In them days Linux was even more about messing around with configurations and finding workarounds. It came on floppies, and as it loaded it made these kind of grinding, farting sounds. We would install it with an onion tied to our belt - which was the style at the time.

Hahaha! I've been dabbling in live USB thumbdrive copies of various flavors of Linux to see which one I want to go to for a while. Did a few years back and thought, "you know, my time is worth something to me, maybe I'll give Windows a go, 10 seems pretty stable."

Booted up Debian Cinnamon, couldn't get two-finger right click to work on the Synaptics config out of box, it had a few arbitrary prefs for whatever the devs decided people would probably use. Tried Debian Gnome. It had trackpad settings that were more in line with what I expected... Not giving up, but it did make me pause, because I know one can reconfigure the trackpad driver under the hood, but did I really want to jump down the rabbit hole of bespoke shellscripts again just so my audio driver correctly wakes from sleep (if it can even successfully sleep)?

Other funny to figure out, the computer has iGPU and dGPU, both were active and the battery life was maybe 2 hours. Another thing to figure out with bespoke configurations.

So it's like, Windows and Linux (and lesser, MacOS) pain is definitely there, it is just kinda what kind of pain do you want to subscribe to? Linux pain will probably only occur during initial setup and maybe every few years when a major OS release comes out. MacOS pain is even more rare, unless a major OS release comes out with something you don't like and you have to find where in the OS frameworks the feature is to disable it, if they have hooks in which to do. Windows pain is....every Tuesday.

"Oh here's a new lock screen weather widget"

"Oh cool, I can get on board with that!"

Next week:

"Oh, here's a new stocks and news widget to go along with the weather."

"Hold on there buddy, I didn't sign up for the first and you've pushed two more? Time to shut those two off. Oh, it's all or nothing, thanks! Nothing it is."

"Don't worry, we'll reinstall Dev Home next week and flag it a system app so you can't uninstall it, and then we'll force Copilot to be present, and then we're going to screw with the start menu, and then we're going to delete WordPad, and reinstall all those Office/cloud 365 shim apps and and and." That was like, last month.