It’s because that might allow them to monopolize access to information later on. Your future library is called Amazon and it costs you a 100 bucks per month subscription. Plus, they can change the information displayed to you at will, as it all comes from their algorithmic black box.
I’m fairly sure that they know this will eventually happen. Windows pretty much only exists for them to milk their user base further, while they’re still “hooked” on it. I’m fairly certain that MS knows that Windows isn’t worth long-term investments anymore. So this is the enshittify-and-milk-users phase of the Windows decline. MS already positioned itself so that it doesn’t NEED Windows to be successful. They make most of their money with cloud services these days. And they are internally building up Linux knowledge by having created their in-house Azure Linux distribution as well as hiring some prominent Linux ecosystem developers like the systemd author. Plus, they ported .NET and Powershell 7+ to cross-platform. They will have no problems if, say, in 10 years, Windows loses its dominance. In the meantime, the poor Windows users who still use this clownware are fair game.
Plan 9 From Outer Space is the classic worst movie ever made, and that’s why it’s entertaining.
This is just the beginning. It will not get better, because after this current shitshow there’s the climate disaster growing and coming with full, unmitigated force. This will cause mass migrations, deaths and chaos world-wide. Humanity just fucked it up. Make the best out of it but don’t expect anyone who’s young today to have any sort of positive future.
What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.
For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.
On many websites, the cookies are created no matter what you choose. It’s a dark pattern to get you to accept all, yes, but In the end it’s often meaningless.
Use a decent browser like librewolf which isolates cookies so only the site that created them can access them and clears all cookies on exit - this protects you from bad effects of cookies so you can just accept all. However, you’re still susceptible to other methods of tracking (like IP address or browser fingerprint based tracking) unless you use Tor Browser or something similar.
How to Wagon your Dragon
Not just themed Chrome but with Microsoft’s anti-features (data gathering) and unwanted integrations added on top. Or instead of Google’s. Not sure. Anyway, if you don’t want to freely give away even more of your browsing data to either Microsoft or Google you shouldn’t use any of those.
If you want a Chromium-based browser for the desktop, try Brave but be wary that you need to change lots of settings to make it behave well (but it’s still the least bad Chromium-based browser, when not counting Vanadium for GrapheneOS/Android).
If not, try Librewolf, which already behaves well out of the box and reigns among the top Firefox-based desktop browsers.
I use Arch since approximately 2006 or so. I like its stability (yes!), performance, rapid updates and technical simplicity. It never stands in my way and it’s fairly simple to understand, administer and modify. It’s probably the most convenient OS I’ve ever used - sure it takes time/effort to set it up but once you’re past that it’s smooth sailing. It also doesn’t change dramatically over the years (it doesn’t need to) so it’s easy to keep up with its development. Plus, I have a custom setup script for it that installs and sets up all of the basics, so if I ever need to reinstall, I’m not starting from zero.
I am eyeing NixOS as “the next step” but didn’t yet experiment with it too much. Arch is just too comfy to use and the advantages that NixOS brings aren’t yet significant enough for me to make any kind of switch to it, but I consider NIxOS (as well as its related technologies like the Nix package manager) to be the most interesting and most advanced things in the Linux world currently.
If you’re reading this as a newbie Linux user: probably don’t use any of the two mentioned above (yet). They’re not considered entry-level stuff, unless you’re interested in learning low-level (as in: highly technical) Linux stuff from the start already. NixOS/Nix in particular is fairly complex and can be a challenge even for veteran Linux admins/users to fully understand and utilize well. Start your journey with more common desktop distros like Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu.
Somehow that got me thinking of Roku’s Basilisk again. If you don’t know that, I’m sorry for mentioning. :) But it’s also a cool thought experiment.