Au revoir pour toujours, monsieur Gates

Posted 04/16/2022

I moved to Arch and finally gave up on Windows! I was one of the assholes stuck in the "but muh games camp" for too long but I had a nice push a few weeks back and I haven't looked back since. I was actually a Windows 7 holdout for absolute ages until Elden Ring concerns finally pushed me to Windows 10. The upgrade went well and I even got to keep my old Windows Pro key or whatever that I never even paid for. Unfortunately, it was genuinely the worst computing experience I've ever had. I started heavily considering a partial Linux move about three weeks in, and my hand actually was kind of forced into it. One evening, I had disabled the Windows Defender service to play with firewall settings, and had found on the next reboot that every single crucial Windows service had also been disabled automatically, and it was outright impossible to undo without first re-enabling the WD service. Which also seemed to essentially be dependent on itself. I killed an evening playing around with Google Fu and whatever came up, but no real luck. I'm no Windowsmancer so it probably was fixable, in hindsight, but it was such a pain that I immediately got my hands on an Arch ISO and haven't looked back since.