it’s hardly a conflation, this hostile modus operandi is baked into the windows product itself with malicious and intrusive features. i’m not sure if this is news to anyone, but those user-hostile features were added to windows by microsoft. and the best defense offered thus far for that is basically “most or all tech giants do it too” - yes, thankyou that’s exactly our point. the fact that shipping this kind of abusive software has been normalised is part of the problem too.
i agree in as much as not everything about windows is bad. and it can be useful sometimes out of necessity. though its worth remembering that necessity may often be the result of hostility on microsoft’s part, either past or present. so it’s not really possible to have an honest conversation about what windows is, without an awareness of how microsoft has maliciously managed our perception of desktop operating systems in general. happy to explain what i mean by this in more detail if anyone’s interested.