You can even skip step 2 by using one of the IoT editions (either Win10 or Win11) which come minus the prepackaged bloatware.

Microsoft is mostly interested in making everything bullshit for home users. If you convince them you're an enterprise customer, preferably by running up the old Jolly Roger, suddenly your life is a lot easier.

Takes a lot more to fully deshittify it, though. I've been down that road. So much registry diving, so many third party apps, strongarming uninstallations of bloatware through brute force, and just all around weeks of work.

When the screenshot shit was announced the first time, I just got tired of looking for workarounds to disable or remove Microsoft's active attempts of policing, spying, and triple-dip profiting off it's paying customers.

my main gripe with Ubuntu right now is the way they are forcing snaps into my system under the covers. if i wanted to install a snap, i would be using snap install instead of apt install. forcing a snap install when i use apt install is just total fuckery. fortunately i only have to use ubuntu at work; home is fedora and alma

Because theyre eithet vauge, blatant lies, or not something people care about:

No New Hardware, No Licensing Costs

Most people are willing to buy new hardware, and nobody pays for a Windows key tbh. Even if they did it would be a free upgrade from 10 to 11. Also the terminology is very enterprise focused and objectively some distros (ex REHL) are paid.

Enhanced Privacy

Once again not something people strictly care about. In addition if you use Linux exactly like Windows with Chrome, Whatsapp, Discord and other non privacy respecting apps you're not improving your privacy by much.

Good For The Planet

The implication that carbon emissions is something an individual can do something about has been objectively disproven. For any meaningful change you need societal change from the top (especially corporations and rich people).

Community & Professional Support

Online Linux forums and chats especially for new people can be extremely overwhelming. Especially when a Windows user comes in and asks why something isnt exactly like Windows. Also once again movements like this is why people dont like the Linux community.

Better User Control

Most new Linux users not only wont use them but especially in KDE software will actively be overwhelmed by the amount of options and menus. Additionally what this critically leaves out is the fact that more advanced customization requires more skill and experience the more advanced it is. There is a clear skill difference from installing a widget in KDE Plasma to compling and installing a custom kernel.

Now lets talk about the things they should have mentioned:

1. Less commercial software: adobe especially but most professional grade editing software for both video and photo does not support Linux (yes I know Davinchi resolve technically does but the Linux version is so awful you might as well not use it)
2. Linux is not Windows or MacOS: Linux does its own thing, sometimes this is good sometimes bad sometimes its highly debatable (and Linux users will debate it). Because of that if you expect to use Linux exactly like Windows you'll get confused and frustrated.
3. Package managers: Almost every major DE has a graphical package manager frontend, this is a good thing and should be talked about.
4. Desktop Environments: Show what they look like, KDE Plasma and Gnome. It should be explained their differnces and who they're made for.
5. Distros: Explain a few of the most common distros and who they're made for. Debian is the most stable but gets few updates, OpenSuse tumbleweed is bleeding edge, Fedora gets updates once every few months, Arch is unstable and not reccomended for beginners, Pop_OS is great for gaming (see ProtonDB for compatibility)

What the hell are you on about. This is not a "everyone or no one" thing. You can consider it. I have, I switched. I still use mac at work but I absolutely can switch at the homefront. Some companies use Linux, most use Windows. And they absolutely can consider switching.

Haven't booted windows in over a month now. If I want to play pubg or bf1, thats about the only reason I need windows. And I do a lot of gaming, just not aaa multi-player. But I am enjoying computing again just like when I was younger and computers were interesting and fun and not corpo ad stations on your machine.

Microsoft already lost enterprise servers to Linux, and has lost significant ground over the years in consumer PCs to ChromeOS, MacOS, and Linux. Hell, the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering. That was an unheard of idea just five years ago.

While I agree that business laptops will continue to be dominated by Windows for awhile, the market shifts we see everywhere have downstream effects on business laptops too. When you find yourself having to train more and more people on how to use Windows than you did in the past, the value argument for Windows on your employee's laptops quickly comes into question.

