Walking Calmly But Quickly Toward the Exits: On Leaving an Operating System

So I've concluded I'm done with Windows.

It's not that the operating system is too buggy, or too expensive, or too anything else. It's just become a big ugly set of hoops and I don't want to contort myself to jump through them anymore.

I came to this decision, slowly but surely, after a thousand tiny cuts. The realization came to me after the theft of the start menu in Windows 8, slipstreaming problems, the fact that Hyper-V is still really finicky and unstable, the Windows 10 telemetry thing, that one month I installed its security update and it broke all of my existing SecureStrings and the certificates installed in CurrentUser, and the spontaneous clean-slate all-or-nothing upgrades that I am obligated to endure like spoonfuls of cod liver oil just because I'm told they're good for me. These upgrades always end up breaking something, though not always the same thing twice.

I'm not mad. This is not an acrimonious divorce. It's mostly the culmination of a couple of years of conscious decisions to stop investing in the Windows platform for my personal and professional needs. It isn't even that I found something better or drank a new kind of Kool-Aid. I don't particularly like Linux all that much and the BSDs don't support all of the demands I have, whether it be software-based or hardware compatibility-restricted.

Turns out that in 2018, the operating systems field kind of sucks for consumers. There isn't a be-all, end-all OS that will scratch every itch. Even Apple's own hardware-tailored offerings leave much to be desired.

I come not to eulogize Windows. It was a fine OS for me for, let's see, twenty years? Ran every game I ever wanted (except the DOS ones (and eventually not the older CD-ROM ones after about 2007)), stopped crashing all the time around 2002, had a kick-butt media player for a while. It even evolved beyond the need to wipe and reinstall it every year like clockwork.

But times change, and wants change. I want a next-gen filesystem that I can leverage to compose a solid backup and painless restore system. I'd like to update my software in a way that won't necessarily reset everything until I manually reorganize, reinstall, or replace the things that are suddenly incompatible with a mandatory update. I want to not have a juvenile init system reinvent the wheel and insist I relearn years of sysadmin skills because it chooses to randomly re-enumerate my hardware devices or replace old, reliable tools with totally different ones under the misguided notion that if it's newer, it must be better. I want to still be able to play StarCraft once in a while. I want my hardware to be mine again.

Sure, I'll still keep a Windows install ISO around. There are still some games that haven't been ported to other OSes, but I already look with an increasingly negative eye at Windows-only and Windows-first software. Browser-based services began to break the ironclad grasp operating systems held on software and that, combined with easy virtualization and emulation tools, helps to make me feel like I have a little bit of choice again. The microcosm of "the other guys" has exploded since the era when the only UNIX software you could get was for backend networking stuff, proprietary databases, and university physics departments. Eventually, decent-looking user interfaces and WYSIWYG tools trickled into the open source ground water supply and you didn't have to spend your evenings on an IRC channel learning black magic shell script incantations through osmosis just to get a usable desktop setup.

I bought some new machines a few years back, at a time on the consumer PC metrics graph just a little to the right of the "good enough" point where the cost curve intersected the reliability curve. They just keep chugging along. Machines are durable enough now that, with a decent SSD, they can run for years without any real performance degradation or ageism penalty and satisfactorily do all but the most demanding rendering stuff in a pleasantly short amount of time. Any new hardware I buy these days is either a replacement part or a luxury item.

So really, I already bought my last Windows-dedicated hard drive at a point in the past I don't rightly recall. Windows as I mentioned finally runs great these days, until it decides to reboot and/or upgrade on you. When the time comes to replace the drive in my last Windows workstation, or the machine itself, the next drive will host something else. I'm not sure precisly what or even approximately when. It was fun while it lasted. Except for the crashing. And the spontaneous restarts. And the integrated advertising. And the fundamental UX changes imposed by corporate fiat. And the suspicious data-collection for purposes unknown. But other than that it was fun.

Next time: How to install Windows 10. No, really!