SymmetricalDataSecurity: The Roll-Out of Windows 11 Is the Perfect Time to Decide to Switch to Linux

Windows 11 rolled out on October 5th on new computers. Users with existing compatible Windows 10 computers should be receiving it soon, if they have not already. No, technically, the upgrade to Windows 11 is not optional. All I can tell you is to check with Microsoft to see if your computer is compatible, because the requirements have been in such flux over the past few months that no one seems to really know for sure which computers will eventually be able to run Windows 11. One thing is clear, however, Windows 11 functionality is pretty much the same as Windows 10 functionality. But, while the ability of users to get things done on their PC's will not change much, Microsoft will have more control over your PC than ever before. Correction, Microsoft will have more control over "its" PC than ever before, because that is how Microsoft has thought of your PC since Windows Vista stopped asking for your permission to update itself on your hard drive.

The roll-out of Windows 11 is the perfect time to re-evaluate your stand on Windows. Do you want to continue using an operating system that becomes more controlling and invasive every year? Do you want to continue using an operating system with annoying bugs that have existed for years, if not decades? With bugs that may never be fixed? With an operating system with such a huge attack surface that it cannot be made even relatively secure? Do you want to continue playing Microsoft's shell game, where menus and applications and terminology are constantly changing, likely solely to trick you into believing that Windows is improving somehow? Do you want to continue giving your money to a company that seems to treat you as nothing more than a faceless "consumer" to be manipulated? Or, do you want to refuse to give Microsoft any more of your money for its buggy, hard-to-use software? Might the roll-out of Windows 11 be the perfect time to bite the bullet and finally decide to switch to a better operating system?

Let us look at a few of the problems with Windows. Some have existed for a while, and some are new to Windows 11.

Windows

Without significant effort and some esoteric knowledge, a user cannot run Windows on any storage device other than his computer's primary hard drive. Windows was not designed to be run from a USB flash drive or any type of external hard drive. This means a normal user cannot boot whatever computer he wants with the same external hard drive and carry it around with him from computer to computer.
When a user's hard drive dies, his Windows license may disappear. He cannot copy Windows from a previous hard drive or from a backup. He must reinstall it, reactivate it, and perhaps pay for a new license.
Microsoft seems to me to have strategically left out various parts of the Windows operating system at various times over the decades, depending on the prevailing market forces at the time. My strong suspicion is that that Microsoft has often done this solely to force users to pay extra for needed capabilities. Missing capabilities have at times included a reasonably full-featured word processor bundled with the operating system. To my knowledge, Microsoft has never included a compiler in the Windows operating system for compiling code that users write themselves. Microsoft has at various times left out a number of needed utilities--like those for cloning an existing Windows installation and copying it to a new drive, or for making backups that actually work reliably, or for compressing files, or for identifying and correcting a number of disk problems, or for measuring disk performance, or for burning CD's and DVD's, or for reading ebooks and PDF files, or for converting image files between formats, or for diagnosing and correcting Windows registry problems, or for better monitoring program and network activity, or for diagnosing wifi problems, or for robustly downloading various types of files from the Internet, or even for robustly copying files from one storage device to another, or for scanning for viruses.
Windows has become a huge, bloated operating system that runs slowly and takes up far too much RAM and hard drive space.
Windows updates whenever it wants, not when you want it to. So, when you stand up for that big presentation in front of God and everyone, your computer may just tell you to go to hell. The only ways to prevent this are to tell Windows you have a metered Internet connection or to keep your computer off the Internet.
Windows 10 and 11 send telemetry to Microsoft. No one but Microsoft knows exactly what data is being collected from their computers, and most users do not know how to easily stop it.
Windows 10 and 11 privacy settings are not turned on by default, and they are complicated. So, users can easily give Microsoft access to their data without realizing.
The distinction between what data is saved on a Windows computer's hard drive and what data is saved in the cloud is becoming more blurred over time. So, a user may not be aware that some data that he wants to be local is actually saved in the cloud, where Microsoft may sift through it at its leisure. Perhaps Microsoft should be renamed "Micro$ift".
For many years, Windows has been, and it apparently still is, insecure by design (see this also). So, Microsoft's statements about increasing Windows security with each new version appear to be largely security theater.
Every user must have a Microsoft account to install Windows 11. If you do not have access to the Internet, you are out of luck.
New Windows computers come with huge amounts of crapware for the user to remove, if he knows how.
Windows 10 and 11 subject users to annoying advertisements that most will desperately want to turn off. Microsoft, how unprofessional can you get? Yes, this is how Microsoft thinks of its customers, as a captive audience. And, some of these advertisements are even causing Windows 11 to crash! But, since when is Windows crashing a new phenomenon?
Do you want your Windows desktop to look completely different? Well, you are out of luck. Windows only has one graphical user interface, the one Microsoft wants it to have.

