Indeed - that’s how I would describe my experience of using EOS again after some years, and this time definitively. It’s peaceful. I feel like I’m in control and not some company that dictates how to use my PC. Same goes for our family PC I installed Mint on. The difference in atmosphere is astounding.
Just try opening up Edge for the first time on Windows, for example. Instantly get hit with a barrage of pop-ups, and inquiries, like “hey, do you want us to sell your data for the best experience??!!11one” and things like that. Start up Firefox in any Linux distro, and it’s just a few questions about importing data, recommending some privacy focused extensions like Privacy Badger, CanvasBlocker and Facebook Container - and you’re off to the races.
No questions about if I would ‘recommend this PC to a friend or colleague’ - nevermind that it’s a custom built PC, Microsoft. No random pesterings of feedback that inevitably goes unnoticed regardless. No forced updates, nothing is forced upon you in Linux and you are free to do as you please. That is what I love most about it. It’s peaceful. And calming to use.
If you do find something in Windows annoying, good luck trying to communicate that to Microsoft who continue to ignore the biggest problems people post on the Feedback Hub that are on the front page. That leaves you with trying to get rid of it yourself, and unless there’s a registry key or group policy that does what you want, you are out of luck. Using Home edition? You don’t even have a group policy! Entirely opposite experience to Linux where you can modify whatever you want and anything that bothers you can be easily rectified with the community’s help.
Soul wise, XP was the peak of Windows. And then it only went downhill from there… becoming more and more corporate, and ominous. Gone are the days of calming music and beautiful presentation-like slides in OOBE as it was in XP - now you just want to get through it as quick as possible.
I remain a huge fan of old Windows, the likes of 95, 98 SE, 2000, XP and so on. But anything after 7 I despise immensely - with a soft spot for 8.1 because, despite the horrible UX, I loved its speed back then and it made my Celeron crapbox usable (after installing Open Shell of course…)
The OS is going be irrelevant eventually. We’re always going to be a subset of a subset, and that’s fine by me. I figure just let people use what they want to use when they have a choice and have actively chosen. If there was a “get people off” anything, it would be SaaS, software as a service, which in recent times is the core of what we would define as a point of surveillance and revenue-specific telemetry.
