• Sloppy file navigation in Windows: Libraries sometimes work, sometimes don’t and god forbid you want to look at the actual file structure on your machine – it’ll be half here and then half over there. Because.
  
  
• Explorer frankly just seems broken entirely. If I create a new folder, it requires a manual refresh to see. Renamed a file and it’s immediately forgotten you’ve done it.
  
  
• Forced AI nonsense everywhere. PAINT DOESN’T NEED AI...
  Notepad is supposed to be a quick way to look at plain text files, it doesn’t need formatting and to take 3 years to launch.
  
  Not to mention the prospect of everything you do on your PC being watched by the omnipotent cloud AI overlord.

So now, on the brink of not being able to update my (once) fully compliant machine, I’m forced to take stock of what I actually use my computer for. More recently it’s been mostly to develop software, create content and to teach from. Some games here and there (although far less than I would like).

With companies like Valve putting in some real effort to push the viability of Linux as a whole and some performance utilization concerns I was always considering spinning a distro onto this machine in some form. At one point, I’d considered going down the bare-metal hypervisor route and have it boot into a cluster of virtual machines to do my bidding – which might still occur in the future (particularly if I were to retire this as my main machine and turn it into a home server).

Coupled with some emerging challengers to the standard computing paradigms, such as BlackMagic with Davinci and Affinity (which is now free, although not currently Linux native), it is looking increasingly possible to do a wholesale switch and not have to look back.