Only tangentially related, but it does relate to tech...
As of earlier this week, I am now Windowless -- I no longer have a load of Windows at my disposal on any of my machines. I built this box some 12 years ago and at the time loaded it with Windows 7, my primary Linux OS (Mepis 11 at the time), and several other Linux offerings I was following at the time. The W7 load and Mepis 11 load were in the primary 500G hard drive, while the rest resided on an identical secondary drive.
Over the years my interest in the other Linux offerings waned and I ended up cleaning them off the secondary drive, leaving it for backups and storage. Later I installed an SSD and moved to a more up to date Linux offering, which I have been running ever since. The load of W7 and M11 remained on the old HDD.
W7 got booted a time or two over the years just for the helluvit, and was used once a year to do my taxes with Tax Act. Even at that, a couple years ago Tax Act claimed that they no longer supported W7, but that was more CYA than anything else owing to MSFT dropping support for W7 -- the software actually did work.
Earlier this week I started hearing some odd noises from my computer, very faint, and it came and went. Did a few diagnostic things, and when I went to check the file system integrity on the old hard drive, the thing went tits up -- couldn't access or even mount the drive. Catastrophic failure is the term that's used.
If it was necessary, I might be able to do some low level, high tech geeky stuff to maybe, just maybe salvage the data from the drive, but it's not necessary and I don't care -- everything was copied to my Linux load and that's backed up regularly. For all intents and purposes, that load of Windows was only there for nostalgia or my not having any other use for the drive. Other than the tax software, I've been able to do everything I've wanted with FOSS (Free Open Source Software).
And the best thing is I was able to confirm that I can still use Tax Act when the time comes. They have a browser based online version that I was pretty certain would work. I even called them last year and as far as the gal that answered knew, the online version would work as long as you have a supported, recent browser, like Google Chrome (which is available in Linux) -- she said that's what they told Mac users and she couldn't imagine running Chrome on Linux would be any different. Last year I still downloaded the Windows software and it worked, but after the drive died this week I took another stab at finding out for sure and ended up finding an entry buried in their knowledge base that specifically said to use the web based version in Linux. Sweet.
So what's my point? None really, other than it's kind of a watershed moment to be without software that 95% of the computing world thinks is necessary, and to be totally fine with it. Call me a rebel I guess.