I have just installed Win10 and I am not happy with it. There is too much spyware. I spent 2 hours disabling settings that spy on me, and I’m sure that’s just the beginning. I don’t trust Microsoft, and I don’t trust Google.
I was considering switching to Ubuntu because I have used this in the past, however I just came across the following:
At the event, Microsoft announced that it has bought Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu Linux, and shut down Ubuntu Linux forever. … Along with acquiring Canonical and killing Ubuntu, Microsoft has announced that it’s making a new operating system called Windows L
I found this website that lists alternatives to Microsoft:
Ideally, what I would like is an OS that is easy to use, does not spy on me, has no relation to Microsoft, Google or Apple. Just something that I can use to browse the web. Something that will not have a steep learning curve. Is Haiku the answer to this? If not, is there another OS that you could recommend that might check these boxes?
First of all,this link is clearly fake news.
Canonical worked together with Microsoft sometimes,for example with the Windows subsystem for Linux,but it’s still a independent company.
Wikipedia confirms this: Canonical (company) - Wikipedia
That being said,Ubuntu is still crap and has too many proprietary bits to be considered free software - Good choice not to install it
Haiku is the right OS for you if you want something that is totally independent,run by a few hobbyists and perfectly privacy-friendly.
It’s also the right choice if you want your computer to really be a computer,not a phone with a too big screen (which is the direction Windows and GNOME are going) and to support your productivity.
You should keep in mind,however,that not every mainstream application will run on Haiku.
You say just browsing the web - Well,if WebPositive (the preinstalled browser) and Otter Browser are enough for you,that can work pretty good,but Firefox,Chromium and other major browsers are not available because they’re too much work to port.
I really recommend giving it a try,you can even test it out directly from the ISO without installing it to your disk first.
If you’re not happy with it,maybe have a look at Manjaro,a Linux distribution that works more closely with the community without all the commercial crap Ubuntu has.
If you don’t want Linux at all,another great OS is OpenIndiana which is forked from the discontinued open-source edition of Oracle Solaris.
It supports many of the major applications Linux supports (including Firefox) but it has a different kernel and is developed by a few hobbyists,I think.
The BSD operating systems could also be interesting for you,especially FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
You see,the world of alternative operating systems gets really exciting if you don’t just focus on the big three.
If you have any questions about any alternative OS,there’s a good chance I already tried it so feel free to ask me.
Thank you for this very informative response. It’s much appreciated.
Once I learned about airgap technology, it was just too much for me:
I have information on external hard drives that I would like to keep private. I’m sure this airgap technology is installed on all Win10 systems and it’s covertly stealing data. I need an OS that doesn’t have all of this CIA spyware junk on it.
Haiku sounds like a good alternative. I’m not too technically savvy. I can figure some things out. I know when I had Ubuntu, it got to be annoying because every app that I wanted to install I had to watch a youtube video on how to install it. Running this cmd line and that cmd line, and sometimes things just didn’t work at all. It became tedious after awhile, but this was probably 8 years ago or more when I used it.
Hopefully open source alternative operating systems have come a long way from that point. It would be GREAT to ditch Windows and use an OS that is run by hobbyists. I am so sick of Windows, Microsoft and Google. This is long overdue. I’ll check ebay and see if they might sell bootable USB sticks to run Haiku. I’ll just jump in the deep end and permanently wipe this Win10 junk off my system.
You can’t have no speakers and at the same produce audio, anyway if you cannot trust your hwardware replacing the software will not help at all, the hardware is still not trustworthy.
As far as user friendlyness goes, it depends, keep in mind that haiku is in beta if you want to use it.
I would also just put haiku on a thumb drive with a running system myself instead of buying something of ebay, its much eiser and cheaper, especially if you already have a usb drive around.
For the level of security you’re looking for, Manjaro Linux or other Arches is one of the distros that will give you the least “can’t do that” headaches later on. The AUR is an impressively expansive repository, and everything there is AFAIK distributed as an inspectable source tarball and build script.
Keep in mind that Haiku doesn’t have as many drivers as the big three. Trying to play shader-heavy games or print documents will not give desirable results.
