It was roughly two months ago when I finally decided to cut the cord as far as Microsoft is concerned. I started to get a bit concerned when it seemed like every couple of days my Windows 10 machine was rebooting itself in the middle of the night and installing things onto my OS without even asking me if I wanted it. It seemed like twice a week I ended up with some crap on my desktop that I didn't ask for, didn't need, and these things would hijack what I was doing to throw something like an advertisement at me. I also started getting certain links opened accidentally, that would open in Edge browser, which I never use, and the results would be provided by Bing, which I also never use.
That's the problem with a company like Microsoft providing something for "free." They don't do free, there is always a catch. So when I heart that Windows 11 was going to be forcefully rolled out later this year, I knew it was time to at least try to get away.
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I wasn't prepared to fully abandon Windows and was only able to make the leap because I was getting another cheap laptop and was still going to keep my Windows machine as a backup in case something went terribly wrong. The Windows machine is still sitting on the other side of the room near my sofa, and I am happy to say that outside of the initial "transfer day" I have only had to access it for something I forgot was important a couple of times.
Those few instances were stark reminders of why it was that I wanted to leave Windows in the first place because it took absolute ages for me to boot up the damn computer at all and when I did, it had to load up so many things to the point where I don't think I am exaggerating when I say that it took 10 minutes before I had proper control of it despite the fact that it is more powerful than the Dell computer I purchased to replace it.
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One of the things that irritated me the most was that AVG anti-virus must have popped up half a dozen times to try to upsell me while I was only trying to access a few files and transfer them via USB.
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That isn't the AVG logo, but the sentiment is the same. I saw in a forum that someone had this to say about all anti-virus on PC's, especially the free ones:
You have become the very thing that you swore to destroy!
And that is basically anti-virus programs in a shell these days. Viruses are a lot less common than they used to be and I think that anti-virus companies had to step up their game in order to scare the population into paying for their services. They do this with pop ups and constantly running in the background and interrupting what you are doing, especially during a fresh reboot or startup.
On Mint, I don't have antivirus and don't know anyone that does. It isn't necessary and many would argue that it isn't actually necessary on Windows either but it is such a massive part of the software community and the companies that provide this service are actually in the business of inventing problems that don't exist and some are actually suspected of creating viruses so that they have some sort of reason to continue to exist as a company.
On a Mint, or any Linux machine, you don't need to worry about such things, viruses simply aren't capable of attacking a Linux machine and even if they could there are so many different distributions of Linux that any virus they might create, would stand very little chance of actually infecting a single machine anyway. Combine this with the fact that Linux only has about 1% market share and there is very little incentive for any would be virus makers to focus on this very small demographic.
So these days when I boot up my Mint machine - even if I do bother to shut it down, which isn't often - it is fired up and ready to go in a matter of seconds, whereas with my Windows machine I need to hit the power button, go do something else for 5 minutes, the come back to log in an go back to doing something else for another 10 minutes just so the OS can load all this crap on startup. Oh and just for the record I already had adjusted my startup items in Windows to only include things that I regularly used. I can't even imagine how much bloatware would exist for someone who just left it on default settings.
So something to keep in mind for the average user these days is this: Your machine doesn't need to cost thousands of dollars if you just make some wise decisions. The computer I am using now cost around $350 and it runs just fine. I suppose I wouldn't be able to play games on it since those are mostly Windows and MacOS centric, but since I never did that anyway, it doesn't matter to me.
I am very happy that I made the switch and as it is now, I am not at all tempted to return to that world. Give it a shot on your next computer or if you have the cash, buy a cheap laptop / notebook as your next computer. I really don't think you will be disappointed once you get past the initial stages.