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I have a Windows 10 pro license and i wanted to use Windows 10. But seeing how it treats the user's privacy and all, I am having second thoughts. I've read a lot about how Windows 10 is a disaster and all, but i want to hear it from some pros with experience in these kinds of stuff. So, as a person who's concerned with privacy, what are things we should watch out for, if we wanted to use Windows 10 ? Or any version of Windows for that matter?

Right now i use Kali 2.0 for home/research and Fedora 22 for work.

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    Questions asking for personal opinions are prohibited as described in the help center because they're not a good fit for this type of Q&A site. Perhaps you can reword the question to make it more concrete?
    – Neil Smithline
    Sep 22, 2015 at 16:06
  • Sorry about that. Excuse me, i will edit it
    – Root
    Sep 22, 2015 at 16:11
  • I upgraded from my existing windows 8.1 to windows 10 and the windows 10 experience so far is not very nice, simply because there are many frequent updates. - it is wise to wait for the first service pack. now i'm on ubuntu, waiting for reactOS beta to be launched.
    – JOW
    Sep 22, 2015 at 16:12

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No

If you are fine using Fedora, keep with it. Really, some people would find a big change changing to Linux, but as you are already enjoying it, and assuming you don't have any hard dependency on a specific Windows-only application… I wouldn't look back.

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  • Thank you. It makes sense. Actually i work as a devops engineer (early in my career though). I love Fedora 22 and it gets my job done without any issues. And I'm pretty sure that i can deal with any issues that may come up on my way. But, i do like to play games once in a while, and i have windows 7 for that. I boot Windows 7 once in a week or so, i was thinking about using Windows 10, guess i should not.
    – Root
    Sep 22, 2015 at 16:10
  • @Manz in the short term there's no compelling reason to switch, but in a year or two when games using the low overhead DX12 APIs start coming out W10 will potentially offer significantly higher frame rates as long as you have a DX11 compatible graphics card. DX versioning is confusing; but broadly speaking the most important performance benefits of the DX12 software API (which requires W10) are available to DX11.0 hardware. You'll probably want to upgrade your gaming system sometime between now and the end of next July (when the free upgrade goes away); but there's no need to rush.
    – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight
    Sep 22, 2015 at 20:45
  • I guess i should stay in my comfort zone and not upgrade, yet, and will see about the gaming as you said. Thank you for that.
    – Root
    Sep 23, 2015 at 2:49
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To answer you question,

Windows 10 is secure.

People are (rightfully so) concerned about many of the privacy (or lack thereof) features within Windows 10. This could include reaching out to Microsoft's command and control to transfer anonymous system data, WIFI sharing, or a number of other things embedded within the OS.

There are several comprehensive guides out there that can help you with "securing" your Windows 10 install. By that, I mostly mean different tweaks and fixes that you can do to improve your privacy. You can find these easily on the Internet.

But as to the question of security, I'd say that because it's the latest Microsoft OS release, it's very secure - all things considered.

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    Windows 10 is secure? This is a VERY bold claim. You cannot be so definitive about it. I wont hold it's track record against it but given how large it is, and how stuff like the GUI is in kernel space, there are a lot of potential vectors.
    – Alec Teal
    Sep 22, 2015 at 20:37
  • If you follow good practices, I'd bet it's pretty damn secure. That's all I'm saying. It's only going to be as secure as the human sitting behind the monitor and operating the OS. It's the most modern Microsoft operating system that's actively being worked on and tweaked - you may be concerned about this or that privacy issue, and the operating system may not be perfectly hardened yet - but even still, I think I answered the OP's question pretty directly and accurately. And there are always attack vectors.
    – shift_tab
    Sep 23, 2015 at 13:43
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    That's totally wrong. Lets use the "word documents can be opened and run arbitrary code" example, a well written bit of software means you can open anything, harmlessly, a badly written one means you should fear emails. For decades microsoft have had really weird bugs like this. It even has a market (antivirus) where people try to find software exploiting it. Note that Linux malware in contrast has to be installed, and things like signing repositories is standard.
    – Alec Teal
    Sep 23, 2015 at 13:45
  • Which exact statements of mine are totally wrong? Arbitrary code can be remotely executed on a number of things, regardless of OS/platform/application. What's your point? Flaws exist in Microsoft Windows 10 as they exist in various Linux distros and other versions of Windows and all sorts of applications! The question that OP asked wasn't "Will I ever get hacked?" In my opinion, there's nothing you need to "look out for" if using Win10 as your primary OS; just follow typical hardening and patching practices and go find one of those privacy tweaking guides if you wish. This is security101.
    – shift_tab
    Sep 23, 2015 at 13:52

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