Walking Away From Linux After 25 Years

Loyalty has its limits. Mine ended with a broken boot.

For most of my life, I stood by Linux. Through every kernel regression, broken update, half-baked feature, and hardware that "mostly" worked, I never joined the chorus of people publicly walking away. I watched those posts come and go without commenting. I stayed quiet and loyal.

Until now.

The Cracks

About a year ago, the cracks began to show. Small things at first: regressions, unpolished experiences, simple tools that made life harder than necessary.

I quietly bought a Mac Studio with the plan to leave Linux without drama. A clean break. No rants. No forum posts.

The Zephyrus Experiment

A few days ago, I installed Ubuntu 25.10 on my Zephyrus laptop. It is arguably the best Ubuntu yet. But the experience did not sit right. Every application: Terminal, Files, Settings, took two seconds to launch.

Two seconds feels like an eternity compared to macOS and GhostBSD, where apps open instantly.

I brushed it off. I figured I would switch to Manjaro, which used to run great on this laptop, and revisit Ubuntu when 26.04 drops.

The Final Straw

I downloaded the ISO, verified the checksum, flashed it with GNOME Disks. Something I have done hundreds of times. Booted the live image, installed Manjaro with full-disk LUKS encryption, rebooted.

Five minutes to the login screen. I rebooted to see if it was a one-off. It was not. The system hung.

            The details: Reinstalled without encryption. Same issue: the boot process was broken, the system confused. Despite wiping the drive, the MBR still prompted for a password for a nonexistent LUKS volume. Two years ago, Manjaro ran fine on this same laptop. Now it could not boot at all.
        

That is when it hit me: I am done.

The Irony

Out of options, I used an old flash drive with a Windows 11 Pro ISO. Installed it. Updated everything. Grabbed the NVIDIA drivers. Cleaned out the bloat using Chris Titus Tech's utility and some manual cleanup.

Within 30 minutes, I had a system that:

Booted fast, around 10 seconds
Paired Bluetooth and peripherals without fuss
Scaled 1440p perfectly between my laptop (125%) and LG ultrawide (100%)
Needed zero configuration tweaks to be productive
Can run completely air-gapped 99.9% of the time

The user experience was years ahead of Linux. Period.

What I Run Now

Mac Studio M4 Max: Daily driver, production work
Zephyrus with Windows 11 Pro: Backup and GPU-heavy tasks
Fedora 44 KDE (on the side): Still watching, still testing

Don't Believe the Hype

Linux still has a role on servers. Maybe in niche tech setups too. But for the average desktop user, even a technically proficient one, it is no longer the best tool for the job.

Arguably, it never was.