> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://yearncummins.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Windows is a dumpster fire. RHEL 10.2 and KDE are what happens when you stop paying for spyware. - URL: https://yearncummins.com/windows-dumpster-rhel-kde/ - Published: 2026-09-26T20:37:19.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-26T21:36:01.000Z - Description: I paid Microsoft for an operating system that spies on me, runs like shit on modern hardware, and periodically breaks itself after every Patch Tuesday. Then I installed RHEL 10.2 with KDE Plasma 6 on the same laptop. Here is what happened. - Author: Yearn Cummins - Tags: Rants You know what really grinds my yearn? I paid Microsoft for an operating system that spies on me, runs like shit on hardware that should scream, and periodically breaks itself in creative new ways after every Patch Tuesday. Then when I finally got tired of it and installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 with KDE Plasma 6 on the same laptop, the machine woke up like it was five years younger and stopped forwarding data about my desktop use to a company in Redmond. Three things pushed me. Let me name them. --- ## The spying Microsoft's telemetry isn't a rumor and it isn't a conspiracy theory. It is a documented, opt-out-if-you-can-find-the-checkbox, always-on data pipe. Windows 10 shipped it. Windows 11 doubled down on it. And then in 2024 Microsoft rolled out Recall. Recall was pitched as an AI feature that periodically screenshots everything you do on your PC, runs OCR against the screenshots, and stores them for later semantic search. Every window. Every document. Every password manager you open. Every banking session. Every private conversation in Signal or Telegram or whatever you use. All of it captured, all of it indexed, all of it sitting locally as a queryable AI training set of your entire digital life. The initial rollout was so obviously catastrophic that Microsoft pulled it under public pressure and shipped it back later with some opt-in language and stricter local-storage claims. The correct read on that whole sequence is not "Microsoft listened to feedback." It is "Microsoft tried to normalize Recall, took the beta bullet, and re-shipped it with a slightly better cover story." Meanwhile the OS keeps doing its other jobs. Ads in the Start menu, which Microsoft calls "recommendations." Ads in the lock screen, which Microsoft calls "Windows Spotlight." A period of File Explorer sponsored placement, which Microsoft tested and dropped when they got caught. A Search bar that quietly routes queries through Bing whether or not you have Bing set as your default anything. A Copilot key on new keyboards you cannot remap without registry surgery. A first-boot experience for Windows 11 Home that will not let you finish setup without creating a Microsoft account and networking your machine to Microsoft's identity system. Every one of those is a decision that traded user control for corporate reach. Cumulatively, the OS became something else. It became a rental storefront that also runs your Excel. --- ## The slow as shit Take a laptop from 2023\. Modern CPU. 32 GB of memory. NVMe SSD. Real hardware. Boot Windows 11 on it fresh. Watch what happens. The first minute after login, half a dozen background processes wake up. Windows Defender. Windows Search Indexer. Microsoft's various Copilot and telemetry services. SearchApp and StartMenuExperienceHost eating memory. Windows Widgets phoning home for MSN news. Notification helpers. Update orchestration daemons. Some of these are actual OS services. Most of them are AI, telemetry, or advertising infrastructure with a system tray icon. On a fresh install with nothing you actively use running, a modern Windows machine sits at meaningful CPU usage and hundreds of megabytes of resident memory just being the OS. Explorer.exe randomly spikes doing whatever it does. File Explorer takes visibly longer to open a folder than it did in Windows 7\. Right-clicking is now a two-stage menu that has to draw the modern context menu first, then the "show more options" legacy fallback, and there is a perceptible delay before the modern menu even appears. None of this is what performance regression looks like. This is what an operating system looks like when it has been given multiple new jobs that are not being an operating system. Compare that to booting the same laptop to RHEL 10.2\. Same CPU, same disk, same memory. Cold boot to a usable graphical desktop in about 15 seconds. Idle CPU usage near zero. Idle memory footprint that leaves you 25 GB of working headroom instead of 20\. No background AI process, no Copilot service, no phone-home indexer for a search bar you did not ask for. The Windows machine is not slow because Windows engineers forgot how to write software. It is slow because Microsoft's business model requires a suite of surveillance and monetization services