I killed windows with Linux

For many years I’ve had at least one Windows machine and at least one OSX machine (and then everything else runs linux). As MS started pushing this (and as Proton and Lutris got good enough to support almost any Windows software I would need to run, mostly games) I finally made the jump to zero Windows machines about a year and a half ago. Don’t miss it.

It’s pretty clear to me that Microsoft wants your PC to be just like your phone: closed-source vendor-only hardware and software with all user data cryptographically linked to your identity. Coupled with social media and internet mass surveillance, device level surveillance will fully enable the fascist takeover of the United States, and other countries. There are untold riches in selling your device-level actions to an authoritarian government so they can eliminate electoral opposition, and to advertisers who will advertise and capture insights at the OS level.

We have been building the surveillance state for decades, and now there is a federal power that is willing to use it not just extra-judicially, but against its own citizens to suppress their constitutional rights. ICE is already using this power to arrest and disappear lawful citizens without trial. Protesting in a city where the national guard is illegally deployed? Better not bring your phone or speak about it online or do anything on your phone relating to it, really. Hell, eventually you won’t be able to safely speak out loud anywhere even near a mobile phone. The Great Eye is ever watchful.

Imagine no more covert device interception, no more packet-level analysis from expensive secret rooms at your ISP, and no more digging through phone records and social media posts - just organized, searchable, chatbot queryable information updated hourly and purchased from Apple, Microsoft, and Google with your tax dollars about what you think, where you go, what you buy, what you do, and who you talk to every minute of every day, with an integrated secret police ready to arrest you at a moments notice of thought-crime or an attempt to exercise your rights. In the end, an AI agent will just tell them where to go and who to arrest. An authoritarian’s dream.

All the attention you’ve paid and all the work you’ve done preserving your privacy is about to come to fruition. And it still won’t be enough to save us.

I’ve had zero Windows physical computers in my life for something like seven years now. If I do for some strange reason need Windows for something, I’m perfectly capable of putting it into a virtual machine and running it for as long as needed.

With that said, I have not had to do that for quite a while.

Yet more for the mountainous pile of proof proprietary software cannot be trusted and is therefore fundamentally not fit for purpose.

I’ve never looked at it as one OS vs another. I think they all have their place. I still maintain a very locked down W10, and I run Linux and Mac. I was wondering tho, if MS would ‘patch’ the ability to log in to a local account because that’s the only way I’d log in to Windows.

I’m on Graphene and deleted Windows for ParotOS home edition with a secure router. I’ve just about halted all of my data collection.

Buy x86 hardware and install Linux on it.