Maybe Intel AMT running? I’m not sure it can be disabled though.

It’s just WIN + Spacebar, or click the keyboard layout icon in the taskbar.

Many people use laptops and use other wifi networks or tether to their phone, both can expose you because of unknown firewall states or IPv6 being used.

By default it should be configured to allow all outgoing, and block all incoming. That’s perfectly fine for a desktop/laptop and you don’t need to mess with it.

You can’t really do that much outgoing filtering with a firewall that will be useful, because basically everything operates on port 80/443, and often connects to the same CDNs or datacenter IPs for multiple services.

Instead DNS blocking is a much more effective way to handle it, plus uBlock Origin in your browser.

It would, but it would be a very small difference. Maybe 2-3% at most.

Torrents work by someone directly connecting to your computer, that’s what happens when you download and seed a torrent after.

So the whole time you’re doing anything with torrents, hundreds/thousands of other computers are connecting to yours to make that work.

You can run a basic model on pretty mid-range hardware, the smaller ones are only 1-2GB in size.

Why would that be the case?

I just do full system images for that reason, easier than trying to pick and choose what should be backed up. Used to use Veeam, currently using Synology Active Backup.

For online backups I don’t due to size, but for local backups it’s just way easier.

To install at minimum you’ll need to likely shrink existing partitions and create new ones for linux if you don’t want to wipe the drive, that would be a dual-boot setup with Windows still installed along side. Or you can just wipe the drive entirely and have only Linux.

Regarding the files you should already have backups of anything important, if you don’t, set it up ASAP.

Messing with partitions can easily cause data loss if something goes wrong.

You also never know when hardware failure, malware, power surges, lightning strikes, or whatever other disaster will happen and cause data loss. 1 copy of files might as well be 0 copies.

How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu?

Most guides on installing things or help on fixing things will offer terminal commands, so I can see how that could certainly lead to that feeling as a new user.

Also depending on the DE and stuff certain very basic obvious settings are not available in the GUI, like fractional scaling on KDE which has to be done by editing some config file first.

Yeah they get a lot of users due to the free plans they offer, so I imagine there’s just a lot of reviews as a result, both good and bad.

Also due to the free plan and being commonly used by home lab groups or small businesses, I think there are a lot of users that don’t fully understand what they’re getting into with CF and may be upset when they find out later on.

If you follow their ToS and understand what cloudflares proxy is doing to your traffic then it all works just fine.

I imagine trustpilot is where people go to vent about bad service because it’ll come up when you search for cloudflare reviews.

It’s just weird that after install it can’t detect my hardware and pull the drivers it needs like windows does.

I find quite often that the Live version of a distro will work perfectly, but after install some hardware won’t work anymore.

I’m not sure what you mean?

the issue is when the OS forcefully installs that update and breaks your system without you doing anything.

The crowdstrike update was pushed out by their own software I thought, not the windows update system?

Plus crowdstrike has caused similar issues with Linux systems before, so the solution is to just not use crowdstrike and similar solutions on any OS.

The issue is not that Windows had a broken update, that can happen and it’s fine, the issue is when the OS forcefully installs that update and breaks your system without you doing anything.

I would have thought most businesses with windows would do staged rollouts.

Can’t say I’ve ever had issues, but PeaZip is good and integrates nicely.

Windows comes with pretty good tools for these already.

1. Game Bar can do this and is built in, or ShareX for short clips

2. Snipping tool is pretty full featured and built in. ShareX is also good.

3. Windows handles ZIP natively.

Oh for sure it made sense back in the HDD days, but with NVMe SSDs it’s not needed for most people anymore.