Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Advice For The Unfortunate Windows User? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by nefarioushoneybee@lemmy.zip to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Long story short here: I tried making Linux my main OS on my PC. I had it dual booted with Win 11 on a separate SSD. Win 11 was going to be solely for work purposes since it was crucial.

However I noticed that I had begun to migrate slowly back to Win 11 because I'm a gamer and Linux just doesn't get along with my graphics card, so games are almost impossible to play well.

I've succumbed to the idea that my PC will just solely run on Win 11. (I do use Linux on a laptop tho). So I got some debloat tools to shut off most of Microsoft's annoying spy shit and manually uninstalled the rest like Cortana. I also have pihole running on my raspi5 so my PC is connected to that, plus I use ProtonVPN. I use Firefox with plugins like ublock, privacy badger, etc.

I want to try to make Windows as private and away from Microsoft's prying eyes as much as possible. Got any other recommendations?

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[–] atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

My advice (even if you do decide to use a separate device for gaming) is to get rid of anything that does telemetry, tracking, ad service, or AI. If you have a pro version or enterprise version of windows 11 you can use Group Policy Editor to remove or disable a lot of stuff and what is left is usually taken care of by Registry Editor in the command line. You can find many guides online that will walk you through how to debloat and remove a lot of the stuff MS uses to track you. I recommend this for anyone who uses windows.

There's also a lot of stuff you can turn off from the setting menu that may help if you're privacy conscious. It also might not hurt to make your account local rather that one attached to outlook or MS services (I recognize this may not be possible depending on what you use for work).

You may also want to try a different distribution of Linux that's specifically made for gaming. I don't know what kind of graphics card you have but the proton compatibility layer has been getting better overtime and so you might give that a shot.