Coming from a Robotics Engineering background, I was an avid Microsoft Windows user. It’s what I grew up with, first using it when I was 7 years old in school. The CAD software that I used from Autodesk’s suite of CAD programs to Solidworks all runs on Windows. Let alone my trading and investment brokerages’ platforms.
As time proceeded, I noticed the bloat being forcefully installed via updates that were forced upon so intrusively causing workflow interruption. Imagine booting up your computer so enthused about getting life-changing work done only to be greeted by “Windows update in progress” and then “Restarting”. If that is not eye-sore, how about waiting for a good 10 mins for the update to progress only for Windows to return “Updates failed, rolling back to previous version” or somewhere along those lines before rebooting with no changes.
Oh, haven’t I mentioned: Ads. Xbox 360 ads on my settings, Candy Crush or worse: built-in AI Copilot. I’m an avid user of AI – perplexity.ai – but not on my operating system. Such features are bloat, a risk to Operational Security (OpSec), and a detriment to privacy given the already known fact that Microsoft sends god-knows-what data – Telemetry – to whom you never know who.
And then Fate has it for me: Blue Screen of Death right after opening up my computer case for a cleanup.
MacOS? I’m broke. So I chose Linux; Ubuntu (minimal) by Canonical, having the best of stable Debian and latest software. Only all that I need is installed. No bloat, stable yet supporting the latest and proprietary drivers and software that I need. No I’m not an open-source purist; I need to get things done.
Converting to Linux has its perks. Increased control, privacy and awareness in said subjects & OpSec. That said, as some software is only supported in Windows – Solidworks – workarounds are needed. So here I document & share what I went through. Fuck Microsoft.