Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.

Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.

This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.

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neilv 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apt username, for a pragmatic strategy.

A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.

When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.

It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.

Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)

Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

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incrudible 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

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Uupis 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'm slowly moving away from the Apple ecosystem, and this is what I rather like about Linux. I find it obviates the anger — there's no specific entity making decisions that make my user experience worse. If something's annoying me, it's quite likely to be my own fault.

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cgio an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You could argue that, with Windows there is a legitimate place to direct your rage at, but the action of directing your rage does not actually have any effect on improving your experience. With Win and Mac, no one cares, because they already have their customers locked in and tight, they will accept any experience degradation. With Linux, you are not a customer so no customer complaints, but still arguably much better support.

	▲	freedomben 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed. And also, if there's something you don't like or a project going in a direction you don't agree with, there is virtually guaranteed to be other people out there that feel the same that are building something different

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tempsaasexample 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I installed Linux Mint Mate on my parents home computer and they have less issues than they ever had with windows 10-11

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le-mark 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you’re implying separating work work on two machines; beware the corporate spyware on the windows machine will show a lot of idle time!

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spacecadet 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same. Work provides the idiot box. I give it its own segmented network too, cause work spyware and all... then run a personal workstation with linux next door to it.