Goodbye, Windows

Let’s not bury the lede: over the last few years, I’ve seen Windows become significantly worse, and it’s been frustrating to watch, and use.

This is classic enshittification at work, and I loathe it. In fact, this is the first post in a series of blog posts about moving away from Windows, because I’ve had enough.

It may sound silly, but you don’t need to tolerate a shitty operating system if there’s a viable alternative.

As it turns out, Linux is a viable alternative for 90% of my use case, so here we are.

Increasingly closed

Windows 7 was celebrated as an excellent update to Windows, but its successor did not suffer the same critical reception.

In retrospect, I think Gabe Newell was right about Windows 8. Today, that version of Windows looks tame compared to what’s shipping now.

If you were there, you may recall that it was a drastic departure from what came before. The teams at Microsoft believed that they needed to adapt their UI’s for a touch-first future (the so-called “Metro UI”), a change they eventually rolled back in Windows 10.

But let’s go back to 2012. You see, Gabe Newell, one of the founders of Valve (you will know them from Steam), had concerns at the time about Windows closing up as a platform and Microsoft making their product worse.

This is what he had to say in an interview on AllThingsD, circa 2012:

In order for innovation to happen, a bunch of things that aren’t happening on closed platforms need to occur. Valve wouldn’t exist today without the PC, or Epic, or Zynga, or Google. They all wouldn’t have existed without the openness of the platform.

There’s a strong tempation to close the platform, because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors’ access to the platform, and they say ‘That’s really exciting.’

We are looking at the platform and saying, ‘We’ve been a free rider, and we’ve been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the Internet, and we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms.

In recent years, Microsoft has been changing the OS in various ways to make it more difficult to use without a Microsoft account. They added telemetry you can’t turn off, and the operating system is now getting various (potentially undesirable) AI integrations in the form of Copilot.

Due to these changes, you could argue that the platform has been getting more closed off in various ways as of late.

A vision of the future

And then there’s what the folks at Microsoft are communicating about the future of Windows (and various other products that they have or are integrating).

For example, David Weston, Microsoft’s current VP of Enterprise and Security, can literally be cited here:

I truly believe the future version of Windows and other Microsoft operating systems will interact in a multimodal way. The computer will be able to see what we see, hear what we hear, and we can talk to it and ask it to do much more sophisticated things.

There’s more in this marketing video which outlines a potential vision for Windows in 2030, which, unsurprisingly, is about AI.

Some of this even sounds useful (perhaps?), but I also think it’s hilarious to think that the folks at Microsoft are going to be able to do something like that, taking into consideration that:

• Windows on ARM took them over a decade to get right and still isn’t mainstream. (Apple executed the transition flawlessly.)
• It’s been over ten years since they announced they would migrate away from the Control Panel to the Settings app. (Control Panel still exists.)

(This was nicely pointed out by one of the top comments on this particular video. I just felt it was a nice thing to point out.)

But, anyway. I digress. Most of my serious work is done on the Mac. For years now, I’ve kept Windows around for gaming, because you can’t really play games on a Mac the same way as you can on a high-spec desktop PC with a dedicated graphics card.

What’s happening on Linux?

But as of late, there are fewer and fewer reasons to stick with Windows, if this is the future we’re headed towards.

Especially on handhelds, it seems clear that a Linux-based operating system is better at pushing out more performance for a longer period of time; i.e. gaming on Linux is more energy efficient.

How did we get here, you might wonder?

For some time now, the many talented people at Valve have been hard at work trying to get games running on Linux. Things really turned over a new leaf for gaming on Linux when the Steam Deck became a hit.

At that point it was becoming really clear that they were making fantastic progress in getting Windows games to run correctly on Linux.

And the work does not stop. After Steam Deck, next year, Valve will be releasing a small form-factor Steam Machine running SteamOS.

How did we get here?

But let’s face it. 95% of PC gaming happens on Windows. So, the simple truth though, is, that if Windows is the primary PC platform that gamers are using to play their games on, it matters seriously which direction the platform is going.

So, the logical question is: where are things going? What’s Microsoft’s strategy? To determine that, we should see what’s been happening to Windows over the past few years.

1. Prior to the release of Windows 11, in 2015, they said Windows 10 would be last version of Windows, confirming that they would continue patching the OS.

2. Unsurprisingly, they changed their mind and released Windows 11 in 2021, with minimal improvements initially. They are now pushing annual feature updates.

3. Many of the significant additions to these feature updates have been mostly Copilot-related. In 2023, they introduced Microsoft Copilot after building upon OpenAI’s foundational large language models.

4. Their latest push in 2025 is one of “Copilot+” devices and services, and since November there’s now even more talk about an agentic operating system.

The latest of their marketing is all about how “you can talk to Windows now”, something people have been asking for for decades!

Oh wait, no.

No one has been asking for this.

My stance on LLMs

When it comes to availability of applications using large language models, I think that ChatGPT by OpenAI is the most popular among the general population. It’s what I hear from regular people, at least.

I don’t think what we call “AI” is useless, but I also think that we’ve diluted the original meaning of artificial intelligence, and I also believe that we’re in a bubble.

