I replaced every Microsoft app on Windows with open-source tools, and here's how it went

Parth Shah

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Windows desktop has always felt like a curated showroom for Microsoft’s latest services. After all, the company’s defaults are baked into every corner of the OS. But what happens when you strip away Edge, Outlook, OneDrive, and more to make room for a purely open-source workflow?

For the last month, I have replaced every stock Microsoft app with a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) alternative to see if a privacy-focused, community-driven desktop is actually viable in 2026. Here is the good, the bad, and the broken of my open-source Windows experiment.