Windows 10, but before Windows 11 was even leaked I believe.

As someone who routinely installs new Laptops for various reasons:

Installing

• Preinstalled Windows is unusable, due to preinstalled spyware
• No torrents
• No multiple versions
• No real support for actually chaning the locale, what you download is what you get. Even if that means redownloading 5 GB for every language, even though the interesting parts are just a few language files, which every OS can also replace while running (Note: OSes, not spyware with a program loader strapped to it)
• No live version
• Unnecessarily complex/long installation (Locale settings being required two times, circumventing the M$ account with cmd, denying all spying stuff)
• Installer does not have drivers for many things eg. some Touchpads, special storage setups etc.
• Installing takes a long time overall
• Removing bloat, with varying success (sometimes uninstalling Edge is one click, sometimes it requires powershell hacks) takes ages (my hand always hurts afterwards because removing one thing takes three clicks at different locations)
• Installing stuff is extremely annoying, inconsistent and insecure (VLCPlus …)
• Everyone loves hunting down 10 different obscure drivers from various websites, each with unique installers, right?
• Windows fucks itself up within a few days with a non-insignificant chance … eg. by entering S-Mode (halfway) somehow

Usage

• It may be in part due to me being used to a tiling WM with dozens of workspaces, but even with KDE I have much better workflow - somehow, Windows’ way to multitask is really strange to me, and I can only use it like a 70 year old with only 10% sight in one eye and 0% in the other: very slow and inefficiently
• You can’t integrate anything with anything, except if you have dozens of accounts of services, some even with costs, and only use everything exactly like daddy manufacturer wants you to
• Literally no support. Windows fucks itself up in so many ways, and the only “reliable” fix is a reinstall
• Even with the dumbed down nature of Windows, users are morons. I’d rather teach my grandparents (including my very loud grandfather and said nearly-blind grandmother) Linux from scratch (yes, also LFS) than teach them the “correct way” to use Windows
• Even when knowing how to use Windows properly, with all tricks applied, it’s less powerful than a pregnancy test running BASIC
• Paying 250+$ to get served ads to pay even more, money and data, is obviously stupid

*sharks.

Finally I can make that joke for the germans:

What I noticed is that alternatives to most electron apps are much better anyway. Spotify-tui is more efficient, and Discord in a separate Firefox instance is even more memory efficient that the normal Discord.

Solution: Create a new standard (always works so well)

Yeah, for me it just showed me how nice a customly installed distro is, and how fast it can be even on an old machine, so it was the first to get Arch installed on. Another Laptop followed, then my main PC, Server and finally the PI.

By the time I finished, half the system was extremely outdated and probably vulnerable to dozens of RCEs. Somehow I managed to compile KDE, but not Firefox. It always crashed the whole Laptop - 2 GB RAM wasn’t enough.

Isn’t ~/.local for such manually installed stuff, like /usr/local instead of /usr?

Live boot and, if possible back up everything first. Everything as in the whole disk. So ``` dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=backup-disk

Not really your question, but I just ignore that dilemma by using sway, so a workspace based tiling WM.

I just installed LFS once, which inevitably came with compiling the kernel. Many times, over and over, every time with other configs as some packages required them. For a dual core Dell Laptop from the 2010 it was surprisingly fast, actually. Still not enjoyable or feasible for my normal systems.

I knew it was saxony before clicking lol

My father was lucky, I wanted a minecraft server so bad that I accepted to learn how to handle an Ubuntu Server, with ~10 years.
Then I kinda had my edgy hacking phase with 12, and installed Kali as dual boot.
As my Windows install got older, dirtier and buggier, I decided to just f it and installed Pop over everything.

So, get them to be interested in having/doing something requiring Linux, then show them the wonders of the Linux desktop, preferably not Kali, but something more user friendly, and finally wait till they want to reinstall for whatever reason, like a new PC (with AMD or Intel GPU).

I’m much happier to install one of the dozens of adblock addons, than to disable the built in one and still install an addon. Cuz that would mean bloat. I want to have the options to choose the adblock I have installed, and not only which one I use.
Builtin adblockers of other browsers, especially more commercial ones, have proven to be buyable by ad companies. They also fail, and have failed, on YouTube, where some addons still succeed.
One could argue Mozilla could encourage the users to actively choose an adblocker, but that would mean annoying popups and basically ads for adblockers.

Default FF with a few settings and addons is fine.

never dream of putting Arch on one of my servers in the same way that

All my devices, including servers and pi, on Arch testing (Only nvidia has fucked me twice):

I only use lf in foot to have a preview of a file (image, text, pdf, ssl cert, everything with sixels, cat or the specific command) without opening or searching for that file first. It’s faster to just use lf to search for a file instead of opening every single one. Other than that I find using xdg-open, cp, mv, rm etc. is faster compared to using any file manager, probably because I never learnt lf’s shortcuts properly. All GUI file managers I know are bound to their DE, eg. dolphin and nautilus, which sucks with a WM.

After guys like Bisqwit made dual boot guides demonstrating how shitty windows is, it’s their only chance to keep their image up apparently lol

What the heck tho, how could a simple script destroy a whole machine?

I believe so, yes. Other than that there’s the official closed driver. Nvidia also “open-sourced” their driver for the RTX 20 series and up, which you could technically run, but I didn’t hear much good from it.