Windows has been the daily driver on my home P.C. ever since I started using computers, all the way from 95/98 through to Windows 10. My dad might have had old MS DOS machines, but I don’t really have a conscious recollection of using those beside playing the odd 2D-game. This fall, I decided I was done with Windows.

Overall, I don’t have very strong opinions on which versions of Windows are the better or worse ones. I considered Windows 10 to be quite decent and stable, that is, until the bugs started to creep up on me. I considered switching to Linux for a while, but the issues I had with Windows were never bad enough to warrant the opportunity costs of switching. I considered dual-booting but that felt like a bigger hassle than an all-out swap. In October 2024, I read about Windows 10 becoming EOL at the end of 2025, which was when I decided it was time to move away from Windows, because I really did not want to switch to Windows 11 or start paying for security upgrades. And before you ask: no, debloating Windows wasn’t an option because that seemed like an even bigger hassle than dual-booting.

Overall, switching to Linux was quite a breeze and I sneaked in a BIOS upgrade as well. First, I tried out Manjaro with KDE Plasma as desktop environment. I quickly noticed some stability issues that annoyed me, thus I switched to Fedora where I swapped out GNOME for Plasma and I’ve been a happy nerd ever since. Switching between Linux distros was as easy, or even easier, than going from Windows to Linux.

Practical Reasons

My main reasons for moving away from Windows were of a practical nature: bugs that I did not manage to resolve. Windows really seems to make it a point to make it difficult to fix issues. Either you have to dig deep into some obscure registry settings, or root around with safe mode… which may or may not fix whatever you’re running into. Hell, I even reinstalled my windows from scratch, but that didn’t help either. There are even big chances that Windows will undo any changes you’ve done at some point, especially when it updates.

I mainly used the start function to search for installed software. At some point, this stopped working properly and it stopped showing results of installed software. I tried to fix this on multiple occasions but nothing I did seemed to work. My workaround was to litter the start menu with tiles for commonly used applications.

The Clock

The clock. Oh, the clock. Every time I started my computer, it was a mystery what time and what year it would be. The date could be off by a few days or weeks, or my computer could be living in the year 2173. And let me tell you, it’s a hassle to manually set the time back to current because you have to root around through layers of settings menus. Again, nothing I tried seemed to fix it because it seems to be part of a ‘feature’. ArsTechnica even has a blog about it.

Ideological Reasons

Privacy is important and the data hunger of private corporations has been an ongoing issue. Here, Microsoft has been no exception: Windows 10 collects large amounts of data from its users and Windows 11 seems to be even worse. And I haven’t even begun talking about the start menu ads!

With the market share of Linux growing steadily (partially due to the popularity of the Steam Deck), I think that there’s a bright future for Linux / FOSS ahead of us but I don’t think the end of Windows 10 will cause a dramatic increase of Linux users.


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