When your OS is pure spyware, maybe it's time to look into switch to a less abusive option. The more people that switch, the stronger signal it sends.
This tool is equivalent to dating an alcoholic that beats you whenever they're drunk, so you keep trying to take away all the alcohol instead of dumping them and finding a new partner. The signs were always there and they just keep getting worse, it's time to move on.
I have a PC mainly for Hauptwerk, which uses ilok, which doesn't run under Linux and probably never will. I've got an MBP, but getting one with 128GB of RAM was terribly expensive, and is probably unaffordable now. Hauptwerk doesn't even run natively on the arm. The End.
Well, when this alcoholic is the only one that works properly for the sort of audio and 3D/VFX work I do, and a bunch of tools are only able to run (well) on Windows (Yes, I've tried WINE and everything else under the sun, for a decade), so dual booting is really the only option here, unless I wanna throw out a bunch of licenses I've paid thousands for and stop accepting that sort of work.
Ableton is probably the biggest reason I still have a Windows installation, and the one I try to get working (properly and well) with Wine/Proton maybe once a month or so. Cascadeur, Unreal Engine Editor, rekordbox are some of the other software I can't get to run well enough on Linux (yet) to fully migrate.
But, on the other hand, lots of other software I use professionally works amazingly on Linux, better than Windows in fact, like Houdini, Unreal Engine (the runtime, not the Editor), DaVinci Resolve and Blender.
I'm not worried though, eventually it'll be runnable on Linux no doubt, but personally we're not quite there yet, sadly.
I know this doesn't address all your concerns, but I switched from Ableton Live to Bitwig Studio for unrelated reasons to my leaving Windows behind, and I was thoroughly pleased with how easy the transition was between the two DAWs (I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise given how many ex-Ableton devs work on Bitwig), and how well the Linux build of Bitwig worked. Bitwig on Linux, with Pipewire as the audio engine for low latency operation, is essentially an identical operating experience for me.
Getting your plugins working is a different story. A small but growing number of mainstream audio plugins have native Linux builds available, a wide swath of them work quite well with yabridge (https://yabridge.org/ - so shim to expose Windows audio plugins running in WINE prefixes to Linux audio plugin hosts), and a few required alternatives to be found.
I found the workflow decent enough to use, but as one might expect, some plugins not working well via yabridge/WINE made things a little janky, and once I picked up a Mac device again, that became my production machine. That said, WINE's come a long say since I last tried this out a few years ago, and I'd be interested to see if things work better.
My point, I suppose, is to share a reasonably good success story (though perhaps still not of a grade that you'd be comfortable switching to for paid work), and perhaps to encourage you to consider some alternatives to the tools you use. Tool changes are expensive, sure in cost, but moreso in time, so I don't suggest it lightly. That being said, I think that it might be worth it to grab a Bitwig trial and see how you like it. I'd grab it both on Windows and Linux, so you can try it "how it should work" when your plugins and the DAW are working in harmony while also getting the Linux toolchain working. And from the cost perspective, Bitwig does not have crossgrade licenses, so you can buy Studio once, and run it on any supported platform.
That's exactly the way I framed the relationship between Microsoft and its victim in a companion article[0] I wrote in 2025 looking back on my switch to Linux.
Since then I started realizing how parasitic the proprietary software industry really is.
I'm daily driving both Windows and Linux, and each has its own issues unfortunately, so using tools like OO is a necessity of making my(and others) life bit less miserable.
For Linux I have bunch of custom repair scripts because of certain bugs I encounter(which are tracked too but not solved).
Unfortunately this is the game no one will ever win, unless you will move, drop tech, and start breeding dogs, but then you need to sell them, and where would you advertise? :)
I use cachyos as my daily driver for a long time now. I play quite a few games. Only league of legends forces me to dual boot into windows every once in a week or so - fuck the anticheat cartel
I'm approaching a year now on CachyOS and it has been a wonderful experience. All the games that I play run just fine, maybe a few FPS drop compared to Windows, but it's not a big deal for me. I also don't play any competitive online games that require 3rd party anti-cheat spyware. Biggest positives, I got very comfortable with terminal and CLI work. My development work has definitely improved.
Very few are these days with the enormous amount of resources Valve has been pouring into Proton. The only truly Windows-only games I have encountered were online multiplayer with anticheat and that was almost always because the developer chose not to support Linux (e.g. EAC, Rust) and not for lack of support for Linux.
Perhaps that wouldn't happen if more people switched...
This hasn't been the case for at least half a decade. Most games run perfectly fine if not better on Linux. The only exceptions are purposely broken remote rootkit "anticheat" gsmes which no sane person would want on their system anyway.