Everyone is pushing AI everywhere, and I am tired of it. In particular, Microsoft is pushing it everywhere. In Windows, in Office, on GitHub, you name it.

Not to mention: there’s too much incorrect information being spewed out.¹

In my view, there’s no real need to bundle all of this into the operating system. Copilot could have been a third-party app, and that would have been fine.

Examining annoyances

I strongly believe that looking at the past can help us determine whether we can trust a company, and so, in this case, Microsoft. So, let’s take a look at some of the major annoyances that are often cited in relation to Windows 11.

1. Updated hardware requirements

An operating system that requires particular support for various hardware, including a TPM and a modern processor, which means that certain hardware is now no longer supported without hacks. Take a look at the system requirements here.

While this is not an issue for me, it is an issue for people who are still using older but totally viable computers. Those PCs are now probably better off running Linux.

2. An updated but worse taskbar with crappy search

Windows 11’s taskbar (which is now centered) displays weather information and still cannot find anything with the search feature consistently.

You cannot move the task bar like you could before, and certain drag-and-drop interactions are no longer possible now.

(I want to note that the fact that products like Start11 exist and provide a better experience than what Microsoft can ship… says enough, I think.)

3. Bad updates that break stuff

There’s been a bunch of bad updates hosing key functionality of the OS.

In particular, recent coverage related to borked storage, or even broken core parts of the OS.

It’s just a guess, but this might have something to do with the fact that Microsoft got rid of many testers who used to do QA on Windows, or perhaps the folks at Redmond using a little bit too much AI to get their work done in a lazy way.

(There’s some good coverage by Paul Thurrott from a few years ago about how Microsoft made QA worse that likely still applies.)

4. More telemetry and Microsoft Account requirement

Let’s not talk about the worse telemetry experience and required onboarding with of a Microsoft account for the latest versions of Windows 11.

(They recently removed one of the last few remaining workarounds.)

Now, if you do a fresh install of Windows 11 today, you are basically forced to either use Windows 11 Pro and follow some specific steps or some workaround script if you do not want to use a Microsoft account.

5. Copilot everywhere

Finally, I already mentioned it: the numerous Copilot integrations, which are difficult or impossible to completely remove.

Yes, you can turn it off, but it’s awful to see it integrated everywhere, even in Notepad. Why is this necessary? I don’t think it is.

6. Windows is still a paid product

Remind me: why would anyone want to pay for this ad-infested operating system? I know I was able to upgrade from my valid Windows 10 Pro license, but I am certainly not a satisfied customer lately.

Windows has become annoying to use, in plenty of ways that it wasn’t prior to 2020.

Look, it’s not like macOS is doing significantly better, but the folks at Apple aren’t actively making their operating system worse – well, maybe except for adding super rounded corners to their window chrome.

But if a visual refresh is the worst complaint to have about their operating system, I think we can all agree that Apple’s doing better in that department.²

The wrong approach

Some people seem content by simply sticking with an older version of Windows, or completely customizing their Windows installation.

In this age, the former is also a really stupid idea… you should not be running an internet-connected device with an operating system that isn’t being updated, if only for security reasons.

So, if you want a secure operating system, you need to remain up-to-date. That means opting into an operating system that seems to be getting progressively worse.

And that… is not good. I previously settled on tweaking my Windows install to fix the problems I have with Windows, but since things seem to be getting worse, I’m not confident this is the right approach.

In fact, I think at this rate I’m wasting far too much time being angry or frustrated at something I use far too often, and that isn’t good.

I’ve learned this about life: you don’t need to tolerate bad things. Some things you can’t do anything about. But if you have options?

The right approach

So, let’s be realistic, then. What is the fix? Clearly, Valve is offering an option that may get us 90% of the way there with Proton and their Linux distribution, SteamOS.

Last year, I wrote about using Fedora in my blog post on using Linux on my mini PC. It was a fun experiment and definitely made me realize there’s some viability here.

I’ve known about Bazzite for some time now, and I figured it was time to give it a decent shot. Bazzite is a Linux distribution based on Fedora.

If you’re unware of how these things work, let me explain. Bazzite uses rpm-ostree and OCI containers as the base for the operating system, so it’s actually a fixed system that you can’t (easily) break. The OS is effectively immutable.³

Using immutable images is great for anyone who does not want to be on the receiving end of an update that breaks their system. In the event something does go wrong, you can also roll back the system partition to a previous revision after an update if something stops working, which is very nice.

Applications or programs that you install are likely going to be Flatpak of AppImage versions, but it is possible to install (“layer”) packages on top of the image by using rpm-ostree. Layering is generally considered to be a last resort, in case Flatpaks or AppImage programs are not an option.

To be continued…

In September, I made the decision to do a trial run of running Linux on my secondary desktop PC (with an AMD GPU⁴), which is exclusively composed of older PC parts from my main computer.

A little over a month later, I decided to make Bazzite my main operating system on my primary computer, too, and I’ve been running it ever since.

Unsurprisingly, it’s been a great experience, so far.

To be continued! I’ve been daily driving Bazzite for a couple of months now, and I will have a dedicated blog post that continues where this one ends up at the start of the next year.