A Glass-Shattering Change in Our Workstation Software

10/02/2019

Four years ago, ED7 ENTERTAINMENT (EDEN) declared its commitment to user freedom and privacy. Our first move in 2015 was to begin transitioning into using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), as well as moving away from Google. Today, as part of this transition, we are finally breaking the glass windows by declaring the switch to Debian GNU/Linux as our official Workstation system software, and that Microsoft Windows steps down into a secondary role.

We would like to spend the majority of this announcement to discuss our experience with Microsoft Windows over the 11 years it had served us. We were quite happy with Windows before it started to modernize itself into its current state. 2012 had brought us to Windows 8, where we were introduced with a brand new platform called Metro, that supposedly blurred the lines between mobile and desktop formats. While we found its initial offerings quite promising, we felt that the platform was leaning more into the mobile formats, especially by means of large user interface elements, wide spacing, and restrictive functionality compared to desktop software. Microsoft supposedly improved the platform with the introduction of Windows 10 in 2015, having re-branded the Metro platform into Universal Windows Platform (UWP). As with many people, we were excited about Windows 10, especially when Microsoft decided to give eligible users a free upgrade offer. What we were not aware of is that this free upgrade offer turns out to be a Trojan horse.

Microsoft officially defines Windows 10 as a service. Devices running Windows 10 are continuously receiving updates as long as they are still competent to run it. The hassles of migrating into the latest software is then a thing of the past. Unfortunately, this is enforced, and as of the time of writing this, we could not find a perfect way to escape from it, though so far our current method is working.

Windows 10 allows Microsoft to take control of PCs, essentially taking their ownership, and that users are loaning them for the price they paid for their PC (if that’s really true). At times, it can be brutal. A classic example is our countless encounters of PCs undergoing update routines in the middle of something important. We also had our moments of hardship in regaining control of our PCs (I have 2), especially in a surprise attack sometime in February 2018 that we managed to stop before Microsoft successfully pulls off a system-wide upgrade. We also received many words of how these updates had caused regressions and/or loss: an update in October 2018 was reported to destroy personal data (to affected users: I’m very sorry for your loss).

This alone is one of the many frustrations we have been holding onto with Windows 10 for four straight years, and we felt that four years is more than enough. So we had to look for an alternative with desperation. We once considered switching to macOS for its legendary stability. However, we found it not viable to switch all of our infrastructure, mainly for financial reasons.

We eventually picked Debian GNU/Linux for its stability—a reason why it is one of the most popular Linux distributions for commercial applications—and the freedom of modification: from the graphical desktop environment, to the kernel, and—mostly—all the way to the source code. We had a test run for a couple of weeks and had some issues getting the system working normally, but we were able to mitigate over most of them. We also managed to get Windows applications to run on it via Wine, further reducing our dependency on Windows. Everything had to be rushed in order to save time for our personal lives.

Because we are dropping support for Windows, a couple of our projects will have to be put on hold: EDENrm (Rainmeter skin suite) and EDENdos (Windows batch script collection). To put them into a good end, both projects will receive one last unscheduled major update.

If in the future Microsoft changes for the better, which it might, then we may reconsider going back. But with the ways software technology works in the recent years, we think that this is unlikely. Nevertheless, we would like to close this message by extending our gestures of appreciation to Microsoft for their hard work in putting together what used to be a legendary family of operating systems. But today, we shattered it into fine pieces so that we could truly escape outside and play with those penguins and wildebeests who have been waiting for us.