If are still not using Linux, now it is a good time to start

[AnalogJoe]

I got my weekly Ask Woody newsletter which had this post from Susan Bradley:

Is Recall in your future?
By Susan Bradley

Don’t panic.

Microsoft Recall, the new Microsoft technology that records what you are doing on a Windows 11 PC so you can review (“recall”) past actions in the future, is very much in beta right now and not coming to a computer near you.

Importantly, Recall has a high bar as far as system requirements are concerned. First, a Copilot+PC is required. For some time, the only processors that could provide the necessary power were Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series, Arm-based processors with the Hexagon neural processing unit. (If you want to learn more about NPUs, see IBM’s article What is a neural processing unit (NPU)?) On December 6, Microsoft announced Windows Insider preview build versions for AMD and Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs, a signal that a wider variety of hardware will soon be available.

There’s a good chance that your recently purchased Windows 11 PC does not have a [required] Qualcomm processor and its powerful 45-TOPS NPU. That means you won’t need to worry about Recall. If you happen to buy a Copilot+ PC, Recall is optional and must be enabled manually. No matter what YouTube clickbait you may have encountered, Recall will not be installed or enabled by default. And it can be blocked by Group Policy or Registry keys. It will not be spying on you. Recall is a headline-generating feature, so there’s a lot of misinformation out there about it.

In other words, don’t panic.

More of the article via donation-subscription: https://www.askwoody.com/newsletter/

Susan goes on to say that Recall is head-scratcher for her so she's apparently not convinced either.

Yeah, don't panic, only after you forget all about it and it suddenly starts running in the background without you even noticing it. If not, I expect the usual tactics of allowing you to deactivate it, only to be reactivated after an update and without asking you.
Or maybe it won't be optional but mandatory. And after all the frogs have been slowly heated up to the boiling point, people will start saying that "it isn't that bad, and they said that none of your pics will be stored in their servers." Or they will start saying the same old "I don't care being spied on, I have nothing to hide." I have nothing to hide either, however, I still close the curtains in my house and do not appreciate people looking through my window.

In any case, I am not going to wait and find out what the outcome will be. Better to switch to Linux now.

[mediatechnology]

I agree with you but that time is not now.
Ms. Bradley, later in the article, is very concerned about the security aspects and raises many of the same points you do.
There will be third-party software to break recall.
At the moment I'm more pissed that MS "steals" my file associations after upgrades and sometimes after reboots.

Recall will collect information on you that the NSA already has.
They already are: Any interaction you have with the internet or other communications providers is already being stored and analyzed regardless of your OS.

"I still close the curtains in my house and do not appreciate people looking through my window."
If you have Wifi they can already see inside your house and visually map you and the room.

I don't carry my cell phone into public spaces - it stays in the car and I have a Faraday pouch for it thanks to "track and trace."

Does the front-facing camera on your phone have tape over it?
It should.
When you want to have a private in-person conversation do you put every cell phone in the microwave and close the door?
You should.

[AnalogJoe]

I agree with you but that time is not now.
Ms. Bradley, later in the article, is very concerned about the security aspects and raises many of the same points you do.
There will be third-party software to break recall.
At the moment I'm more pissed that MS "steals" my file associations after upgrades and sometimes after reboots.

Recall will collect information on you that the NSA already has.
They already are: Any interaction you have with the internet or other communications providers is already being stored and analyzed regardless of your OS.

"I still close the curtains in my house and do not appreciate people looking through my window."
If you have Wifi they can already see inside your house and visually map you and the room.

I don't carry my cell phone into public spaces - it stays in the car and I have a Faraday pouch for it thanks to "track and trace."

Does the front-facing camera on your phone have tape over it?
It should.
When you want to have a private in-person conversation do you put every cell phone in the microwave and close the door?
You should.

I already thought that Windows had become incredibly flawed regardless of Recall, so moving to Linux due to Recall was just the final push I needed.
My brother bought a laptop with something like 64 GB of RAM. I believe it is an Intel i9 processor, etc.. a monster of a laptop. The other day he was complaining about how his laptop would constantly start running full steam ahead with the fan at max and the CPU at more than 50% usage, just by being idle looking at the desktop. This is due to the bazillion background processes of Windows 11, the never-ending updates, tons of useless "features", telemetry, indexing, etc... It is absolutely ridiculous having to invest lots on hardware just to waste it on that. When Recall, or something similar to Recall, becomes ingrained in future updates or OS versions, the amount of resources it will consume will be off the scales.

With regards to Mac I can say that I like that their OS is based on Linux and works much better than Windows. However, their hardware is much inferior if one takes into account price, like that time when an executive tried to gaslight people into thinking that 8GB on a Mac were like 16GB on other systems https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/09/ ... B%20on%20a. I also dislike the whole Apple fan club and culture, the insane prices, the planned obsolescence and the inability to be able to repair or easily upgrade their products by myself.

Bottom line is that Linux is the way to go.

[AnalogJoe]

Well, it seems like things are not so black and white after all.

The whole idea of Linux = free&private, Windows = paid&spyware, may not be entirely accurate after all, at least in some cases.

Here is a video, which YouTube claims was posted 11 years ago, in which Richard Stallman (Google him) describes how the creators of Ubuntu are essentially carrying out the same tracking and data collection practices of Microsoft and Apple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8CNp-vksc

Even though it seems that newer versions of Ubuntu no longer have this "feature", which was probably removed due to user backlash, the issue remains the same: Linux is not a panacea. I've tried newer versions of Ubuntu on a different laptop and it felt "heavy" and more sluggish than Mint, it has some "buy me" buttons if you want to pay for the Ubuntu Pro version or extra features, etc.... Overall it feels as Windows as Linux can get (the bad aspects of Windows, that is), and I didn't like it in general, to be honest.

