Okay, let’s talk about Linux. For real this time. Because apparently I can’t stop trying, failing, and then writing about it.
Over the past few years I’ve hopped around more distros than I care to admit. We’re talking Fedora KDE, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, and plain old Ubuntu. Some of them I ran for a few days. Some lasted a few months. And yet, here I am, writing this on Windows 11. As always. Like a clown.
But before I get to the “why Windows is even allowed to exist on my drive”, let me tell you why Linux is the better OS.
What Linux Gets Absolutely Right
Freedom. Actual Freedom.
You know that feeling when you install Windows and it immediately asks you to log in with a Microsoft account, sets up OneDrive, pins Teams to your taskbar, and shoves a Candy Crush tile in your Start Menu? Yeah, Linux doesn’t do that. You install it, and it’s just… yours. You pick your desktop environment, your file manager, your everything. KDE Plasma, GNOME, XFCE. The choice is yours, and none of them are trying to sell you a subscription.
Privacy? On Linux It’s Not a Joke.
When I’m on Linux, I’m not constantly wondering what’s being phoned home to some server farm. There’s no built-in telemetry silently cataloguing my behavior. My machine is doing what I tell it to do, not what some product roadmap dictates. It’s a refreshing feeling that I genuinely didn’t appreciate until I went back to Windows and started seeing just how bad it had gotten on that front.
Customization Goes All the Way Down
On Windows, you can change your wallpaper and maybe fiddle with accent colors. On Linux, specifically on KDE, you can change everything. Window decorations, animations, spacing, fonts, icon themes, cursor themes, the behavior of literally every UI element. It’s almost overwhelming at first, but once you get a setup dialed in, it feels like your machine in a way that Windows never does.
It’s Open Source: And That Actually Matters
The entire OS, the desktop, the apps, a huge portion of the Linux ecosystem is open source. Anyone can look at the code, audit it, improve it, fork it. That’s not just a philosophical win, it has real practical implications for security, transparency, and longevity. There’s something deeply reassuring about knowing your OS isn’t a black box controlled entirely by a trillion-dollar corporation.
Linux Demands That You Learn
This one might sound like a negative at first, but hear me out. Linux doesn’t hold your hand. At some point you’re going to end up in a terminal. You’re going to edit a config file. You’re going to Google something weird and cryptic, stumble across a forum post from 2009 that somehow fixes your exact problem, and come out the other side actually understanding something about how your system works. Over time you pick up concepts like file permissions, package managers, mounting drives, system services, stuff that Windows just quietly hides from you. It’s not always fun in the moment, but it makes you feel genuinely competent. There’s a nerd satisfaction to it that’s hard to describe.
You Actually Feel Like You Own Your Computer
This is the big one. When I’m using Linux, the computer feels like mine. I am in control. The OS is working for me. It’s a subtle thing until you’ve experienced it, and then going back to Windows makes it painfully obvious just how much Windows has flipped that dynamic.
And Then There’s Windows 11
The Telemetry and the “AI” Nonsense
Microsoft has been steadily turning Windows into a data collection platform with an operating system bolted on. Telemetry that you can technically disable but never really disable. And now we’ve got things like Recall; Microsoft’s genius idea to constantly screenshot your screen and index everything you’ve ever done so an AI can “help” you find it later. I mean, sure, a permanent local surveillance log of everything on my PC sounds totally fine and not terrifying at all. Completely normal feature to ship by default. Nothing to worry about.
Windows 11 Might Be the Ugliest OS I’ve Ever Used
I am not joking here. Windows 11 looks like it was designed by three different teams who never spoke to each other and then were each interrupted halfway through. You’ve got modern rounded windows next to ancient Control Panel dialogs that look like they time-traveled from 2005. The centered taskbar that you can’t move properly, the Start Menu that’s somehow worse than Windows 10’s, the context menus with a “Show more options” button that just opens the old context menu: It’s a masterclass in inconsistency. Whoever signed off on this clearly lost a bet.
You Need a Stack of Third-Party Tools Just to Make It Bearable
Fresh Windows 11 install? Cool, first stop: StartAllBack, because the taskbar and Start Menu are genuinely unusable for me otherwise. Then I run Chris Titus’s “The Ultimate Windows Utility” tool to strip out bloatware, tweak privacy settings, and generally undo all the decisions Microsoft made that I didn’t ask for. I’m patching my OS before I’ve even installed the software I actually want. That’s where we are. That’s fine. This is fine.
It Doesn’t Feel Like Your Computer
You don’t own Windows, you rent the experience. Microsoft will push updates you didn’t ask for, change settings you already set, re-enable features you turned off, and one day show you an ad in your File Explorer. The computer sitting on your desk, that you paid for, running an OS that you paid for, is ultimately working for Microsoft first and you second. Once you’ve felt the alternative, this is really hard to go back to.
So Why Am I Still on Windows?
Gaming. Specifically: modding.
Look, I know, Valve’s Proton is an absolute engineering marvel. The fact that you can run a huge chunk of the Steam library natively on Linux through a compatibility layer is genuinely impressive, and the team behind it deserves enormous credit. Most games? They just work now. It’s not 2015 anymore.
But here’s my personal wall: kernel-level anti-cheat. Games running BattleEye or Easy Anti-Cheat in kernel mode are still largely a no-go on Linux, and that knocks out a handful of titles I actually play. Annoying, but honestly manageable.
The real killer for me is modding. I am, at my core, a modder. I want to throw hundreds of mods at Bethesda games and watch everything either come together beautifully or explode spectacularly. And the modding ecosystem, tools like Vortex, Mod Organizer 2 and various other utilities relies heavily on Windows-specific features. Virtual File Systems (VFS), deep Windows API hooks, things that either don’t work under Wine/Proton or work just well enough to give you false confidence before breaking everything in a way that’s impossible to debug at 1am.
I’ve tried. Running MO2 through Proton with a Linux-native game underneath involves a level of configuration archaeology that I respect intellectually but don’t have the patience for when I just want to play Skyrim with 300 mods and a weather overhaul.
So here I am. Using StartAllBack so my taskbar looks like an OS designed by an adult, running Chris Titus’s script every fresh install like a ritual, ranting about Recall, and booting into Windows 11 every single day.
The dream of a Linux daily driver lives on. Maybe next year. Maybe when the modding tools catch up. Maybe when some developer finally gets VFS working properly under Proton.
Until then… I’ll be here, ranting about Windows 11 and how much i want to switch back to Linux.
