>>It is why I hate Microsoft, and everything they stand for.

Because they charge a couple hundred $ for an OS? Depending what you buy, the profit margin on PC hardware easily can exceed that and local supermarkets have a written agenda to scalp more profit than that from you every month. So why pick on MS?

FWIW, in the good old days the hardware carried the cost and the OS was bundled for free. That changed on the TRS-80 when NEWDOS costing $99 did well because the bundled TRSDOS was buggy and unreliable. Perhaps you can consider that paid OS came about because the writers of honorable freeware for the TRS-80 did a lousy job. ;-) MS inherited that mantle for the PC and did a fine job at the start- Windows 95 probably was the pinnacle with people sleeping outside stores to get the first copies of a rock star OS.

For the rest, I doubt I'll be paying for a MS OS ever again - current notebook only has to last a couple of years to carry me through to the post-grandpa-box era.

>>I pray deeply to free everyone who wants freed from this profit-based / control-based / horrendous system of control and domination that is money-seeking big business, from that unholy thing which is seen everywhere profit-seeking is involved, something along the lines the "Microsoft agenda" as of being nothing short of a dominating and directing leech.

Simply not true that profit and corporate behavior are interchangeable. As for control: if you're referring to the Cloud thing, there's no compulsion to participate. LibreOffice does the trick. But make sure you do pay for an internet security system like Norton rather than relying on the one that good old MS bundles for free.