Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

Realize the people who complain how hard it is are the people who are stuck. The people who don't made it out aren't complaining. Get out takes effort, but also it depends on how you approach it. If you look at trying to leave as in "how to run what I have now without Windows OS," you're going to have a bad time. Instead, I would suggest a few approaches that make a transition a lot easier:

_Look at it as opportunity_ Other platforms have other ideas about how things should work. Instead of trying to replace Windows, take the time to realize that it's not the only way to solve problems. The Unix world has a pretty different idea about what's the way to work, which is often foreign until you realize there is a method to the madness. If you want opinionated and guided, MacOS is designed to have very strong "you won't have to worry about that" goal. Linux is the opposite and very flexible. So, you'll want to look at a lot of different distributions, as they all have particular goals in mind.

_Reconsider your current software_ Look at your current software and see if you can find replacements that are cross platform. This can mean software that runs on multiple platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, etc). This can also mean switching to cloud/self-hosted software. The software I use I choose through the lens of "if I have to give up my current platform of choice, does this go with me?"

_Sync your environment_ It can be daunting to jump ship to another OS if all your stuff is stuck on a different machine. I highly suggest SyncThing. It is a multi-platform, self-hosted synchronizer. Get a new machine (Linux, Mac) and sync your important files from your other machine. Now, you try out working on the new machine without loosing your work. Install some tools. Try getting stuff done. When you feel you've been held up for too long and need to get some stuff done again in Windows, all your stuff is magically sync'ed. Eventually, you'll find you're doing most of your work on the new machine, and you'll decide what to decommission from the old one.

_VM/Wine/Proton_ Windows support under Mac and Linux has come a long way. Maybe you still need a very specific piece of software. That's fine, just plan on taking time to figure out if you can still get it to work on your new platform.

About 12 years go I jumped from Windows to Mac and about 4 years ago I started working with Linux, as well. And, so can you. Today is your first day to start making changes.

Photoshop CS6 works pretty reliably on the majority of setups, I remember having an... ahem, perfectly legal copy installed without needing to use any install helpers whatsoever. WINE just downloaded all of the dependencies before launching the installer and it worked like a charm. According to WineHQ[0], the only features it seems to be missing is the updater that came with it. Creative Cloud seems to be a bit more hit-or-miss, but I genuinely don't know many people running CC these days. It might be worth doing your own research there.

Ableton Live 10 works fine though, I played around with it for a while before switching to Bitwig (which has a native Linux build), and I really didn't have any complaints besides the CPU usage being marginally higher than native Windows. I haven't tried it recently either, so the situation may well have improved.

EDIT: just reinstalled my copy of Live 11, it works out-of-the-box with WINE installed and no configuration.

I can't go around making claims that it's perfect, but it's pretty damn close. You may as well see for yourself, all the software (WINE, Linux, etc) is free.

[0] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

Oh yeah! I had forgotten to mention that.

I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the Linux desktop is unfriendly.

I think a lot of people would genuinely like the 2021 Linux desktop experience if they tried it, but I fear that it will be quite difficult to shake the (well earned) stigma.

You're not necessarily wrong, but the vast majority of recent WINE developments have been going into making it a much more stable experience. The past decade of WINE development has pretty much been about throwing the kitchen sink at your program and praying that it works, but companies like Valve have made some pretty wild overhauls to the system that allow for both leaner and more predictable prefixes. It's still not perfect (and as you've suggested, will likely never be), but the gap is definitely closing. We've gotten to the point where people are confident shipping Linux consoles because the Windows compatibility layer is just that good. Game studios are able to support Linux-based platforms without targeting a build for the OS in the first place. As the technology continues to be refined, I can definitely see some CAD and studio software developers experimenting with the tech.

Much like you, I'm pretty pessimistic about the whole thing. It's safe to assume that nobody cares about it, but it's also still too early to say for sure. In 5 years, WINE could well be a stable development platform for third-party developers who want to focus on a Windows build but also offer compatibility with other operating systems. Stranger things have happened.