Windows 10 was spooky enough that I held on to Windows 7 as my work operating system until 2020. The constant telemetry, settings that would switch themselves back on a reboot without any indication, forced updates with forced reboots that followed, and Cortana intermixing your file system with web results were all giant pier spanning red flags that told me Microsoft had turned fully hostile instead of just adversarial. The main thing to remember is that everything I just listed was there from the start in June of 2015. Then Microsoft stopped trying to be Wilson Fisk with Windows 11 and just came out as Kingpin.

I installed CachyOS (KDE) about 2 years ago and I’m obsessed with it, it’s so satisfying to tinker with. I also game on it every day. Recently invested in a AMD GPU just because it has a better driver story in Linux. I can’t imagine going back to Windows.

Edit: Shout out to SteamOS for getting Linux to where it is for gaming, incredible.

I did the same on my gaming machine in early 2025 to get well ahead of the Win10 EOL. I installed Nobara and have been really happy with it.

> If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better.

How much of that experience is a result of your corporate IT removing all the bullshit with group policies that Microsoft has introduced

> "If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better."

People here on HN are willing pay Google (monthly even!) to remove ads from YouTube. People here are willing to pay for RHEL Workstation or Ubuntu Pro Desktop for enterprise deployments. Yet people here are unwilling to pay Microsoft for the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want. Their problems are self-inflicted.

They have to try and claw back some of the sunk cost somehow. Microsoft made a trillion dollar bad bet and have decided that it's your problem

Microsoft has a bad history of actually making things optional. Required Microsoft account, Edge automatically importing your browser history and syncing it to Microsoft, OneDrive automatically copying your files and sending it to Microsoft, the repeated attempts after every update to make Edge default again...

They haven't given a fuck about the user experience for years and that's colliding with AI exhaustion. There's well over a dozen different things you need to turn off in various parts of Windows at this point to make it accept your decisions and stop throwing ads in your face, all tucked behind multiple layers of dark patterns.

But in the end, you could run what you needed, and move the garbage they threw in, out of the way. Now, I can't run Minecraft without logging into the MS Store. That was the last straw for me, and I built my entire career on Windows and .NET.