A while back (when juggling surgery and freelancing), I ran a copy of Fedora full time on a desktop that sat on a coffee table in the lounge of our small CBD apartment. This was mostly since the machine was a salvaged server and didn't have a valid Windows license and partly because I was cheap.
Fast forward about a little over a decade and the increasing enshittification of Windows as a platform and the shift to doing everything online anyway has forced me to reconsider where I spend most of my time in the digital realm. While the machine I currently have came with a Windows license and has even been running 11 just fine preinstalled, Microsoft have decided that it is now too old to continue running updates.
This is a Dual Xeon render machine with an RTX GPU and 128GB of RAM (HP Workstation). It is more than capable of running what is essentially only really meant to be little more than a window manager. Historically, the OS is a way to run your apps and manage your files with a few extra conveniences thrown in here and there. Yet, somewhere along the line, Microsoft seems to have forgotten what an operating system is and is determined to force a plethora of bad business decisions and sloppy work upon the masses.
I was not a fan of Windows 10, particularly the added snooping “customer experience telemetry” but lived with it because it worked well enough. I also wasn’t a fan of 11 requiring that half the worlds perfectly functional devices need to be thrown out in order to upgrade. TPM 2.0 sounds good on paper for an enterprise setting but enforcing it on consumer editions seems a little heavy handed – enterprise grade encryption to watch Netflix and play games? Suuuure.