Defenestration 11

With the advent of Windows 11 25H2, and the incorporation of yet more Co-Pilot bull into the fabric of the operating system at a fundamental level (to make no mention of Recall!), along with the end of Windows 10 support in October just gone, a lot of people are looking at life away from Redmond's spyware-OS.

A few years back I spent an entire year just using Linux on my home PC. I didn't even have Windows installed on it, and did everything that year in either Pop_OS! or Arch Linux.

With the introduction of Wayland as a compositor, things had started to become a bit jankier, and so I eventually re-installed Windows 11 and have been using it since then, sometimes as my daily driver, other times just as a gaming OS.

However over the past several months, the state of Wayland, particularly when used in conjunction with Nvidia hardware (my 5090), has improved considerably. In fact Wayland is probably now at the point where it's at least on a par with the old X11 system in terms of stability.

Right now (touch wood), everything just appears to work, which is the goal.

I'm still using EndeavourOS, my favoured variant of Arch Linux, with both KDE Plasma and Gnome desktop environments. Mainly I'm using Plasma, but I've been tinkering with Gnome as well the past few weeks.

The biggest change for my personal use case was the discovery of Faugus, a replacement for the aging Lutris, to help manage my installation of World of Warcraft. A much simpler proposition, with no scripts required, or fiddling with configurations etc. It, much like Wayland, just appears to work. The installation of the battle.net launcher itself was a breeze, simply a 2-3 click process, and Wow after that is exactly the same as it is in Windows.

The second discovery was the fact that WoWUp, which I use in Windows 11 to manage my addons, is available in Linux as an AppImage, which is a self-contained standalone executable.

Again, it just works.

I simply made the AppImage file I downloaded executable (which all AppImage files need), by ticking a checkbox in the properties dialog box for the file, then double-clicked it to run. No installation needed, I just needed to point it at my wow.exe file and away I went.

So in essence, 90% of my gaming time is sorted with those two installations.

Why keep Windows 11 around at all?

That's a very good question, and one I've been mulling over for the past few weeks.

There are still some issues with apps on Windows that don't/won't work under Linux. Notably the Affinity apps, Photo & Designer, which have recently been merged into one free application, Affinity by Canva.

Also, FL Studio has a significant amount of trouble running on Linux.

That said, given how much creative energy I've had over the past year or more, my use of those two apps has dwindled to near nothing. Much to my own disappointment.

The biggest issue is probably psychological for me. Knowing that Windows just works, and everything is setup just how I like it? Particularly when it comes to competitive raiding in WoW? Back during my year of Linux-only gaming, I wasn't raiding at a CE-level, and it's only been since then that I've been playing at that higher-level.

I think what I'll do is this: Keep Win11 around until I finish off this tier in WoW, then come the Midnight pre-patch in January (more or less confirmed at this point) when the likes of WeakAuras, ElvUI etc are all killed off - it's at that point I think I'll make the full-time jump back to Linux again.

The remaining handful of add-ons that still work at that point can be easily managed via my AppImage version of WoWUp, and with 90% of Steam games now working in Linux, it will make the transition back that much easier.

Gaming aside everything else I tend to do on my PC is web-based, so that's obviously not going to be an issue.

A simpler, more private 2026 onwards

My focus and interest for 2026 will be on privacy-centred solutions, FOSS and personal ownership going forwards. Linux, along with a GrapheneOS-powered Pixel 10 Pro XL phone (whenever GOS arrives for that model!) will be my daily drivers from early next year onwards.

Doing my day-to-day activities in operating systems that are free from spyware, bloat and advertising will be a huge weight off my mind. As time goes by, and AI gets forcibly integrated into seemingly every avenue of our daily lives, not knowing who gets your data and information, or how much of your freedom you're giving up to use such products and services, and in conjunction with the attacks on privacy and the rights to it from governments around the world, it can seem like there is little to no hope for the future for people like me who desire to enact their basic right to privacy and security.

But steps can be taken to reduce or eliminate that threat, and I'll be making that my goal for 2026 - to step away from Microsoft, Google, Meta, Samsung et al as much as is practically possible.

They may think that the future is theirs, in this burgeoning billionaire-driven Technocracy, but it doesn't have to be mine, or indeed yours.