Why switch to Linux: privacy, ownership, and not renting your computer

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Nobody switches operating systems for fun. Switching is annoying: you relearn habits, you hunt for replacement apps, you spend a weekend you would rather have spent doing anything else. People do it anyway, and almost always for the same reason — at some point they realise how little of the machine in front of them they actually control. The computer is theirs in the sense that they paid for it, but the software that runs it answers to someone else. It shows them ads they did not ask for, takes screenshots they did not authorise, demands an online account to finish setup, and updates itself on its own schedule. That gap — between owning the hardware and controlling what it does — is the whole motivation for this post.

The case for Linux is easiest to make through four values, and the rest of this article is built around them: privacy (your computer should not report on you), ownership (a machine you bought should be yours to govern), editability (you should be free to change software you depend on), and not renting (paying for software should not mean leasing it forever without ever owning anything). The strong, principled version of these arguments comes from the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, who have been making them since the 1980s. I will pair each principle with a concrete, current fact about what Windows — and where it applies, macOS — actually does today, so the case rests on evidence rather than slogans. To understand the mechanics behind why Linux can offer these things at all, the companion post on what Linux actually is explains the GPL and open-source licensing that make it possible.

Privacy: your computer should not be reporting on you

The first value is the simplest to feel and the hardest to fully escape on a proprietary system. A modern Windows or macOS install sends telemetry — diagnostic and usage data — back to the vendor by default, and while both let you reduce it, neither lets a normal user fully verify or fully disable what leaves the machine, because the code doing the sending is closed. The GNU Project maintains a running, sourced catalogue of these behaviours under the deliberately blunt title "Microsoft's Software Is Malware"; whatever you think of the framing, the individual entries are documented incidents, not rhetoric.

The sharpest current example is Windows Recall. Recall takes periodic screenshots of everything on your screen, runs them through on-device AI, and builds a searchable timeline of your activity — so you can later ask "what was that recipe I looked at last Tuesday." After the privacy backlash to its 2024 reveal, Microsoft reworked it: as of its 2025 rollout to Copilot+ PCs it is opt-in, off by default, gated behind Windows Hello biometric sign-in, and stored encrypted and processed locally rather than sent to the cloud (GeekWire, The Register). Those are real improvements and worth acknowledging. But the design still amounts to a system feature whose job is to record what you do, security researchers continue to find gaps in what it captures and how that data can be reached (Kevin Beaumont / DoublePulsar), and "off by default today" is a setting the vendor can revisit, not a guarantee you control.

The smaller indignities matter too, because they reveal the relationship. Recent Windows builds have shown ads and "suggestions" in the Start menu, on the lock screen, and even inside File Explorer — your own file manager used as ad space. macOS is markedly cleaner here, which is the honest per-OS picture: this is not "every proprietary OS is identically bad." But macOS is still closed source, so you are trusting Apple's word about what its telemetry does rather than being able to check. On Linux the relationship is inverted by default: a typical distribution sends nothing home unless you opt in, and because the source is open, anyone — not just you, but the entire community of people who would love to catch a vendor lying — can read exactly what it does. Privacy stops being a setting you toggle and hope, and becomes a property you can verify.

Owning your computer: you bought it, but do you control it?

The second value is about who governs the machine. When you "buy" Windows, you do not buy the software — you accept a licence to use it under terms Microsoft sets and can change. That is the legal reality behind a string of experiences that feel, correctly, like the machine is not fully yours: forced updates that reboot the computer on the vendor's schedule, features added or removed without your consent, and setup flows that steer you where the vendor wants you to go. The FSF's "Upgrade from Windows" campaign is built precisely on this point — that the device you paid for should answer to you.

Two concrete examples make it vivid. First, the Microsoft account requirement. Windows 11 Home has required a Microsoft account and internet connection to complete setup for some time, and with the 24H2 release Microsoft began actively closing the local-account workarounds — removing the long-standing bypassnro script from setup so that getting a local account now takes a deliberate hack rather than a menu choice (PCWorld). You can still get there, but the direction of travel is clear: a machine you own increasingly insists on a vendor account to set up.

