Yesterday, my 19 years relationship with Windows has come to an end. over the last decade Windows has become more hostile, unreliable, and borderline unusable hardware wise. I'm tired of being forced to use gimmicks and being subject of a privacy violation, on top of that, I feel sick of continuing supporting Microsoft with all this massive Layoffs and destruction of companies under their umbrella and how they support terrible causes . I'm currently a user of a basic Laptop for almost everything, games, art, paperwork, web-browsing. it's not a monster on resources but I managed to get at least some decent upgrades, upgrades that aren't enough for the smelly and ugly fat fuck of Windows 11 and even with 10 y RAM upgrades didn't made the difference because it also sucks a lot of my CPU and RAM.

I said enough and finally dare to switch to Linux, part of that decision was not only because of Microsoft, but also Valve with their Steam Deck managed to convinced me to try this environment, learning to configure and tinker with my brother's Deck gave me a tease of what can offer in terms of user experience and gaming, sure it's not without it's problems and accessibility but seeing that the fucking file explorer actually working (UNLIKE WINDOWS EXPLORER!) can change you.

Originally I was schedule to switch to Linux Mint in October of this year, the end of support of Windows 10, but the avalanche of terrible news coming from MS made me change my plans and switch this summer. with help of people like James Lee and his videos about corporate greed and his awful relationship with Adobe and very useful tutorials like @AhWham's Linux Mint - Setup, Customization, and Familiarity tutorial managed to get a good grip of my target Distro and after a brief installation I finally have Linux Mint 21.1 running on my humble HP laptop. got my games working thanks to Steam and Heroic Games Launcher and the power of Proton, my table works on Linux too, pen pressure and Krita is all set up and the rest of my software is A-OK. I'm still learning to use the terminal and how this environment works but thankfully Mint makes things more easy.

Sketch of Ruby holding a Tux plushie

Linux is not without it's problems and accessibility issues, in fact, I got a lot of issues trying to Install my GOG copy of Dishonored on Heroic only to discover that I Installed the launcher wrong, and I'm still having this feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, but it's a worthy sacrifice to do in order to have a better future PC wise and seeing how Windows only gets worst and worst, will be more people willing to enter GNU/Linux and try to make an effort of making it more easy for the average people just like Windows in the 90's only without a corporate overlord reign supreme.

If you excuse me, I'm gonna buy my thigh long socks.