Microsoft really seems out of control. Yesterday I noticed that OneDrive was turned on automatically (I've always been very clear about not turning it on). Which was incredibly shocking to me, that they'd just turn on uploading my data to the cloud on the sly. And of course, it's nearly impossible to turn off Edge loading things. I'm really on the verge of switching to Linux, it's getting too awful
I’ve been running Linux distros on my primary machines for over a decade now, and there’s no way I’m going back. Even a few years ago I figured “when I finish grad school, I’ll probably get a Mac just for a smoother experience working with colleagues.” But even in the past few years the volume of complaints I hear from friends and colleagues seems to have skyrocketed - updates randomly breaking their environments, new annoying barriers to installing real software, pestering notifications that you can’t seem to turn off. Meanwhile, my Linux experience only seems to improve! And I hate Windows with a burning passion - just no way I’m using it on my personal machines.
Been using Linux for ages, but only for a few years on my home desktop, because Steam is now that good, and gaming is a major part of that computers duties.
HOWEVER - I've yet to find a good email client. Kmail is good, but uses Akonadi with is a disaster, and literally doesn't work. I have to restart it multiple times a day, because it silently stops working. I have found bug reports about this issue going back years which are either ignored or marked fixed, which it clearly isn't.
Thunderbird. Seriously though, why do people hate on it so much? I use it on all of my non-mobile devices and the latest version out of the box (at least for Linux desktops) is really sleek.
My only issue is Google Calendar integration, and that's only because auto-generated calendar entries suck and cannot be dismissed. When those events pop up, I just click on the link in the notification which takes me to the email and calendar view, and I delete the auto-gemerated event on the Gmail website.
I've heard folks complain it gets slow with very large or old mailboxes. One reason that happens is that they need to be compacted, another is that the sqlites need to be vacuumed.
So, twice a year I compact my mailboxes, and I put a sqlite command loop to vacuum in my main cleanup script. Which I run maybe once a month.
Yes, strictly speaking I shouldn't need to do this, but my tbird install has been running happily for decades now.
Because in v115 (I think, it's been a while), the interface received a thick coat of clown makeup for no reason, and now it's terrible and there's no way to revert it. You can apparently hack some CSS to make it tolerable, but I'm not going to engage in a war with my email client, because I know that solution will break with every update.
You search for a solution to this, you get plenty of hits of people trying to revert the UI. I'm not alone with this opinion. It's an email client, it's not supposed to be new and exciting. The interface was fine.
All I really want is working Kmail. It's boring in the best kind of way.
Is "Message List Display Options -> Table View" not pretty well exactly what you want? I enabled it (on desktop) shortly after the roll-out, and I've never had it revert back. There's no CSS hackery, no forced reversion, not even a hidden menu - Card vs. Table view is a top-level menu item.
Telling me "There's no way to revert it" feels like, at best, giving up at the sign of the smallest difficulty. At worst it's a bad-faith argument, as it's clearly possible - and fairly easy and straightforward, IMO.
Mozilla themselves called it "Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch", and as we know, rebuilding something from scratch is a great idea, and improves the product on all metrics always.
In my opinion, it's a travesty. I refuse to use it. I would rather use broken Kmail.
Working offline such as on a train. This includes having all emails and attachments saved locally. Also useful for backups. E.g. suppose you get locked out of your email account because "AI says you look suspicious". How ruined is your day?
Managing multiple email accounts in a single interface.
Easily moving emails between different accounts and from online to offline.
Relatedly, storing years of emails with attachments on a local drive is cheap. Storing them in webmail is a hefty subscription fee. I have no issue with one time payments, but I like to minimize subscriptions.
Local search in most commercial software has regressed since ~2000.
My only explanation is that local search is inherently cross-team and integration-heavy. Consequently, if there's no higher-org prioritization it just molds and breaks over time, as unaddressed integration bugs pile up that cannot be fixed by a single team.
Companies shipping their dysfunctional org chart.
Still, I never thought I'd say that I could do things with the built-in search 20 years ago that I can't today.
The only ads I ever see in either Google or Proton web mail clients are for their own services, or if I check the spam folder. And I don't have an ad blocker set up (I have NoScript, but there isn't any third-party JavaScript anyway).
I absolutely hate how Windows now basically forces you to sign in with a Microsoft ID in order to facilitate this kind of stuff. I just want a local system; I don't need all this online crap built into my desktop OS.
For the last two decades or so I've been running Linux for everything (personal and work) except for gaming. I'm to the point of being sufficiently annoyed with Windows that I'm going to set up a Linux disk for gaming to see how that goes. I've used Wine etc. for gaming sporadically throughout the years. Recently that landscape has improved quite a bit thanks to Valve.
While it's been improved a whole lot, it's not all sunshine and rainbow as some game companies decided to drop support after they decided kernel anti-cheat is the way (notably GTA onlin & Apex legend).
That being said, I personally use proton compatibility to gauge whether a game is worth my time so I'm not too bothered by this. And I'm constantly surprised by how much the Venn diagram of games that don't run on Linux and games that have off-putting bullshit unrelated to Linux looks like a single overlapping circle.
While VAC is indeed far from competent at detecting all but the most rudimentary cheats, it is so by design. When the first third party CSGO matchmaking/league services decided to use kernel level AC, Valve publically said they would personally not do such a thing. I can't remember if any exact reasons were named at the time, but I do think it's a fair take on their end. It's not like they're locking developers into using VAC anyway.