Second, the hardware gatekeeping at the Windows 10 end of support. Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025 — no more free security updates. The natural next step, upgrading to Windows 11, requires TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, which Microsoft has called "non-negotiable". The result is millions of perfectly functional PCs — machines that still do everything their owners need — declared unfit for the only supported upgrade path, pushing people toward either a paid Extended Security Updates subscription or new hardware. There are legitimate security reasons for the TPM requirement; that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is who decides when your working computer becomes e-waste, and on a proprietary OS, that decision is not yours.

flowchart TD
    A["Who decides what your computer does?"] --> B["Proprietary OS<br/><i>Windows, macOS</i>"]
    A --> C["Free OS<br/><i>Linux</i>"]
    B --> D["Vendor decides<br/><i>updates, telemetry, account rules, hardware support</i>"]
    C --> E["You decide<br/><i>and can read the code to confirm it</i>"]
    D --> F["You licence it"]
    E --> G["You own the whole stack"]

On a proprietary system the vendor holds the governing decisions; on a free system they sit with you.

This is exactly the gap Linux closes. A Linux machine has no vendor account requirement, no remotely-imposed reboots, and no hardware allow-list deciding whether your CPU is permitted to receive updates. Old hardware is one of the most common reasons people install Linux at all — and it reaches far past the machines Windows 11 merely declined. A lightweight distribution will happily keep a decade-old laptop — even a ten-to-twelve-year-old one that was already too old to run Windows 10 — fast, secure, and fully updated today. Those are not lost causes headed for the recycling bin; they are some of the best switch candidates there are, precisely because Linux hands them years of supported, secure life that the proprietary upgrade path flatly refused them. The hands-on Arch install guide is the clearest demonstration of the principle: you assemble the system from parts you choose, and at the end nothing on it is there because a vendor decided it should be.

Editability: the freedom to change what you depend on

The third value is the one that distinguishes free software at the root, and it is best stated precisely. The Free Software Foundation defines free software by four essential freedoms: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works and change it (which requires access to the source code), to redistribute copies, and to distribute modified copies so the whole community benefits. "Free" here means freedom, not price — the usual gloss is "free as in speech, not free as in beer."

flowchart TD
    A["The four essential freedoms"] --> B["Freedom 0<br/><i>run it for any purpose</i>"]
    A --> C["Freedom 1<br/><i>study and change the source</i>"]
    A --> D["Freedom 2<br/><i>redistribute copies</i>"]
    A --> E["Freedom 3<br/><i>share your changes</i>"]
    C --> F["Requires access to source code"]
    E --> F

The FSF's four freedoms; freedoms 1 and 3 are the ones that require open source.

In practice this is the difference between living in a rented flat where you cannot move a wall, and owning a house you can renovate. On Windows or macOS you get whatever interface the vendor ships, and when they redesign it — moving the Start menu, restyling settings, hiding a control you used daily — you adapt, because you have no other option. On Linux the user interface is just more software, and you can replace any of it. Do not like the desktop environment? Install a different one — GNOME, KDE, something minimal — or swap the whole thing without reinstalling the OS. Want the system to never reorganise itself against your wishes? It will not, because nothing changes unless you change it. Even when you personally never touch a line of code, you benefit from the fact that someone can: a vendor that ships open source cannot quietly do the things a closed vendor can get away with, because the source is right there to be read. This is a freedom proprietary operating systems cannot offer as a matter of structure, not policy — you cannot study or modify source code you are not permitted to see.

Not paying for what you don't own

The fourth value follows from the others. Proprietary licensing increasingly means renting: you pay, often forever, and at no point do you own the thing you are paying for. The clearest example is Microsoft 365. In January 2025 Microsoft bundled its Copilot AI into the consumer plans and raised the price for the first time since launch — Microsoft 365 Personal went from $69.99 to $99.99 per year, and Family from $99.99 to $129.99, a roughly 30% jump (Pureinfotech, Microsoft 365 blog). Existing subscribers can opt back down to "Classic" plans without the AI, which is a fair caveat to note — but the default got more expensive, and stopping payment means losing access to the software entirely. You rent indefinitely and own nothing at the end.

