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Windows is a good and stable OS with a reasonable privacy, BUT ONLY if the first thing you do in a new PC with Windows, to spend an afternoon disabling and throwing out a ton of junk, trials, unnecessary services and functions and most of the telemetry. So if you have a fast and compliant OS. Luckily Windows allows all this, but naturally it requires an advanced user (registry and servicelists can be a comanche territory if you don't exacly know what you do) and M$ does not offer much documentation and help on this topic either, of course. But in the new online subscription version they will naturally nip these possibilities in the bud.
You can't disable the tracking properly at all so no clue where you get that reasonable privacy first...
Yo can desactivate completly all telemetries, if you want. But it isn't very usefull. Privacy is often misunderstood, a privacy problem can be when personal data is leaked, your activities on- and offline, but not so much technical details of your PC in case an error report is sent for a driver or other issue, if they send a report about the version of Windows, searches for security updates and patches, things like that that do not compromise privacy at all, because it is data that is identical to millions of other users who use a similar system. Alll other you can block, desactivate or desinstall, apart simply avoiding to use EDGE or Bing por searches, using instead you prefered browser and search engine, which you surely do. I use the Portmaster app, with which I controll all the outgoing and incomming traffic, even blocking it if needed, because of this I know that there isn't any strange thing that compromises privacy.
You can implement Telementry in a privacy preserving way if you put in some effort but a lot of technical details are anything but unique and absolutely a risk to your privacy, not to talk about what big tech sometimes calls Telemetry. You can disable the majority of tracking in Windows but that takes literal hours and a lot of knowledge and the highest settings (if you aren't on the enterprise version) still tell you that some data is send to Microsoft servers without specifiying what that is. Portmaster is a cool app but all you can see there are servers your computer connects to and every Windows computer unless it's cribbled down to the point where updates are disabled connects to Microsoft servers which is okay but also ensures that you can't know from that data...
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Lol, I am viewed as an absolute Wizard by some of my friends in IT, because I am not at all afraid of RegEdit. Just don't touch anything at all without triple checking that that is in fact the key you want to be playing with.
I'll have to remember "Comanche Territory"!
Use Winternals sysmon to suss out problem registry keys and file permissions and their minds will be blown.
Yes, no much problem with the cleartext software part, but the other where you see only numbers are not so easy, just easy to turn your PC into a Paperweight. This really isn't very intuitive
Easier the Services, although you can also screw up there
Windows is a good and stable OS with a reasonable privacy
{Looks around confused}
What the hell dimension did I walk into?!?
I mean, hes not wrong if hes talking about Windows 7.
if hes talking about 10 or 11, then the dudes clearly on LSD.
At least W10 in this point isn`t different from W7, not sure in W11 and user intervencion with W12 and W365 online with subscription ends completely. Until now you can still gut Windows to your like, without LSD, maybe with some Tranxilium.
Read also the rest what is necessary to make Windows private and stable. Nothing new that Windows by default is a privacy nightmare, but you can change it, but how to do this is not in the Windows Helpfile.
If my OS installs broken by default. I'm just going to use something that's not broken. Simple as that.
Just the fact that windows has a hidden "true administrator" account that you have to use for some stuff, and is not easily accessible makes it way harder to take control of your own hardware.
Linux has the same thing, with the root account, but you can access it from a single
sudo sucommand in a terminal (which is mostly pointless since sudo itself executes commands with the highest priviledges).Also, Microsoft, not every damn thing needs a GUI. I'd rather have a good command line experience than having to trifle through the registry.
I know all this, I already mentioned elsewhere that I laugh when some users say they don't use Linux, because it is an OS for advanced users. No, it is precisely Windows that requires a more advanced user than Linux, when you really need to modify something, which naturally cannot be done with the GUI and requires using the console (cmd). On Linux this is the rule for everything (although less and less), on Windows you can do most of it with GUI, but not all of it, if you don't want to use a third party app. In General Windows is only easier and more intuitive to use superficially, but in depth it is a minefield, much more complicated and less intuitive than Linux.
What trials?
Only thing I had to remove was Skype and there are tools that let you do whatever you want in a matter of minutes.
Yes, there are some tools which can help, eg https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer, also Windows itself has the GodMode, but it need somewhat more than this and only remove Skype, MS Store and Cortana.
I don't use Windows, but doesn't the LTSC and/or Enterprise edition come with better defaults?
I don't know, I've the Home edition and this came by default with a lot of crap and services to "improve the User experience" as they call it euphemistically and that can only be understood sarcastically.
Yeah, LTSC is basically how Windows should be, with less bloatware and security updates only.
or the server version. But it is difficult and/or expensive for ordinary users to use any of the unbloated versions.
Yeah, cause shockingly enterprise customers don't like the idea of microsoft taking big chunks of data for no rhyme or reason.
Maybe I'm just really fast but it takes me about 10 minutes. About the same amount of time I spend installing and customing a fresh Linux install.