2) When I see some app, system that connect to network which I think it should not. I just block their network connections with Windows Firewall or uninstall those app.
There is a "netsh advfirewall firewall" command that can do this from command line.
3) BTW this works very well with Windows' own service too. I block svchost.exe, Edge, SerchIndex, etc from accessing internet. svchost.exe is allowed to access local subnet for file, print sharing. When I feel like upgrade to to latest version windows 10. I turn off the firewall rules for a few hours to allow the update to go thru.
4) Only Firefox and Chrome in my windows system are allowed to connect to internet full time. The CPU usage is normally < 15% and most of the time < 10% even when playing youtube @ 1080 resolution.
The latest Firefox Quantum has less CPU usage and faster also. I love it.
5) The WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is getting better - X, xfce4-termnial now working good enough for me. I like accessing the Ubuntu shell in windows environment without the overhead of Virtualbox.
I have a beloved 2015 MBP that I'm trying to keep alive, but it's becoming a little underpowered and it's not upgradeable. New MBPs are a non-starter with the port and keyboard situation and my coworkers all hate them. Then I have a maxed out XPS 13 which is a very nice and capable machine that suits me completely, except that it has a malicious OS that I have to constantly fight. And Linux doesn't support a lot of the tools I need.
> "Then I have a maxed out XPS 13 which is a very nice and capable machine that suits me completely, except that it has a malicious OS that I have to constantly fight. And Linux doesn't support a lot of the tools I need.
So..... what's the solution here?"
The solution is sitting in your hands. That XPS 13 can run Ubuntu (and probably Debian, Arch/Antergos, or any other major distro) flawlessly since Dell ships a version with Ubuntu preinstalled. Set it up to dual boot with Windows, and use VirtualBox's raw hard disk access feature to set up a Windows guest under Linux using the Windows partition as the VM's boot drive.
That way, you can slowly wean yourself off of Windows; use the VM for your Windows-only tasks with the option of booting natively into Windows for anything strictly hardware dependent, until you have replaced your Windows workflow with Linux. Even if you find you can't 100% escape Windows, at least you're not living in it so you're not being spied on all day.
> set up a Windows guest under Linux using the Windows partition as the VM's boot drive.
> with the option of booting natively into Windows for anything strictly hardware dependent
IIRC, years ago, when Windows 7 was the latest Windows, this couldn't be done. Windows used to take offense if the hardware it was running on changed significantly from boot to boot. Has that changed with Windows 10?
It's gotten better both with changes in Windows itself and with improvements in virtualization. VirtualBox allows you to use different hypervisors so you can get closer to native hardware access in a VM. It works best when the guest is Linux but it also works well with Windows and recently, macOS. You can even do GPU passthrough for better Windows gaming on a Linux host.
Well, yes, if you want to do any significant amount of gaming on a computer, you'd want a dedicated GPU. If integrated GPUs meet your demands for gaming, you're better of with native Linux games and Wine for Windows casual games.
> "I've recently moved to Mint with Win7 in a vm and its lack of GPU and DirectX support is not really workable."
It sounds like you're better served by dual-booting then. Running a VM isn't a solution for everyone, just another option for some.
use linux for everything that you can use it for and then just run windows in a vm when you need it for certain software.
I started off in a dual boot situation, and i can't even remember the last time i went into my windows partition. It has to be less than 5 times in the past 3 years.
I think utilizing a firewall at the router level would be one way to deal with the problem, but it will take time to determine and implement the appropriate rules (a popular choice on HN is the EdgeRouter Lite3 from Ubiquiti).
There may be Linux equivalents of the tools you use, but it would be difficult to say without you naming these tools specifically.
Xamarin, Adobe stuff. And I've found a Windows VM in a Linux host to be passable, though suboptimal. Especially because you only run it sporadically, so even though it's a VM you still have to deal with its compulsive and compulsory updating, restarting, and whatever else it does that keeps it busy for 20 minutes when it hasn't been started in a month.
Also Linux multi-screen/multi-DPI support is still bad.
My 3 monitors (which have different DPIs than the monitor that comes with my linux laptop). Trying to do this with the tools Ubuntu provides doesn't work. Ubuntu's GUI doesn't scale well, and I can't find a setup that does.
I just want this to work, but it doesn't. This was a Dell laptop that came preinstalled with Ubuntu, too.
Running MacOS on virtualbox on top of Windows works ok. There are a lots of tutorials on the web that shows you how to do that. It does violate Apple's SW license.
It is very fun to play with a full screen MacOS on a touch screen enable Laptop.
Not really. If you can live with the same OS X you installed first, allowing only fix updates, you can be totally fine on XPS 13/15 (given you have Broadcom WiFi). Everything else works like on real MacBook. The same holds for most Zenbooks (those without NVidia).
I would run "msfw log --tail" to watch for blocked connections. If I wanted to allow the connection, I then added it as a rule.
It was alot of work to setup initially, and I even found some scenarios where adding a rule was not sufficient to allow the connection. I never understood why.
I use a Dell XPS with Ubuntu. I didn't have to deal with any of the bullshit.
