I feel your point regarding the WiFi devices and that they shouldn’t be recommended to casual users. But if you just set up an isolated VLAN with its own SSID and use e.g. homeassistant running locally to orchestrate them, then what’s the harm? If your goal is privacy, you need some kind of local “hub” anyway, and to me it makes way more sense to be able to place that machine anywhere, regardless of e.g. bluetooth reception to your smart home devices (since that is taken care of via the additional SSID on your WAPs).

You mean firefox or the mullvad app? Took me a hot minute to figure out why things aren’t working as expected when setting up adguardhome, turned out the mullvad app was hijacking /etc/resolv.conf to inject mullvad nameservers

Windows is just not quite there yet for desktop use. Give them a few years to clean up their sharp edges and clunky UX and add some long overdue features, then maybe it’ll be a real alternative.

With the 10G NIC upgrade, I would see some use in this if it ran Linux

I have also encountered games that needed tweaking (like changing settings in an .ini file that weren’t visible in the game’s menu) to run in an acceptable way on windows. Does this mean that Windows is ‘not quite there yet’, or is the game to blame?

I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but which drivers do you have in mind? You can install Linux on almost any machine, and if there are driver issues the culprits are usually nvidia, realtek, etc. for which Microsoft is hardly responsible.

The big Windows 10 problem is that it is Windows.

Ok, I’ll bite. How can a corporation not be capitalist?

What do you mean? I remove all vendor keys and enroll my own secure boot keys. This way only my install with my bootloader signed by my keys will boot.

Not FOSS as far as I can tell. Maybe it’s no concern to folks running MS stuff already, but IMO closed-source is a red flag for trustworthiness.

Not familiar with iphones, can’t you just use plain wireguard?

Not related to the refund at all, but: Why would you turn off the monitor and not the computer? Even when idling it eats way more power than a monitor in standby.

Seems like something you would think about while, you know, designign a product? And not after its release?

Just install and try to resolve all your issues (if any) in a dualboot. That way you can always go back to Windows if something doesn’t work. But if your experience is anything like mine, you’ll find that 99% works either out of the box or after some minimal configuration. The only notable exception for me are online games that insist on intrusive anti-cheat software (e.g. BattleEye) and choose not to support Proton/Wine on Linux. Curse you, Escape from Tarkov!

Julia?

or just install and then shut down?