It’s honestly an upgrade to go back to 10 and for me it was an upgrade to go to iot ltsc because literally everything that’s annoying about windows is not there including ads, preinstalled apps, news, weather etc. I have done a few installs of it for other people who want some of that stuff and it can be added back but in terms of clean, crisp taste, those mountains are blue.

I’ve used everything for a long time and you’re never going to get away from needing the terminal in linux because everything is a wrapper for something you can do in the terminal and if you need to communicate what to do it’s easier to say “type “sudo journalctl —since today | grep /dev/sda” and tell me what errors it’s giving” than to figure out what desktop environment, window manager, file manager, log system, log viewer and text editor a person is using or has installed and walk em through installing and using each of those to troubleshoot the same issue. So any two linux users will eventually triangulate down to the terminal unless they’re discussing things specific to guis.

If you’re looking to avoid ai, apple is a better bet than Microsoft just because of the money flow. It’s always gonna be hard to get away from ai on the platform that makes its money through ai, ads and web services as opposed to the one that takes a cut of App Store sales and charges for hardware.

There’s also the positioning of each company in their own words, Microsoft selling itself as the ai computer and Apple selling itself as the private and secure computer. We can’t trust what corporations say, but their presentation has to be believable or no one would buy their stuff and their self talk can tell us things about them.