What most people don't realise is that this enshittification has been ongoing since a long time, about the time of Windows 8 and the introduction of "Metro"/UWP apps. The Control Panel was the first victim - replaced by the shitty Settings app which we saw in Win10. But along the way, MS have been slowly replacing the good ol' small and fast win32 apps with highly bloated UWP versions. It's not just Notepad now, every core Windows app is a UWP app.
People don't realise how much bloat this is. The new Snipping tool for instance is 449 MEGABYTES, whereas it used to be only a few KB in size. Same with Paint, Calculator etc - all bloated UWP apps.
UWP was a mistake, they should've stuck to win32, at least for core apps.
I don't know if it's an option for you, but my workplace provides me with a Citrix VDI that I remote into from my BYOD Linux laptop. So I use the VDI for all the windows-only stuff, and everything else is web-based/has a PWA (like Teams, Outlook, Office etc), which works fine in Linux.
Can't speak for others, but this one is a fairly obvious vulnerability for someone who's in this field - similar bugs have existed back in the day in web browsers, and even somewhat recently on other platforms like Android (messages app) etc. Basically anything that displays clickable links, or renders web content etc - there's a high probably of there being a vulnerability, you just need to test a few well-known scenarios (and there are automated test suits for these things too).
The moment Microsoft started adding crap to Notepad, we knew that it was only a matter of time before such a vulnerability cropped up.
They did ultimately kill it though - and then they re-created it as a bloated UWP version that is an insane 449 MEGABYTES in size! The old win32 Snipping Tool used to be only a few kilobytes...
When was the last time you tried it? Assetto Corsa EVO has a Gold rating on ProtonDB[1] and apparently SimHub also works fine, according to the SimHub forums[2].
> Kinda wish i could run everything my family wants on Debian. I know i could do that right now, but the wife and kids will never get used to that if they have to use Microsoft products in their working and school life.
You won't know until you try. My mum used all versions of Windows from 3.1 till Windows 7. She hated Windows 8, and that's when I decided to switch her to Linux (with XFCE) - and she felt the UI was a lot more familiar to her than Windows 8. I recently showed her a few screenshots of Windows 11, and she finds her current desktop (now on KDE) a lot more familiar than Windows 11. Same with Office, she prefers the older style toolbar of LibreOffice than the ribbon UI of modern versions Office.
So maybe install it on a spare device as a trial and see how they like it?
I've set up Ergo and KiwiIRC before, and it seemed pretty cool. I even enabled the Jitsi plugin in KiwiIRC, so it was like an indie alternative to Slack or Teams. I turned it off years ago, but if I were to do that again, I might try with UnrealIRCd.
People don't realise how much bloat this is. The new Snipping tool for instance is 449 MEGABYTES, whereas it used to be only a few KB in size. Same with Paint, Calculator etc - all bloated UWP apps.
UWP was a mistake, they should've stuck to win32, at least for core apps.