I recently bashed Windows for being too darn snoopy, but you know what? It’s not just Windows. Ever since Yosemite came out, Apple’s macOS has been just as untrustworthy. As for Chrome OS, Android and iOS, come on! They’re all built around cloud services; by design, they share everything you do with third-party services. What’s the answer? Desktop Linux.
With President Trump considering asking foreign visitors to disclose all websites and social media sites they visit and Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general pick, wanting cryptographic back doors, I think privacy is more important than ever.
True, I’ve been praising desktop Linux for ages, but privacy is a new reason to use it. In the past, while Windows had lousy security, at least it didn’t report into headquarters. Now it does. So do almost all operating systems.
Chrome OS and Android, for example, are Linux distributions, but they perform at full power only with an internet connection. Google makes its money from your information.
So if privacy really matters to you, you need an operating system that doesn’t broadcast your moves to the World Wide Web. For all practical purposes, that means desktop Linux.
Why? Because while you can certainly use cloud services such as Gmail or even Microsoft’s Office 365 on Linux, most Linux desktop apps live and work on your desktop.
These applications, such as the LibreOffice office suite, the Evolution email client and the GIMP image editor, are every bit as good as their Windows equivalents. If you do need a specific Windows application, chances are good that Wine 2.0, a set of Windows APIs that have been ported to Linux, will let you run your program on top of Linux. For example, Microsoft Office 2013 now runs on Linux with Wine.