Nintendo DS. Loved how it felt in my hands.
The DS Lite was too sharp and felt fragile. The 3DS was a gimmick, and the 2DS was the best 3DS version, but lacking folding hurt how portable it was. It never felt right having the screens exposed in my pocket. Losing GBA compatibility was also a deal breaker.
The OG DS was a perfect evolution of the GBA and I will take both of mine to my grave.
Lots of little things, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the constant pop-ups asking me to try out Copilot in Win10, harassing me daily on both on my personal PC and my work laptop.
Windows has been on thin ice since the trash fire that was Win8, and I’d only stuck with it for Nvidia driver support for gaming. I’ve been watching Proton development for years now, and putting it through its paces on my older PCs every few months, so I knew I was ready to make the switch for about a year before I finally pulled the trigger. I justified putting it off with the thought that “I can build my next PC around an AMD graphics card amd make the switch then.”
Then Win11 and all its garbage was announced, AI took off, and Microsoft started pushing their slop on my machine harder than ever. It was too much. I switched to Mint DE on my current machine and haven’t looked back.