For decades Microsoft has been making user-hostile decisions, and for decades users have put up with it. Windows market share is down compared to ten years ago, but still, no alternative comes even close. And Microsoft continues to make user-hostile decisions, seemingly to just provoke people into action. And still, people put up with it. Over the years I’ve seen hundreds of articles describing the malpractices and dark patterns employed by Microsoft, and yet they all seem to just scream into the void, ignored by the larger public. Given the quality of Windows 11, and all the ways in which Microsoft is planning to make it worse, Windows does not deserve the market share it currently has. It’s a shit product, and it should be replaced by something better. But what will it take to make that happen?
So here’s a prediction: 2026 is the year to switch to Linux on the desktop. I’ve made the plunge and switched my second machine over to Linux already. Historically, three things have held me back every time I tried some form of Linux as my primary OS: 1. mouse acceleration, 2. being able to play retro games, and 3. being able to play modern games.
The mouse acceleration thing is very subjective, and I’ll give credit to Windows there, because it just gets it right. Ten years ago the mousing experience on Linux was just.. off, compared to Windows, and no matter how much I tweaked it, I could not get it to feel right for me. Mac OS always felt wrong to me and still feels wrong; the mouse just seems like a second-rate citizen in that ecosystem. But I was happily surprised when I tried Arch Linux a couple of weeks ago and mouse acceleration just felt great out of the box. Problem solved!
On the retro gaming front, I can be brief: technology has moved on, anything consider retro is easily emulatable these days, and this is not a blocker for switching to Linux (and it’s not been a blocker for a while).
Lastly, modern games. I’ve resisted switching over to Linux for a long time because of this, but Valve has been making some amazing progress in getting all kinds of games to run well under Linux, to the point that even Microsoft titles like Forza Horizon 4 ran without a hitch when I tried it on Arch. Massive props to Valve, if any company deserves to dethrone Microsoft when it comes to desktop OS’s, it’s them.
So, what are you waiting for? If you don’t switch away from Windows, Microsoft will start feeding all your personal documents into their LLMs. They might say they won’t turn that behavior on by default, but I guarantee you that eventually there’ll be a Windows update that ‘accidentally’ turns that on. With Microsoft you can always expect the worst. Switch before it’s too late.