This issue raises a series of logical questions: Which Linux distros have these sort of "features" that track you and which don't? If so, exactly what data are they collecting from the user? etc....

I tried installing Debian which, as my brother says, "It is Linux for people who like doing things the hard way". Even Linus Torvalds mentioned that he doesn't use Debian because it is "hard to install" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHGTs1NSB1s.

So, bottom line, I do think that Linux is a lot better than Windows in almost every aspect, but it appears that it may not be as wonderful and airtight secure in terms of privacy as one may be led to believe. And the choices between distros seem to be ease of use/less guarantee of privacy vs IT-level-terminal-only-painstaking-coding-computer-science-PhD-dissertation skils/more privacy.

[mediatechnology]

I tried Linux Mint from a bootable CD and liked it though I couldn't tell how fast it was.

Have you tried Zorin? https://zorin.com/os/pro/
It seems very polished.
I also tried it from a boot CD many years ago.

[AnalogJoe]

I tried Linux Mint from a bootable CD and liked it though I couldn't tell how fast it was.

Have you tried Zorin? https://zorin.com/os/pro/
It seems very polished.
I also tried it from a boot CD many years ago.

I am really happy with Linux Mint. I have zero issues with it to be honest, aside from the fact of not being able to run all of my Windows programs. Although I can run the vast majority of them with Wine or Play-On-Linux. In fact, some Windows programs, like LTSpice, perform better on Linux with Wine than on Windows itself. I cannot say the same thing for other programs but, in general, I cannot complain.

When it comes to electronic simulation software in Linux I have zero issues running MicroCap, LTSpice, Tina-Ti and Qucs-S. When it comes to the recently released uSimmics (previously known as QucsStudio) it has some graphic bugs with Wine, although I am now running it with Play-On-Linux after I altered some parameters and it works ok, so far. The relatively new QSPICE, which is one of the best simulators I have tried (although it has tons of convergence issues when using many opamp models) is simply unusable with Wine. The schematic screen goes black and you can't see what you are doing. People at the QSPICE forum have been pushing over to get the issue fixed but Mike Engelhardt, the creator of QSPICE, has expressed a severe lack of interest in Linux support. To get around the issue users have created scripts to draw the circuit in Eagle, export it, and then import it in QSPICE, but that seems like a ton of work that can be avoided by just using a different simulator. I can live without QSPICE.

Other applications work decently in Linux, like MATLAB. I use MATLAB a lot but it has issues with my graphics card when running on Linux. MATLAB has no issues with my graphics card on Windows, but there is something about my graphics card on Linux that MATLAB doesn't like. Although, in general, MATLAB performs much better in Linux and there is a workaround that can make things work just fine.

I reckon that the biggest issue most people have with Linux is not being able to use the Microsoft Office suite natively. My brother uses Excel and Word every day at work. I can work with Libre Office 99% of the time and for most things I prefer LaTeX anyway. You can of course use the online version of Excel and Word, but it is not exactly the same as having the real thing.

I haven't tried Zorin but I looked at the website link you provided. It seems like a really interesting idea but I am honestly wary of what seems to be a small company selling an OS. They claim it is based on Linux and what have you, but it doesn't give me a lot of confidence. Seems like it is not simply another Linux distro but that they took care into making a new thing that works like Windows, feels like Windows, looks like Windows, but isn't Windows. Also, paying for an OS (and updates, the pro vs the business version, or whatever) after having Linux Mint for zero dollars is something hard to overcome.

[mediatechnology]

Zorin has the "core" distribution without the suite of apps that is no charge.

They've been around since 2008 IIRC.

[Heikki]

Debian is fairly easy to install. It's even easier to install from live CD or USB . Just boot your PC to the live Debian and you can install it from there by clicking install Debian icon. Before installing just check that your wifi and ethernet work. If you're not setting up a server you might want to go with Debian testing release. The testing release is still more stable than many Linux distributions. How much you need to use command line terminal depends more on the desktop environment. With GNOME desktop environment or KDE you rarely if ever need to use terminal.

With Linux AMD graphics cards are the way to go. AMD cards work right out the gate and no need to setup anything. Even gaming works great on Linux. There's a Linux version of Steam and you can play all windows games with Valve's version of Wine called Proton.

[AnalogJoe]

Debian is fairly easy to install. It's even easier to install from live CD or USB . Just boot your PC to the live Debian and you can install it from there by clicking install Debian icon. Before installing just check that your wifi and ethernet work. If you're not setting up a server you might want to go with Debian testing release. The testing release is still more stable than many Linux distributions. How much you need to use command line terminal depends more on the desktop environment. With GNOME desktop environment or KDE you rarely if ever need to use terminal.

With Linux AMD graphics cards are the way to go. AMD cards work right out the gate and no need to setup anything. Even gaming works great on Linux. There's a Linux version of Steam and you can play all windows games with Valve's version of Wine called Proton.

Thanks for the tips.

I've tried Debian before and, as my brother puts it, Debian is for people who like doing things the hard way. You have to setup everything. Even Linus Torvalds mentioned years ago that he doesn't use Debian because "It is hard to install". Maybe the installer is easier now, but everything else still requires a lot of elbow grease. Things normally given for granted, e.g., typing "sudo" to install something is not straightforward. You have to set the sudo users in a list, etc... Why? I am an EE, I don't want to be a server administrator, I just want to spend my time using the computer rather than maintaining the computer. But maybe I should give it another try in the future.

[Heikki]

Installer in the live system automatically adds the user to sudoers list. Installer in the live system is much more new user friendly than the regular Debian installer. Only thing you might have to setup afte installing the OS is a firewall and that takes two or three commands on the terminal.