Then there is the "Windows tax": the cost of the Windows licence is baked into the price of nearly every prebuilt PC, whether or not you ever wanted Windows — you pay for it at purchase and still only get a licence, not ownership.

Set against this, Linux and its core applications are free to download and use, and that is genuinely the smaller half of the point. The larger half is what the FSF's "Upgrade from Windows" framing stresses: you own the whole stack. There is no subscription that can lapse and lock you out of your own documents, and no business model that depends on extracting more from you over time. Free software ties the value back to freedom — the price of zero is a consequence of the freedoms, not the reason for them. LibreOffice opens your old Office files and asks nothing in return, forever, because no one needs you to keep paying.

The honest trade-offs (and why this isn't "Windows bad, Mac fine")

ℹ️ Note — This is a values trade-off, not a free win. Linux pays you back in privacy, ownership, and control, but it asks for some convenience and compatibility in return. Go in knowing both sides.

A balanced case has to admit the costs, and Linux has real ones. Some applications simply do not run on it — the Adobe Creative Suite, certain professional and engineering tools, a number of anti-cheat-protected games — and while alternatives and compatibility layers exist, "it just works" is not always true. Hardware can be quirky: a Wi-Fi chip or fingerprint reader that worked instantly on Windows may need fiddling, or may not work at all. And you maintain a Linux system yourself; there is no vendor support line, and the freedom to change everything is also the responsibility to occasionally fix it. These are not reasons to avoid Linux, but they are reasons to go in with open eyes. The two migration guides — migrating from Windows and migrating from macOS — lay out the specific costs honestly, including which apps have good replacements and which do not.

It is also worth being precise about the target of this argument, because the strong FSF version is easy to caricature as a grudge against one company. It is not. In "Is Microsoft the Great Satan?", the FSF makes the point directly: the problem is proprietary software in general, not Microsoft specifically. Microsoft is simply the largest and most visible practitioner. That framing matters because of macOS. It is tempting to read the privacy and ownership complaints as "Windows bad, Mac fine" — and on surface polish, ads, and bloat, macOS genuinely is cleaner. But on the four values that drive this post, macOS shares most of the same issues: it is closed source, so you cannot study or verify it; you do not own it, you license it; and Apple's ecosystem lock-in — the Mac App Store, notarisation, the steady tightening of what software is allowed to run — has been increasing, not decreasing. A Mac asks you to trust Apple where Windows asks you to trust Microsoft. Linux asks you to trust no one, because you can check.

flowchart TD
    A["Is Linux for you?"] --> B["Do you care about privacy, owning your machine, customising it, or not renting software?"]
    B -->|"yes"| C["Do you depend on specific locked apps<br/><i>Adobe, anti-cheat games</i> — or need zero maintenance?"]
    B -->|"no"| D["Stay where you are<br/><i>it's a fair choice</i>"]
    C -->|"no"| E["Switch to Linux"]
    C -->|"yes"| F["Dual-boot or keep one machine on Windows/macOS"]

The four values are the question; locked apps and maintenance appetite are the practical filter.

A short close

You do not switch to Linux because it is trendy, or free, or because someone on the internet told you to. You switch when the four values land — when you decide that a computer reporting on you, governed by a vendor's rules, unchangeable by you, and rented rather than owned, is not the relationship you want with a machine you paid for. Linux is the option where privacy is the default, the machine answers to you, every part is yours to change, and you own the whole stack outright. It costs you some convenience and some compatibility, honestly stated. Whether that trade is worth it is exactly the decision the flowchart above is for — and if it is, the rest of the Linux series is the path: start with what Linux actually is for the mechanics, read the migration guide for your current OS, and when you are ready to build one from scratch, install Arch.