Thank you for the replies. OK, I’m wondering if Manjaro may be the best way to go. I’m looking for the least amount of headaches, with the maximum level of privacy. I’m hoping that Manajaro does not have Microsoft code embedded into it that spies on you. I know it should be Linux based, but I’m not sure if Microsoft has purchased portions of Linux to spread their spyware tentacles. In any case, I’ll give it a shot. Thanks so much for all your help!! Much appreciated.
Hardcore spies, hackers, ransomwarers will usually claim in court that they have mental health issues. And companies that spy on users are morally distorted. Since such activities are related to mental health - and unconscionable behaviour - finding an OS that can defend against such ppl is a tough ask.
Cannonical is only a tool company that provides support, sales, and infrastructures. Ubuntu is a Debian based distribution, due to the fact both projects have opposite philosophy, it’s also probably the crappiest despite support.
Debian project wouldn’t end because one distribution or two disappeared.
Don’t forget that SuSE was part of the Novell deal therefore M$ already owns a linux distribution. If you are asking SuSE guys on an event, they will tell you that M$ has brought a lot of customers. In fact, if the client asks for a linux server, they are selling it anyway and it is still a M$ product.
Just as a warning, if you are worried about the CIA getting into your computer I would not recommend Haiku. The OS is a work in progress and it is not really designed with security in mind first. As a result, if the CIA really cares about your data, they probably don’t need any spyware to get into your computer when you run Haiku. They will find some vulnerability in our code that they can exploit.
In that situation I would rather look into one of the security-oriented Linux distributions or maybe OpenBSD.
I find it confusing that you don’t trust Microsoft and Google, but you trust random unknown developers on the internet.
Billions of people use Windows every day. Microsoft has a very high obligations to keep it secure. It has contracts with multiple governments (not only USA) and organizations to provide software. Similar situation with Apple and macOS.
Haiku is done on best effort basis. Similarly a lot of Linux distributions.
Well simply see how it turned out for their business partners. IBM had to spend a lot developing DOS because M$ was not delivering. They became partners again for a new OS but when parts that interested M$ were ready (understand the kernel bought from DEC), they suddenly decided that the file system was not to their taste and rushed to get NT out before OS/2 can see the light. They escaped multiple lawsuit for stealing software (i.e but not the only one Defrag for DOS) by buying or ruining the company that was suing them. Many hardware manufacturers also received pressure to not propose alternative systems. The other day we were talking about the drivers racket.
And that’s how they treat partners. It’s really amazing that there are still people wanting to work with them.
For clients it is even worse, Business Software Alliance has been convicted in France for acts of vandalism and racket. But somehow in Sarkozy era a paper managed to publish photograph of law projects with the stamp “BSA Approved” on them.
I don’t want such companies to be part of my life. What the Hell do they think they are?
And I don’t want either politicians who are making their boots shine.
I don’t have anything highly confidential on my computer, but I just don’t like idea of the gov’t taking everything and putting it into a database somewhere. I like privacy.
What are the security-oriented Linux distros that you are referring to. It might be worth looking into them. Thanks!
Maybe a bit off-topic but curious: is there an institution or group that would audit Haiku’s source code for free, since it’s open source? That would be nice to have and results submitted to developer team privately.
I’m with Starcrasher. I consider myself a small-time competitor to Microsoft. If I were to use Windows 10 or 11 in my business, those versions as an advertised “feature” send the contents of my hard drive to Microsoft’s cloud servers for “off-site backups”. Once there, Microsoft has every right to inspect their cloud servers for any reason (or at least until they get caught) so I’d be financially ruined from day 1. My hard drive might even be remotely “inspected” by Windows Defender for “malware” and my competition against Microsoft is once again ruined.
As for Google, don’t use their search engine. It points you to different results than if your neighbor did it. Those custom-tailored results are influenced by Google’s advertisers. The same goes for Android’s Google Apps including YouTube.
Haiku currently have quite a lot of vulnerabilities and fixing all of them is hard work. For example every userland process have access to GPU memory and registers so it can write to physical memory bypassing kernel using GPU DMA engine.
I’m not sure if DuckDuckGo is any better than Google security/privacy-wise, but that’s the best suggestion I can think of for an alternative to Google as a search engine…
