As someone who spends all day in spreadsheets and deep in system hardware, I've noticed a frustrating trend in the OS space. Windows has been around for a long time, and many of us in Gen Z grew up with Windows XP, which was a great OS. Windows 7 was the best one, the true successor to XP, and then Windows 10 arrived and I really liked it. Remember when they famously stated Windows 10 would be the "last version of Windows"? That was Jerry Nixon at the 2015 Ignite conference, and the community hasn't forgotten it. They broke that promise. And with the arbitrary TPM 2.0 requirement, they didn't just release a new OS, they created a global e-waste crisis by making millions of perfectly functional machines "obsolete."
I actually grabbed a couple of those discarded machines dirt cheap to run some experiments on, and they were still pretty capable. I tried a few Linux distros on them: Mint, Ubuntu, Arch (EndeavourOS), plus some server-specific options to run a homelab with Proxmox and Jellyfin. Linux brought these machines back to life. The planned obsolescence move by Microsoft really contradicts their stated commitment to sustainability and a net zero economy. The TPM 2.0 requirement created an unnecessary and entirely avoidable e-waste crisis: 240 million capable PCs destined for landfills because of an arbitrary spec requirement.
During the time I spent hopping between Linux distros, I realised that most installation processes take no longer than 10 to 20 minutes. That is something I never experienced installing Windows on different systems in our office. There I had to go through 50 minutes of privacy-compromising hoops just to reach the desktop. It now takes nearly an hour and a forced Microsoft Account with an internet connection just to set up an OS. That is not a "bicycle," that's a gated community.
Windows 11 also consumes a lot of resources. I'm not talking about Copilot or their Recall feature, which is already a privacy and security concern in itself. It's that the OS itself is poorly optimized. With the AI craze and RAM prices skyrocketing, an upgrade isn't an option for many of us. It doesn't matter how much you debloat your Windows 11 installation, it will never be enough. When the OS consumes 4 to 6GB of RAM just to idle, it's not a "bicycle," it's a parasite on the hardware. You'd need quite a lot of computing power to keep things running smoothly and still have room left for productivity apps, or just for the system to breathe.
Speaking of productivity, as someone who uses spreadsheets, word processing, and presentations almost daily, Microsoft's decision to kill one of their signature brand apps, the famous Microsoft Office, in favor of Copilot and shoving AI into every corner of it makes the integration feel forced. It's an interference rather than a feature. Their "Holy Grail" of productivity, Excel and Word, has been adopted worldwide, and they decided to butcher it, prioritizing Copilot suggestions over core stability and privacy. The tool stops being a tool and starts being a marketing billboard. Turning MS Office into a playground for forced AI agents and "Copilots" that many of us, professionals included, never asked for. The tool you "own" feels more like a service you're renting, with constant nudges to subscribe to OneDrive or Microsoft 365.
I've migrated completely off the Windows, MS Office, and Copilot environment. I'm currently using Mint on my ThinkPad with LibreOffice and Google for work, while Bazzite, the immutable Fedora-based distro, and Arch run on my main PC for gaming and some testing. It's actually liberating, moving away from the slop Microsoft enforced on us with Windows 11. I'd suggest trying out Zorin OS to people attempting to migrate out of Windows 11. Linux Mint with Cinnamon is also a great choice. Both Zorin and Mint are widely known as easy to use for Windows users, including myself, since no terminal is needed most of the time for daily use. I'm increasingly looking toward the work companies like Valve are doing with SteamOS to make Linux mainstream. The industry needs a "Year of the Linux Desktop," not because we love terminal commands, but because we miss owning our operating systems.
A tool is supposed to serve the user. When a tool starts serving the vendor's telemetry needs and ad revenue at the expense of system resources, it's no longer a tool, it's bloatware. If you want people to stop calling you "slop," stop producing the slop and deliver what people actually want. It's that simple.