Windows experience
I've been Linux user for majority of my adult life as the idea of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and open internet was always very dear to my heart.
I've always also been a gamer on the side. With Linux at the time (10-15 years ago) was not so good for gaming as it is today, so dualbooting was the primary thing of keeping the world-view aligned with the software philosophy while still being able to play some of the online titles of the 2010s. I was there when Overwatch League was a thing and it has opened my world to the whole Korean e-sport scene, so naturally I was introduced to League of Legends and later on to Valorant (both by Riot Games). While Windows has served me well for my gaming hobby, there was always this constant ick, especially with the latter requiring kernel level anticheat software to be able to play the game.
As this was unravelling life got in a way and I put my PC to sleep for a few years, using company provided laptop as my general purpose PC and not really gaming at all during this period.
Cue few months back, as life got more stable, I've decided to dust off my PC and give it some long-needed upgrades. It was still running a Windows from the years past, which was again giving me an ick, especially with all the recent years and Microsoft being kind of a shitty company. After upgrading few parts I was greeted with Windows desktop with the "Activate Windows" watermark. After trying for 20 minutes to find proper way to get in touch with the actual HUMAN from Microsoft support and very weird call at the end of which I was yelling at the poor soul about my inability to comprehend how could've my legitimately bought version of Windows 10 that got bumped up to 11 be no longer valid after upgrading the motherboard. I was thinking about "stick it to the man" and paying 3€ to a company with HQ in Cyprus to get a license, but then it hit me. While I was using Windows, I've remembered all the popups, weird nagging to subscribe to various Microsoft services, the fullscreen popup trying to trick me into changing my browser from Firefox to Edge without any way to say "Do not ask again". I've said to myself "That's enough", and went to download Ubuntu, which I was using since the day I've jumped on the Linux train.
Gone was the Windows partition, gone were the popups, just clean experience with telemetry turned off by default and just a prompt during first start to enable it if, and only if, I would like to. Everything clicked for me immediately. It was like I've never left. On top of that, the two of the biggest e-sport titles (Counter-Strike 2, DOTA 2), are native Linux programs and I've been playing Counter-Strike on and off since the noughties. Additionally, as Valve, the company behind Steam platform, Steam Deck and now the greatest (and smallest) Linux gaming machine - Steam Machine, has done some good work on the gaming side of things and I am now finishing Cyberpunk 2077, played Stray, Doom and enjoyed couple of competitive matches in Counter-Stike. This has been going on for almost 6 months and I have not felt a need to go back to Windows for anything.
Which brings me to the bottom line of this post - there are choices, and choices matter, especially in the world we are living in today. Big corporations have shown us that they do not care about consumer products if it does not bring them additional source of revenue, or at very least some data that they can use to push users towards their subscriptions. To quote a comment from Reddit
"Sure, the planet got destroyed. But for one beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders."
and I think it cannot be more true. So now, as a properly adjusted adult, I vote with my choices and that is why I am choosing things that align with my philosophy. Ubuntu being a European Linux distribution checks all the boxes for me, and while I know there are better FOSS aligned projects, while still backed by big US tech corporations (Fedora), I am enjoying the simplicity of the OS that just works, and does not require me to spend more time in terminal than I would like to.