We've been stuck with Windows 10 for so long that we've forgotten what a good OS is

Windows 10 started great. It really did! I used the preview builds on my actual daily laptop for months without issue. I did an entire school project on one of them, connected it to the copier at my mom's work, and printed it out. On a beta build of Windows.

The launch day was a disaster. Any computer with an Nvidia graphics card - which was all of mine - were left unusable due to a driver problem caused by a massively stupid design decision made last minute. Windows Update insisted on pushing a very unstable driver, and GeForce Experience refused and said "nuh-uh, we're sticking with stable versions here," at which point Windows just said, "well, I guess nobody gets to have a graphics driver, then. Microsoft Basic Display Adapter it is."

It didn't get much better in the following days. Microsoft Edge barely functioned. Automatic updates were forced, but also broken constantly. Bad driver versions were pushed out every other day. Heck, some people had updates just delete files from their documents folders for no reason.

Eventually, things shaped up. Edge got pretty good (and then ultimately got replaced by another Chrome fork. Rip.), the automatic update problems calmed down, lots of UI improvements were made, and more. However, for every good Windows 10 feature or change, there existed an equal and opposite awful feature or change. Without fail, I promise you.

The current iteration of Windows 10 (21H2) is hardly recognizable as the same operating system as the launch day build (10240). The file explorer is much better, but the start menu is worse. The settings app works a lot better, but now they've unnecessarily hidden settings from the control panel, where they were once easy to reach. Oh, and it still performs horribly, for no reason. It is SO slow. The list goes on. It's a shame, really. I had such high hopes for Windows 10, especially following Windows 8.1, which I was a legitimate fan of, thanks to its incredible performance and ambitious design decisions. Windows 10 seemed like it would just be the refinement of that - and in some ways, it was, but in many other ways, it was a step backwards.

I've spent several months with Windows 11 now, on both my laptop and my desktop PCs. It truly is a special operating system that has made significant strides toward Windows finally being feature matched with every other operating system. Which is crazy, because at its heart it really is just Windows 10 again, with a new CPU scheduler and a new theme.

Windows Terminal is amazing. It incorporates Command Prompt and PowerShell into one program that can be navigated with multiple tabs and such. It can be extended with Azure Cloud Shell, if you have access to that, as well as Visual Studio's development environments, giving you easy access to Microsoft's command line dev tools, including their C and C++ compiler. But it doesn't stop there. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) can also coexist in this same window with everything else, giving you direct access to your Linux command line tools from the exact same environment.

While we're talking about WSL... it's about to get support for Linux GUI applications. That's huge. We're talking about bridging the last major gap between Windows and Linux in easily the most heavy-handed yet simple way possible. And PowerShell already made truly portable cross-platform scripting a possibility.

Windows 11 is great. It marks a point where Microsoft, although still plenty lazy, has decided to stop messing around and actually make some half-decent products again. It is still Microsoft, though, so I give it a year or two before things go to crap again...

Meanwhile, I spent this weekend installing Linux onto the second SSD in my Dell XPS 15. I tried Fedora and Manjaro to varying degrees of stability and success, and finally landed on one I've head a lot about these last few years, but haven't actually tried myself: Pop!_OS.

Pop!_OS desktop, GNOME 42

 

This is what a truly good operating system looks like. I'm not even personally a huge fan of GNOME 3 and 4x. I grew up using GNOME 2, so I feel more at home with MATE. I also have a soft spot for KDE Plasma and its extremely customizable  nature, as well as Xfce and its simplicity. Cinnamon is also quite good, although I've never felt like it was something very special.

GNOME 3 and 4x each have their own weaknesses, but Linus Torvalds himself went so far as to say the devs had figured it was "too complicated" to be productive, and decided to "make it really annoying to do." I, on the other hand, just felt like it was a huge step backwards, and didn't really resemble the GNOME I knew and loved at all.

Yet, here I am happily typing on a system powered by GNOME 42. Maybe it's largely due to Pop's customizations, but I just feel perfectly content to be here. Everything feels responsive and productive. It looks nice, while remaining modern. As someone who has generally embraced the rather antiquated look and feel of GTK 2 for years and years, I find myself shocked to be so content.

Pop!_OS power management menu

 

 This little menu right here is so, so important. Everything else I tried made rather clunky use of my Nvidia Optimus chipset. And yeah, I know, if you want a good Linux hardware set, you should probably use AMD hardware. But I wanted a Dell XPS, and they're only Intel/Nvidia. Thankfully, the fine people at System76 make similarly equipped systems of their own, and their Pop!_OS distro supports that very thing.

I'm very pleased with the performance I get out of everything I have tried on Pop!_OS, and I am looking forward to using it throughout the rest of my school career as a computer science major. I still have Windows 11 around on this laptop in case I need it, but unless I am required to use Office, need to open a Visual Studio project, or if I feel the desire to play a Windows game, I doubt I will be.

If you have even an inkling of knowledge about modern computing, do yourself a favor and attempt to make the switch from Windows to Linux. It's not for everybody, and most people won't be able to completely get away from Windows. But for all those things you can do on Linux, you won't ever feel like doing it anywhere else ever again. Trust me on that. The freedom is intoxicating.

I hear people use the gaming argument all the time, and I totally get that. Buy a second drive, though, and dual-boot. A 240 GB Kingston A400 SATA SSD is $30 USD, and a 500 GB hard drive from eBay is literally less than $20. It doesn't get much cheaper than that. You can more than likely achieve a state where the only need you have for Windows anymore is entertainment. Linux is better for almost everything else, and once you realize that, you just won't feel like using anything else anymore.

--Sidney

P.S. I haven't forgotten about our Touhou-themed arcade cabinet. I've just had other projects come up, and so has Michael. It'll happen. Someday™