this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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That's not really the point though. I'm not even talking about end users. Government agencies, corporate backend services, customer service agencies and more are all abandoning Windows for Linux partially because Win11 is a horrible product, but also because the requirements just keep growing which is stupid.
Microsoft's response to this is the above, which they were STAUNCHLY opposed to previously because they need to try and force AI down users throats to justify the money they have pissed away on it. They're shoehorning Copilot bullshit into every product line they have now, and it's WILDLY unpopular and unnecessary. If this is the best they can do to address it, they'll continue to hemorrhage users.
When more state agencies in the US start switching, they'll release some "Windows Lite" bullshit, but it will too late because the commitments needed for these organizations to bother switching is massive. They'll be losing licenses for an entire generation of Windows at the very least.
I still have a some sway at work regarding tech stuff, and I know roughly half of my team feels at least half a strongly as I do about how shitty Microsoft is. there are a couple programs for which we need to use Windows, but I could see us at least exploring how to not use windows anymore. It's just too difficult to do our goddamn jobs
Issue is that there's one thing that organizations love about Windows that isn't really catered to in any Linux distribution: Nannying the users and not letting them do their own things with their own systems.
For example, no Linux distribution out there will help you prevent the end-users from changing their own desktop wallpaper, or what to show when the user locks their screen. When my company hands out laptops, the users are blocked from changing out the ugly propaganda slides they make our systems display. Just the tip of the iceburg for how much the enduser can be screwed with by a microsoft admin that just isn't possible in any significant Linux desktop environment.
So user may love Linux, but their employer still wants to make sure they are running Windows.
Uhhhh yeah there is? You can customize any user profile and centrally control it just as you can on Windows. You can even PXE boot all workstations with new images whenever you want instead of relying on individual machines to issue updates, something that Windows isn't capable of.
Not sure where you got this idea, but you're misinformed.
You can't to the same degree. If you let the user use a typical desktop environment like gnome or plasma., then they can set their wallpaper.
Now if you want to make a kiosk thing, so much easier in Linux. But if you want to have a general purpose desktop experience but restrict stupid stuff like wallpaper, windows has got you.
I would rather use and administer Linux systems at scale any day, but if you hated your users and wanted to lock personalization, then Windows has done the work to enable that.
Sorry, ma dude. This is 100% incorrect. Been doing this a long time, and have managed massive numbers of desktop sessions for enterprise end users.
Lookup
dconf. It's the tool that manages the underlying configuration engine for Gnome specifically.Outside of the granularity there, you could also just lock everything to a group and exclude logged in users from that group. That's a very simplistic way of explaining it, but achieves the exact same thing. You build a base image with only the apps the user needs, set execution to an inclusive group that user belongs to, and everything else to some other groups, and there you go. Dead simple.
Of course that's not how you'd do it for an org with thousands of users, but you get the point.