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.

For another example, your claim of conflation very much appears to be centred around your misunderstanding of the facts

I’m entirely unconvinced by your claim that any participation in “capitalistic evil” immediately invalidates all subsequent discernment of shades of evil or the complex interactions thereof.

even when discussing a topic you openly admit you know little to nothing about.

All because your ego got a little bruised

Funny, for somebody that claims to not conflate Windows with Microsoft you seem to spend a lot of time telling Windows users that they're ignorant or wrong for association with Microsoft. Not to mention you edited out most of the times you lumped them together.