The tips, ads, and recommendations you see will be more generic and may be less relevant to you.
And this is treated as a bad thing?!
The number of ads you see won't change, but they may be less relevant to you.
Send only info about your device, its settings and capabilities, and whether it is performing properly.
In other words, even after turning off all the settings, your data still gets collected.
The rest of the installation process wasn't fun either. It was worded in this weird, condescending tone, like "Let's get everything set up for you", and "Let Cortana help you get things done!".
Thank goodness for FLOSS and GNU/Linux.
Yeah sadly as a gamer I HAVE to put up with Windows. But Next time I build a machine I'm definitely dedicating a whole drive to a linux OS because fuck Windows and their petty marketing shit.
Personally I treat my windows pc as a gaming console. I play games on it and nothing else. Then it becomes a non issue: so what if they track my gaming activity?
Have to? Been playing on Linux for years, haven't had many issues so far.
There are unfortunately still too many games that my friends and I play that won't work on Linux. In my own situation, I'd be alienating myself from my friends from switching over even though I really want to. Not to mention I built my PC with a Nvida card which all I hear is that it either works perfectly for you, or you better buy an AMD card so there are still some valid reasons for people not to switch. Once windows 11 is forced upon me is when I'll cut my losses though. Glad to hear that it's a good enough experience for you though!
I have to agree. I used to play Rainbow 6 with my friends. I enjoyed it, because I was addicted to gaming and they were the only friends I had. After I switched to Linux, I couldn't play R6 online, which led to them... well... not being friends with me anymore. I'm glad I got out, because if the only thing keeping them being friends with me were the all-nighters of Rainbow, there was no friendship to speak of (I knew these people offline, not just online). After this I eventually stopped gaming completely, not because of a few very minor compatibility issues, but because I realised how much time I was wasting gaming.
So essentially, not only did Linux help me get back control of my computing, but it also completely eradicated my gaming addiction and helped realise what functioning relationships look like, since I even started socialising more. An absolute bargain!
I made the jump back last fall. I've ran into one game so far I couldn't play and that was just because of it's anticheat software (the game was "hell let loose"). Check out Pop!_os. The GPU drivers are preinstalled in the kernel and just work. For both Nvidia and AMD. Steams proton and lutris/wine have made everything easy to play. Never going back to windows now.
You should get a Steam Deck, I want one as it seems pretty awesome. It runs Linux and you can sail the seven seas like crazy on there, yk?
Honestly, I haven't played games in a while but in the future, when I feel like gaming again, the Steam Deck will likely be my thing.