Is such paranoia warranted? Millions of corporate laptops run Windows 11 just fine. I know M$ is evil and spying on you, but not to such degree.

Having a Windows 11 corporate laptop with a domain/Entra login, I actually trust it more than a home Windows 11 with a Microsoft account. Because if I lock myself out, I have a contact (corporate support) that is actually interested in helping me recover everything. With a Microsoft account it's a mess. I had so many problems with Microsoft accounts that I lost count of how many I have, and most are broken in some way, because of different issues and different service integrations over time. The Skype account is now useless. I never recovered my paid Minecraft account after one event. With a machine with a local account, now I have to be very careful on what I click related to MS accounts, because trying to solve various issues with Teams, I managed to get the local account linked with that MS account. I spent hours trying to recover a different account after I randomly filled one nagging question about birth date - who wants to give the real birth date to Microsoft - and then I got locked out because I said was underage :). So yes, one of the big issues is the push to have a linked OS account where you have to rely on MS support to solve your issues, otherwise you basically get locked out of your machine and other things you paid for.

Also, domain policies offer more control over the corporate PCs (this is how some of the MS spying is shut off on corporate PCs; it's debatable if the corporate spying added by other domain policies is an improvement).

I recently, by playing around with the LAN's default PAC file and a dummy HTTP server, discovered that on a machine that says in System Settings that Proxy Auto-Discovery is turned off, the PAC file is still fetched and used by a too-large number of Microsoft/Google background auto-update services, from Windows Update to Office.

* https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114693762493884550

I had been lucky through having done my own experimentation, decades ago, with setting up a default PAC file on the LAN and having left it in just-send-everything-directly mode, keeping it as I upgraded things on the LAN, all of these years. Because otherwise I would have been vulnerable to a third-party in the search path for years, on a machine that clearly and unequivocally, including per direct inspection of the setting in the registry, has this switched off.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/web-browser-auto-proxy-configuration.ht...

> Is such paranoia warranted? Millions of corporate laptops run Windows 11 just fine.

Yes. With Windows Recall data mining surveillance screenshots taken every 5-7 seconds, completely disregarding if this may compromise your security, safety or privacy, we move from "you're the product" to "you're a pet in a zoo, and we want to learn from your behavior."

> I know M$ is evil and spying on you, but not to such degree.*

I mean, they could be recording every second.

I'm pretty sure that's a bandwidth issue.

Not because they really feel like giving you 3-4 second pockets of security, safety and privacy.

I don't trust microsoft to not push an update that exposes all my stuff. Their updates the last few years have been an absolutely shitshow in so many regards.