There’s a sadness in the technosphere right now, ain’t there? This overwhelming disappointment that sort of lingers at the back of your mind like unkempt cable management. Enough journalists have called out the enshittification of PC gaming (or platform decay as us sophisticated lot call it), I’m certainly not the first in that regard. But back in January of this year, I finally had enough of it in Windows, and sacked off the legendary operating system entirely in favour of Pop! and that’s a big bloody deal for me.
I’ve been using Windows since around 1998. At the age of seven, it was my first insight into the world of PC gaming. Since then, I’ve navigated the trials and tribulations of Microsoft’s best efforts day-in, day-out. From Win 98 all the way up to modern-era 11 and every service pack in between.
I’ve gamed for hours beyond count, crafted all manner of UIs, websites, and programs with it, finished my degree thanks to it, and it’s been a critical part of my time in tech journalism. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to become editor of Maximum PC magazine, or even gotten a job there to begin with. Yet through all the ups and downs, and the best efforts of my Linux-touting colleagues trying to push me to the big open source OS in the sky, I just refused to try any of the open source distros out. At least that is until recently.
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Let’s face it, modern-day Windows is just a bit crap. You fork out all this money for an official license, one that’s meant to provide you with complete access to a clean, fast, modern-day OS, without issue (and it’s not cheap, for the “official” non-OEM one), and yet what you get is an excessively degraded experience compared to what it once was. One that honestly feels like it’s just continually getting worse, no matter how many times you reinstall it.
From over-eager back-end telemetry forever pinging Microsoft’s servers on your use habits, to the aggressive Copilot AI integration that may or may not be…
