this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Seeing the horde of Linux evangelists here at Lemmy has been reminding me of seeing a similar push toward it back in the mid 00s.
Back then I tried probably 5 or 6 different Linux variants.
And after trying them all, I went right back to Windows.
Why?
Because I realized that all I wanted was for my OS to disappear, and years of using Windows meant that I wanted something that looked, felt, and acted like Windows. So any version of Linux that might replace it for me was going to have to do that while also adding some positives to the exchange to more-than-cancel-out the awkward differences.
As I said, I tried several, for a few months each, really trying to give them a fair shake.
In the end, I found that whatever one I liked best was the one I liked best because it was the least awkward to use...but even that one was just a worse experience than just using Windows.
So for an average user like me, who really doesn't have any problem with Windows...why switch?
But...I don't want to use Edge...so I don't.
I really don't give a shit about the data they might be collecting on me, since everyone else is too, and I have yet to see any horrible effects of that.
Windows does what I ask it to do, and I don't feel that it's forcing me to use it in ways I don't want to. I primarily use my computer for surfing the Internet, watching YouTube, doing a bit of online shopping, and playing two games. I guess I don't really see how switching to Linux could make my experience doing that better in any significant way...and certainly not to any degree that might justify educating myself in how to choose, download, install, set up, and use any of the different options.
My last go-round with Linux ended when I realized that I was just trying distro after distro (is that the right term?) basically looking for something that looked, sounded, and smelled like Windows, and eventually I realized that all I was doing was trying a bunch of shit that wasn't Windows and trying to turn it into Windows. Everything felt like a crappy workaround, tasks that should've been simple and intuitive weren't, and while, yes, Linux did seem to have an android program to anything I wanted to replace, in every case it just seemed like "Discount Store Syndrome", where everything was the slightly worse knock off version of the real thing, only different for the sake of being "not Windows".