Three months ago I wrote about how, for my personal use at least, I’ve changed office suites, moving from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.
I’ve now made a corresponding change to my primary desktop operating system, moving from Microsoft Windows to Linux – specifically from Windows 11 to MX Linux with the KDE desktop environment.
Why the change?
My reasons for the switch are pretty straightforward: I am increasingly unhappy with the decisions Microsoft is taking around Windows.
For example:
I’m tired of having unwanted large language model (LLM) chat interfaces and other artificial intelligence (AI) functionality integrated into Windows and Microsoft software with no ability to opt-out or turn this functionality off.
I’m wary of the telemetry that Microsoft adds to its products and the monitoring it does of all its customers.
I’m exhausted by the constant tinkering and unasked-for “improvements” Microsoft keeps making to its operating system (OS), giving their OS no chance to settle and stabilise.
Overall, I’m angry about big tech’s technology lock-in and the ongoing enshittification of their products and services.
Why Linux?
Fortunately, Linux [1] takes a far different approach from Microsoft.
For example:
Linux is mostly community driven and its developers are much more open to feedback from users.
There are many competing implementations of the Linux operating system – meaning there a great many Linux distributions to choose from – so it is difficult for any single group or organisation to lock-in its users and then enshittify its products and services.
Modern Linux is surprisingly user friendly, which makes it relatively easy for most people – even power users – to switch to this as their primary OS.
That said, it helps that I’ve been using UNIX and Linux for almost 30 years [2], so the idea of moving my life over to Linux was a lot less daunting to me. Quite the opposite, in fact, since I’ve really enjoyed the process of learning and experimenting as I’ve made the move :)
What now?
I’ve almost completely migrated my day-to-day computing life over to Linux and, over the next several weeks, I plan to write posts about:
Why I picked MX Linux over other Linux distributions
How I’ve had to reorganise the way I store, sync, and back up all my data
What steps I took to make the switch from Windows to Linux
What I’ve learned about specific Linux applications along the way
For now let me just say that I’m super happy with my move and I’m really enjoying my computing life right now :)
[1] Or GNU/Linux, if you want to get into that naming controversy!
[2] My earliest experience (circa 1996) was with IBM AIX, FreeBSD, and Red Hat Linux. Since then I’ve tried many, many, other distros, with Fedora (KDE desktop), Linux Mint (Cinnamon desktop), and openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE desktop) being my favourites.