Frankly, besides those who are forced by their employers to use Windows, the only excuse anyone has for still using it is that they don't know any better. For decades, I have watched friends and coworkers suffer mostly silently with Windows. And, for much of that time, I have suffered along with them--although not so silently. I think most Windows users have put up with it for so long for two reasons. First, they have never had the experience of using a good operating system. I was fortunate enough back in the mid eighties to be exposed to Unix, and that experience has given me a much different perspective on Windows than the vast majority of Windows users have had. The second reason I believe users have stayed with Windows so long is that, until around the mid 2000's, they have had no real alternative.

Admittedly, Windows had a vital role to play back in the eighties and nineties. It helped standardize the PC industry, which allowed greater efficiency in software development, which in turn lowered the prices of PC's. Unfortunately, Microsoft often wielded Windows in a heavy-handed monopolistic way, which reduced innovation in the PC industry.

Since the mid 2000's, we have had an alternative to Windows. It is called Linux. I am speaking of the generic Linux that is designed for general-purpose computing, not the more locked-down versions like Android and Chrome OS. Is Linux perfect? No, it is not. But, Linux has come such a long way from its unassuming beginnings in the early nineties that it is frankly hard to believe. It began as a buggy piece of junk that no one but a masochist or an absolute technofreak would use. Today, it is a highly-configurable, modern, powerful, and eminent operating system that is usable by nearly everyone. Were Linux to be more widely adopted, those who would use their Linux computers for nothing more than Internet surfboards would not even notice that they were not using Windows. Those who are now Windows "power users" would definitely have a learning curve. But, once they had put in the effort, I think nearly every current Windows power user would eventually admit that the effort had been worthwhile.

Despite the huge success of Android and Chrome OS, I do not expect to see the mass adoption of the general-purpose-PC flavor of Linux any time soon. Windows is like an aircraft carrier plowing through the sea of the PC industry. It has momentum that is unlikely to dissipate in the next few years. Also, in today's PC industry, any product without a huge company financing an enormous advertising campaign does not seem to get far, and Linux will never have that. Despite this, even Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall and included Linux into Windows as Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Though many informed and intelligent people claim that Microsoft is a different company than in the past, in my view, WSL merely represents Microsoft's usual strategy of destroying its competition with "embrace, extend, extinguish". In this case, however, I believe Microsoft's strategy will fail. The Linux development community is not a corporate competitor that can be killed by choking off its revenue stream. It exists without the backing of investors, a pool of marketers, and an advertising budget. Linux developers have also had one huge advantage over Microsoft. They have not had to play the money-grabbing game that every company must play or die (I am, of course, excluding companies that survive for years on investment money acquired through the pretense of working on a viable future product). As long as the Linux development community remains non-commercial, they are free to behave in a very different way and produce a very different type of product than Microsoft's. Unfortunately, the Linux development community seems to be changing, and not necessarily for the better, but that is a topic for another article written by someone more knowledgeable about the subject than me.

We have seen how Windows behaves and how it treats its users. Let us now look at how Linux behaves and how Linux treats its users.

