Regardless of os full disk encryption is your friend and keep regular backups incase shit hits the fan. Rely on bookmarks as much as possible to minimize your chances of clicking on phishing links and stick to trusted sites. Lastly use a trusted vpn with a killswitch even if you dont think you need one it never hurts.
If it were up to me, the first boot I would make sure theres no internet access either via Ethernet or wifi that ensures the computer cannot phone home to its mothership. From there either reinstall windows fresh or straight to Linux if you want to avoid spyware.
What is your threat model like ? Who are you intending to guard yourself against ?
Is it an assembled PC or a pre-built ? Pre-builts may come with some form of tracking. OS support also may be a concern on some pre-builts.
Maybe something like Debian 12 testing might be a good Linux option to consider, of course Windows or Mac are not recommended for the privacy conscious amongst us. Debian is not the most user friendly to get installer image of, but it has a fairly straightforward GUI based setup for a fresh install.
In case Windows is a requirement then probably look into the Tron script, helps automate a lot of things you might need as privacy settings (among other actions performed by the script).
Note: These are to be treated as opinions, not advice.
Throw Linux on it or reinstall windows if you don’t want to learn Linux. I assume it’s a new PC, but you never know what may be on there regardless. A new install with a complete overwrite is the way to go imo.
For Linux, it personally use arch (btw) and love it but it’s not super beginner friendly. I’ve heard good things about Linux mint for beginners so that may be a good place to start
Mint is great and feels very similar to Windows, and Pop OS is also very great and feels a bit more analogous to Mac OS if you prefer that.
Pop is in the middle of building their own desktop environment (moving away from Gnome) so the latest version is 22.04, but they’re still keeping kernel updates and packages up to date until the new DE is ready to launch.
When I first wanted to switch to Linux I tried out both on a USB stick and I was impressed with both, but I preferred the style of Pop. Both are based on Ubuntu so if you need to Google for tech support 99% of what you find will apply to you.
AFAIK no, I have been playing a couple of games in Co-op with friends and have no problems related with Windows for now, my only mistake was not measure performance before enabling everything.
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