Threat of Software Migration

"If Microsoft adds X, or removes Y, then I'm switching to Linux!"

Those who exclaim similar outrages seldom ever carry through with their hollow threats, and if they truly cared, they would have already abandoned Windows a long time ago. Just as those who threaten relocating to another country because a certain party won the (s)elections, those who threaten switching to Linux often have no real working knowledge of the adjustments they will need to make in their migration process, in fact, if you ask said people about what Linux distribution they're planning to switch to, you'd find out that they have absolutely no idea what a "distribution" even means. This doesn't only apply to Windows as an operating system, but also YouTube as a video platform, Google as a search engine, Discord as whatever it has become, etc.

Such individuals tend to suffer from a variation of slave morality; their assumption being that if only they plead and protest loudly enough, then their master may cease beating them so harshly, despite the master's long history of known abuse. It exposes their complete lack of understanding of power dynamics and motivational forces, as they unabashedly try to bargain with a tech giant who likely views them no differently from the way that a farmer views his cattle; that being a desire to maximize their extraction of value while ensuring they're kept within the boundaries of the farm.

This is why, for example, whenever Microsoft releases a worse version of the operating system (in a way that is universally agreed upon by the entire userbase), such people begin looking left and right for ways to stay with the last version they considered to be "good" in comparison (or even downgrade to it), while ignoring the main problem which is their dependency on proprietary corporate spyware. This problem even exists in corporate-backed Linux distributions like Ubuntu, where a lot of users simply refused to upgrade from 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS.

The questions remains; why downgrade when you can switch over completely? There's plenty of better alternatives for any truly essential software, including operating systems. At this point, staying with older versions of Windows or Ubuntu and refusing to upgrade is like wanting to stay with the current slave master because the other one is even more abusive, all while you're given plenty of options to just break out of your chains.