Wow
I fail to comprehend the reason why someone who is so paranoid about monitoring from big brother Microsoft would ever use, let alone purchase, their products. If it makes for a better OS and more relevant ads I call it a service. You may prefer wasting your time with irrelevant ads and crashing software, but my time is worth more than your paranoia. If you don't like what they do then take your money elsewhere.
I can say this as someone who ran Linux for six years because I couldn't stand Vista (and neither could my PC). Windows 10 and their newer investments in technology and open-sourcing of several major projects has changed my mind about them. I enjoy the new UI, despite all the hate from people who want another Win95 clone (I also liked Ubuntu's Unity and new Gnome desktop). They are actively working on areas that only developers would use. I never thought I'd see the day when MS would provide something like the WSL. Now I can run all my CLI tools on full-blown Ubuntu without the hassle of setting up and maintaining Cygwin. They are actively working on user-requested features for their re-vamped console, WSL, and powershell (which is another fantastic tool I was surprised to see, and even more surprised to find that they are committed to supporting for all products).
They could still be evil behind it all, I suppose, but unless you're running Linux From Scratch on a bootloader you wrote for your own custom hardware (compiled with a from-scratch compiler) you can never really be sure someone isn't looking over your shoulder.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
