Windows 10 users after 14 October 2025

[Yellow Fang]

What would be a better option please? Not a fan of Google, Microsoft or any of the big tech companies really, would like to avoid them if possible. Is it Firefox or something else?

Who is going to say it first?

 

[Cletus Van Damme]

Who is going to say it first?

Do you mean ditching Windows altogether and using Linux or something else?

 

[Yellow Fang]

Who is going to say it first?

Me, Linux. There is a choice of about 30 flavours or more. The most common is Ubuntu. It is free, although you may have to buy a magazine with a DVD, or they may ask you to make a donation to download a distro. In my experience they are not very difficult to install, although more difficult than they used to be. It is better to install on a laptop or PC you don't really need as a Windows computer. You can have Linux on a computer as dual boot, so you have a choice of logging into Windows or Linux, but if something goes wrong you lose your Windows system and everything you had stored in it. On the other hand you can find light versions of Linux which will bring to life a PC or laptop that had slowed down to snail's pace from years of MS uploads.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Do you mean ditching Windows altogether and using Linux or something else?

Yeah, I was going to say Linux.

 

[Cletus Van Damme]

Yeah, I was going to say Linux.

Thought so. I'm tempted to give that a go, is it a steep learning curve? Sounds like a good option, more so for an older PC. Just getting fed up with all the unnecessary crap on Windows and control, really don't care for 11 much at all. Its just an interface for opening programs nothing else to me.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Thought so. I'm tempted to give that a go, is it a steep learning curve? Sounds like a good option, more so for an older PC. Just getting fed up with all the unnecessary crap on Windows and control, really don't care for 11 much at all. Its just an interface for opening programs nothing else to me.

Installing it is harder than using it. I would not say it is massively hard, but I suspect it is harder than it was. I have not tried installing it on anything recently. Raspberry Pi's use a version of Linux called Raspian. Once installed, the trickiest bit is installing drivers, typically for printers.

 

[DaveReading]

This is quite amusing. You're worried about what data Microsoft is sending back and forth from Edge, but not what Google is doing with Chrome? If you're very concerned with this there are far better browsers for privacy.

I use Edge. Yes, it nags you now and again to sign in, but works fine if you don't.

Well OK, it does create a humungous number of different tasks while it's running (I typically have dozens of tabs open), but it's quite happy if you kill it every so often and just restore the tabs after reopening it.

 

[Dadam]

What would be a better option please? Not a fan of Google, Microsoft or any of the big tech companies really, would like to avoid them if possible. Is it Firefox or something else?

I've not investigated it much myself yet but I've read DuckDuckGo, plus Firefox with a couple of extensions is good

 

[DRM]

Brave Browser works well