Every year that goes by, the less my colleagues give funny looks when I talk about being a Linux user. These days it's more often envy -- my default browser never changes, I can put my start menu wherever I like, my hard-drive never spontaneously encrypts itself, my user account never deletes and replaces itself with an always-online doppleganger. These statements are somehow impressive brags and that amuses me greatly.

Get on linux mint. There are dozens of us!

To anyone who used Linux once upon a time and got scared off - try it again. Nowadays so much works without any config, driver support is so much better and, at least with my last year using Fedora, it's incredibly stable.

And if you get stuck, ChatGPT is so good at helping you through the experience. Also, IMO, once you spend a week or so to get used to Gnome desktop environment it's better than both windows and macos.

Never did. I am reminded of the whole "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" tactic they use(d).

It's pretty brutal.

I adopted Edge when it started out as a more lightweight Chrome. After that I eventually just got used to it, like a frog being slow-cooked? And now I find it hard to leave, even though it's gotten more and more bloated. Edge has a really nice text to speech feature with natural voices that I use a lot. I've read a lot of books in the two years I've been using edge. If I could find an alternative with that feature that was also cross-platform I would gladly switch in a heartbeat.

It started as the no frills chrome, and slowly descended into madness

I think it is a lot of the latter at this point, tbh. Non tech-savvy folks that don't even think about the browser software at all, let alone know there are other options or seek them out.

Edge is/was(have read that windows fixed some defender issue) slightly faster than firefox.

IDK about that, there are many claims from users of it being available on stable. I believe it's another one of those A-B test things so it's only available for a subset of stable users.