That’s my point. Please take a look at group policy editor. You’ll be amazed how many settings are hidden from the settings app. And once it’s set there, it cannot be overridden by anything, INCLUDING UPDATES. You can even completely turn off automatic updates there and only update manually when you feel comfortable.

It’s meant to be a enterprise thing to lock down PCs. But on your own PC you are your own boss.

1. With group policy you actually really need to do it once.

2. I guess you didn’t read the next sentence of the one you quoted?

I guess a better question to ask is: WHY do you want to switch to Linux. Is there a compelling yet specific reason. Abstract things like “better privacy” is not that valid for regular folks. You can tweak enough things in windows with group policy/registry to make it just okay. Surely it’s not out of the box but you only need to do it once, and I imagine this will only take a fraction of the time you would otherwise spend troubleshooting Linux.

If there are specific Linux things you need to run, why not use your server or even WSL?

As much as I love Linux, my main gaming/video production PC will always be windows.

Yep I’m looking at system76. Not sure about how valid the 14h battery life claim is though. That seems awfully optimistic on a 10-core Intel chip.

Some addition power management tools I suppose?

That’s new info for me thanks. Never knew thinkpad can excel in this department.

Things you mentioned about windows before “etc” can actually be disabled through group policy or other means. It’s an annoyance nonetheless. But after ~30 minutes of tweaking after a new install, windows is not that bad these days.

Anyway, if I don’t play games I’ll probably be Linux all the way. Most things today are web based anyway.

But how is gaming on Linux nowadays, if you may elaborate? I have top of the line hardwares but the games I play easily max out their usage. I know there are things like translation layer, but I’m afraid the performance hit may be not ideal…