Re: "and increasing customer delight with Windows."
"Delight." I do not think that word means what they think it means. (Disdain? Disgust maybe?)
Mint is really excellent, isn't it? I've only had it installed for a few weeks now, but already I hardly boot Windows anymore. I found that my favorite game works really well under WINE (not perfect, but close enough that it might soon get there, and it's playable now even in imperfect form), and that was the one "MUST have Windows" thing for me I thought I had up front. I've been finding Linux versions for everything else pretty well... I've used Firefox and Thunderbird exclusively since their respective initial releases, so that much was super simple.
My Win 7 install is fully updated, though, aside from the telemetry updates and those that have any kind of reference to "the latest version of Windows." Just keep it on manual installation ("Notify me of updates that are available, but let me decide whether to download and install them," or whatever the actual text is), keep the list of the bad updates handy & keep hiding the bad ones when they pop back up, and read the description text very carefully before allowing any non-critical update to be installed. And as always, keep backups of everything! Even if MS were to sneak a non-removable "security" update in that contained a Windows 10 trojan, you can always just restore from backup.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