Linux

Linux runs from a bootable USB stick, external hard drive, CD, or DVD, as well as from a computer's internal hard drive. So you can carry a USB stick in your pocket with your favorite distribution of Linux and plug it into just about any computer you want that is older than 3 or 4 years (and many newer Dells, HP's, and Lenovos) and effectively have your Linux computer with you at all times.
If you have a Linux ISO file, you can install it wherever and whenever you like. You say you're in a submarine under 2000 feet of water, sitting on the floor of the Pacific ocean? Not a problem.
Once installed onto a hard drive, Linux should run on almost any Dell, HP, Lenovo, or other Linux-compatible computer. Two weeks ago, I installed a Linux solid state drive into my Lenovo Thinkpad T500 laptop. This was a drive that I had pulled from my Dell Latitude E6500 laptop back in March. I did not have to re-install anything, and it worked perfectly! Most computers with Intel or AMD CPU's should run Linux with relatively few problems, but computers with the newest hardware may have parts for which your preferred Linux distribution has no drivers. Since some Linux distributions have more complete sets of drivers than others, you may or may not find the drivers you need in another distribution.
Linux does not cost anything and requires no license that a user has to worry about. So, you do not have to activate or register it on line. You simply download a Linux ISO file and write it to your hard drive, or whatever storage device you want, and run it. The same ISO file can be used on an unlimited number of computers. Linux also allows you to experiment with it on a USB flash drive or USB hard drive and, if you like it, install it on your internal hard drive directly from the USB drive.
A windows manager is the software underlying a computer's graphical user interface that a user interacts with directly. It makes a Windows computer look like a Windows computer--different than a Mac or an Android computer. Some people like to point out the distinction between a windows manager and a desktop environment; I will ignore that distinction here. I do not even know how many windows managers exist for Linux. At least dozens. Perhaps hundreds. So, your Linux machine can look like a Windows PC, a Mac, a Chromebook, an Android device, or something you have never even seen before. The variety of ways that your Linux desktop can be configured is amazing. Here is a list of 48 Linux windows managers. You can even find windows managers that display continuous real-time information on your desktop--like CPU core temperatures, hard drive and RAM usage, network activity, battery charge, percentage of CPU utilization, and more. And, that capability can be added to a windows manager that does not come with it. Okay, technically, it is not part of the windows manager, but I am ignoring the distinction. The AntiX distribution of Linux is especially amenable to trying different windows managers, because it comes prepackaged with several.
Linux never updates itself without your permission, because Linux developers realize that you, not they, own your computer.
Linux does not obtain telemetry from your computer.
Linux does not monitor or track you on line.
Linux distributions with efficient windows managers run faster than Windows. In part, this is because Linux is not engaged in tracking and monitoring, nor does it rearrange the files on your computer's hard drive seemingly endlessly and for no apparent reason.
The very idea of an advertisement built into the operating system on a Linux computer is as laughable as it should be on a Windows computer.
Linux does not come with hard-to-remove crapware designed to entice users into paying for additional software.
Linux has all the utilities you will ever need. So, unlike with Windows, you will never have to buy a utility program to do something that a real operating system should support.
Linux runs all the major Internet browsers--Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi, the Tor browser, Opera--and many others. I have used many different browsers on both Windows and Linux, and I have never noticed one functioning differently on Linux than it does on Windows. This is why those who do nothing more than surf the Internet on their computers should not even notice they are running Linux instead of Windows.
Most major Linux distributions come with a software manager that allows the average user to very easily download and install nearly all additional applications that he may need. He does not have to hunt for download links on obscure websites. Most of the remaining applications that power users may need can be installed using a standard package manager like Apt. Most of the rest can be found as standalone ".deb" or ".rpm" packages. All of this software is free. It is not trialware. It is absolutely free. Some commercial companies like game developers have begun to port their games to Linux and charge for them. But, you will never accidentally download a non-free application through a Linux software manager or package manager.
Most major Linux distributions come with the LibraOffice office suite, which I have found to be faster and easier to use than Microsoft Office. LibreOffice creates files that are mostly compatible, but not completely compatible in every detail, with Microsoft Office. LibraOffice will never force you to connect to the Internet to open a file that you have previously created and saved to your computer's hard drive. In fact, all Linux applications that are not specifically designed to be used with the Internet run completely off line. Those who are fans of Microsoft's Notepad may want to try one of Linux's simpler editors, like Gedit, which also has a spelling checker.
As I discoverd a few weeks ago, even Zoom now runs on Linux.
Unlike Windows, Linux is secure by design. Sure, Linux has vulnerabilities, as does any computer operating system. But the simple fact is that Windows viruses do not run on Linux computers. Since far fewer people now use Linux than use Windows, hackers have much less incentive to create viruses for Linux. The bottom line is that far fewer viruses and other malware run on Linux than run on Windows.