I guess for that you could have a Windows machine just for gaming. No need to deal with the trade-offs of that come with using a console (if that matters to you).
Not having a windows machine is one of the benefits of not having a windows machine! Using a console for gaming is cheaper, more secure, and more reliable then using a windows machine. The only downside is i don't have access to the wide ocean of steam and gog releases, but it's a fair trade as far as I'm concerned.
If you need Autohotkey you can still run that under wine (if you are ahk on windows applications), you can run total commander under wine. You can log in as admin I think its time to make the switch
If they’re running auto hotkey they’re also likely gamers, likely needing to run games that either can’t emulate or lose performance when running via proton or wine. AKA, this advice, like most “switch to Linux” advice, is tone deaf.
I completely agree with this comment! If your OS does not behave like an OS anymore, better to switch to a real OS at that point. That's it. I've always been disappointed by Windows "OS" in the past but now it's really too much..
> There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately.
FWIW, O&O ShutUp10 dates back to 2015, with the launch of Windows 10. This isn't v10, it's "Shut Up, [Windows] 10!".
O&O Defrag has been a trusted tool since 1998.
That said, I largely agree with "No source code? No thanks." as I don't want to worry about a private equity group buying O&O Software and doing with it what they will.
I understand. Different people have different thresholds for trust. Unfortunately, I have lived in DC for a long time. Long enough to know the basics of how espionage works. And, appealing to authority is very effective. Humans love authorities. Write a few papers. Give a few conference talks. Get a few magazines to report on your expertise. That's pretty much all it takes to get entry. Otto and Olaf are probably great guys. I'm just extra cautious.
Few were as potentially deadly, at least at the time (in earlier times there might have been less we could do to treat them), and in the 80s the main source of fear of HIV was that it was not understood (people feared catching it in ways that are not possible, and so forth) were those that had been around much longer had well known risk factors.
I removed my dual boot in 2009, so the last windows I used on a personal computer was Vista. I switched my close family (parents and even my grand mother) to Linux years ago, nevertheless I still am the tech-savyy go-to person for other people and I am completely disconnected from what's going on the Windows world. Is an antivirus still needed there? Are there some good tools that should always be installed on a computer?
The only thing I usually do is to put as many free software as I can (Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, VLC, Gimp...) But then what ?
Yes, antivirus is still required but as long as you have decent common sense, the built in antivirus and antimalware on Windows (sometimes known as Windows Defender or Windows Security) is good enough for most users (the only use case where I can see commercial AV solution being of any use is for compliance checklists).
Chocolatey, Winget, and Scoop are all good options for installing software.
Oh and you will love Powershell 7 on Windows Terminal. It is a delight and a breath of fresh air if you ask me.
This is more a decrapifier than an "anti-spy tool". Yes, it also lets you easily block things like microphone access and disable AI features, but it's not a firewall.
I started using it with Windows 10 because I could disable most of the crap Microsoft was using with a few clicks. When I reinstalled Windows 11, this was one of the first things I ran because of how much shit there's now (weather, news, recommended apps, ai, etc). I have almost everything disabled.
We can do the same by following some guides, setting up system policies and go to 20 different menus, but this does the same in 1 or 2 minutes.
Unfortunately, over the years, ShutUp10 has also suffered from some enshittification itself. Now there's a message tell you to buy the premium version, more branding, etc. I understand why, and considering it still does the job and still runs without having to install it, perhaps I shouldn't complain too much especially when it's free, but it used to be more "bare-bones"... something that I prefer on these tools.
Huge fan of this. I run it once on a fresh format, and then I never have to worry about Windows annoying me again.
(And no, I simply do not like Linux or even macOS enough to switch over, despite being perfectly competent. That, and I play video games that will never be compatible.)
The “million eyes” argument has massive exceptions, among the top of my head is OpenSSL’s HeartBleed, a critical and extremely popular security suite that had a simple overflow issue for a decade or longer.
People don’t read the source. And chief among them, statistically, is you.
Honestly, even as a Linux guy who doesn't use Windows (almost) at all anymore, I trust Microsoft to be generic and corporate in their spying.
They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.
A random closed-source black-box "privacy" tool though? You have zero guarantees.
> They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.
What’s the difference between backdooring for the US gov’t and directly robbing/bugging you (assuming for the sake of argument that they don’t already do at least the latter)?
Used to be that you’d only ask that question if you were brown and/or write your name from right to left. Doesn’t matter much whether you were from Svalbard or Sanaa these days…
I get the sentiment. But for the record, O&O has been around for a long time, they were known for their excellent defragmentation tool, which isn't so much required nowadays. Their business model was never close to Adware (to my knowledge).
