Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news

I left Windows in a hail of Vista bugs, over a decade ago. I've seen it get worse and worse in that time, both in UX rot and anti-consumer "features".

I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.

Not here to eulogize over what I moved to, but I think it's important people consider why they're still using Windows. It's not your friend.

Thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck, all games that I care about now run on Linux.

I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because the text import crashes in Wine. But apart from that, this year has finally been the year of the Linux Desktop for me. And 3 months later, I can say that it's been a bliss :)

PopOS feels exceptionally responsive. Looking back, it's hard to justify why Windows was feeling so sluggish on a PCI5 NVME with 64GB RAM and high-end GPU...

Games were the main reason I came back to Windows after trying Ubuntu with Wine over 15 years ago, then quickly switched to Mac, and when I was unhappy with Apples direction, Windows the unfortunate but obvious place to come back to. Should have gone to Linux instead.

I still need to check whether all my favourite games are supported on Linux. Also, a lot of my games are from GOG rather than Steam. And I need to choose a good distribution. My laziness and indecisiveness is holding me back.

But I really think the time is right for something better. An OS on a Linux-like foundation, with an Apple-style UI (but better, because plenty of stuff there still doesn't make sense), capable of running all games. Probably developed and polished by a big hardware manufacturer trying to eat Apple's lunch. There's System76 of course, but they're small. I want something that's for everybody. A new standard to draw everybody away from the increasing piles of crap from Apple and Microsoft.

If you don't want to tinker with your UI, would suggest PopOS (System76 distro). If you like to tinker, I really like Ubuntu Budgie, which lets me have some bits of config based on Windows, Mac and just different from either. I took a few days to get it how I liked, and over a year since without much issue. Alternatively, there's always Mint or other Ubuntu or Fedora options out there.

All said, I really liked PopOS, it has some very sane defaults, good out of the box support for hardware as well. Most of the support is upstream via Ubuntu, but a lot of UI tweaks and custom additions are coming from System76, and they have been doing very well. Will likely switch back for the next LTS release.

PopOS doesn't let me tinker with the UI? That's a shame. It was a big contender for me. But if it's Ubuntu-based, shouldn't it be just as configurable?