Blog 9th August 2026 – Adopting Linux Late one evening around 2 months ago I noticed our little movie streaming Windows 10 HP Pavilion PC had a pending Windows update. I kicked that off. That little machine does have history given a kind soul donated it to me after it previously died due to a 256GB SSD sector error. After a format and full reinstall of windows 10 (using the windows recovery software and a windows 10 ISO) it burst back into life and worked fine for maybe a year or so. The machine was elderly but still usable; running a 2 core Intel i3-5005U CPU with 16GB of RAM. Anyway around 2 days after the Windows update I tried to turn it on, but found it was now properly dead. There followed a week of me trying every trick in the book to get Windows 10 reinstalled either on the existing 256GB SSD or on a brand new 512GB SSD. Nothing I tried worked. All the hardware passed HP BIOS tests (SSD, memory, all the I/O) but every time the BIOS handed control to the Windows 10 ISO, the process simply hung. I knew the ISO was good and I’d even tried a memory stick with an older ISO build of Windows 10 (which had been used in the past) but all to no avail. In tests, I’d left the machine in the hung state overnight just on the off chance a locked hardware issue might time out and resolve - but it never did. I tried everything but have to admit, it defeated me. On the off chance, I used rufus to create an ISO of linux Mint which installed first time, perfectly. The machine ran (and continues to run) Mint like a charm. I’d played with Linux Mint and the Ubuntu distro back in 2022 and really liked both, but a stumbling block for switching away from windows was ASPX, Visual Studio and Microchip support for microcontrollers. I wanted to be able to code against all three and while I can do some of that on Linux, I just can’t do it all. Windows 10 was good enough and didn’t get in my way to much, so I was happy to stick with it. ...and then along came Windows 11 to royally focus my mind on where this operating system is heading. Windows 11, by design, can’t work on perfectly adequate but slightly older hardware when those machines don’t have the trusted platform module or TPM installed. I can’t know for sure how many Windows 10 machines were excluded from running Windows 11 (I own three of them) but I’ve read that it was around 55-57% - a hell of a lot of machines. TPM can be a good thing. For example it offers measured boot, meaning it can be used to confirm no one has altered the code involved in booting a machine (BIOS, option ROMs, bootloader etc). Those areas are vulnerable to attack so making sure no malicious code has altered them is a good thing. But on the other hand, the same feature can be used to ensure you only run software on your PC that Microsoft has said is ok... In that case you might need to visit a Microsoft webstore every time you buy software which would ensure they get a cut from every sale. Meanwhile you’d be stuck with them as the sole supplier. Microsoft are making this happen by introducing the necessary hardware requirement to deal with the key signing issue (ie: TPM) and by adding what they call Smart App Control - which basically means if they don’t approve of an application, they can deny key signing and you won’t be able to run it at all. It strikes me as ironic that Bill Gates claimed he never wanted Microsoft to become like IBM and yet this TPM stuff is the sort of stunt IBM would have pulled back in the day. Yes you own the machine, but they will control what you can do with the machine - which means you really don’t own anything at all. Then I got to use Windows 11 professionally and that’s when my motive to change really strengthened. First thing I had to switch off was the tiresomely irritating snap-window feature. Millions had figured out how to switch that off before me judging by the number of posts. I also met the inescapable but woefully illiterate, ignorant and comically useless AI “assistant” called copilot... which had been shoehorned into every application... including, er... notepad. ...notepad. Really?!? Copilot (which should be renamed Clippy V2) felt a little like my own personal stalker, always armed with a dumb irrelevant opinion while constantly looking over my shoulder to offer “help” that I hadn’t asked for and neither wanted nor needed. My comments regarding this ghastly “assistant” are polite... most online are not. Personally, the breach of consumer trust has been the final straw. PC Security ran tests on a clean Windows 11 machine sitting on a desk with no user logged in and no apps opened and found that over 24 hours it quietly made contact with dozens of non Microsoft servers (advert networks, market research) and they found it didn’t matter if you adjusted the privacy settings right down. The only way to prevent this spying would have required operating system policy controls but unsurprisingly consumer editions of Windows 11 don’t include these. That’s worrying enough and even more so because it felt like a trend - where the very design of Windows 11 seemed to discard consumer privacy as a matter of policy. Applications like 365 Outlook will quite happily pass (to Microsoft) the credentials you supply for any of your alternate email accounts. One can see why Microsoft built 365 Outlook in the light of the subscription model - but what doesn’t make sense was the backward step of moving a stable reliable application like the old outlook to a web based client where 60% of the useful functionality had been ditched but deceptive “features” had been added like the deliberate insertion of adverts to your inbox designed to look indistinguishable from ordinary emails.
After buying Windows 11, you’ll face another bunch of infuriating hoops to jump through just to install it. Optional before, you now require a Microsoft account before you can install Windows 11 and you can rely on Microsoft to bombard you with constant demands to switch on their cloud storage “onedrive” solution. In fact, killing onedrive on Windows 10 became a sport for me, requiring a significant reconfiguration (including a registry edit) but every time there is a new windows update, it returns. To date, I’ve lost count of the number of times I've had to remove this annoying and unwanted "feature". Paul Thurrot wrote an interesting wider piece called The Madness of Copilot in Windows 11 (Premium) last year which is well worth a read. This covers a much broader observational argument but within it, we'd definately see eye to eye. In the snippet I've shown here, he was also forced to do battle with onedrive and despite him saying no, umpteen times, it simply enabled it anyway.
Review of Windows 11 by Paul Thurrott
Uninstalling the horrible Microsoft Edge browser is another step that is only ever temporary (assuming you can actually figure out how to do it at all) because come the next Microsoft update (which you won’t be able to stop), Edge will magically reappear... and that brings us to the whole issue of Microsoft updates - occurring frequently and with no control over what is being updated and when the update will occur. The built in windows 11 search function called Recall (which no surprise, uses AI) is yet another privacy horror story given it turned out to be taking screen grab images of your desktop and adding those to a searchable database every time you did something. Yes, the hundreds of thousands of these images it was storing were held locally (good thing) - but they were being created all the time, no matter what you did (bad thing) including when you signed in to your online bank, typed emails, sent private chats and when you visited any website. At the time of writing, Recall doesn’t sync all those images to the cloud - but Microsoft could change that with a single update. You’d be none the wiser and you wouldn't be able to say no. Windows 11 has systematically eliminated your right to privacy. The French government are now phasing out all Microsoft products across 2.5 million government systems. Part of that decision is a fear of overdependence on American tech along with cutting the cost of licensing - they refer to it as regaining digital sovereignty. But I shouldn't be surprised if a significant motivational factor are the privacy concerns they have with Microsoft products going forward... and honestly, who can blame them? The French are switching to Linux. I’m doing the same. Comment | Back to Quick Links...