ShutUp has also been around for a while and always seemed to me like a O&O side project by someone who got really pissed at Windows taking the spyware tangent. The distribution model is still that of shareware / freeware (no source), because that's what O&O does. But as far as closed software goes, that's _probably_ as clean as it gets.
Windows has had built in defrag since at least WinXP. I can't remember if Win2000 had it - I think it did. It runs in the background and you don't have to worry about it. 3rd party defrag tools are snake oil, like registry cleaners and so on.
I'm pretty sure some versions of DOS had a defrag tool, or at least windows 9x had a DOS mode equivalent where you could see the block map getting moved around.
When your OS is pure spyware, maybe it's time to look into switch to a less abusive option. The more people that switch, the stronger signal it sends.
This tool is equivalent to dating an alcoholic that beats you whenever they're drunk, so you keep trying to take away all the alcohol instead of dumping them and finding a new partner. The signs were always there and they just keep getting worse, it's time to move on.
I have a PC mainly for Hauptwerk, which uses ilok, which doesn't run under Linux and probably never will. I've got an MBP, but getting one with 128GB of RAM was terribly expensive, and is probably unaffordable now. Hauptwerk doesn't even run natively on the arm. The End.
Well, when this alcoholic is the only one that works properly for the sort of audio and 3D/VFX work I do, and a bunch of tools are only able to run (well) on Windows (Yes, I've tried WINE and everything else under the sun, for a decade), so dual booting is really the only option here, unless I wanna throw out a bunch of licenses I've paid thousands for and stop accepting that sort of work.
Ableton is probably the biggest reason I still have a Windows installation, and the one I try to get working (properly and well) with Wine/Proton maybe once a month or so. Cascadeur, Unreal Engine Editor, rekordbox are some of the other software I can't get to run well enough on Linux (yet) to fully migrate.
But, on the other hand, lots of other software I use professionally works amazingly on Linux, better than Windows in fact, like Houdini, Unreal Engine (the runtime, not the Editor), DaVinci Resolve and Blender.
I'm not worried though, eventually it'll be runnable on Linux no doubt, but personally we're not quite there yet, sadly.
I know this doesn't address all your concerns, but I switched from Ableton Live to Bitwig Studio for unrelated reasons to my leaving Windows behind, and I was thoroughly pleased with how easy the transition was between the two DAWs (I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise given how many ex-Ableton devs work on Bitwig), and how well the Linux build of Bitwig worked. Bitwig on Linux, with Pipewire as the audio engine for low latency operation, is essentially an identical operating experience for me.
Getting your plugins working is a different story. A small but growing number of mainstream audio plugins have native Linux builds available, a wide swath of them work quite well with yabridge (https://yabridge.org/ - so shim to expose Windows audio plugins running in WINE prefixes to Linux audio plugin hosts), and a few required alternatives to be found.
I found the workflow decent enough to use, but as one might expect, some plugins not working well via yabridge/WINE made things a little janky, and once I picked up a Mac device again, that became my production machine. That said, WINE's come a long say since I last tried this out a few years ago, and I'd be interested to see if things work better.
My point, I suppose, is to share a reasonably good success story (though perhaps still not of a grade that you'd be comfortable switching to for paid work), and perhaps to encourage you to consider some alternatives to the tools you use. Tool changes are expensive, sure in cost, but moreso in time, so I don't suggest it lightly. That being said, I think that it might be worth it to grab a Bitwig trial and see how you like it. I'd grab it both on Windows and Linux, so you can try it "how it should work" when your plugins and the DAW are working in harmony while also getting the Linux toolchain working. And from the cost perspective, Bitwig does not have crossgrade licenses, so you can buy Studio once, and run it on any supported platform.
Well, Ableton at least works pretty fine on macOS, if that's more acceptable than Windows for you.
>when this alcoholic is the only one that works properly for the sort of audio and 3D/VFX work
I mean, that seems universally truer than not.
That's exactly the way I framed the relationship between Microsoft and its victim in a companion article[0] I wrote in 2025 looking back on my switch to Linux.
Since then I started realizing how parasitic the proprietary software industry really is.
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-w...
Not everybody has a possibility.
Each system has pros and cons.
I'm daily driving both Windows and Linux, and each has its own issues unfortunately, so using tools like OO is a necessity of making my(and others) life bit less miserable.
For Linux I have bunch of custom repair scripts because of certain bugs I encounter(which are tracked too but not solved).
Unfortunately this is the game no one will ever win, unless you will move, drop tech, and start breeding dogs, but then you need to sell them, and where would you advertise? :)
IMHO:
I like the issues faced on Linux more, since I can solve them. I too have a handful of repair scripts.
