You are not worried about 0-days and other malware?
I left Windows 11. The last straw wasn’t Microsoft accounts or Windows updates. I actually thought the OS was fine, most OS updates actually added great new features, and anything I considered an annoyance was easy to disable permanently.
Toss your Windows 11 ISO into Rufus and disabling things like Microsoft account requirements is a trivial process.
What I actually rage quit Windows over was AMD graphics drivers and a couple of my video games crashing.
What caught me by surprise is just how little I’d miss it. I thought I’d need to dual boot or run a Windows VM for little random things. Nope, I just don’t need them.
I didn’t expect to find an OS with more software that I tend to like better. Like my email client, where I moved from Thunderbird to Evolution and for the most part I find that to be a step up in user experience.
Linux has been usable for non proprietary software for decades now. The fact that people are refusing to jump ship even when Windows actively undermines them and itself speaks volumes of people's aversion (or inability) to switch OSes.
I also think the AI era goes very far in eliminating those 5% problems. I have a mostly non-technical friend who set up an old laptop with Linux for the first time and he told me that he’d never have been able to do it on his own without AI. Anytime there’s an issue, his solution is just a quick question or copy/paste away.
The last time I had instability on a Nvidia card in Windows turned out to be a faulty card I had to RMA.
But yeah, switching to Linux with an AMD card is basically an upgrade compared to Windows.
(My card is a 9070XT)
I'm in the process of setting up a Linux desktop to replace my Win10 one, and for me it's these (if anyone has suggestions for migration or replacement, I'd love some opinions!)
- Lightroom. If anyone knows how to either run this under Linux, or migrate an entirely catalog of photos (plus edits) to something open source (including the Negative Lab Pro plugin), that would be amazing.
- MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.
- Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)
It's a major step up in power but the steam deck has really pushed the wine/proton environment to near parity. The only things that really don't work through it reliably is anti-cheat stuff that I really don't want on my machine anyway.
I can't speak for the experience with nvidia drivers but it's pretty amazing how far it's come.
https://www.protondb.com/search?q=microsoft%20flight%20simul...
For a traditional "all batteries included" collection management music player try Strawberry and Quod Libet. You should also look into the MuiscBrainz Picard tagger, it's a bit unwieldy to use but is very powerful once you learn it's wonky workflow.
I switched from the standard kernel to the bore kernel and went from a pretty disappointing experience in terms of performance and stutters to a really great one.
I've had five clients who have lost access to their Microsoft accounts permanently due to insufficient, or old, recovery information. SMS can't be used anymore. I've been thinking about recommending Yubikeys, but when older people don't even want to use password managers because they don't trust them, that's a hard sell.
The biggest problem is Microsoft changes the rules and requires all of these features, but doesn't tell any normal users of the changes nor the addition of the features.
Namely, it's the "blockers" one hasn't found suitable replacements for.
So it’s the same risk whether you choose online accounting software or Windows accounting software.
I’m aware that bypassing the Microsoft account is presently trivial, but I figured I’d point out this food for thought.
I would add that I've also used Windows 11 IoT LTSC and that experience is very similar to Windows 10 IoT LTSC.
It depends on the type of software a user runs. I installed Windows 10 LTSC on a friend's computer last year thinking she could run it for at least 5 more years and just ignore the newer Windows 11/12/whatever.
But she needed Intuit TurboTax 2025 and it requires Windows 11 and it's a hard requirement. The installer aborts on Windows 10. It's not a soft requirement like Adobe where they only support Windows 11 but their installer still runs on Windows 10. Autodesk Fusion 360 is another example that requires Windows 11.
I'm guessing if there's a future Windows 12, Intuit TurboTax will be aggressive about making it a requirement that forces the issue even though nobody wants to upgrade to it.
Desktop installed version can file multiple returns so the overall cost is lower.
https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/...
The biggest attack vectors are the browser, the mail client and direct network access. I would never use outlook, edge or connect my computer directly without NAT or firewall to the open internet. And would never open a website without a add blocker.
You can count all other known big attacks(on unpatched Windows 7!!!) on one hand.
1) Remote execution via Wifi Stack
2) Remote execution via True Type Fonts
3) 0-Click code execution via USB Stick Icon processing
Windows update instead gives AT LEAST Microsoft a steady remote code execution on your and millions of other computers. It's a really interesting attack target when you go big. Why I should trust M$ to get the security there right?
The same holes exists and have existed for some time already. If he was not worried about them before why be worried about them now? And if you're worried about security holes why not be worried about the ones that exist now?
In general I find it funny that some people think that system is "secure" when it's on the latest version. At time t0 version N is considered "secure" then an update is made at t1 with version N1 and suddenly N is no longer secure. But it didn't change... it's the same version it was before.
Fact is a computer system is never going to be 100% secure.
So till november 2026 or so everything is fine. Then I will probably have to switch to Linux.
I joke