Is that an Enterprise version at work? I mean even if you pause updates for as long as they allow you to on consumer versions, at some point you do have to do it. I do get nagged on one of my installations but not on my main one. Both Windows 10.
I was planning to transition to Linux completely by this autumn but laziness strikes as per. I guess autumn 2025 is the new deadline now.
I didn’t understand the “forced upgrade” argument until now. Yea I guess you’re right, at some point you have to do updates (they nag about upgrading to 11 but you can skip that indefinitely). But with how popular Windows is you have options for a lot of problems (including forced updates which to be fair shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to security patches).
If you open up Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility (https://christitus.com/windows-tool/) you basically have a comprehensive list of all the ameliorations one could ever want at their disposal. That’s really the main thing Windows still has going for it, it’s a decades-long mainstay which means there are plenty of knowledgable people out there who know how it can be made to heel even if Microsoft decide to force a Microsoft account on you, telemetry, whatever it may be, there will probably always be a way around it.
For example one of my main gripes with Windows 11 is how you can’t make the taskbar show all tray icons anymore by default. They removed window titles in the taskbar so now everything is basically a square down there meaning there’s all this empty space between my open windows and the tray. But of course someone out there has written a program to automatically unhide all tray icons and thrown it on GitHub.
To me personally it doesn’t matter how crappy the design choices are as long as they can be mitigated. If bad corporate decisionmaking is a dealbreaker (which is also a fair assessment) then you have to ditch the corporation entirely and go Linux or what have you. Not trying to be smart or anything but there really is no reason to stay on Windows left anymore. Maybe if you absolutely need Microsoft Office or something but ever since Proton came out the issue with Windows-only games has pretty much evaporated.
Switching to Linux without prior experience will challenge even the most tech-savvy, but it’s an investment worth making many times over.
If Mullvad is not available as a Snap or Flatpak (2 ways of installing self-sufficient auto-updateable packages without dependencies on other packages) then youre probably stuck with either adding this 3rd party repository (something which isn’t always recommendable either) which gives you automatic updates or using a .deb installation file like you would probably prefer and then manually retrieving updates when needed.
Anyways, others have told you as much already anyways. What I’d like to add is that it is definitely worth it to learn to work the terminal. I get that there are many people looking for an alternative to Windows or just an open approach to computing in general without looking for added complexity. Who wants complexity right? Whether such an experience exists in the Linux world is probably subjective. Ubuntu has definitely been a safe bet for the flattest learning curve required since its inception in 2004. But its still a niche thing that won’t experience user-friendly support from everyone (ie Mullvad).
So one could conclude that in order to truly be “free” (as in Free Software freedom) one needs to claim that freedom. You will fuck things up. You will learn from your mistakes. You will regroup and you will grow as a user and dare I say PC-curious person.
I recently “upgraded” one of my raspberrys SD cards to an industrial grade one. Seems to me like those are a lot slower but for that particular use case it doesnt matter to me. What matters is that the card doesn’t die. It runs noticeably cooler when lots of data is being written to it so I feel like I must be onto something there.
I used to (over a span of about 4 years now) just rely on a RaidZ2 (ZFS) pool (faulted drive replacements never gave any issues) but I recently did an expansion of the array plus OS reinstall and only now am I starting to incorporate Docker containers into my workflows. The live data is in ~ and nightly rsynced onto the new larger RaidZ2 pool but there is also data on that pool which I’ve thus far never stored anywhere else.
So my answer to the question would be an off-site unraid install which is still in the works. This really will only be that. A catastophe insurance. I probably won’t even rely on parity drives there in order to maximize space since I already have double parity on ZFS.
As far as reinstallation goes, I don’t feel like restoring ~ and running docker compose for all the services again would be too much of a hassle.
I have a middle aged customer who is legitimately using Mint on one of those old Athlons today in 2024 for her day to day. There literally is no reason for her to upgrade hardware unless her usecases evolve into something more demanding.
I agree Linux is a lot more accessible than it used to be, but if I understand you correctly the people you helped transition still needed at least some initial holding of their hands. If for example you buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled that initial hurdle could be cleared but I still believe there’s a learning curve at least as steep as it would be for someone learning Windows for the first time. The difference being that everything out there takes Windows into account.
If you just wana surf the web Linux can probably be as easy as ChromeOS these days but that isn’t really a usecase where operating systems can make a difference one way or the other.