Back from hell

I was on Windows for 2 days. The goal was to have a lot of "normal" sounds for working. I opened Reaper and came up with 2 electronic songs like I do on Linux. But the process was painful. Everything is a bloody "software manager" and user accounts. Very heavy software. Rendering times were very slow. Everything takes a long time on Windows, from installing the OS to installing some instruments. I ran back to Manjaro GNOME, but there was a bug affecting my track pad. Ended up on Debian 12 Xfce. Part of the thing was to get clients for backing tracks, I know a few people playing in big ships etc but now people take out the vocals from tracks with AI. I've decided to stick with my normal way of life, retired from the stoopid rat race, and enjoying Linux. I'm glad I hated W$ so much, to be honest. EDIT: there are other ways to make some extra cash.

I haven't used windoze for years at home. At work I cringe everytime!

I had to set up a new laptop the other day and before converting it over to Linux, I wanted to update the BIOS... and this laptop did not have a method I could find where the BIOS was updeatable via the BIOS itself, so I had to go through Windows 11 to update the BIOS. It was a nightmare. The amount of bloat and garbage on the machine was so extensive I could not believe that any sane human would tolerate it. Not to mention the surprising amount of offers, ads, updates, notifications, news, weather, sports headlines, cloud sync stuff and other crap being flashed at me that I never asked for and never wanted. And also not to mention the lag that was generated, along with extra fan noise, by all the CPU cycles stolen by all that crap. Out of curiosity, I decided I wanted to see how much I could prune Windows 11 to get some semblance of sanity and privacy back. It took me over an hour to go through and disable dozens of settings, remove various apps, etc., etc... and I finally got the machine down to a "somewhat decent" level (considering it was Windows 11). It was still not acceptable to me, but that represented basically the best a normal consumer Windows user could aspire to achieve on this machine out of the box. It was an honest shame what has become of Microsoft and also in this case, Hewlett Packard. Once I updated the BIOS, wiped Windows, and installed Ubuntu for testing, the base Ubuntu was very happy and also *very* snappy running in 1.7GB of RAM (compared to the 7+GB of RAM occupied by the massive crapware running when I first booted with Windows 11). Insanity. It was night and day.

I went back to Windows for a month, composing on Reaper and trying out other DAWs. It was a difficult experience, though I admit there are more advanced tools for the more popular commercial/spying OS. What I regret leaving as I come back to KDE is ARA and the plugins, like Arturia and Toontrack (not all of them work in Linux).