Eroding / taking away user agency. It’s always little bits they chip away but over the time those chips amount to a huge cut off edge of things you cannot do anymore, or only through very convoluted and potentially breaking third party tweaks & tools. Every Windows installation ended up with a growing shit-list of things to do. Disable this, tweak that, download tool X, Y & Z just to further disable & tweak shit, and whoop-de-doo several hours have already passed when you’re finally “done”. Then, in the middle of doing shit, Windows update! “No! Go away!” 10 minutes later… “Hey, I think you forgot about me?” - “NO, I UPDATE WHEN I SHUT THE DAMN PC DOWN, NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS! GO AWAY!” … “BUT HAVE YOU HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, THE WINDOWS UPDATE?! OH AND BY THE WAY, WE RE-ENABLED OUR SPYING OPTIONS AGAIN AND WILL SEND ALL THE UNSENT DATA BEFORE YOU CAN DISABLE IT AGAIN!”
At some point I just realized that using Windows became more of a hassle than using Linux. And when you finally do the switch, you suddenly realize how fucking awesome it is that your OS is not constantly nagging you, not constantly spying on you, not constantly fighting you, not constantly changing its configuration to re-enable the things you purposefully disabled. I finally have an operating system again that does what I want it to do, a system that respects my privacy, as well as me as a user.
It gets to a point where it doesn’t feel like you have control over your own computer.
For me, a big one was how it would constantly wake from sleep for no reason or to update. If put it to sleep and most times it would wake before I even s stood up from my desk. And there are settings you can change to stop that, but Windows will just randomly reset them.
And this is a really small one, but Windows 11 dropping features that Windows 10 has. It’s very stupid that Windows 11 won’t let you have a vertical task bar.
I’ve been a Windows user for 30+ years and always loved that OS until recently. But now I love Linux. An OS that truly lets me own my computer and do what I want.