To be fair, Linux has a learning curve, just as Windows does. The two work similarly (except for the invasion of privacy, etc.) for most activities in which you engage on your computer every day--surfing the Internet, composing an office document, reading a PDF, watching a movie or listening to music, talking to your friends or work colleagues on Zoom. To the average computer user, the most significant difference between the actual usage of Linux versus the use of Windows will be their overlapping collections of software applications. An individual who intends to use Linux for more than just surfing the Internet will first have to learn how to use a mostly new set of applications. The next difference will be that Linux will likely not be as compatible with some lesser-known software that you may want to download from the Internet, and this may be a challenge for Linux newbies. Linux has also not completely solved its problems of users trying to install additional software and then discovering unmet dependencies or of otherwise successful installations leading to reduced stability. By "additional software", I mean software that is not included in the ISO file of a distribution or in its software repositories. But, if you only install software with the software manager that comes with your distribution, you should not face this problem.

In my opinion, the best Linux distribution for newbies is Linux Mint. It has built-in drivers for just about all computer hardware more than 3 or 4 years old that you can imagine (and a large majority of the newer hardware). Many other high-quality, nearly bug free Linux distributions also exist. Unfortunately, I have found over the years that most reviewers do not paint clear pictures of the level of bugginess of each distribution. The only way to know this is to try a particular Linux distribution yourself on your own hardware. If you have never used Linux before, start with Linux Mint. I think you will like it. For complete installation instructions, see this Wikihow article.

Final Words

At times in this article, I have lapsed briefly into "corporate-speak", for example, in the paragraph where I compared Microsoft's presence in the PC industry to an aircraft carrier. In some ways, though accurate, this language is deceptive. It views computer users as a faceless mass that acts as a single entity with a single brain. This is the view the corporate world has of us. It sees us superficially as 2-dimensional "consumers", not as people.

Every computer user has his or her own mind. Each of us is capable of more clearly seeing our true relationship with computers and ignoring massive advertising campaigns implemented to convince the less knowledgeable that they want things that are not in their best interests. Each of us is capable of ignoring the pressure from the PC industry's marketers and choosing instead to do what is best for each of us as individuals.

If I were somehow the only person on the planet using Linux, I would still be using it for the simple reason that it is a better operating system than Windows. By that, I mean it does what I need it to do, and it does it efficiently while still treating me like a human being, not merely as a source of income. This is why using Linux is in my best interest.

I have little faith that those who are not already using Linux will be converted to it solely by what I have written here. Convincing people to do what is in their own best interests is often impossible.

Nevertheless, I wrote this article, because I felt it has valuable information to impart. I have created this website for the same reason. To paint a picture of the corporate world in the same undiscerning light in which it paints us, I will say that the corporate world expresses itself though a carefully-crafted voice, expressed through slick hundred-million-dollar advertising campaigns. In contrast, from time to time, if only briefly and faintly, regular people also manage to be heard. Though I doubt my words will change anything, I am now using this article and this website partly as my voice to tell Microsoft and the rest of the mainstream corporate world, "I am a human being, and I choose to be treated as such, whether you understand that concept or not. If you do not make products that respect me as a human being, I will spend my money elsewhere." I can, I will, and I often do.

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