Good bye, Windows

Windows was my go-to OS for 25-30 years (Amiga OS before that), I see no problem with it, it just works and while it has some annoying quirks, it gets the job done and that's all that matters to me. But, my working laptop runs Windows 10 and the update to 11 did not go well. I spent almost a whole day trying everything I could to just update, but I always ended up with "This PC does not meet Windows 11 system requirements". This is bullshit - the machine is i7 11th gen, has 16 GB of RAM and plenty of disk space.

I had enough. I made a backup of important data, formatted the drive and installed Debian 13 with XFCE. I was very afraid to do it, to be honest. I never really used Linux on desktop for more than... an hour, maybe. And every time, I returned to the safe, familiar Windows environment. But this time, I went through all the "hey, how does this work?" steps, I knew that there is no Windows to go back to :-). In the end, it was not difficult at all. I was actually surprised, how better the OS is compared to Windows.

It's WAY faster. It's almost unbelievable how snappy and immediate everything is (even after installing a lot of stuff). The UI is not really beautiful, but it is consistent and predictable. Because of the combination of a lightweight fast OS, configurable key shortcuts and insanely powerful command line, my productivity went up just because of changing operating system. I never really noticed how Windows slowed me down until I switched to something else.

So, goodbye Windows. It was fun.

Maybe I'll come back when you get your shit together, but I have my doubts.