Personally, I don’t like the idea of any recommendation or advertising algorithm using personal information of any kind. Though I can understand why location would be needed for advertising: in order to ensure ads for regional services are not shown outside of that region.

The kinds of data that I think should be used:
-Recommendations:
-Like history
-Watch (or view) history - specifically (and only) if I click on a post or watch more than some reasonable percentage of a video that would indicate I watched the entirety of the video.

-Advertisements:
-Location (based solely on IP)
-The content currently being viewed, based on a general categorization of the content. If I’m watching a video about technology I don’t need to be seeing ads for financial services.

I’m currently using this. It doesn’t appear to have a way to auto import a list of subscriptions. But it fits all of OPs other requests. It also has a jellyfin add on to import the videos into a library there with title and thumbnail.

If it’s been more than 30 or 60 days (can’t remember which) you will be unable to sign in if you don’t have an active internet connection. I found that out in 2022 when I had to travel for work (90 days in a fairly remote area) and the only internet connection I had was at the worksite on a company computer.

The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I’m sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on “accidentally” after some updates.

They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it’s impossible to actually do that in practice.

That’s just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don’t give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn’t even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.

They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.

Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.

So, between the inherent security nightmare that is this feature and the myriad of other things in Windows that push ads, steal user data, and generally make the simple act of using the computer less secure, when do we give Microsoft an APT designation and start treating them as the world’s largest vendor of malware on the planet?

They mention in the post that they have a list of official clients you can choose to donate to.

So, if there’s a client you use every day and that you love, consider finding it’s author in our list of official clients, and sending them a little something instead (or too).

It would probably be helpful if they included a link to that list in the post, though it is just one click from the projects homepage, and made it clearer that the list does include at least some subset of third-party clients. Though it would also be reasonable to infer that from the quote.

Something I only saw mentioned in a somewhat snarky comment in this thread (apologies if I missed it elsewhere) is that Windows has the option to do a full system image backup.

If you have an external hdd or a nas, from the Windows Backup applet in control panel (not settings) you can create a system image that will contain a full backup of your C: drive and, optionally other drives in your system. You can then restore that backup from the recovery options in your windows install media.

For the windows install media, I’d recommend using the windows media creation tool to create a usb installer on a separate usb key from your Linux installer and then setting it aside just in case. Trying to create windows install media from within Linux is, while not impossible, difficult.

Obviously, you should do all of this before committing to installing Linux to disk. Most Linux install media also functions as a live Linux environment from which you can try things out and see if things will work for you.

This is some good advice. I’d add two caveats though: - For learning the distro’s package manager, while I’d say it’s definitely good to learn it (and do so early on), I’d also say beginners should probably stay away from the command line version of it unless it’s absolutely needed. - For running commands from random websites rather than a blanket prohibition, I’d say don’t do it unless you can confidently say you understand what the command will do and are willing to take the risk that you’re wrong.

My experience has been that 1440p is noticeable jump in quality on desktop monitors but less so laptops. On desktop 4K is virtually unnoticeable, a high refresh rate, HDR, and OLED are far more noticeable.

For TV, I’ve found that it depends more on distance from the screen and resolution and bit rate of the media. I sit about 8’ from a 65” 4K tv and the difference between Blu-ray quality at 1080p and 4K is night and day.

As others pointed out, you’re missing Vista from your list. You’re also missing Windows 2000 for Workstations (between 98SE and ME) and 8.1 (between 8 and 10) both of which were pretty good releases.

Bookworm, Trixie, and Sid all currently support a total of 10 different architectures.

And looking through the Wikipedia article for Debian’s version history, most of the dropped architectures were functionally obsolete when they were dropped, or like the Motorola 68000, when support was added. (notable exceptions being IA-64 which was dropped 4 years before intel discontinued it, SPARC which is still supported by Oracle, and PowerPC.)

There is a local Administrator account in an AD environment (just like on all Windows systems), but that may be disabled.

As for the domain users, you have a locally created profile and because it caches your credentials you can sign in offline, but your account isn’t local in the sense that you could sign in offline (or without access to the domain) indefinitely. For on-prem AD, at least with 2012R2, 2012, and 2008R2 (the last versions I worked with, so can’t speak for newer) by default the length that clients held onto that cache was 30 days, but it was configurable in Group Policy. If your device was away from the domain for longer than that you would no longer be able to sign in.

Depending on how your domain is configured you might even have your profile redirected to a network share somewhere, making the account even less local.

Microsoft accounts on personal devices function in basically the same way. If they’re offline for too long you stop being able to logon, but you won’t lose data in your user folder (unless you’ve setup profile redirection to One Drive or an SMB share on a NAS).

In neither of those scenarios would I say your account is local, because a network connection is required for initial sign in and then periodically afterwards to be able to use the device with your account.

In a corporate setting you’re probably using Active Directory for authentication and don’t have a local account anyway.

So, only knives that have no legitimate purpose other than to cause harm are banned? A switch blade is banned while a filet knife is not. Both knives are equally capable of being tools for murder, but the filet knife can be used in hunting, fishing, and cooking. All legitimate uses. While the switchblade isn’t really feasible in any scenario outside of a fight.

It’s not the presence of illegitimate uses that gives rise to the ban. It’s the absence of legitimate uses.

Unless you’re using one of the more recent Win11 builds, where you won’t be able to finish OOBE without an internet connection unless you had the foresight to patch the installer beforehand.