to be running all the time, and those services need CPU cycles and memory too. --- ## The random shit breaking The third one is the reason I actually stopped. Not the spying, not the slowness. The randomness. Every Patch Tuesday introduces the possibility that something you rely on will stop working. A driver that used to load will not load. A shared printer that used to print will stop printing. A Bluetooth device that used to connect will pair but not stream audio. An update will reset a settings toggle you had turned off, so you turn it off again next week. A feature you disabled will come back because Microsoft decided you should try it again. A feature you liked will disappear entirely because it did not fit whatever the strategy is now. The Windows update track record over the last few years contains real, documented catastrophes. Print subsystem regressions that took weeks to unwind. Boot loops on specific hardware combinations. A Bluetooth stack update that broke audio for wide swaths of consumer devices. Recall itself was a self-inflicted disaster that had to be pulled and re-released. And these are the incidents that made the news. The lower-visibility drift is everywhere: quirks that appear and disappear across updates, defaults that reset, integrations that stop working. The generous read on this is that Windows supports a truly gigantic and fragmented hardware ecosystem and some breakage is inevitable. The ungenerous but more honest read is that Microsoft has been forcing new capabilities into a legacy platform faster than they can regression-test them, because their incentive is not to keep your machine stable, it is to ship whatever feature the current strategy prioritizes. Either way, the practical experience of running Windows is that you cannot fully trust the state of your own machine month to month. Something that worked on Monday might not work on Wednesday, and the reason will be that Microsoft shipped an update. --- ## Enough. I moved. At some point I got tired of paying to be the QA team. I installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 on the laptop that was previously running Windows. Not as a dual boot to try it out for a weekend. As my daily driver. Full commit. The same day I was going to do a Windows reinstall to try to recover from something the OS had broken, I installed RHEL instead. That was a month ago. I have not looked back. --- ## Why RHEL 10.2 specifically RHEL is not the Linux you install because you want to spend your evenings tuning your window manager. It is the Linux you install because you want the boring, enterprise-grade stability of a distribution that has to support paying customers for a decade. RHEL 10 has a ten-year support runway from its 2025 release. Point releases like 10.2 are conservative, tested, and shipped with the assumption that they will be running production workloads at banks and hospitals and defense contractors. The kernel is not the latest. The packages are not the latest. What they are is battle-tested, patched for CVEs on Red Hat's timeline, and unlikely to eat your desktop the way a rolling release sometimes will. You do not need to be a Red Hat customer to use it. Red Hat's Developer Subscription for Individuals is free and lets you run RHEL on up to sixteen machines for personal, non-production use. Sign up, get a license, install, done. You get the exact same bits enterprise customers get, at zero cost, forever. Fedora is the upstream you want if you like being a couple of releases ahead. Rocky and Alma are the community rebuilds if you want RHEL without the account. All three are legitimate. I picked RHEL because I like Red Hat's support story and because it costs me nothing. Once RHEL 10.2 is installed, the daily experience is quiet. Cold boots in seconds. Suspend and resume actually work. Battery life on the same hardware is measurably better than Windows because the OS is not running a background AI and a telemetry pipe. Updates come in via dnf and do not surprise you. When something does break, \`journalctl\` tells you what happened in the actual logs, in the actual English language that the actual error message actually said. --- ## Why KDE Plasma 6 specifically Every couple of years a Linux desktop environment matures far enough that it stops feeling like a science project and starts feeling like a shipped product. KDE Plasma 6, which stabilized through 2024, is where the KDE project crossed that line for me. Plasma 6 is Wayland-first. It runs on Wayland by default, and Wayland actually works now: HiDPI scaling is per-monitor, fractional scaling works, mixed-refresh multi-monitor works, and gaming through Proton runs at full performance. The rendering pipeline is GPU-accelerated in a way that makes the compositor feel snappy on hardware that Windows 11 makes feel sluggish. The customization ceiling is not comparable to any commercial desktop. Activities let you group workspaces by