So, I wouldn’t let it lie.
I bought myself a new mini-PC with the intention of solving the shitware problem once and for all. And I thought ‘This comes with Windows 11. I’m just going to keep it Windows 11, throw Synergy on there, and then I can have everything insulated in a way that lets me still effectively work from home’. No need to wrestle with platform compatibility if I can just have a designated nuclear waste zone safely buried away from anything that matters.
It’s hard to believe I’ve only been away from Windows for six months, because I can’t go back. It’s fucking AWFUL. Just getting the updates necessary to run the thing for the first time took about 80 minutes. And when it ran, it ran like an asthmatic dog. So slow, so laggy, so grindy. Sure, it’s a mini-PC but surely I shouldn’t be idling at 80% CPU use with Discord and Outlook running, right? And Jesus Christ, the opinionated bloatware. The nagging. The fucking thirstiness of Microsoft for every spare second of my attention. I ran a ‘debloater’ and even so – it’s horrendous. It’s the OS equivalent of the loading sound from a ZX Spectrum piped directly into your nervous system. It’s the computing equivalent of being waterboarded. I cannot believe how long I put up with this, and how I never even noticed as its continual microaggressions became so insistent as to blend into the background.
I never though I’d become one of those people who, when faced with someone complaining about every single Windows problem, would reply ‘Just install Linux’.
But seriously just install Linux. Everything else is treating a gunshot wound with paracetamol.
So, I gave up. Fedora went on this mini PC. Again. Fedora – pretty good. Now it purrs like a kitten.
But alas, this is a kitten due for some real abuse. Sorry little buddy, but the world is cruel and so am I. Don’t make those cute eyes at me, it’s not going to change anything abut the future. Your life in my ecosystem will be nasty, brutish, and won’t even have the mercy of being short.
Step One – Insulation
This system doesn’t integrate into my network. It doesn’t go on Tailscale. It gets Synergy to let me use my mouse and keyboard between my main system and this one, but it doesn’t get to see anything else. Files get shared with a cool little application called LocalSend. It goes on the IoT subnetwork where the rest of my beasts are bedded, to paraphrase Arthur Miller. Otherwise, it stays away from the good stuff. I might even put a biohazard sticker on the box. And now I don’t even use Microsoft Authenticator for it – I have a FIDO2 USB key that I press and it does all the authentication for me – that’s a hardware level authentication. It does require a PIN, which is a little annoying, but I might be able to automate that away. And it does confuse Microsoft when I access my account from any other system – the expectation of a FIDO2 key is that you bring it with you and use it on multiple devices. I haven’t quite gotten to that point yet, but I do have a second key that I might try out.
I could have done all this inside a virtual machine on my main system, to be fair, but having actual airgapped hardware is cleaner. Nothing can get in. The doors are locked and barred. I’m not trapped in there with the shitware, the shitware is trapped in here with me.
Step Two – Cruelty
This is now my interface to the world of corporate shitware so I go all Doctor Mengele on it. It gets Edge. Yes, Edge. On Linux. Every time the mouse hovers over the icon I can hear the screams of tiny souls from deep inside the kernel. Edge though is probably my best bet to integrate semi-cleanly with the shitware I can’t install to a Linux desktop – specifically Outlook and Teams. I have a Zoom Linux install there too. And since I can’t have native Teams or Outlook I have them instead as ‘Progressive Web Apps’, which are essentially desktop containers that wrap around the webpages. Looking down at my taskbar is like seeing Jesus’ back at the end of the Temptation of the Christ. Teams. Zoom. Outlook. Edge. EduVPN. Facebook Messenger.
Look at how they massacred my boy.
I think if the Red Cross came in to my study they’d call in the war crimes investigation team.
I mean, it even has a Windows 10 install inside a virtual machine that I use for Adobe e-signing. Someone needs to come put a bullet into this poor bastard’s CPU to put it out of its misery.
Step three – Sustained indignity
Ah, but it turns out that this is actually perhaps the apotheosis of the Shitware Tablet idea. Synergy works almost flawlessly. Outlook behaves mostly as well as I would hope, as does Teams. I connected my webcam into this rather than my desktop so it’s actually also my video conferencing suite. Discord is on here. It’s the computing equivalent of an over-stimulated dog on Bonfire Night. It would cry if I attached tear-ducts to a USB port. It’s a pentagram in which I have trapped horrible, uncaring demons that claw and scratch for the thin sliver of life they can smell outwith the magic circle. But mini-PC or not, it’s taking the load like a champ. Average CPU usage is about 20% CPU, with about 5% at idle. It uses about 5GB of its 16GB memory, except when the virtual machine spins up. Being an Intel N150 machine it sips power too. It’s silent. It’s cool. And yet inside, atrocities are being committed.
The only issue is that Synergy’s copy and paste doesn’t work on the new Wayland system that has dominated Linux desktop managers for the past few years. But KDE Connect, bundled into my systems, has a copy and paste sharing tool that works alongside Syngery to solve the problem. It won’t work for images or documents, which is a little irksome, but there may be a way to do that too when I dig into it. For now, LocalSend is fine. It’s a bit kludgy, but nobody said a containment strategy had to be elegant.
Problems solved:
So, this is financial shit in place of logistical shit. I have solved the need to navigate between Android and Fedora by making everything, again, Fedora. I don’t need Webmail or Teams or Zoom on my actual computer now, because I can treat this system like a fourth screen through Synergy. I can opt-in to limited amounts of the Microsoft ecosystem without it spreading its tentacles deeper into a computer I care about.
One thing that always enraged me about Windows was how it kept overriding my wishes regarding Teams and Copilot. You could only ever get rid of them briefly before they forcefully reinstalled themselves in a mandatory update. Here, Linux is hostile soil which does not admit those seeds of shit willingly. Even if they did extend their dirty little tendrils it’s not like they can do much – the integrations they rely on just aren’t present. I can switch this system off on the weekends and completely disconnect from work. That was never my goal, but it turns out it’s a nice bonus.
The FIDO USB key solves the authenticator problem. The mini-PC solves the shitware problem. And when I get around to it I will stuff this thing full of Amiga games and give myself Pinball Fantasies on tap.
Literally the only sticking point here is Adobe Acrobat, which runs abysmally in the virtual machine. I literally only use this because I occasionally need to use a proprietary esignature system in PDF documents. I am trying to find the perfect balance between ‘a a new enough version of Windows to support Adobe Acrobat’ and ‘an old enough version that hasn’t been fundamentally compromised’. I’ve been experimenting with Windows 7 and Windows 8, without a lot of luck so far. But I’ll crack this nut yet.
Deshittification 2026 is going pretty well. The mini-PC wasn’t exactly a nothing expense, but for every literal pound it took out of my bank account it has taken a metaphorical pound off of my shoulders.