That's a lot of work to make software you paid for not spy on you...

Indeed, and I hate it.

I have a beloved 2015 MBP that I'm trying to keep alive, but it's becoming a little underpowered and it's not upgradeable. New MBPs are a non-starter with the port and keyboard situation and my coworkers all hate them. Then I have a maxed out XPS 13 which is a very nice and capable machine that suits me completely, except that it has a malicious OS that I have to constantly fight. And Linux doesn't support a lot of the tools I need.

So..... what's the solution here?

> "Then I have a maxed out XPS 13 which is a very nice and capable machine that suits me completely, except that it has a malicious OS that I have to constantly fight. And Linux doesn't support a lot of the tools I need.

So..... what's the solution here?"

The solution is sitting in your hands. That XPS 13 can run Ubuntu (and probably Debian, Arch/Antergos, or any other major distro) flawlessly since Dell ships a version with Ubuntu preinstalled. Set it up to dual boot with Windows, and use VirtualBox's raw hard disk access feature to set up a Windows guest under Linux using the Windows partition as the VM's boot drive.

That way, you can slowly wean yourself off of Windows; use the VM for your Windows-only tasks with the option of booting natively into Windows for anything strictly hardware dependent, until you have replaced your Windows workflow with Linux. Even if you find you can't 100% escape Windows, at least you're not living in it so you're not being spied on all day.

> set up a Windows guest under Linux using the Windows partition as the VM's boot drive.

> with the option of booting natively into Windows for anything strictly hardware dependent

IIRC, years ago, when Windows 7 was the latest Windows, this couldn't be done. Windows used to take offense if the hardware it was running on changed significantly from boot to boot. Has that changed with Windows 10?

It's gotten better both with changes in Windows itself and with improvements in virtualization. VirtualBox allows you to use different hypervisors so you can get closer to native hardware access in a VM. It works best when the guest is Linux but it also works well with Windows and recently, macOS. You can even do GPU passthrough for better Windows gaming on a Linux host.

With a separate, dedicated GPU is my understanding, which is a deal-breaker.

I've recently moved to Mint with Win7 in a vm and its lack of GPU and DirectX support is not really workable. Basic apps are fine.

> "With a separate, dedicated GPU"

Well, yes, if you want to do any significant amount of gaming on a computer, you'd want a dedicated GPU. If integrated GPUs meet your demands for gaming, you're better of with native Linux games and Wine for Windows casual games.

> "I've recently moved to Mint with Win7 in a vm and its lack of GPU and DirectX support is not really workable."

It sounds like you're better served by dual-booting then. Running a VM isn't a solution for everyone, just another option for some.

use linux for everything that you can use it for and then just run windows in a vm when you need it for certain software.

I started off in a dual boot situation, and i can't even remember the last time i went into my windows partition. It has to be less than 5 times in the past 3 years.

Games are what would prevent a lot of people. GPU support in a vm (at least VirtualBox) is still abysmal.

I think utilizing a firewall at the router level would be one way to deal with the problem, but it will take time to determine and implement the appropriate rules (a popular choice on HN is the EdgeRouter Lite3 from Ubiquiti).

There may be Linux equivalents of the tools you use, but it would be difficult to say without you naming these tools specifically.

> I have a beloved 2015 MBP that I'm trying to keep alive, but it's becoming a little underpowered

The new 2017 models don't have much more horsepower. They just have a worse keyboard and a touch strip.

What are the tools you need that work in both Mac and Windows but not Linux?

Xamarin, Adobe stuff. And I've found a Windows VM in a Linux host to be passable, though suboptimal. Especially because you only run it sporadically, so even though it's a VM you still have to deal with its compulsive and compulsory updating, restarting, and whatever else it does that keeps it busy for 20 minutes when it hasn't been started in a month.

Also Linux multi-screen/multi-DPI support is still bad.

My 3 monitors (which have different DPIs than the monitor that comes with my linux laptop). Trying to do this with the tools Ubuntu provides doesn't work. Ubuntu's GUI doesn't scale well, and I can't find a setup that does.

I just want this to work, but it doesn't. This was a Dell laptop that came preinstalled with Ubuntu, too.

Running MacOS on virtualbox on top of Windows works ok. There are a lots of tutorials on the web that shows you how to do that. It does violate Apple's SW license.

It is very fun to play with a full screen MacOS on a touch screen enable Laptop.

Use a windows vm for the tools that are not available on linux.

Hackintosh

This would effectively just be trading one fight for another.

Not really. If you can live with the same OS X you installed first, allowing only fix updates, you can be totally fine on XPS 13/15 (given you have Broadcom WiFi). Everything else works like on real MacBook. The same holds for most Zenbooks (those without NVidia).

As an experiment last year, I tried to run Windows Firewall in "block all" mode and wrote this tool to manage it:

https://github.com/caesarshift/msfw

I would run "msfw log --tail" to watch for blocked connections. If I wanted to allow the connection, I then added it as a rule.

It was alot of work to setup initially, and I even found some scenarios where adding a rule was not sufficient to allow the connection. I never understood why.

I use a Dell XPS with Ubuntu. I didn't have to deal with any of the bullshit.

Why do people continue to purchase products from companies that blatantly want to spy on them? Vote with your wallet and never go through a bizarre multi-step anti-spyware setup again.

That sound interesting but you have really to be proactive and deploy significant a technical knowledge to block the software from abusing you.

Still you count as a happy Windows user and will reinforce the Microsoft position. This way they will be able to abuse 99% of their users, those that don't have the same competencies and time to spend on these countermeasures.

As for the WSL I stopped using it. This is an honey trap to let people use Windows as their primary OS by just giving them the developer goodies they like. I may consider it again if you can use it to develop a full-fledged Windows application that can access the windowing system and can be redistributed. You may have noticed that with WSL you cannot and the applications you may do remains nicely restricted to the linux subsystem.

> As for the WSL I stopped using it. This is an honey trap to let people use Windows as their primary OS by just giving them the developer goodies they like. I may consider it again if you can use it to develop a full-fledged Windows application that can access the windowing system and can be redistributed.

A honey pot? I don't think that means what you think it means. If you are interested in developing full-fledged Windows applications, why in the world would you want to use WSL? You are not the kind of developer that WSL is designed for.

I develop full fledged Windows applications using GCC with MinGW. They could have managed to let people doing the same thing with WSL but you cannot.

WSL is Linux. It is not Windows. Microsoft "managed" to make it possible to run Linux binaries on Windows, in a pseudo-virtual Linux environment. The distro you choose to run in WSL is not built by Microsoft.

If you want to develop to a Windows target, then configure your WSL environment to do cross-compiling. That's up to you. If you can cross-compile in Ubuntu, then you can cross-compile in WSL. Just don't expect WSL to be anything but Linux.

My solution with Windows is easier. I run it in a VM and block all network traffic. Problem solved.

And regarding (5)... well, the same thing I used to tell people about WINE applies, just in reverse. Unless you're butting up against a corporate policy or something, why pick the inferior, broken imitation when the real thing is right there?

Jesus man, wipe that OS off and do a clean install or jettison for Linux immediately.

MS has in the past overridden (or gone around) Windows Firewall for the downloading of Windows updates.