intent, not just by app. KWin scripts let you build window-management rules that would take a full third-party utility on Windows. Widgets are self-contained and do not phone anyone. Global menus, tiling extensions, focus-follows-mouse, virtual desktops per monitor, all of it is a checkbox in a settings menu. If you want your desktop to behave a particular way, KDE can do it, and it will not lose that configuration on the next update. The apps ship with KDE are quietly excellent. Konsole is a better terminal than the Windows Terminal, which is impressive because the Windows Terminal is actually pretty good. Dolphin is a better file manager than File Explorer in every way that matters, including in-place file preview, split view, and a tabbed interface that has worked correctly for a decade. Kate is a better default text editor than Notepad or Notepad++, with syntax highlighting, LSP support, and a genuinely useful sidebar. KDE Connect pairs your phone to your desktop for clipboard sharing, notification mirroring, and file transfer without an account, without a cloud service, and without Microsoft learning about it. If you have not touched a Linux desktop since the last time you tried it, the gap you remember has closed. --- ## The honest counterweights I am not going to pretend RHEL and KDE do everything Windows does. They do not, and it is worth naming what they do not. Anti-cheat gaming for the very biggest AAA titles is still a mixed story. Proton runs an enormous fraction of the Steam library at native or near-native performance, but a small set of anti-cheat middleware still refuses to sign Linux. If you make a living playing Valorant or Fortnite, dual boot or keep a gaming rig. A handful of professional creative applications, notably Adobe's suite and some specific Autodesk products, do not have Linux equivalents that match feature-for-feature. Alternatives exist and are genuinely good, but if you are shipping paid client work on Photoshop today, budget an adjustment period. Some enterprise IT setups assume Windows domain membership, Windows-only VPN clients, or Microsoft-signed executables. If your day job runs your machine, this fight is with your IT department, not with your OS. Bank apps and government portals occasionally target Windows and Mac only. This is almost always a browser issue that a standard Firefox or Chrome on Linux resolves, but not always. Verify before you switch. None of these are dealbreakers for most people. They are the shape of the remaining gap. Ten years ago the gap was ten times wider. Five years ago it was three times wider. Today it is small enough that "I need Windows" is usually a habit, not a technical requirement. --- ## Practical guide to actually trying this 1\. Sign up for a free Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals. It is real, it costs nothing, and it gets you legitimate RHEL 10 access. 2\. Download the RHEL 10.2 ISO. Write it to a USB stick. Boot the laptop to it. Live-try the desktop before you install. 3\. If you like it, dual boot for a couple of weeks. Leave Windows on a partition. Use RHEL as your daily driver. See what breaks, what you miss, what you do not. 4\. During those two weeks, install KDE Plasma 6\. On RHEL 10 the cleanest path is to add EPEL and pull KDE from there, then set it as the default session. The KDE Neon and Fedora KDE spins are also worth a look if you want the cleanest KDE experience out of the box. 5\. Install the apps you actually use. Firefox and Chrome are one-liners. Signal, Telegram, Discord, Slack all have Linux clients. VS Code, JetBrains, and every major dev toolchain are first-class. Steam, Proton, Lutris cover most gaming. LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, or a browser-based Office 365 tab handles documents. 6\. After two weeks, decide honestly. If Windows still has one specific thing you cannot live without, keep the dual boot. If it does not, reclaim the disk space. You are not signing up for a religion. You are trying an OS. --- ## The bigger lesson This is the same argument that the VMware post made about infrastructure, one layer up in the stack. You are running a general-purpose computer. You paid for the hardware. The software that runs on it should be working for you, not for a company whose current business model is monetizing your attention and your data. Windows is not that any more. If it ever was, that ship sailed several Patch Tuesdays ago. When the vendor's incentive stops aligning with your interest, you have two options. You can keep paying and hope the vendor changes. Or you can move to a stack where the vendor is either you or a community whose interest is the software working correctly. RHEL 10.2 and KDE Plasma 6 are that stack for the desktop. They are not perfect. They are not for everyone. They are, in 2026, unambiguously better for a working developer or sysadmin than the OS Microsoft is selling. > Get your desktop off Windows. Yesterday.