With Microsoft bodging the operating system by disabling offline accounts, cramping AI in everything and obviously don’t giving a flying f*** about your personal data: how far did you come sweeping that company from your or your family members life?
For me, it is still hard to evade Microsoft, as for reasons, companies and governments are still buying into that ecosystem (Teams, OneDrive, Office, Azure, …).
Did you manage to cut or phase Microsoft out?
I basically cut Microsoft out in 2001 when I first installed Mandrake Linux, though continued to dual boot until 2006. I had found myself rebooting to Microsoft fairly rarely, so when I had issues with my NTFS partition, I simply didn’t bother to reinstall, and have only ever single booted my desktop since.
I bought a MacBook around 2005, with Mac OS 10.04 (Tiger). Apple wanted to charge me for upgrades, so once support for that finished (I forget when that was) I put Ubuntu on it as a dual boot. Back then the Unity interface of Ubuntu was very similar to that of MacOS. And with the greater freedom that Linux offered me I then ditched MacOS too.
From that time the only Microsoft operating system I’ve ever owned was Windows CE on the MediaNav of the two Dacias I owned. I can tell you once I found out they were running Microsoft it was almost a deal breaker 😂