Havatra

The big one for me is grep/ripgrep. I'm a dev, so there are often times I need to search the contents of files to figure out where something obscure is mentioned. This is also possible on Windows, but as with most things on Windows, it's slow.

The second mention-worthy thing is, oftentimes in conjunction with grep, is piping! It's so enjoyable for me to find the files/content, pipe it to anything (sometimes through xargs and/or tee), so that I can replace the text en-masse with sed, remove all junk files that match a certain parameter with rm, and generally automatically act upon something that I don't have to manually look for.

Although I'm a dev mainly on Windows, I've installed WSL as a compromise, and quite often find myself using its bash to perform tasks like the ones mentioned above.

I'd say Linux Mint, ZorinOS, and Manjaro Linux are all viable options for Windows users who want an easy transition. Although I don't think any distro will ever be considered a "plug-and-play" experience. There are varying degrees of user-friendliness, but if one wants user-friendliness like not having to do root/sudo actions even once, I think one might be better off with MacOS..? Though from what I've heard, the main reason Windows users are looking towards Linux and not MacOS is exactly because of the ability to customize more than just the wallpaper (and also the entire boycott US movement).

I love the blunt title of "... for Windows 10 Exiles", though I wonder if it will rub people the right or wrong way when reading it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, but all the hype around the so-called “apocalyptic” October 14 feels a little overblown.

I agree somewhat - the date itself is not that big of a deal, as it's just a date that Microsoft has set in order to have a spesific time to keep as a reference for when they have their last support push for Windows 10:

Windows 10 will reach the end of support on October 14, 2025. At this point technical assistance, feature updates and security updates will no longer be provided.

This doesn't mean that it will immediately be defunct or a serious security risk. But from this point on, the more time that passes, the higher is the likelyhood of security holes being found (and used), that will not be patched.

Windows 11 has proven itself to have - a - lot - of - anti-features. Being forced to choose between having to deal with those, or change the entire system which you've grown so very used to, can be a rather difficult decision for many. KDE trying to ease the transition I think is appreciated by many who find themselves stuck in this choice. Or at least to give Linux a try.

It's impressive to see that they save in the money they spend on licenses this quickly! It's a little bit of work to transfer the current systems and get used to a different system, but it's very doable it seems (albeit over years of work), as well as economically attractive. I hope this inspires the rest of the country!