This is going to be a bit of a rant, and I apologize.
To some extent, I believe I am the boy who cried wolf on the Windows 11 front. I both hate it and run it every day. But look—there’s a lot to love about the operating system. It’s functional, it runs games out of the box, and most importantly: it works for most people. Nobody’s denying that.
All of that comes at a cost, however. One that a lot don’t see. Quite literally, in fact, as the biggest issue right now is that Windows 10 and 11 were (and still are) a privacy nightmare. The most egregious thing Microsoft is doing is removing local accounts and any bypasses to get around the abritrary requirement they’ve set. The only reason I can think of that they’ve set this for, by the way, is likely to sell ads to you. In a proprietary operating system. That you paid a license for. How is this okay?!
Honestly at the end of the day, I don’t think Windows is the right platform for most people. Most choose it because there’s a level of comfort there. I get that. For me, however, I grew up on Linux and remember what it was like back then. Things have changed dramatically over the years. Anti-cheat compatibility hell is unfortunately still alive and well, no thanks to Tim Sweeney (CEO of Epic and someone who comes across as having a massive ego) of course.
It’s also worth pointing out that Windows 11 has been steadily losing market share for the past couple of months, according to the GlobalStats StatCounter. That gives you a pretty good idea of what we’re looking at here. I’d hazard a guess that most of the folks keeping Windows 11’s marketshare up as high as it is fall into three categories: 1) people who want to play games that have anti-cheat, 2) people who buy prebuilts and don’t even know what we’re talking about here, or 3) people who just really don’t want to switch away from Windows.
The folks in categories 2 and 3 may not necessary know what the trade-offs are. You’re giving up any semblance of privacy. You’re agreeing to giving away so much data to Microsoft by default. In my experience, they’ve toggled these data collection settings on after various Windows Updates. Without consent, in all cases. Again, how is this okay?!
I cannot underscore enough how dangerous this is. It is so dangerous, in fact, that it is my opinion (much like everything in this piece) that businesses subject to significant privacy laws like HIPAA shouldn’t be running Windows at all in their stack. Any business who does, I have asked them not to even place records in those systems because I cannot guarantee they are secure.
And Windows certainly has enough security vulnerabilities these days…