I feel like an adult to be given access all the internals. I don’t feel that way on Windows (and any other locked down OS).
We should put in the volunteer hours to upstream these fixes to make it nicer for normies :^)
I use cachyos as my daily driver for a long time now. I play quite a few games. Only league of legends forces me to dual boot into windows every once in a week or so - fuck the anticheat cartel
I'm approaching a year now on CachyOS and it has been a wonderful experience. All the games that I play run just fine, maybe a few FPS drop compared to Windows, but it's not a big deal for me. I also don't play any competitive online games that require 3rd party anti-cheat spyware. Biggest positives, I got very comfortable with terminal and CLI work. My development work has definitely improved.
Too many games are Windows only
Very few are these days with the enormous amount of resources Valve has been pouring into Proton. The only truly Windows-only games I have encountered were online multiplayer with anticheat and that was almost always because the developer chose not to support Linux (e.g. EAC, Rust) and not for lack of support for Linux.
Perhaps that wouldn't happen if more people switched...
those are the vast majority of games that people play
and people won't switch if there is no way to switch, it's like asking people to go on a hunger strike
This hasn't been the case for at least half a decade. Most games run perfectly fine if not better on Linux. The only exceptions are purposely broken remote rootkit "anticheat" gsmes which no sane person would want on their system anyway.
This is why I own a playstation
Because your PlayStation couldn't possibly be spying on you?
Because my playstation spies on my games, not my whole life. It's limitation of scope.
I guess for that you could have a Windows machine just for gaming. No need to deal with the trade-offs of that come with using a console (if that matters to you).
Not having a windows machine is one of the benefits of not having a windows machine! Using a console for gaming is cheaper, more secure, and more reliable then using a windows machine. The only downside is i don't have access to the wide ocean of steam and gog releases, but it's a fair trade as far as I'm concerned.
Though that would likely be a bit more expensive, or if cheaper it might be by compromising on GPU performance.
Fine, I will switch when your OS has Autohotkey, Total Commander, and allows me to log in as Administrator.
If you need Autohotkey you can still run that under wine (if you are ahk on windows applications), you can run total commander under wine. You can log in as admin I think its time to make the switch
If they’re running auto hotkey they’re also likely gamers, likely needing to run games that either can’t emulate or lose performance when running via proton or wine. AKA, this advice, like most “switch to Linux” advice, is tone deaf.
Oh, I also need a way to compile CodeBrowser 4.9 [1]
[1] https://github.com/nilslindemann/Code_Browser_49
I completely agree with this comment! If your OS does not behave like an OS anymore, better to switch to a real OS at that point. That's it. I've always been disappointed by Windows "OS" in the past but now it's really too much..
No source code? No thanks but no thanks.
There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately. It’s a good time to be wary of any if you don’t trust the author 100%.
It’s like when HIV emerged in the 80s - the disco days of free love are over. Be wary of who you’re sleeping with, and always wear a condom.
> There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately.
FWIW, O&O ShutUp10 dates back to 2015, with the launch of Windows 10. This isn't v10, it's "Shut Up, [Windows] 10!".
O&O Defrag has been a trusted tool since 1998.
That said, I largely agree with "No source code? No thanks." as I don't want to worry about a private equity group buying O&O Software and doing with it what they will.
O&O has been around for decades, they're among the OGs of third party functionality providers for Windows.
I understand. Different people have different thresholds for trust. Unfortunately, I have lived in DC for a long time. Long enough to know the basics of how espionage works. And, appealing to authority is very effective. Humans love authorities. Write a few papers. Give a few conference talks. Get a few magazines to report on your expertise. That's pretty much all it takes to get entry. Otto and Olaf are probably great guys. I'm just extra cautious.
a myriad STDs existed before HIV.
Few were as potentially deadly, at least at the time (in earlier times there might have been less we could do to treat them), and in the 80s the main source of fear of HIV was that it was not understood (people feared catching it in ways that are not possible, and so forth) were those that had been around much longer had well known risk factors.
You may also check out https://github.com/flick9000/winscript. It has a GUI, but generates a powershell script.
https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk is also worth mentioning, I use it to unfuck the Taskbar.
I'm always hesitant to trust these things after one of them turned off CRL checking because external connectivity = bad!!1
I removed my dual boot in 2009, so the last windows I used on a personal computer was Vista. I switched my close family (parents and even my grand mother) to Linux years ago, nevertheless I still am the tech-savyy go-to person for other people and I am completely disconnected from what's going on the Windows world. Is an antivirus still needed there? Are there some good tools that should always be installed on a computer? The only thing I usually do is to put as many free software as I can (Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, VLC, Gimp...) But then what ?
