Saying Goodbye to Windows (Windows 10 EOL)

With the end of life of Windows 10 and the stringent hardware requirements of Windows 11, users are left stranded without a secure path forward.  With the new online account requirements during Windows 11 installation, forced ads within the operating system,  Windows recall, and the ever increasing telemetry data mining, Microsoft is doing their best to alienate their user base.  Ironically, statcounter was reporting that they had a spike in Windows 7 devices on various website they are tracking.  (Unsure of how accurate this really is, however)

Some users are opting to try and bypass the TPM 2.0 requirements of Windows 11, while others are opting for Linux as an alternate operating system.  With the steady progress that Valve has been making towards Wine and Proton, Linux has become a more viable solution for gamers as well as the average Windows users.

Personally, on my Plex server, out of sheer laziness, I have opted to extend my Windows 10 support for another year, as I do not want to:

• Upgrade my hardware to support Windows 11 
• Completely reinstall a Linux distro and refomat the 100+ TB of data

Despite my laziness to change the OS of my media server, (my mentality at this point is to not "fix" anything that is not broken), I have tried out a few distros as my daily driver to see what the switching out of Windows would look like.  On said journey to replace Windows, it turns out that I am fairly unopinionated in what my desktop experience is like as long as I am able to run these few applications.

• Visual studio code
• Postman
• Plex media player
• Parsec
• Brave
• Steam
• Discord

Even prior to the Windows 10 EOL date, I have been using Linux Mint, which is a debian based distro that is very user friendly.  Since then, I have also installed Fedora with the KDE plasma desktop environment, and aside from using a different package manager to install applications, my user experience has been mostly the same. Honestly, my workflow does not require a specific distro or operating system as I am effectively just working with Visual Studio Code and the browser. (The soy boy development environment)

My active personal projects are using Next.js and pocket pages with turbopack, which have had no issues on Windows as well as on Linux.  Frankly speaking, it may be even running better on Linux.

My biggest issue right now is not having a great remote desktop application to remotely access my personal machine.  On Windows, Parsec has been a great way for me to remote into various machines, but Parsec unfortunately does not have a hosting feature on Linux.  As such, I have been looking into Rustdesk to see if that would adequately support use cases and it appears that tentatively, it will.  I will still need additional configuration in order to able to remotely access my machines from outside the network, but this is a decent start.

Aside from my remote desktop woes, Fedora, so far seems to be stable and working well.  Although I have only been using it less than a week, I am finding that it is more stable than Linux Mint, which is somewhat surprising.  Another distro I am planning on checking out would be Arch, but for now, Fedora and Linux Mint are both serving me well.

I would honestly recommend looking into Linux as a viable alternative (Assuming you are not mainly using proprietary software in your daily workflow that is not available outside of the Windows/Mac ecosystem)