I’m seriously surprised how many people are still putting up with microsoft

Last Friday I showed a colleague that the computer he had been using to control a robot arm with a CNC mill that day, is running Linux (Ubuntu). I opened a terminal, listened to the obligatory "wow, are you hacking?!", and typed uname.

"THAT'S Linux?!"... And he is a clever nerd.

There are entire business models built around customer complacency. Most people don't want to make a change unless their hand is forced, even with a steady decline in quality.

A lot of nerds would be perfectly capable of installing a different OS. But i atleast often forget that screwing around with the computer itself isnt the focus for a lot of them. They just use the computer to get shit done in their field of special interests. Like for me the whole administrative overhead of switching to Linux was only bound by the resource of time. But i really looked forward to it and had a blast when i finally secured enough time to do it. In the end i just learned a new aspect for my hobby. For others that would just take time away for the things they want to do. Interest in open source, privacy, beeing in control of your digital shit etc also isnt as common as one would hope even for computer nerds.

With that said in the last two years i still saw a big shift. Atleast in the other online spaces i frequent and even in my private life tons of people picked up Linux. Just because the strain of windows became so insuffereable.

I've tried to switch to Linux a handful of times on my secondary machine, from Vista era up to Windows 11. My primary use case at the beginning was DVR. Couldn't beat Windows Media Center for that in the Vista/Win7 era. Then WMC got the axe so my use case shifted to Plex with other content sources. Tried Linux for that changeover. As an unseasoned Linux toe-dipper, that process was just a bunch of blindly running commands from a setup guide to install everything, usually without an explanation of what each command does. Some stuff wasn't working and I didn't have an idea of how to fix it where to start looking, so I aborted Linux and ran Windows 10. As a largely headless machine (accessible via KVM, but I usually just used remote desktop to manage), Windows 10 updates were a frequent hassle with the full-screen nags for OneDrive and whatnot that interrupted the boot to desktop (and thus prevented my background services from starting), but I lived with it for years, and remoted in when I had to fix something.

This past year, I finally did a fresh start with TrueNAS running all the same apps I was using on Windows. It took a while to figure out permissions, and the process of getting there was messy, but everything is working.

In anticipation of the Valheim 1.0 release, I wanted to setup a dedicated server. I initially tried setting up a spare laptop to run it in Mint, but I ended up reallocating that laptop to my wife so she could dip her toes in Linux. I then shifted to trying to set up a Docker container for it, but had a misunderstanding of where to paste the Docker compose, so I gave up and installed a Mint VM and setup the server inside that VM. Then a couple months passed, and I'd forgotten what installation type I used and also what commands to update/configure, which motivated me to delete the VM and figure out what I was doing wrong with Docker. Got it set up after a little struggle with file paths to a separate storage pool, but it's now working perfectly. Now I have an easy update button in the GUI so I don't have to remember or document any commands. I'd go so far as to say the vanilla dedicated server running as a Docker app inside TrueNAS is a cleaner, easier experience than the default method in Windows. Now I have a friend asking for a server-side mod, so we'll see how that goes...

As for my wife, her main use case is simple Libre Office and web browsing, so there's basically no struggle there. There was one hiccup with her touchpad not working, but she resolved that. She did try to run Clone Hero and ran into an issue with button mapping with her Xbox 360 guitar but didn't have the will to look into it at the time. She'll get around to it.

As for me, I'm a gamer and an engineer. Until all my games and SolidWorks run on Linux, I won't be switching my primary PC off of Windows.

I‘m old(er), need my PC for work since my livelyhood depends on it, and unfortunately only have a limited amount of fucks to give per day. That made it quite the daunting task to switch OS since I‘m stuck with Windows for over 20 years now.

Got new hardware recently and will take my time to set up Zorin OS while keeping the old Windows machine running in parallel for a while. It is the softest of switches I could think of all in all, and I‘m looking forward to it. Sometimes things take time, especially when people have essentially been indoctrinated with Windows since their early school days.

If you have to use Windows and Office at work, you're kind of stuck. At home I finally ditched Win10 and found LibreOffice perfectly fine to use. Not everyone can make that choice or would want to have one type at home and one at work.

But it's okay, Microsoft seems to want to shoot themselves in the foot every chance they get. Even making the mistakes they are, they can't even easily topple the monopoly dependence they built up.