You certainly won't be told what 'core telemetry' is required at any point in time.

Except the Diagnostics Data Viewer has been a thing for a long time and tells you exactly what data is sent back as telemetry. Now if you don't believe it that another topic.

at least I haven't seen anyone prove it sends all data of your machine

Hm, yeah that is definitely a weird thing to do, I'm using nobara (fedora) and it has the app center for snap and flatpost for flatpaks plus dnf for the package manager.

Fair enough. Personally my hardware isn't that new; the GPU is 3-4 years old at this point, the rest of the PC is ~5 years old so you would think even the latest LTS which is only a year or two old would support it. shrug

But yeah I'm liking nobara's rapid update cycle so far, though I haven't tried to change GPU drivers with it yet, so I suppose I will reserve a tiny amount of judgement until I have to do that.

I haven't used Windows at work in years for anything, not for cloud hosting, not for on-prem, not for employee machines etc etc. until the cost-cutters came in and forced Teams and other Microsoft crap to squeeze the market during inflation. The company is just waiting to be killed off now.

Rufus is great and I still keep a copy around, but I haven't gone back since I found Ventoy. You just run Ventoy on your stick, and then drag and drop any and all bootable ISOs into it. When you boot it, you get a list of all the ISOs to work with.

The only caveat is that you absolutely have to eject the USB, or else Ventoy probably will corrupt. That's a small price to pay to have Arch, Mint, Fedora, NixOS, and Win11 all on one OS ISO toolkit drive, plus I always eject my drives as a rule of thumb. Then all I have to do is update them every couple months.

Install the IoT version, that comes without any of the bloat and works just fine. Not even the Microsoft store is bundled in.

I have to assume so since other versions that have been "activated" the same way do. Real big shout out to you-know-who, btw. They make Microsoft software viable at all.

What?! I'm still working on my spreadsheet comparing 7 and 8!

I have heard about the IoT version. I'd have to look more into it, but I doubt I'm going back now that I've learned so much about Linux. I can troubleshoot most of Arch without touching the docs or asking online now, so it really defeats the purpose of switching back.

I also enjoy putting in a little effort to get things working. That's the thing about Linux. Most people that daily drive it get a dopamine release from tinkering with it and fixing things, and I'm one of those people.

I know there has been a big "its for everyone" push these days, but its really not. So I'm glad the IoT version exists for those that want or need it.

I downvoted it.

For starters I've seen this exact post a few times over the past 3 months in this community.

Secondly, the comments go exactly the same in these threads:

1. "linux can do everything, no faults at all, windows sucks"
2. "but I use windows for x and y and linux can't do it"
3. "how dare you insult linux, you should not be doing x and y, just do it with this app (which is completely inferior)"

Next, windows does everything I want it to do, I disabled and uninstalled everything I didn't want easily through settings & group policy, and it hasn't bothered me since.

I'd actually argue enterprise is more likely for people to switch, there's a lot of Linux sysadmins out there, and there's a lot of Linux in enterprise environments, and of course especially servers.

Unless you have specific requirements for specific software that runs only on Windows, getting away from Microsoft can be a pretty tempting prospect. Even if there are people who fear change and the idea of change like the plague.

Sleep/hibernate has been a pretty big problem for a while. As for the gpu, have you checked out NixOS? There's ways to enforce your integrated card to handle everything and change states for certain apps to the discreet card.

It takes a bit to learn, but nixlang is pretty simple. I've heard it referred to as "JSON with functions". It also has the largest package repository of any OS and is atomic, so its hard as hell to break. You can even make separate, containerized dev environments with flakes.

Yeah Linux is great, no doubt. I've been using Xubuntu since forever, never really touched Arch, but fundamentally if you know your way around one system, you'll manage another.

Still, there are a bunch of applications that I must run under Windows, so it's good to have the no frills version available for that.