Microsoft Windows is infuriating. It used to be great… or at least good. Good enough that in my youth I could be enough of a fanboy to shit on Macintosh for being a locked down, Fisher Price version of an operating system with no right-click that couldn’t play games.* But in an all-too-common business strategy these days, Microsoft has taken a fine product and slowly made it worse in order to milk every last dollar out of its customers. Their users are so locked in to the ecosystem that they’ll put up with more and more bullshit… because they have to. You have to have an internet connection in order to register Windows. Do you want to turn off customized ads? You’ll still get ads, but they just won’t be driven by the data we collect from you. And yes, we will still collect the data from you. Even I put up with this for years. I did this in part because (to Microsoft’s credit), they somewhat made up for this by basically giving away Windows for free. Yes, it still costs $100-$200 for a “legit” license but 1) They seem to give away the updates for free. I think I last paid for Windows… XP? Maybe 7?, tied it to my account and haven’t been asked for a new key once through multiple OS upgrades and or newly built machines. And B) Alternative Legit or Semi-Legit copies are dirt cheap ($15) and while I think these are supposed to be for specific users (not normies like me), they are valid keys and Microsoft never seems to care about enforcing restrictions.
So I dealt with the ads, the stupid aspects of the redesigns (remember when they got rid of the start menu?), the data collection. But last week I’d had enough. If you’re a Windows user, and you keep your machine up to date, you may have noticed that every few months there’s an update that Microsoft likes to use as an excuse to try to get you to accept more of their bullshit. Upon restart, you’re greeted with the screen as if you just pulled a new PC out of the box. “Let’s finish setting up your computer,” the text greets you. Let’s not, you jackass… I finished setting this up three years ago when I built it. I still do not want to turn on “find my device” for a 50 pound water cooled tower that moves about ten feet on the occasion that I get motivated enough to clean it. So I clicked through this bullshit again, Still turned everything off that I could, and somehow Microsoft decided that A) I wanted to start using One Drive for my desktop and 2) I really needed Norton 360 all of the sudden. So after a few hours of trying to figure out how to remove the 50 extra icons that were now on my Desktop, without removing them from my other family machines that actually had those things installed, I had had enough. Sometimes things just aren’t working. Sometimes you think the best solution is to change. So I decided to switch to Linux.
This might have been a mistake. Now in case there are any super-nerds reading, I’ve got nothing against Linux. I’ve used Linux a bit before for very specific tasks. It’s fast. It’s light weight. And it’s very good at doing some things like coding very well. It’s also not that common, so there aren’t that many viruses and things trying to attack it. I actually think if I took the time to learn Linux, I’d really like it. But here’s the thing; It’s expensive implement. For someone who’s been running Windows for 30 years, it takes a while to make that adjustment. If I had spent, say, 9 months to really learn it, I’m sure I could have set up my graphics drivers correctly. I’m sure I’d be screaming through hordes of zombies at 90 FPS with GSync enabled. But I didn’t do that.
I have games to play tonight. And I can’t figure out how to get Linux to register that my monitor will go above 60Hz. So you know what I did? I booted back into Windows. I ran the same programs I’ve always run. I loaded up 7 days to die and it was fine. Yes, it was still incredibly annoying that I had to parse through extra bullshit to find the game… and my performance probably took a hit because now I’m in a mismatch state where I’ve got a Linux machine running Windows on it’s second boot drive… But my 3090 is a tank. So it didn’t matter. I was up and running and killing zombies with my friends and it was still incredibly satisfying.
So, yes, if I’d had the foresight to prep this early and really repped using Linux, I’d probably be having a much more enjoyable experience. But I didn’t do that. I don’t yet know how to make Linux good. So for now, change is bad. I’m going to run the same old Operating System I’ve had. It’s not going to be as perfect as I’d like it to be, but for the most part, it’s going to work. And for now, that’s good enough for me. At least it’ll probably be fine until I try to play the next Cyberpunk type game with PC killing hardware requirements. But that’s probably not for at least a few years.
*RIP Rooster Teeth