Technology

Microsoft will never stop developing new ways to be anticompetitive leeches on society. You learn how to use one debloating tool, they'll take the developer of that debloating tool to court and have it pulled from circulation. You learn what registry key to edit, they'll change it. You get used to a menu, they'll remove it.

You have a choice: 1, You can continue that arms race with a monstrous evil megacorp, which you will continue to lose, or 2, you can switch to a platform that doesn't treat you this way in the first place.

Linux Mint among many others has a feature complete GUI which will provide anything the average user needs, including a graphical app "store" for installing software. The desktop paradigm is quite similar to Windows, it will be mostly familiar. The CLI is frankly easier to deal with than Windows' endless and redundant series of settings menus and applications. When someone asks for help on a text-based forum like StackOverflow or Reddit or Lemmy, it's easier to tell them "Open a terminal and copy-paste lshw -f" than it is to tell them "Open the Start menu and click Programs > Administration >Regedit then look for a thing that says win11embraceextendextinguish and toggle that from 1 to 0, and do this after every update because it automatically changes it back."

Linux does not require a week to install. Windows does. My father bought a new Dell about the time I built my little Ryzen box I'm typing this on. It took him over a week to wipe the factory Win 10 Dell Bloatware Edition image for vanilla Win 10, fuck around with drivers, then manually go to individual software websites, download installers, run them, haul out CDs and DVDs and install software (including Office 2010, the damned old chad) one at a time, then restore a backup of his files...He was actively engaged with this task for over a week. I had it done in about three hours, most of which I actually spent trimming my hedges while waiting for files to download or transfer from an external HDD. It was a 100% GUI process; I didn't open a terminal throughout.

Sure, Linux is different than Windows and this will take some learning. Just like Windows does every time they come out with a new version and you have to learn where they arbitrarily rearranged basic functions to this time. When I switched to Linux a decade ago, it was a similar process in going from Win 98 to Win XP, or XP to 7. Except after awhile the basic reorientation finished, and I started learning new things.