I hate to break it to you but XP-7 only existed the way it did because Microsoft was under an injunction preventing them from bundling services with the OS. They actually intended to have Microsoft accounts (then called .Net Passports) tied to activation in XP.

Mad rant props!

For real though, flatpak exists partially for exactly your use case. Simple to use, won't break shit, and pretty much available everywhere.

You're kinda lucky in a way. Linux in all its flavors have steadily improved over the years. Even when win10 came out and I jumped ship for all but a few niche uses, it was a higher learning curve, and came with much disappointment in what I couldn't do that I had been able to on win 7 (which was my favorite version of Windows overall).

Now, while I still have my win 7 drive for the two things I can't get working on linux reliably, I can do everything else. I also have a win10 partition on my laptop for one single piece of software because it's easier to just keep it for the rare usage than try to figure out how to get it working (is Amazon's shitty kindle author program, and since I only crank out a book every three years or so [and only one that I've felt like selling there], it just isn't worth fucking with for that tiny amount of extra space.

Linux, right now, is the best it's ever been. It's also on par with windows. Enough so that I can't see myself ever going back. At some point, win7 won't work on new hardware, and I'll have to jank a musicbee install on linux, and tackle the character sheet generator that I use formy absurdly over crunchy home brew TTRPG that I've yet to find a replacement for that isn't a compromise.

Anyway, I suspect that in a year or two, you'll be in a similar space. You'll have figured out the bullshit, abandoned windows habits, and actually be satisfied with your distro of choice.

Truth? If I had spent as much time on linux back in the nineties, I would likely have has equal difficulty adapting to windows if things had been in reverse.

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise is maintained until 2032, de-bloated, and free.

I use Teams flatpak to communicate with family and like a week ago got a prompt "would you recommend this to others?".

I clicked no, and for the reason "Sloppity slop slop slopitty slop" and 3 days later M$ announced they were rolling back Copilot integration in trivial apps. I felt listened to :P

ReactOS is windows. Here's their front page blurb:

"Imagine running your favorite Windows applications and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust. That's the mission of ReactOS!"

It's not Linux, specifically. Its not Linux under the hood, it's written to be windows without microsoft.

Haven't tried it myself, but its definitely worth a try if you've been using Linux that long and its just not for you.

Which distro are you on?

I'm sure you could easily get some help with how to install things and the basics of using the terminal (though you really shouldn't need to use the terminal much anyway).

Windows 10 was ok-ish until they announced

Windows 11 and ramped up it's enshitification... They improved the tiles idea a lot over windows 8

Windows phone 7 was great too...

I use Linux now though too, I've found flatpak isn't a silver bullet though: depending on what distro you're using and what distro whoever made the flatpak was using sometimes strange issues happen such as not loading in dark mode or losing settings on close/shutdown...

Debian + KDE and then install synaptic and your basically there man. https://itsfoss.com/synaptic-package-manager/ You could go with Ubuntu but it has telemitry bullshit (if you don't care then its fine). Ubuntu is just the commercialized linux that is based on Debian, basically the same thing but with the Ubuntu store and settings on top of Debian. Launch Synaptic once a month and refresh and apply updates or add the software from the repositry from there. Debian is all about being stable so it wont have all the latest versions of software but if you want a Windows XP version of Linux that just fucking works, Debian is the way to go. Everything has a .deb installer if it is trying to be available to the wider Linux user market.

The scream of an era!

C'mon beb Linux gon be guuuuud.

Man…I don’t even like linux. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have difficulty understanding what I’m even doing wrong. I have issues installing software unless it’s a flatpak.

Use decent distro like Fedora KDE. A lot of issues are because new people pick Debian, Ubuntu or Arch

For publicly traded companies, you actually have to apply the inverse of Hanlons Razor.

I think Hanlon was either a lot more optimistic than I am or he was malicious when he came up with that Razor, assuming razors are named after the person who coined them.