> Running some barely maintained operating system that is an nth-degree spin-off is like buying a pacemaker from craigslist.
If my options are between a barely maintained linux operating system which might compromise my data and a barely maintained windows operating system that is designed to compromise my data I'll take my chances with linux. At this point no one can be assured of their safety and all anyone can do is choose the lesser evil and hope for the best.
It's a stretch to call Windows a "barely maintained operating systems". Windows probably has more paid contributors to the Start menu than Ubuntu has total employees. The Windows software is generally rock solid, if frequently spammy (which an advanced Windows user can mostly fix in 30 minutes, especially in Europe).
I luckily hardly use any Windows so I refrain from commenting on its (maintenance) quality.
But I have to use another MS product daily: Teams. It's a product with very poor usability. Even simple things like tracking which message you have read and which one you haven't don't get better upgrade after upgrade. I am sure they have a huge development budget and tons of paid developers. The number of paid developers can be completely uncorrelated to quality.
(I am sure zulip has just a little fraction of paid developers, but it is a program in the same domain that works muuuch better.)
Not a great day to try to argue how well maintained and "rock solid" windows is considering the issues it's having (see https://www.techpowerup.com/342032/windows-11-25h2-october-u...) not to mention all the other updates that've caused data loss or broken things and that's just windows 11! Just paying a bunch of people to push out updates isn't enough for a well maintained OS.
You are focusing on the least interesting part they said. Even if Windows is rock solid, it is still out to steal your data 100% and there might be a chance some linux distro is doing the same. When it does, it ends up being flagged by users as happened now. When Microsoft does it, nobody is surprised though.
I've used both Windows and Linux for 20+ years and I can count the major issues I've had with both on one hand. Yes, sometimes they both botch QA but you can also live with both without major issues.
Oh, and that update - fairly sure it was optional.
The usual lesson applies, never install version 1.0. Install 1.0.5 or even better, 1.1.1.
If my options are between a barely maintained linux operating system which might compromise my data and a barely maintained windows operating system that is designed to compromise my data I'll take my chances with linux. At this point no one can be assured of their safety and all anyone can do is choose the lesser evil and hope for the best.