There’s also Spybot Anti-Beacon to limit/stop Windows from phoning home. Spybot Anti-Beacon - Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus : Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus
I’ve tried it, just like most Ubuntu distros just slow and clunky.
I use OpenSuse…no spyware at all except when interacting online with known/most web sites. I prefer FireFox extended by DuckDuckGo privacy extensions and other extensions for protecting my online presence.
As for EQT, they are associated with Suse Enterprise (the commercial entity), which has a open relationship with the openSUSE community who develops openSuse. So you are confusing the two entities. Remember that “openSUSE is a great symbol of community driven projects.”
Here is a great article from last year, 5 Reasons Why You Should Be Using OpenSUSE
Avoiding updates is exactly the opposite of what one should recommend for security and privacy. You then risk your computer being exploited by actual bad guys for illegal actions as opposed to Microsoft knowing that you use Firefox instead of Edge 
4 Likes
Debian with xfce4 and xubuntu are what I use everywhere. They are very much alike, xubuntu is easier to set up initially. Although I’ve tried to use haiku as a day to day OS it’s not quite there yet for me (mostly because of the browser, but also dual head support and hosting VMs). I have some windows installations in VMs because I sometimes have to support software on windows. I’d like to check out SerenityOS at some point, but at this stage it’s still a curiosity. I feel that haiku may be ready for prime time pretty soon, and when it is I am ready to make the switch.
1 Like
I would enjoy XFCE a lot more if they would fix the broken theming system
On the topic of Serenity, it seems like more of an enthusiast operating system more than anything, all respect to the developers creating their own Unix system but I don’t see the amount of use I would see in Haiku.
Errr… if this is transmitting data, it is at a seriously low baud rate and also without a lot of error correction the data it is transmitting it going to be pretty corrupt quite often.
I don’t want to add extra fuel to the hysteria here, but any computer could theoretically leak RF if you could exploit components, and any one who knows how to collect that RF and decode it could probably find out what it going on. I mean, every bit of electrical equipment you own has an RF signature caused by the electric current in it “leaking out”. You know that you can transmit data over the wiring in your house, right? If you could find a way to consume electricity with peaks, I bet you could probably read that too.
The thing with it is that the amount of data that any of these techniques could transmit depends a lot on how the transmission is being made, and how the data is being received. If an 8-bit computer from the 80’s using a cassette tape could take 2 - 3 minutes to load 32KiB - 64KiB of data, I doubt anyone is taking your 120GiB+ hard drive contents using these means. But if these techniques exist - then I would assume they would be low level and the OS you install would not really have a lot to do with it.
1 Like
Yes, I was using Win 7 for as long as possible, but (I suspect) someone broke into my laptop and was able to crack my bank account and did a lot of damage. That forced me to install Win10, but there is just too much Windows spyware built in to make it acceptable for me.
What’s xfce4 ?
I purchased a bootable USB for Debian off of ebay. I’m just waiting for it to come in. Once I get it, I’m going to wipe Win10 and install Debian. This looks to be the best option for security and usability from my preliminary research. I could be wrong though! It’s been known to happen. 
Good points. It looked like in the youtube video that is was quite slow at stealing data. Bit by bit. So it’s probably not super efficient at this point. Not to say they won’t be able to advance the technology to the point where they beam it down from a satellite some day. I wouldn’t put it past them.
What’s RF?
When it comes to trust, I wouldn’t trust a usb bought off ebay. Best to download it, if your bandwidth is limited, use the net installer (40MB), that way, the installer will only download what’s necessary.
Debian is (one of the) right choices when it comes to non-corporate Linux. Loads better than Ubuntu.
Radio Frequency.
XFCE can look quite nice without too much effort. Here is my desktop on the machine I’m currently working on 
3 Likes
That does look nice, very Mac-ish
2 Likes
It’s a desktop environment for Linux, like KDE or gnome. It’s more lightweight than those options, but still user friendly.
How? I always have issues with the UI looking corrupt after changing the theme
I’ve never experienced UI corruption I’m afraid so I’m not sure how to help. I use one of the standard themes (adwaita dark), with a different icon set (papirus dark) and then customise other things a little.
I think there is some misconception here. This “airgap technology” is not a feature or defect of Windows. Instead it describes ways how data can be transmitted from a computer even if it has no network connection at all. One way to do this is via audio output from the speakers. The Youtube video you shared shows a method to use the noise emitted by the CPU fan instead.
Malware could use such methods to transfer data to a nearby located device in the control of the attacker. There is absolutely nothing Windows specific to this. Such attacks are possible on other OS just the same.
I think I would be interested in a Haiku ReactOS dual boot setup once ReactOS gets to stable.
I agree, but at this point, I question whether ReactOS will ever be stable. Granted, it’s obviously come a long way since the start of that project, but it’s still extremely far from being stable enough for everyday use, as far as I’ve seen. (And before you ask, I have messed with it myself, on both virtual and real hardware; on my main machine, installing the appropriate NVIDIA Windows GPU driver completely broke the system, with a “failed to initialize video driver” BSoD. Also, attempts to install certain other essential drivers, such as the Intel WiFi card driver, simply failed, with various error messages when launching the installer, as far as I can recall.)
1 Like