> user-hostile decisions that forced me away from my first love of windows. So well said. Its been travesty after travesty. "First love of Windows" is what rea

> user-hostile decisions that forced me away from my first love of windows. So well said. Its been travesty after travesty. "First love of Windows" is what really leapt out at me and triggered some dusty memories: - finally learning how to spell administrator - G4 Cubes - Apache Server-Side Includes - How good Acer's Desktop over Windows 3.11 was - Kilrathi - How delightful it was to customize my Win95 desktop. Picking out icons and sounds for too many hours, my AuDHD antidote to middle school. - The stunning bunch of people I fell in with who had a particular set of skills. Phreaks and Geeks. In retrospect they all grew up to be some fantastic people, but they felt so edgy at the time. - All of the sounds of computing, playing over PCM speakers, the drives, the models, the hum of simpler fans. The gawdawful desktop mics. - Dirty, hairy, smelly Mouse balls - All of the print media about computing before there were consistently good online publications about tech. - The first time I ever held a $1200 check with my name on it for helping a small business upgrade their Windows machines. - The ethereal pull of software catalogs - The smells of burning/smashing capacitors - Lego Technics - Elenco Electronic Playground 130 Circuits - the one with the spring terminals. Look at me ramble on. It's a milestone day for me and I'm feeling nostalgic. I'm sitting here on a Win 11 boot and I haven't taken the time to virtualize it yet (IOMMU Passthru being as it is..). Its really good. It stays out of the way most of the time, and its new APIs + new gen hardware performs very well together. I've been feeling uneasy about using it the whole time, but certain applications for configuring my hardware required it, and the occasional game demands it. I'm really productive in WSL. I've done all I can to disable telemetry but haven't messed with my network yet to filter and block their outbound requests. In any case, I like the system, I detest how they have made it into a tool of supervision and coercion. I'm having similar concerns with some of their groundbreaking APIs and popular services, and I'm frankly at a loss with how to proceed with either topic. In any case, thank you for reminding me about how I loved Windows, and a lot of memories surrounding it. Not all of them were related to anti-trust, bluescreens, and dystopian corpgov topics. And thanks for plugging Opensuse, and after a honeymoon with Fedora I'm facing some of the "beta tester" experiences as well, and I have too many demands on my time to volunteer in that way for IBM, nor is it my talent. I just want a good, just-works system that lets me do anything and demands little in return. For that, I am happy to financially support and get involved.