Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.
Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.
This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.
Apt username, for a pragmatic strategy.
A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.
When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.
It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.
Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)
Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
> Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame.
The Windows 10 bait n switch to Windows 11.
Hundreds of millions of PC users worldwide on old hardware using old Windows OSes were offered Win10 as free upgrade, with the promise that Win10 is the final Windows edition.
Later though, M$ announced Win11 and it would work only on new hardware (BIOS TPM 2.0 constraint), and Win10 is no longer being supported for personal use (except via some complicated ways to get an extension for the Win10 updates). And not only is Win11 buggy and full of ads, its performance is also bad.
Well, the good thing is that such shenanigans are pushing PC users to migrate to Linux.
some companies don't have a choice; in a previous AEC job (architecture/engineering/construction), we had to deploy windows to use Autodeck Revit.
Now servers and other backend stuff, on the other hand, linux and illumos.
I like this in theory but as someone who travels often with my work laptop, it's nice to be able to use the same hardware for personal use as carrying a second computer is impractical regarding carry weight and packing.
Apple used to allow installing a second copy of MacOS without it being subject to the work profile - completely isolated from the work partition (because you could ignore the "set up work profile" prompts after installation).
I would simply restart my MacBook into the personal install after work & on weekends.
Apple have recently updated the MacOS installer to be always online so I can no longer install a seperate MacOS partition without a work profile.
I ended up buying an ROG Ally but it's honestly not that portable. The power brick is almost the same size as the handheld and it occupies about as much space as a laptop in my carry on.
Two laptops is easier than you’d think if you have the right bag.
My work lap is so locked down I cannot do anything personal on it, so when I go into the office I always carry two laptops, and the personal one is an old thick heavy dinosaur; it’s got to be at least five pounds. However, with a good bag that has a (non-padded) belt and sternum strap, it is not difficult. The belt carries most of the load and my shoulders don’t hurt; they hardly feel anything.
I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.
It’s good exercise but I absolutely need a belt and sternum pack to do it. Wouldn’t dream of trying that with only shoulder straps.
Tell that to airport check-in staff haha. A laptop and charger are around 3kg and there's only so much clothing I can take out of my suitcase and wear to make it passed check-in.
But I hear you. It's annoying that I can't reuse perfectly good hardware, but it's fine - we make do.
The added scrutiny at some border crossings can be problematic too. Explaining to the inspectors at the Turkey/Bulgaria border why I had two phones and two laptops (and dissuading them of the suspicion that I was smuggling electronics to friends/family) through language barriers was a pain.
No full time job, so as a freelancer those machines need to combine. And my work uses similar software that simply doesn't work well on Linux.
But yes, ideally I'd have two machines to separate my career from my personal life.
I'm using Debian an when working for a client that requires Windows, I'm working in a VirtualBox with Windows Server 2022 as my desktop OS. It works really well (running mainly Visual Studio) and licenses are pretty cheap. But the best part is, that there are no ads and other Windows 11 Copilot nonsense.
If you’re implying separating work work on two machines; beware the corporate spyware on the windows machine will show a lot of idle time!
Same. Work provides the idiot box. I give it its own segmented network too, cause work spyware and all... then run a personal workstation with linux next door to it.
The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
I'm slowly moving away from the Apple ecosystem, and this is what I rather like about Linux. I find it obviates the anger — there's no specific entity making decisions that make my user experience worse. If something's annoying me, it's quite likely to be my own fault.
You could argue that, with Windows there is a legitimate place to direct your rage at, but the action of directing your rage does not actually have any effect on improving your experience. With Win and Mac, no one cares, because they already have their customers locked in and tight, they will accept any experience degradation. With Linux, you are not a customer so no customer complaints, but still arguably much better support.
Agreed. And also, if there's something you don't like or a project going in a direction you don't agree with, there is virtually guaranteed to be other people out there that feel the same that are building something different
[delayed]
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
On the one hand, yes, this is not a nice thing to have happen. The frustrations shouldn't happen to begin with, and then people shouldn't be using the reverse Uno card on you just for that.
On the other hand, Linux has a lot fewer of these frustrations (in my experience), and a lot of frustrations are being fixed with time, since you're likely not the only one who is frustrated by it.
On the third hand, the situation being shit for obvious human reasons, not enough dev time, disagreements about the way forward, as is the case with Linux development, is a much, much nicer thing to have your problems caused by, rather than the source of Windows being shit, that is, someone wasn't happy with their dashboard this morning and decided to make that your problem today.
> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
There are also people who often claim that their installation of Linux always crashes after every single update, their favourite commodity hardware that's a decade old still doesnt work out of the box on Linux etc etc.
The truth is somewhere in between and its a lot closer to the positive experience these days compared to the old days.
When Windows is awful, everyone is sympathetic except for their support. They are beyond useless.
Ubuntu with support is totally a thing, not sure if it is good or not.
Windows 11 Home: $139/license Ubuntu with support: $150/yr
Whats to rage about w/ Linux?
Like Apple used to warrant, it just works.
sudo pacman -Syu. -> Secure boot config broken, OS won't boot (Manjaro this summer with some Intel firmware update). No HDMI sound on nvidia for some distros until recently. Getting the Wifi to work ootb on Mint is not always easy..
A lot of rage over systemd from what I recall.
I raged a lot when my Arch machine would break after an update and I'd have to do config file surgery on a machine that no longer wanted to boot into a graphical desktop. I've never had that sort of thing happen on Mac or Windows.
I installed Linux Mint Mate on my parents home computer and they have less issues than they ever had with windows 10-11