Long Term Servicing Conundrum

~abacushex

At the risk of branding oneself a pariah, I'm going to pose a question. While I'm a grateful user of much FOSS, I tend to approach this more from a functional perspective than a principled one. Is such a statement complete anathema to much of the crowd here?

To illustrate the point: thanks to decades of daily work experience since the mid 90s, I simply know the Windows OS inside and out. I have my 10,000 hours, and then some. I also have access, thanks to my employer, to the prized LTSC "Long Term Servicing Channel" version of Windows 10. Which means, no bloatware pre-installed (Candy Crush and Netflix on even an Enterprise install? Really MS?), no Cortana, only the basic admin utilities. No every 6-month "feature updates" whether you want them or not. Not even the Windows Store. Essentially, for LTSC they took Server and put the standard desktop on it.

That's the base of my system, and layered on top is FOSS-everything-I-can-find. For those not familiar, there's a simple and smartly designed 'package manager' called Scoop that functions like an apt-get for Windows. I've scripted out and aliased everything I can for the things I want to do on the system. I spend as much time in VS Code as I do in anything else.

For me this is very much a use-what-works approach, functional, pragmatic. It works well, it's second nature to me at this point.

But then a hardware change required 'reactivation', which didn't work and I couldn't get resolved until the next day. That's when I felt the whole arrangement hitting The Wall of Control.

 pardon the interruption
 however
 the system is not yours
 until you are compliant

The issue is resolved and I am now In Compliance And Can Be Sure I Am Running Genuine Windows. It didn't occur to me that a hardware change meant some sneaky silicon sleuths might have replaced my existing, already Genuine install with a liar! Fake! Cheat! that just so happened to look and work exactly the same as before, except for said warning. But apparently MS thinks this is a thing. Or wants you to think so.

It's a little like having a house built and then finding the plumber installed a cut-off valve that only they have access to. And if you replace a faucet in the kitchen some months later, they just might use that valve until you show them the receipt for the new faucet.

I really don't like that. At all.

This isn't for me about hating on a software giant working for profit. And Windows has come a very long way in terms of performance and stability. At least in my experience, crashes and instability are a thing of the past. It's a different design philosophy than *nix, being inspired by VMS, and has its pros and cons just like any complex system design. There is a place in the world for capital investment-sponsored code and FOSS, in my view. We wouldn't have it as good as we do now without both, I believe. But I also believe that your system is YOUR system.

So I'm seriously considering the split-brain procedure I must perform to move to some variant of Linux. Go full FOSS. I've dabbled before but always ended up going back to the familiar. When you spend all your working hours in that space for years, well, it's just easier. I think this time I'm going to put a serious learning effort in, treat it as an exploration and going back to school. I'm a nerd from way back. I self-taught Atari BASIC and then went on to learn 6502 Assembler. I'm a "systems engineer" by trade but I learned to think like a programmer. I probably owe it to my history.