Whoa, I finally have time to get back to tempcast listening! Neat episode, I like the healthy skepticism of windows 10/11. Though I suspect most people will end up accepting it and the slow creep towards more locked down systems and surveillance.
Personally I switched to GNU/Linux as my primary OS around... 2006 or 2005, I think. It's important to go into a Real OS with the right state of mind and goals. I see many people who want it to be a direct replacement of windows, but that's the wrong way to approach it. It is objectively better, but it's also very different. Many people have the wrong perspective, expect it to be the same, get disappointed and just return to windows. But when you get to know the system it's almost impossible to go back to windows. To me windows feels so archaic, almost impossible to use for real. I just keep it around for some proprietary games (steam/epic).
With GNU/Linux you're not meant to "download and run an exe" like with windows, instead all programs and even the parts of the OS itself are installed and kept up to date by a package manager. And those packages have all source code available and undergo significant quality testing and security updates.
And now that proton (and good old wine) is starting to get really mature I can totally see myself ditching windows for games as well, but not quite yet. I see no reason to run libre/open emulators like dolphin on windows, but the steam games still make sense. But it's not just emulators start are starting to require windows 10 and later, some games do (like star wars squadrons).
I've actually just put together a new PC, and I'm (reluctantly) going to dual-boot windows 10 on it for the proprietary games. For anyone else in a similar situation, have a look at
Windows 10 Ameliorated and
AtlasOS. I've played around with atlas, and while I don't notice much performance improvements, but it's still refreshingly free from all the typical bloat (even internet explorer is gone!). Of course neither of them can be 100% free from all telemetry, which seems impossible to completely remove...
