupidity is monotonously predictable:

• Microsoft releases an “update” full of bugs and problems that they did not fully run through a proper QA process;
• The bugs and problems end up breaking essential features in Win11 that both home and business users actually need;
• After a lot of feedback – the kind that your toddler gives you when he wants you to know, very specifically and directly, that he does not appreciate the strained carrots you are feeding him – from severely cheesed-off customers, Mr. Softy tries to fix what they broke with an emergency patch or a rollback;
• The patch goes into effect, but ends up breaking something else important;
• The whole depressingly stupid cycle starts up all over again;

This is, I repeat, not new at all. Anyone who has suffered through the misery of the last few Windows versions – ever since the abomination that was Windows 8 – knows the pain, all too well.

The reason why this keeps happening, is very simple. Windows is THE standard operating system for the vast majority of programs, and as such, it has to maintain backwards compatibility for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of old programs dating back a quarter-century – sometimes more.

Many of those programs were designed to run on Windows XP – a truly GREAT operating system, actually – and have never really been updated since to handle modern kernels, drivers, memory-handling, graphics cards, hardware, or whatever.

The result is that Microsoft has to maintain this constant balancing act between ensuring the old stuff works properly, while providing a real platform for the new stuff.

However, this problem is not insurmountable. After all, Linux – or, to be more precise, operating systems based on the Linux kernel – are more than capable of running software that is years or even decades out of date, without serious issues. Just ask your typical Debian user, who probably has not rebooted since the awfulness of the Obama Era.

But this is because the fundamental architecture of Linux is sound, thoroughly tested, secure, and designed for multi-user systems from the start. It has never suffered from the dreadful setup problems that Microsoft always had in attempting to merge the legacy of usability from a single-user system, like Win98, with the scalability and stability of a multi-user system, like Win2K.

That, as far as I can tell, is a struggle that continues at Microsoft to this very day, because the basic architecture of Windows remains problematic.

The lack of a solid foundation is bad enough. But now, in the modern age, Microsoft, under Satya Nadella, is trying to ram Abominable Intelligence features into EVERYTHING – whether users want them or not.

And most of us ABSOLUTELY DO NOT want them.

Have you ever tried using Copilot? I have not. I flatly refuse to do so. It is not a useful AI app. It is rather like a very retarded version of ChadGippity, as I call it, and not nearly as fun to use. But Microsoft seems to think that everyone wants to interact with this idiotic Copilot assistant for everything – when, in reality, most people (especially Excel power users like me) JUST WANT A COMPUTER THAT WORKS.

We do not get that with Microsoft anymore.

I use Win11 on my work laptop – or rather, I should say, I HAVE to use it. And over the last few weeks, I am finding it nigh-unusable.

Things that I take for granted on my Linux machine – which runs Linux Mint and is quite stable and smooth – just do not work properly in Win11. Let’s take tabbed file managers as an example. Linux has had tabbed file managers for what seems like an eternity – I remember using them all the way back in 2008 and being blown away by the fact that I could open up MULTIPLE FOLDERS IN SEPARATE TABS and simply flick between them, the way I could pages in a web browser.

Microsoft didn’t figure out how to do the same basic thing until Win11 came along. But, to this day, it cannot seem to figure out how to keep Windows Explorer open while you are doing other things. For absolutely no good reason, Win11 will just randomly close Windows Exploder, which means I lose the 3-10 folders that I have open, and then I have to go back in and laboriously reopen every single one.

This is merely the start of the headaches.

Win11 seems to fall over these days if you so much as sneeze at it. Applications hang constantly. The CPU cores seem to lock up the moment you open Excel and PowerPoint at the same time. Try programming anything in VS Code and watch as it very “helpfully” tries to insert an AI bot into your process, then refuses to compile, because reasons.

I have no real idea why things have gotten this bad, but one video up top points it out by saying that, apparently, Microsoft has seriously cut back on its QA teams.

I have worked in an IT-centric organisation before, so I know just how important the DEV – QA – UAT – PROD release cycle actually is. I get along very well with IT types, as a general rule, because I know how they think, and I understand the value of testing with real users who really know what they are doing. Back in the day, when I was working for Big Bad Globohomo Bank #2, that was me – I was the power user, and I was the one telling the DEV guys what to build, and the QA guys what to test.

(As an aside – that bank moved its DEV and QA teams from India to Russia, which was one of the very few smart things they ever did. For that particular application stack, we suddenly found that the programs actually, y’know, worked for a change.)

So when I see that Microsoft, which should understand such things, fails to obey basic good practices for creating stable code releases, well, I cannot say I am surprised by the results.

That being said – it is important to remember that there is another way.

Linux distributions are now at the point where they are genuinely, legitimately viable and useful for the average person. They are now more user-friendly, in my view, than Win11. They can run roughly 90% or so of the games you might want to play, either natively or via Steam – if you have a good enough graphics card, and the right device drivers (which nowadays typically come pre-installed with a decent Linux distro), you can play many triple-A titles right there on Linux, with frame rates approaching those of Win11, but without all the horrible bloatware.

There are only a few areas where Linux does not stack up.

It cannot run MS Excel natively – and I do not care how many Libreoffice Calc users chime in here, it is nowhere NEAR as good. Excel is simply the best product of its kind anywhere, hands down, and the race isn’t even close. I use both, and while I think Calc is perfectly fine for about 95% of both home and corporate users, it is simply not an adequate full replacement for power users of Excel, like me.

Linux also cannot use some of Adobe’s products natively, which is a big no-no for content creators – though I understand this is becoming less of a limitation nowadays, because of Adobe’s totally forked-up fee model. And Linux struggles with CAD work – though, again, not quite as big an issue as it used to be.

But… for everything else, it just sort of… works.

Now, Linux will NEVER take over the corporate desktop market. It simply won’t. There is too much legacy infrastructure to overcome. But, for most personal use, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, ZorinOS, Manjaro, and a whole host of others, are plenty good enough.

You really do not have to keep buying a new PC just because Microslop keeps changing the minimum system specs in collusion with the big hardware manufacturers. You do not have to tolerate broken system updates and patches that brick your computer. And you do not have to deal with Microsoft constantly harassing you for your data.

There IS another way. It isn’t Apple’s walled-garden Mac OS X – I have my own serious beefs with that one. You CAN, in fact, have a system that “just works”, is stable and secure, and – most importantly – treats you with respect.

So, come to the Dark Side, my friend. We have penguins.