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I just run two drives - one with windows and one with Linux.

I treat the windows one as a console essentially, not even logged into my password manager or email or anything. It is only for games. Basically an Xbox, with all sorts of normal annoying UX, but it doesn’t matter for all of the ~2 minutes until I can launch a game

Separate linux drive for everything else.

For me last year was the tipping point, with Windows 10 hitting EOL I refused to move to the buggy mess of 11. All the games I regularly play are now nearly flawless in proton and games that refuse to run on Linux just don't exist for me anymore. Admittedly I already didn't play the kinds of highly competitive online games that like to use KLAC, so might be a tougher sell if that's your jam. Most of my game time goes to FF14 and GW2.

I assume this isn't the case with every machine, but every hardware I've ever owned (including the Framework 13, which has pretty good Linux support) has had worse battery life under Linux (mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu).

To say nothing of the truly excellent battery life Macs these days get.

That's the only reason to avoid Linux on a laptop these days, IMO.

I tend to run pretty close to the edge on hardware (9950x, 9070xt, gen5 nvme)... I've had a few issues with that in Linux... that said, I've been using Linux as the main OS on my desktop for a while now, and when I upgraded about a year ago, I ditched the Windows drive entirely.

I do have a Windows Server 2025 and Win11 VM running for a couple testing issues, but that's about it. That said, there seems to be a few integration issues on Wayland where the RDP client or the VM UI both will not intercept hotkeys like alt-tab, which makes it kind of painful to use the VM effectively.

Even with the rough edges in Cosmic, I'll still take it over the jank they keep addding to Windows.

Anecdotally, my (smart but doesn't really care much about computers) fiancee was able to get all dozen of her mods for The Sims working on Bazzite Linux without any help from me besides a chmod +x to one script.

But we don't play any online multiplayer games, so YMMV on that one.

Its always been a momentum thing for me, grew up on Windows, esp in my LAN party days. The guys running linux couldn't play 90% of the games the rest of us were. When dev became more important to me I would typically reach for something else because the windows dev experience always kind of sucked IMO (unless you were a .NET person, which for the most part I was not).

I have a spare laptop with Pop OS on it now and I'm really enjoying it. Kind of forget I'm on it sometimes. I'm considering putting it as my OS for my main powerful laptop that I play most of my games on.

I dual boot Windows and Pop OS. I find the Windows 10 LTSC experience totally perfect, and it has a longer EOL.

I repeat this story every now and then but I "maintain" a 18 years old laptop with Ubuntu (mainly for Internet) for non-tech savvy user. I put it in quotes because I just run apt update every now and then - that's it. Just works. The only bottleneck is how resource-hungry browsers got over time but it remains usable. Ubuntu was installed sometime back in 2017 and there was no need for fresh reinstall since then.

Linux is missing good vm defaults (dirty_bytes etc.) - out of the box settings on the distros I tried are abysmal; both windows and macos are much saner.

Other than that, yeah, it's a royal pain in the ass. It's treating the user primarily as an upsell funnel.

I don't seem to have issues modding games like Skyrim, Fallout 4 or Factorio on Linux

If you avoid games that demand kernel-level access, gaming on Linux works just fine.

Honestly, I don't trust game producers enough to grant then kernel access. Do you? Really?

Install the IoT LTSC edition. No crapware at all. It's a really solid OS. Less painful than Linux overall.

I run Windows 11 as my main desktop (and use Mac at work and have a bunch of servers / NAS where I run debian), and W11 is not painful at all.

I installed the Professional edition, disabled a few settings that I don't like the first time I installed it, and haven't had any issue or friction since then.

Meanwhile I'm constantly frustrated at MacOS and obviously you can't do anything on Linux without running into some sort of trouble.

Slavery. It was meant to fix slavery.

Rasism was fixed by not using black- and whitelists on firewalls. Separate endeavour.

At least Comcast isn't the company with the worst customer support now, we can give that honor to Xfinity

all the racism is gone now /s

Maybe comparing <the sum total of annoyance from reading the old name> to <the current sum total of annoyance reading the current name>, it was a positive direction overall?