Why do people continue to purchase products from companies that blatantly want to spy on them? Vote with your wallet and never go through a bizarre multi-step anti-spyware setup again.
That sound interesting but you have really to be proactive and deploy significant a technical knowledge to block the software from abusing you.
Still you count as a happy Windows user and will reinforce the Microsoft position. This way they will be able to abuse 99% of their users, those that don't have the same competencies and time to spend on these countermeasures.
As for the WSL I stopped using it. This is an honey trap to let people use Windows as their primary OS by just giving them the developer goodies they like. I may consider it again if you can use it to develop a full-fledged Windows application that can access the windowing system and can be redistributed. You may have noticed that with WSL you cannot and the applications you may do remains nicely restricted to the linux subsystem.
> As for the WSL I stopped using it. This is an honey trap to let people use Windows as their primary OS by just giving them the developer goodies they like. I may consider it again if you can use it to develop a full-fledged Windows application that can access the windowing system and can be redistributed.
A honey pot? I don't think that means what you think it means. If you are interested in developing full-fledged Windows applications, why in the world would you want to use WSL? You are not the kind of developer that WSL is designed for.
WSL is Linux. It is not Windows. Microsoft "managed" to make it possible to run Linux binaries on Windows, in a pseudo-virtual Linux environment. The distro you choose to run in WSL is not built by Microsoft.
If you want to develop to a Windows target, then configure your WSL environment to do cross-compiling. That's up to you. If you can cross-compile in Ubuntu, then you can cross-compile in WSL. Just don't expect WSL to be anything but Linux.
My solution with Windows is easier. I run it in a VM and block all network traffic. Problem solved.
And regarding (5)... well, the same thing I used to tell people about WINE applies, just in reverse. Unless you're butting up against a corporate policy or something, why pick the inferior, broken imitation when the real thing is right there?
Same here, been using Windows since 3.11 and MacOS the past 6 years. But when i installed Ubuntu 17.04 on my new HP laptop, i was really impressed and haven't needed to switch yet.
When the recovery partition got corrupted on my teenage niece's nonfunctional Win10 laptop, I fixed her computer by installing Ubuntu Mate. She's been using it for over a year now and loves it.
If a teen girl likes her Linux desktop, then things are doing pretty well.
I did a fresh install of Ubuntu desktop the other day and there are Amazon icons on the sidebar by default. I didn't opt in unless it was maliciously bundled with another option.
There is a conflation of issues here. There's two separate Amazon things: (1) The launcher on the dock by default -- annoying but not subversive -- and (2) search integration, where your local searches would also query Amazon, which used to be enabled by default -- a privacy issue which caused some controversy a few years back. Great grandparent was talking about (2), specifically, so in that context I understood the grandparent to mean only it. However, the wording was certainly unclear if you weren't familiar with the controversy.
And not just downvoted but flagged... Anyways yeah, I tried Ubuntu out and the Amazon icon is there and isn't easily removed. Plus Unbuntu has auto-on telemetry or crash reporting as far as I understand.
Can I recompile Windows without any telemetry? Can I build my own Windows OS from scratch or install a pre-built one from a person or organization I trust?
You are correct, that pre-built machines are almost never trustworthy. That is not really important though, in that the very nature of GPLed Linux makes a huge difference to the user in terms of control of their machine.
> Let's not pretend that if Linux ever got to the desktop in any meaningful way that these boxes wouldn't ship with everything including kernel modules to do "value added" nonsense.
Windows and Android are able to do these these things because of the lock-in they have on application developers. Apps made for Ubuntu run fine on other Linux distros so Canonical doesn't have the kind of control and lock-in which MS/Google/Apple. This equivalence is therefore dubious.
If Ubuntu started shipping on a lot of devices, the HP and other OEMs would start shipping value-adds from third parties as well. The title of this thread is "HP installs system-slowing spyware on its PCs". This by no means would be Windows-specific if HP shipped any serious quantity of consumer Ubuntu boxes.
Please don't spread FUD. I'm not a huge fan of Ubuntu but be honest, its so-called telemetry drama from several years ago never required the command line to turn off, it was a switch in Unity's graphical settings app. Since that controversy it has always shipped opt-in, and non-Unity versions of Ubuntu never had the issue to start with. There are no Amazon "ads" apart from a link on the dock that is removed with a right-click, again no command line wizardry required.
This is incorrect. Every time I click the Unity button, the first icon is Amazon. No way to remove it that I can see. Just Launch. Please step me through clicking the top right Unity button to see all apps, then removing Amazon via the UI only.
It's a .desktop file just like any other icon in Unity. It's at /usr/share/applications/ubuntu-amazon-default.desktop; right click, delete, just like you would any other .desktop file.
Back in the 1990s, people would claim that if Linux were used by anyone at all, it would be as buggy and insecure as Windows 95 was. Because bugs magically pop up due to use.
Now it's claiming telemetry magically pops up due to use. Plus ça change, I suppose.
No. I know what a Linux distro look like. I'm just saying that the only Linux that could have conquered the world, through HP, Compaq or Dell pre-installing Linux on the Desktop, would have looked more like Android than Debian.
Actually, it would have been worse, since at least Google is mandating some kind of inter-operability between OEMs together.
