So, I bet you assume that this title has to be massive hyperbole. Well, keep reading and decide for yourself.

About a month ago, I had an MRI taken due to my back issues and the disk they gave me did not seem to be readable. I thought that perhaps it was an operating system issue, so I downloaded the windows 11 installer, took one of my unused SSDs and installed Windows 11 on it. To my dismay, the installation failed at first due to secureboot and TPM not being enabled at the BIOS level. So I turned that on, installed windows, found out the hack to get to install it without an internet connection (already abusive enough that they make you require an internet connection - for some reason internet didn’t work during install, even though there was no problem with my network)

Anyhow, I continued, found out that on Windows 11, the disk is equally unreadable and was about ready to fix my BIOS settings again and go back to Arch Linux like a sane person.

Out of laziness I didn’t change my BIOS settings right away and booted into my regular OS immediately. Then, by sheer luck, I noticed that suddenly, I had no access to the data on my files drive anymore. A quick lsblk command revealed that it was encrypted by Bitlocker. What the fuck?! So. Windows 11 just encrypts all other drives connected to the computer which are in NTFS encoding. My files drive was in that format so that I can just use it if I ever had to use Windows again.

It is utterly INSANE that Windows 11 encrypts data on drives it has no business messing with without your knowledge, consent, any warning.

So, at that point I was panicking hard. All my data suddenly inaccessible. I roughly knew how to fix it, but I couldn’t due to the panic I was dealing with. So I had a friend deactivate the encryption on this drive which took several hours. After this the data was accessible again.

It was only by SHEER LUCK and LAZINESS that I noticed my data being encrypted before fixing my BIOS settings after which the data would have been irrecoverably LOST. I can’t put into words how malicious and violating it felt to have been locked out of my own data by some malicious operating system. If not for this luck, I would have lost all the personal data I have accumulated in my lifetime. All the music I created, coding projects, pictures I’ve taken, drawn, or otherwisely created, my games library, etc.

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that if I lost all this, there may have been a realistic chance for me to end myself. And I’m writing this as a PSA. Absolutely, don’t ever use Windows 11. After having switched to Linux from Windows 10, I can say that it’s like coming out of an abusive relationship where you don’t really realize just how bad it was while it was going on, but afterwards you look back on it and think to yourself: “Holy fuck, why did I ever put up with being treated like this?!”

Stay safe. Don’t do Windows.