Enshittification.
noun Colloquial the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
Macquarie Dictionary word of the year in 2024. Relevant.
I’m never moving to Windows 11. I can’t list all of the reasons, because I can’t remember them all at the one time, but here is a short list of reasons why I think the operating system, and maybe the company in general, is going to shit. Windows 10 is bad enough. And most of these things are Windows 10 related.
Telemetry. Microsoft are over-reaching with what information they collect. I don’t want an operating system that spies on me when I’m using it. Escaping this in all software is getting harder and harder (especially with even Mozilla/Firefox going down a privacy-invasion path).
The Start Menu. It used to be the place to launch programs that you wanted to use. But now it gives you search results, lists applications that you don’t have installed, the weather, the stock market, sport results, and services that aren’t actually on my computer.
Default Settings. A fresh installation of Windows 10 takes up 75% of the task bar with a search bar, weather (“Temperatures set to rise!” – what is this? SimCity??), stock ticker, a start button, and a system tray. It’s all to cramped that the programs you open end up as just icons. Two instances of one program running and they’re grouped so you have to hover on the icon to open the instance that you want. In Windows 10 this behaviour can be changed, but I don’t understand why anyone would want to have their computer work that way. It’s as though people at Microsoft don’t use their own products.
OneDrive and MS365. Everything is OneDrive. Everything is MS365. But not quite well enough. On my work computer where I have to use OneDrive, I have two Desktop folders. One is C:\Users\bitterswede\Desktop and the other is C:\Users\bitterswede\OneDrive – placeofemployment\Desktop. Just let me store things on my computer.
Anyway. I promised a non-exhaustive list, so that’s what this will be.
So, with support for Windows 10 ending, what will I do, since I’ve taken the stand to never move to Windows 11.
Linux.
This year is, indeed, the year of Linux on the desktop.
The only issue I have with moving is that I need to abandon Affinity’s suite of software. It’s no massive loss and there are replacements, but I spent good money on them.
I’m going to order a new M.2 drive, and then install Ubuntu on that.
Stand by for the post on that.
