I'm not saying there have been zero useful improvements in later Windows releases, but 7 looked good and did what you told it to. "Openness" is a very abstract idea but "Only does what you tell it to" is a selling point for Linux.
You know it's not going to upload all your documents to OneDrive and then erase them from the computer.
I was recently connecting to some server with the Windows 8 derived version of Windows Server and gosh that full screen start menu is stupid with a mouse.
Not a fan of those aquarium PC cases though, they sacrifice airflow for aesthetics which isn't a great shout. I have a 5090 and a 9950X in a more traditional case and my temperatures are fine with air cooling alone. Not sure you'd get away with that in an aquarium case with poorer airflow, at least without it sounding like a hairdryer all day.
Great reviews back you could get cases with multi-layered sound deadening side panels instead of windows.
There’s a whole spectrum of PC gamers, and I think Linux+Proton can appeal to most of them. Let the people spending $10,000 on a glowing case make their own bad decisions.
I also have a glowing case PC. Out of the box, it's possible to change the fan light color patterns from Linux.
I had one problem putting Devuan on it:
If you plug the gaming keyboard 2.4GHz dongle into the monitor, the bios doesn't enumerate far enough down the USB tree to find it. So, you can't enter the bios and tell it to boot from USB. Then, the windows setup screen pops up.
After a few force reboots (M$ removed the "shut down cleanly" button from the language chooser), Windows goes into deep diagnostics mode on each boot trying to figure out why it keeps crashing out during the install flow. So, each debug step of "why can't I get into the bios?" takes a few minutes.
The solution was to plug the keyboard dongle directly into the box. The only time the fan has come on after boot (I think it likes to knock the dust off itself when it turns on) was when I told it to download my steam library all at once.
Not sure what language chooser you're talking about here, but if you're trying to shutdown Windows without hybrid shutdown to access the uefi, there's two switches you can use with shutdown.exe: `shutdown /s /t 0` will perform a full shutdown without hibernating the system session (not hybrid shutdown, that can be done with another parameter). If you want to reboot into your UEFI menu, use `shutdown /r /fw /t 0`
I may be confusing the time parameter, it might be `/t now` and not `/t 0`; I usually use a dedicated command to reboot to UEFI via slickrun.
