The turning point was when Windows was no longer set and forget. Windows 7 was the last time that was the case before I had to put any real work into it.
I put up with Windows 10 for a bit and wrote a script to neutralise bloat and configure the OS to some saner settings, then I could keep things consistent between installations. That was fine for a while.
But over time Microsoft became more unhinged and my script evolved into several larger scripts in order to deal with the BS. It became an endless cat and mouse game and I found that I was wasting too much of my time maintaining it just to have a OS that was clean of crap.
The last straw was when a botched update gutted the performance of my PC, and Microsoft took several months to fix the issue. I installed Debian which just worked, and it was good timing because Windows 11 was announced shortly afterwards. I’ve experienced it at work and it’s hands down the worst OS I’ve ever used, and I’ve used pretty much every version of Windows since 3.1. I think I’d even take Me over it. At least that OS sucked because it was poorly designed. Windows 11 is intentionally hostile to its users.
It wasn’t my first rodeo with Linux since I’ve been on and off with it since 2007. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works out of the box these days.
A few months later and I had built my new machine. I didn’t even bother to install Windows on it. Now I use Arch btw and haven’t looked back.
Defectors: “There are dozens of us… DOZENS!”