Comment by leptons

For me, after 35 years of Windows, 2025 was the year of the Linux desktop. Finally. Linux has become a lot better, and my skills with Linux have too. And Microsoft screwed me over a few times too many. I had bought a "lifetime license" for Outlook, which cost me over $100 a couple of years ago. So then I wanted to upgrade the CPU on the machine running the VM where I had Outlook running, and suddenly that "lifetime license" ended due to the CPU being different. That was really the last straw for me. I moved to Linux Mint and Firebird for email, and it's been great. Now all of my VMs are running Linux, all the locally hosted services I had running have Linux binaries. The switch was a lot easier than I anticipated.

If Microsoft is alienating people like me, using Windows for 35 years, they can alienate anyone.

The forced buying of new hardware just to run Windows 11 is going to be the last straw for a lot of people. And Apple is really no better, their existing x86 machines have the same problem. We could no longer update a MBP, and other software stopped working due to the inability to update (and sorry, no we're not going to use hacky solutions to force it to update).