This October represents a watershed of sorts, because it marks the end-of-support life for non-enterprise Windows 10. I’ve always been one to keep a foot in more than one technology puddle at a time, but Microsoft is betting they are oceanic in scale, and through the collective mass of their market share, can keep most of their customers even when the gales of change blow, the sea foam of mandatory hardware updates flies, and waves threaten to upend many enterprises that ply their waters. Surveying that stormy sea, I anticipate the dilemma faced by many of their current customers is actually this: commerce vs cooperation. Doubtless, many SWOT analyses in corporate boardrooms have been applied, presented, and debated to determine how different strategies could threaten or strengthen business plans, development goals, and overall corporate strategies. I’m obviously not an MBA to make management decisions, or an IT associate to implement them, but I do have to make a decision or two for myself at this forced juncture.
You might say, ah, you’ve got to go with one of the majors. If you don’t upgrade hardware and accept Windows 11, then it is mandatory to get whatever Apple Silicon is in the twilight zone between obscenely overpriced and annoyingly unaffordable. Oh, and since you’re a photographer and shoot video, why wouldn’t that be a Mac? It’s what all the creatives use, and the new Apple chips are really fast. Just pay the Cupertino tax and get on with it. It’s a very tempting proposition, except for two things. First, I already have a vintage Mac workstation whose functionality is very good, with manageable caveats. Second, the only Windows 10 computer currently in my life is a laptop, where I mostly do laptop things like writing, running web apps, attending Teams meetings (and oh how I would be so disappointed to give up those!), and doing general Windows stuff. It’s not that I’d liken Microsoft’s flagship operating system to the watercraft equivalent of a river barge, because the right hardware can enable even a broad, mainstream OS to accomplish things that are speedy and specialized. Second, have you heard of Apple core rot? Yeah, I know it’s not accompanied by an official diagnostic criterion in the IT playbook, but it’s a notion that Apple’s discipline in software has been more focused on the calendar than it has been on elegance, scalability, or (especially) stability.
My thirst for hardware that runs MacOS is currently slaked. And the likelihood that I will suddenly try to press an old Windows laptop into creative work tasks is also basically zero. That machine is incapable of running any version of MacOS. Despite it being an old laptop, it’s still a general workhorse; it had higher RAM capacity than any mobile computer from Apple could be upgraded to at the time; it has a 4K screen resolution, which makes looking while typing very easy on the eyes. But I digress; this post is about the OS, not hardware.
If I’m honest, I haven’t even looked up whether this laptop is capable of running Win11, under the terms and requirements that our fair $MSFT has dictated. Technically, the upgrade from 10 to 11 is free, provided that your hardware meets certain nebulous requirements to achieve eligibility. I’m sure that there are some bright-line minimums that apply across all PCs, but the only way that I think most people know is to hit the "Check for compatibility" button. I can’t be bothered. Sometimes, "free" isn’t worth the price.
This brings me to another kind of freedom, and to a "third way" that I think may ultimately be the best investment. The Linux operating system (GNU/Linux, for the purists) boasts liberty and very often a free price-tag, although some vendors levy a cost for purchase or support. As a college student, I did what any sensible and indebted youth would, I dual-booted: Linux for the cool software, and Windows for the games. Linux gave me a lot. It corrected my lack of touch-typing expertise, it helped me learn new things, and it introduced me to my still-favorite document processing software, that I’ve now deployed across too many different computers to track. Typing and committing thoughts to a document is a sacred rite which requires an interface free from distraction or other hurdles that are damaging to productivity. Think I’m kidding? Just the presence of a YouTube landing page in view is somehow able to wipe my working memory of every critical thought.
On the side of the "free cost" OS, you’d be shocked how much people collectively spend on even simple note-taking apps like Notion. For a slapstick rejoinder to this unnecessary expense, as well as an anarchic viewpoint on how to select a text editor, this amazing video on YouTube might be just what the doctor ordered: https://youtu.be/XRpHIa-2XCE?si=zU9HZLiZKh5hkE5b. If you failed at watching 30 minutes of amusing text/note commentary, then just focusing on the first 3 minutes of that video might marshal all the support I need to make this point. The narrator lists his note app requirements as:
- free,
- non-commercial open source
- local and self-hosted,
- plaintext storage, and
- fast.
These are basically my requirements for an OS to replace Win10. Of course, the third bullet is about format compatibility and avoiding vendor lock-in, since text editors and operating systems are very different things. As the presenter also correctly notes, the first point is a philosophical one. By maintaining the ability to view the source, there is not an arbitrary monopoly on whether a given application may be improved for stability, the addition of features, or the squashing of bugs in its code. Essentially, this is why my favorite document processor has remained incredibly stable, increasing in capability without being bloated by performance-sapping features, interface confusion, or other varieties of software entropy. There are definitely trade-offs in adopting this approach, but I’m excited that it could breathe new life into old tech.
I would be remiss to move ahead without a couple of departure-readiness steps. First, I’ve been grateful for the years I’ve had with Win10. To use a maritime metaphor, it’s been a serviceable sloop, catching the wind and moving predictably through standard maneuvers and modes of tech use. It's gotten me from "A" to "B" without a lot of drama. But changing a sailboat into a cigarette boat is not a trivial conversion, so the wise would advisedly have a good fallback plan. Mine is bootable media—which serves two purposes: 1) If something goes wrong during installation, bootable media can be used to recover a totally operational Win10 environment, and 2) If I for some reason decide that I want the option to dual boot the laptop, then having bootable media would enable to me to pick either OS at startup, when the boot-loader offers the choice. There are reasons this may be more "elegant" than virtualizing applications in Wine on Linux, but that’s a bridge I’ll only cross if the need arises. Creating a bootable Win10 disk is pretty straightforward. It would be hard to go amiss by following Dave’s recommendations here: https://youtu.be/am0O6GpB7qI?si=ZqI8wJ1_fRF-w4pH. Still, I can almost guarantee that this adventure will merit an update or two along the way.