My Progress
I started by removing dependencies to US based megacorps like meta/facebook and google, electing for either things I could host myself or things that were hosted in Europe. I still have some dependencies to both of those because untangling them fully is difficult but I axed as much as I could for the time being. For the first time in my life I'm paying for my email service, which is a very strange feeling after 20+ years of free email and 18 years of having a gmail account. It's slower but really, when do you ever need to send an email in a hurry? That was one of the realizations I've had during this process, just how we've been conditioned to expect everything, instantly, all the time, everywhere. I already use social media very little but I axed my instagram and deactivated facebook while keeping messenger active as it's the only way to talk to certain older relatives.
A while ago I decided for the first time in a decade maybe that I wanted to make windows truly mine, I used to modify my win xp/vista/7 OS to hell and back, but each generation it became harder and harder, Microsoft putting more and more restrictions on what I could do easily. I wanted sounds again, I wanted colour again. Colours were extremely limited out of the box, so I settled for going with everything in light theme for the first time since dark mode had been available in one way or another, I moved my task bar to the top of the screen instead of the bottom and I set colourful, peaceful wallpapers and I found myself more at ease. When I tried to add sounds back in I hit yet another snag, the events for which I wanted to add sounds (wav files that came with windows no less) I couldn't find them in the settings for sounds. Turns out they're hidden behind registry keys you need to change but that didn't matter because of the 4 sounds I wanted to add back (Startup, login, lock and unlock), only one actually worked! I ended up having to make batch files that play the wav on certain events in the scheduled tasks.
Features I wanted were gone, hidden or plain broken but they'd never get added, revealed or fixed because Microsoft knows better than me what I want. After all these years it left a bitter taste in my mouth, a bitter taste that would stick around for a while. While travelling abroad, an idea started to form in my head, one I couldn't ignore once it was there. I needed to ditch microsoft and go full linux and open source, I've grown so tired of fighting my operating system and the corporate interests of Microsoft, pushing their latest OS's like a virus, adding more spying, more forced accounts, more ads. I'm tired of not owning my computer but merely being allowed the privilege of them making money off of my data.
A few days ago I made the switch to Linux Mint and it's been rough but I'm getting there.