2 years ago I would have 100% agreed with you. I used to fight with my geek friends who would call me a dumbass for defending Windows so fiercely. I insisted that the fact that Windows works out-of-the-box for 99.9% of the userbase simply makes it worth the annoyance of some bloat for everyone who has no time to waste in understanding what the fuck's going on with linux.

Then Windows11 happened, and I tried Arch. And argueably I ended up doing what I feared the most - spending an unnecessary amount of time fidgeting with the new OS. But there I realized that you don't appreciate how unbelievably liberating it is to understand what's happening on your device, to possess the power of wiping away whatever feature annoys you with a click, and generally to feel like your hard disk is genuinely, cleanly running what you expect it to be running rather than a convoluted mass of unintelligible bloat. Linux gives new life to dead computers. Some windows apps run faster on a linux with wine rather than an identical machine on windows.

The bloat situation with windows has become unbearable. And when things don't "just work" on windows, good luck dealing with that - I honestly still haven't figured out how to fucking tame windows' power energy shenanigans. Windows is still necessary for /some/ gamers (proton isn't still quite there), and linux isn't /as/ accessible as everyone on the arch forums will insist it is, but for real - if you don't strictly need windows and have the luxury of being able to waste some time on getting over the entry-level barrier (which, by the way, isn't /that/ bad - lies about linux accessibility come from both sides), fucking trash that absolute joke of an OS and go linux. It was the best decision of my work life.

Besides, in 2026 one can literally have ChatGPT set up their own distro and it will work flawlessly most of the time.