Yes, antivirus is still required but as long as you have decent common sense, the built in antivirus and antimalware on Windows (sometimes known as Windows Defender or Windows Security) is good enough for most users (the only use case where I can see commercial AV solution being of any use is for compliance checklists). Chocolatey, Winget, and Scoop are all good options for installing software.
Oh and you will love Powershell 7 on Windows Terminal. It is a delight and a breath of fresh air if you ask me.
My favorite anti-spyware tool for Windows is Linux.
This isn’t helpful to the fairly large percentage of people who are forced to use Windows by their employers
This is more a decrapifier than an "anti-spy tool". Yes, it also lets you easily block things like microphone access and disable AI features, but it's not a firewall.
I started using it with Windows 10 because I could disable most of the crap Microsoft was using with a few clicks. When I reinstalled Windows 11, this was one of the first things I ran because of how much shit there's now (weather, news, recommended apps, ai, etc). I have almost everything disabled.
We can do the same by following some guides, setting up system policies and go to 20 different menus, but this does the same in 1 or 2 minutes.
Unfortunately, over the years, ShutUp10 has also suffered from some enshittification itself. Now there's a message tell you to buy the premium version, more branding, etc. I understand why, and considering it still does the job and still runs without having to install it, perhaps I shouldn't complain too much especially when it's free, but it used to be more "bare-bones"... something that I prefer on these tools.
Huge fan of this. I run it once on a fresh format, and then I never have to worry about Windows annoying me again.
(And no, I simply do not like Linux or even macOS enough to switch over, despite being perfectly competent. That, and I play video games that will never be compatible.)
You should check your settings (or run this again) after each major update, because Microsoft loves to reset some settings to default.
An even better solution — don’t use windows.
I can't read the page. There's a giant fucking sticky navigation panel that blocks over half the screen.
Ah yes, the closed-source proprietary black box antispy tool.
Closed source doesn't mean not trustworthy. O&O has been making tools like these for a long time.
>Closed source doesn't mean not trustworthy
Yes, it does.
>O&O has been making tools like these for a long time.
Microsoft has made Windows for a long time. Longer, even.
The “million eyes” argument has massive exceptions, among the top of my head is OpenSSL’s HeartBleed, a critical and extremely popular security suite that had a simple overflow issue for a decade or longer.
People don’t read the source. And chief among them, statistically, is you.
Open Source is ideal but not a deal breaker.
True. And yet the possibility exists that one COULD. That's the difference.
If you care about software being closed source or proprietary you probably aren't running Windows.
Honestly, even as a Linux guy who doesn't use Windows (almost) at all anymore, I trust Microsoft to be generic and corporate in their spying.
They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.
A random closed-source black-box "privacy" tool though? You have zero guarantees.
> They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.
What’s the difference between backdooring for the US gov’t and directly robbing/bugging you (assuming for the sake of argument that they don’t already do at least the latter)?
Used to be that you’d only ask that question if you were brown and/or write your name from right to left. Doesn’t matter much whether you were from Svalbard or Sanaa these days…
Any recommendations for a FOSS alternative?
Non-smartass answer: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Linux is a great FOSS alternative.
Right? Im not touching that thing with a 10ft pole.
I get the sentiment. But for the record, O&O has been around for a long time, they were known for their excellent defragmentation tool, which isn't so much required nowadays. Their business model was never close to Adware (to my knowledge).
ShutUp has also been around for a while and always seemed to me like a O&O side project by someone who got really pissed at Windows taking the spyware tangent. The distribution model is still that of shareware / freeware (no source), because that's what O&O does. But as far as closed software goes, that's _probably_ as clean as it gets.
>defragmentation
Windows has had built in defrag since at least WinXP. I can't remember if Win2000 had it - I think it did. It runs in the background and you don't have to worry about it. 3rd party defrag tools are snake oil, like registry cleaners and so on.
I'm pretty sure some versions of DOS had a defrag tool, or at least windows 9x had a DOS mode equivalent where you could see the block map getting moved around.
FYI this seems to be an AI slop copy of Win11Debloat which is the original (+has all the same options).
Support the original, not the copy: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
This was released half a decade before Windows 11 was even out.
Been using this for a few years, since I moved to Windows 10, so I don't think it's a copy.
But thanks for the link, wasn't aware about that open source project.
Nice hallucination.
Upvote for bringing up a FOSS alternative, but the rest of your comment is wrong
shutUp10 was originally released on September 28, 2015
Huh? OOSU10 is from 2015. If anything Win11Debloat is the copy