MS know who butters their bread. Businesses get given the tools to control windows properly. Even without needing to resort to LTSC versions, domain joined with group policy, you can manage all the shitty parts of windows to make it behave as you wish - even down to control over when you receive the updates

Good point - my thought is to go through that pain now while I’m still learning to use Linux properly. I’m not tied into anything yet so I can always swap something out if it doesn’t play with Wayland and gets too troublesome.

Began moving all my hardware to Linux this year since none of them will run win11 without fk-about-ing - and I just don’t want to. So my server, media box and laptop are all cut over, only my main desktop left on windows a bit longer but it’s goose is cooked too.

I’ve tried dozens of distros over the years but I’ve settled on Fedora KDE.

The why:

• Skipping x11 and head straight into Wayland so I don’t have to worry about that in the future.
• I wanted something more up to date than debian-based and less cutting edge then Arch-based.
• Stability and support of being in the RHEL family
• Flatpaks
• Tried to get on with gnome to get away from the ‘start menu’ paradigm but ended up getting on with kde better.

And a formatting-stripping tool

Phase one: force everyone’s data into their OneDrive account. OneDrive now at capacity, you must upgrade to ensure all your data is backed up and retained.

Phase two: MS secretly (or not so secretly) use all this data to train copilot.

Human generated content to feed into ai systems is the new good rush

Got a well specced 4th Gen i7 that does everything I need so unless it blows up, I won’t be upgrading. Started working on the plan this week. Been using Mint on my secondary (non essential laptop) but never had the stones to take the plunge on my main rig.

Watching MS stepping into the enshittification trend and AI with Win11 means this is the last straw, particularly now I don’t need to rely on keeping up with windows for work. Currently bashing on Linux Mint DE in a VM to test what I need and have working to be happy:

Outlook/Office - Thunderbird is good but it’s been a while since I’ve used Libre Office but didn’t have much luck with it in the past - trashing the formatting when bouncing between LO & MSO. Hoping the more recent versions are better else office web will have to do for those documents that don’t play nice.

Steam - make sure I can get it going, several key games. This is the least of my worries after seeing what others have said. NVIDIA graphics may be a bit more painful.

RDP - I still have another headless win10 media box. VNC as backup. This box will be the next on the chopping block if all goes well.

Backup - this is the big one. Currently use Backblaze for unlimited backup and love the set & forget nature. No native Linux client so would require moving to their B2 platform with a third party interface - do-able, just need to get off my butt to work it out :p

File structure - always struggled with this in my playing with Linux, need to become more comfortable with where files live and general directory structure.

Will slowly pick those off over the next couple of weeks and then I should be good to go.