But it's just so unnecessary. Everyone has always expected Notepad to be a simple utility as it has always been, why does it need optional AI features? It just feels like bloat.

Even with it off, you can still see that it uses a lot of resources for a basic Notepad. I've ditched Windows for work, second drive now has Windows for gaming and that is all. I can do all my work on Linux and that is fine by me.

If I'm understanding correctly, you have to go into "advanced" features to turn off AI? So someone who doesn't think they're an expert who needs advanced features might not ever go and look there? I'd argue that "advanced" features are something that a casual user would expect to be off by default and need to go out of their way to enable.

I would prefer off by default.

No nags, just a simple, "We are offering you this feature, use it or don't, it's your computer".

Be better if there was a global "Disable AI" option easily found in the settings that is a flag everywhere.

Some of us (including very much me) simply do not want Copilot/AI anything and playing whackamole with settings is annoying but we'll do it anyway and it leaves a bad taste.

Since it's the software equivalent of been in a filing cabinet in the basement behind a door that has a sign saying "Beware the Leopard".

In reality it's a moot point, I disable AI features and Windows is a gloried steamos box for me at this point, I do my actual computing booted into Linux and have for decades.

The "AI" additions to Notepad are not limited to systems with an NPU. Why would they be, it's powered by LLMs running on Azure [0].

These sudden additions also correlated with the first CVE [1] in Notepad since its inception, so maybe their attention isn't where it should be.

I for one very much mind this and many other inclusions including the metastatic takeover off Office. OneDrive also was forced upon and severely worsened functioning software, despite not being "AI", so there is precedent at least.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...

[1] https://infosecwriteups.com/the-dumb-editor-that-got-too-sma...

IMHO they're just hiding the wolf in sheep clothing. Can't complain about AI if it's not called AI. Modern problems require modern solutions, you get the idea. The snark in TFA about shareholders and stakeholders hits the nail on the head.

> I honestly don't mind this, as long as it's not being forced.

This is indeed a step forward. With QuickBooks, there is currently no way to disable their extremely intrusive AI. I may just vibe-code a browser extension to block it. Fight fire with fire.

For real, it was insane to drop Cortana. Halo-aside, it’s a great name for an AI assistant.

This is decidedly the result of a lack of strategy. Microsoft isn’t a single unified borg.

Instead, all the little individual teams got their hands on these capabilities and they figured out where to shove it. At “best” there would have been the head of Windows or Office or whatever saying to all their reports “go do AI!”

It looks like you're trying to write something! Click here to have me fuck it up for you!

Good news: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/03/23/microsoft-confirms-...

I'm guessing the 'sparkle' icon will stick around, for better or worse

I think it's even more than that, they'll be features without AI even being mentioned

Ah, you make a great point - I made almost the same comment a moment ago, because I remember that Microslop babbled about "we will listen to the community" some weeks ago. Guess it was indeed at the start of the year.

So those who were skeptic were right - one can not trust Microslop. Its AI addiction is too strong already. It sold its soul to AI. There is no way back for Microslop anymore. All Win11 users will have to support AI. AI up all the things! \o/

If you turn off Apple Intelligence, it’s one switch and features like that are gone from every single location.

Yeah, I remember the same. Also, "Windows 11 fans" sounds like an oxymoron.

Needs more 'Clippy'.

I built a new PC at around the same time that notepad++ was exploited so I steered clear of it for a bit. And VSCode was becoming too clunky to use as a general purpose text editor. So I tried the new notepad. The new version is also clunky and sluggish, and I didn’t want Copilot, so I switched back to notepad++ after a few days.

Well, they heard that we don't like copilot in notepad so they removed "copilot" from notepad.

And right after that they added a brand new feature called tolipoc that will revolutionize the way you analyze your logs or modify your 17 year old cmd file!

Want to create a file with the current date and time? No need to google for it, tolipoc will do it for you!

You prob recall this thing from 23 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459296

For me there's nothing MS could do at this point that would bring me back. And as I said in that thread, it's too late for them - people are moving elsewhere, maybe not in big numbers but exodus is in progress. MS harassed their users/clients too hard and for too long; now it's time to "enjoy" fruits of their deranged actions and decisions.