Furthermore, more recently they have debuted VACNet, which uses machine learning, most likely to recognize certain patterns and behaviors associated with cheating. Probably still avoidable if one were to use subtle settings and knows how to act properly. But it shows they haven't given up and are trying to explore alternative methods at least. I'm admittedly not familiar with how successful it has been as I have not been playing or even following the game for a long time.
"VAC bans are permanent, non-negotiable, and cannot be removed by Steam Support. If a VAC ban is determined to have been issued incorrectly it will automatically be removed." [0]
False bans cannot be appealed. They do happen. [1] You have no power to deal with them when they happen, and they really, really do happen. [2] You don't just get a game or server ban, you lose pretty much everything, and it becomes a public permanent record. Unless you're part of a headline, you have zero chance of reversal.
Most anti-cheats will immediately kick/ban someone from a game if it detects certain applications or hooks. Good for removing cheaters, but that gives cheat devs immediate feedback that something in their cheat has triggered it – they'll modify the cheat, try again, then see if it's detected or not.
VAC is designed around obscurity. When it detects a cheat it flags the account, and then an indeterminate amount of time later it/Valve bans all the flagged accounts. It makes it much harder for cheat devs to figure out what exactly flagged VAC, but the lack of an immediate ban means that normal players are still putting up with cheaters day in day out.
Another caveat is that VAC only bans you from the game engine. So you could get VAC banned from Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, yet still be free to hack on Counter-Strike 2.
Also considering how many of Valve's titles are free, there's no wonder why hacks are so prolific in their games.
I recommend Bazzite, a Fedora SilverBlue image customised for gaming on Linux.
I've been gaming on it exclusively for over a year and between it, Steam, and Proton, I'm yet to encounter a game in my steam library that doesn't run.
I don't really care how easy or difficult Linux is, I'm done with Windows.
(On the upside: holy cow some computers work way better with Linux. A crappy $100 Chromebook I had lying around gets over 30 hours of battery life with my normal use now, it's insane. It has become my go-to "just chuck it in a bag for whatever" machine because I can forget to charge it for weeks and it's fine)
An "IdeaPad 3 CB 11IGLO5" apparently, likely from mid 2020. And it's just vanilla Mint + XFCE, I haven't done anything to optimize it. It ain't fast, but it is definitely fast enough for normal web / writing / etc, and 4GB of ram goes a lot further than I expected (with Firefox and a few dozen tabs, I'm at around 2GB used, and I almost never touch even 3GB).
My only real complaint is the pretty crappy screen, it's one of those cheap LCDs that drastically changes color/contrast/etc as you move away from the tiny perfect viewing angle... but that screen is probably a moderate amount of the reason why the battery lasts so long.
When fully charged and on low brightness, Mint claims I have ~77h of battery life. It's definitely over-estimating, but 30 is totally reachable while I'm doing my normal stuff (likely not on high brightness tho). And when closed I lose like 2%/week, noticeably better than any other laptop I've ever had.
Chrome on linux does the same sadly... prompts to be the default browser, never remembers the "no" option, and if you misclick the small 'x', it sets itself as the default again.
It's really easy to just try different distros and desktop environments out. For me, KDE Plasma has been an excellent vaguely Windows shaped Windows replacement.
With MacOS dropping subpixel support for text and with the cleartype patents expiring, Linux font rendering just keeps getting better while the others stay the same or get worse. I can't really conceive any reason to stay on Windows now unless you're a hardcore gamer.
Everything about Microsoft these days feels like they're working to point their software AT me ... not help me in any way, or even think of the end user at all.
I feel like that's the entire tech and b2c space lately. It's a restriction of options and forced compliance into things that take away value and give the company money.
Fedora desktop is actually a really nice experience in 2025. I switched in maybe 2022, after getting annoyed by the surge in nagging. The last time I tried desktop Linux was maybe 2008. Things have come quite a long way since then.
Ive been distro hopping and landedon Fedora KDE plasma edition. It is amazing, so much configurability yet its super slick and clean. It is a real joy to use. Kudos to the dev community.
Recently rebuilt my PC and installed Fedora 42 KDE, it's been great so far, except that I've been running into a reboot/shutdown bug that freezes the system.
I'm using Linux (Ubuntu LTS is a no brainer) on my desktop for years. It enables me to just do the things I want or need to do with my computer. Windows is much more in our way than it's helping us just using our devices.
Linux works.
At home I made the switch in 2003, after a couple of years triple booting Win98, OS/2 and Linux. I feel lucky to have never used XP/Vista/7/8/10/11.
If you ever sign into a Microsoft account - i.e. when setting up your PC since it's nearly mandatory - Windows turns on OneDrive automatically even if you explicitly opt out of it during the setup wizard because apparently user consent doesn't mean anything. Happened to me a couple times.
I've never had it hijack the desktop/documents/pictures folder when I've explicitly disabled it, so perhaps that's a viable workaround. Ie enable OneDrive, but have it use it's own separate folders and just ignore those.
That said, really dark pattern to enable stuff users have explicitly said no to. Microsoft really is a two-headed monster these days. Parts of Windows is really good, but then there's shit like this that just ruins it.
