Right now my computer isn't supported by Windows 11 so I have some time. But seeing this crap coming eventually in my future, I started dual booting Linux Mint to see if I could live with it. Turns out I like it better than windows. I haven't booted my window partition in weeks. When I finally upgrade my computer it will probably be running solely on Linux now and maybe have Windows 7 running in a virtual box for the very few programs I still need it for.
None of this would have happened had Microsoft not pushed their corporate enshitification past my threshold. Thanks Microsoft.
I've been using Debian on servers for over 20 years. Rock solid. I like it. I like that it doesn't have any corporate influence, and that the main repo consists only of free software. Changes are only made if there's a good reason, unlike Canonical which seem to change things in Ubuntu just because they can.
The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2007 so I'm excited to get back into it.
Canonical is basically the closed to corporate Linux you will find on the free distro market... They are pushing stuff you don't want for marketing reasons (for example their own proprietary Snaps when a better working open source solution already exists with Flatpack), love their telemetry (can be mostly disabled for now, but given the defaults and their other behavior we can already see where this is heading) and in general decide more alongside their latest business plan than actually making sense or listening to users.
Not who you asked but, Ubuntu is basically Linux from a corporation. They are forcing people to install 'snaps' instead of your typical .deb package. They are like flatpaks but way worse.
Weren't they also the first ones to add ads to their start menu, a decade before Microsoft? I'm not an Ubuntu user, so I didn't care enough to remember the details, but I recall something about them sending your search strings to Amazon to present you with ads.