edit: wow that’s a big image

I’ll look into Bodhi and Lubuntu!

Windows ran fine on it but I do wonder if it’s just so old that it needs something more lightweight. If you know any distributions that are particularly well suited to ancient shitboxes, I’d appreciate a recommendation.

Have you tried Bodhi Linux?

And because Microsoft is… well… Microsoft, you may have to check/update this setting every few updates or so. I’ve definitely had to chase up stupid settings changes that updates have made counter to my desires.

Yep. So far I haven’t had to re-enable that on my Windows machine. I’m guessing since it getting reactivated in an update would mess up a lot of business deals, they don’t touch that setting with update packages. Only time will tell though.

I have a side laptop I’ve been tinkering with as a way to dip my toes into it, but I think as a side effect of being easily 10+ years old, this thing runs like a fridge. It has Debian (LXQt) on it now, but tends to freeze and crash.

Windows ran fine on it but I do wonder if it’s just so old that it needs something more lightweight. If you know any distributions that are particularly well suited to ancient shitboxes, I’d appreciate a recommendation.

Just run gpedit.msc, find User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Copilot. There’s a policy called “Turn off Windows Copilot”. Enable that, and voila, no more pesky Microsoft AI on your system.

Ever since I found Copilot in Notepad, that was it. 2025 was the year of Windows going from “passable” to “steaming manure”. All the adware and telemetry and forced AI and bunged-up local search reminded me too much of using Internet Explorer 5 instead of an actual operating system.

In July I got a new SSD for my boot drive and was able to set up Linux Mint (Ubuntu for cowards like me, if you believe the internet!) for dual-boot. I say “dual-boot”, but I haven’t booted into Windows ever since I got the Linux distro up and running. I genuinely haven’t needed to.

The worst issue I’ve had on Linux is one that actually ate up a few hours last night, where my wifi card decided after a kernel update (which didn’t resolve on rollback, itself a super-easy process) that it would make one connection total, and if you tried to swap SSIDs it’d just kark it and NetworkManager would crash. That led into a deep dive that taught me a lot more about how NetworkManager works, the joys of wpa_supplicant, and why my excellent crash-hot infinitely-tweaked tri-band router configuration was more of a hindrance than a help. Fixing that, and accidentally making the household wifi a lot better, I feel like I learned something.

Had that been Windows, I never would have known it was a problem, and it would have been “wait for a patch”.

When it comes to gaming, praise be to Gaben our lord and saviour for Proton. The only game I’ve found that was more than plug-and-play was Bannerlord once you start installing mods, because those need a few Windows dependencies which are easy enough to install with Protontricks once you do some research. When it comes to Anticheat, I’ve found most of the stuff I’ve played worked great out of the box. The only exception is, to no surprise, EA, which is actively preventing Linux machines from playing their games because “omg piracy lol”.

A lot of this pontificating on my part is because Linux works for me. My day job is DevOps so I’m always writing BASH and spinning up containers and virtual machines etc. I will absolutely dig into an OS to get it running to my specifications and I will constantly prune things that I don’t need. For the average user who may well use the AI more than my blistering hatred permits, who doesn’t care about the telemetry, who isn’t fussed about localhost suddenly being inaccessible, yeah Windows is fine. I wouldn’t tell my wife to stop using it. But for myself, I really like how this stuff isn’t being (re)installed now with every update.

If you’re looking for a change, willing to get into the weeds, and bothered by what Microsoft is doing, I recommend at least investigating swapping the OS. If you’re a daily user, then to be honest you don’t lose much if anything by staying on Windows.

Many games with an online multiplayer component rely on kernel-based anti-cheating software, which often doesn’t work on Linux (it could, but many devs don’t bother enabling it… it’s a big discussion point on Linux reddit). So if you’re big into your online multiplayer games, double check whether it’ll work before you go to the effort of moving everything over.

ETA: If you want to check compatibility between your steam library and Linux’s Proton, you can link your steam (or simply enter your steam id) here: https://www.protondb.com/profile and it’ll spurt out your Steam library and ratings of compatibility (including those impacted by the aforementioned anticheat problems).