Leaving Windows behind

I finally did it. I wiped the last Windows partition from my machine. For months I tried to convince myself I could keep it air-gapped, keep it clean. But Copilot crept in everywhere. You can’t patch silence into a system that has been designed to listen.

So I left it behind.

Tonight, I booted into Linux and for the first time in years felt a strange relief. Watching the kernel messages roll past gave me a sense of honesty. Lines of code telling me what was happening—errors, warnings, confirmations. Not hidden. Not silent watchers in the background.

[2024-09-04 22:11] boot.log  
System: Linux 6.10  
Status: running — no outbound traffic detected  

It’s not about perfection. Linux is flawed. Open source is messy. But it is human in its imperfection. It doesn’t pretend silence while whispering elsewhere.

Leaving Windows felt like leaving a room full of microphones. Linux may not be paradise, but at least the microphones are visible—and removable.