I recently upgraded to Windows 11. I’ve been putting it off, but there are a few apps I need that simply do not work under 10 anymore. Bleah.

I’ve been using it on a work machine for several years, but I am still surprised at just how much it sucked to switch from 10. My personal setup has been heavily customized over many years to suit my particular needs and wants. More than half of that customization is no possible under 11. There are workarounds for a few pieces of it, but even those are unlikely to remain stable and functional for very long. Microsoft is constantly changing things that cause unsupported features to break.

So I now have a slower, less reliable, less versatile, and less configurable software environment. It also conducts far more surveillance and sends even more information about me to Microsoft. There is not one single way in which this could be considered an upgrade, except by Microsoft’s shareholders.

I’m going to set up dual boot with Zorin. That will allow me to boot into Windows 11 for the few things I need that will only run in that environment. The remaining 99.9% of the time I will just run Linux. (I already know Linux pretty well, I just haven’t run it as my primary desktop.)

I suspect my next project will be replacing my Android phone’s OS with something less invasive.