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Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

> First, you get Windows for everything else (if you use the machine for personal stuff, gaming, need Office desktop apps, if you need Photoshop, etc).

Does that include all the phone-home stuff and ads as well?

I only run Windows (10) on a work laptop, and I'm guessing it's the 'Enterprise' edition, so all of that is not present. I've heard that there's a lot of intrusive garbage in the home-oriented editions: is that accurate?

(I sysadmin, so dog food Linux on my workstation.)

Edit: why the downvotes? As someone who runs an Helpdesk/IT-managed Windows laptop I have no idea what the state of the consumer Windows sphere is. The parent lists many good things: are there any bad things worth mentioning?

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I've never seen an ad in Windows 10 aside on blog posts talking about the ads, though I do have the Pro version.

The phone home stuff is likely still there though.

My Windows 10 Home Single Language license cost the OEM $50 AFAIK and despite that MS decided to put placeholder tiles on the start menu which are replaced with apps (e.g. Candy Crush) once you connect to the internet after setting up the OS and those are finished being downloaded.

Xbox app can be uninstalled, but not Xbox Game Bar? Bing on the Start menu search which for some reason I can't disable because there isn't any straightforward option for that.

When I try to download an app from Windows Store, the instant I press 'GET' button a dialogue window asking me to log into my MS account is opened upon closing which I can proceed to download the app.

I can shed some light on that. I am a long time linux user and recently brought a gaming laptop which comes pre-installed with Windows 10 Home. I made up my mind to use whatever software came with it rather than installing linux since I don't want to mess up with my system too soon. I gave away all my pro-linux biases and gave Windows a honest try. I didn't last two days with Windows, main reasons: 1) Privacy Nightmare: I was not able to login without first creating and logging in to an outlook account. They're pushing very aggressively than I'm comfortable with. And data stealing booby traps are everywhere. On the activities view, it always shows a "Keep more recent activity" button or something like that, which when clicked will send my browsing history to Microsoft servers to sync. I didn't find any way to completely uninstall edge. It rings similar to Android, we get extremely less control on our own system. For system updates, it will by default send update files to other users in the internet(like torrenting). 2)Excess data usage: When I was on linux, the data usage is almost null when idle but windows seems to be always downloading something. 3)Development: WSL2 definitely made Windows a bearable platform for development but I did encounter some problems. Installation was not straight forward, got some errors and fixed it by searching for an hour. There is no intuitive way to open bash in a terminal. Now, I don't know if I didn't search hard enough, but I was unable to setup a Ionic development environment on Windows and failed. That was when I realized windows wasn't really for me and switched to PopOS the second day. Everything expect the nvidea card worked out of the box, and fixed it after reading a couple of threads on reddit. Battery life reduced by about 1 hour as compared with Windows but I can live with that. The linux operating system and community is awesome, it is much frictionless to develop in linux than to use WSL2 in windows and you get a elegant operating system respecting our privacy than a bloated OS subsidized by data. And linux is free! I really wish linux will be around on desktops for a very long time and thanks to this recent experience, I will dread the day when Windows becomes the only available choice for personal computers.

You can create an offline account by not connecting to the net during setup.

> There is no intuitive way to open bash in a terminal.

I have the new Windows terminal setup to open the WSL2 Linux bash shell by default (and have it set so I can optionally use git bash if I need a shell in the Windows world).

Though a great way to use WSL2 is with Docker, which will leverage it for Linux environments instead of using a virtual machine (which it would do if WSL2 wasn't there). It's quite nice.

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