If you care about privacy and wanna use Windows… God help you…

You want Linux my friend

There’s a lot of helpful comments here and being your age is a great time to start tinkering with computers! Just start by installing them into a VirtualBox because if you don’t have the knowledge it’s very easy to break things and anyone else that has to use the computer isn’t going to be very happy with you.

However, I want to point out something that actually address your concerns.

1. If you are concerned about getting “caught” for torrenting then Windows vs any other OS makes zero difference.
2. If you are concerned about viruses, Linux is more secure based on the fact that most viruses target Windows. However, this does not mean it is impossible. Learning basic security practices will help you on Windows and much as any other OS.

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Windows 10 IoT enterprise LTSC and disable telemetry. Don’t bother with 3rd party apps for privacy unless you are 100% sure they are safe.

And never install from an ISO that’s been tampered with. Get directly from Microsoft.

If all you want to do is torrent just use a vpn, as it sounds like all you really want is to avoid DMCA notices.

This is a good lesson in understanding your threat model.

A “just works” distribution like Linux Mint is miles ahead compared to Windows and Tails OS is a step even further as it is only Live and routes everything through TOR.

Linux is not hard to be honest. Your main concern in difficulty is third-party software support. (Creative cloud and office 365 does not work for instance.)

If you want to try out any of these, just ask me if you need any help

Ameliorate your Windows 10 and Windows 11 installation.

Tails isn’t really designed for daily driving. I’d go for a user friendly distro like Ubuntu if you an on switching from windows.

It is possible to make windows a little more private if you didn’t want to switch. Here’s a pretty good guide in modifying the the iso before installing: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/create-custom-windows-11-install-disk

Modifying window does help users gain more control and privacy, but windows is proprietary so a person can only do so much. Be careful on what you remove if you GI this route, windows relies on weird apps to function.

Another note, I wouldn’t be afraid of torrenting. The inky person that would care that your getting free movies and such is your ISP, and you can just flip on a VPN to clear their radar.

I dumped Windows for Linux bout 12 years ago, but because I wasn’t too sure, I didn’t do the jump all in one go. I spent about 12 months “dual booting”. What this means is that you install linux to a USB / pen drive (Mint seems a great option). Once you’ve installed Mint to a USB drive, you can boot your Windows machine into Linux Mint from that USB drive. That will give you the chance to poke around and try it out as often as you like. Just remember that it won’t be as fast as it would be if you installl to your hard drive. If you like it, then you can install it alongside your Windows system. This is dual booting. When you power up your laptop or PC, you get to choose whether you boot into Windows or Linux. All this was quite daunting for me at the time, as I wasn’t “techy”. But quite quickly I’d become quite comfortable as it is easy once you’ve done it. There are a range of tutorials online about creating a bootable USB drive with Linux and how to get your machine to boot from it. My best advice is to give that a try.

If you know how to use Windows, you can easily master a popular Linux distribution. It will dual boot with Windows so anytime you can’t do something in Linux, you can switch back or run an emulator.

The German government has an ongoing investigation into achieving this: https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Service-Navi/Publikationen/Studien/SiSyPHuS_Win10/SiSyPHuS.html

I’m mostly posting this to say that it’s a lot of work. They dubbed it “SiSyPHuS”, not because that acronym just came naturally from the study’s title…

Download whatever distro seems interesting, if tails is something you want to try then try it I actually had a similar introduction to Linux but I doubt youd stick with tails as its not a daily not to say tails doesn’t have its place. I personal like arch distros and if your moving from windows you’d probably like KDE plasma. Using Linux won’t instantly net you privacy, this is something that you’d need to pro actively aim to be private, like what is the URL for the pirate bay, 1337x, can I trust this torrent? Which browser do you use and search engine, what torrent client can be trusted.

I’d recommend using transmission, qbittorrent or anything Foss with half decent user base. VPN you’ve got proton free, mullvad costs but I’d say its worth it or you can tunnel through tor network. Distros you’ve got lots of options, recommend you look at distrowatch or youtubers like distrotube. Find a small pall of trust worthy torrent sites and names of trust worthy repackere, fitgirl, dodi, jc141 to name a few.

But most importantly. Make sure to seed 🙃

One thing I have done more of, of late, is using an external drive plugged in to the fastest usb port I’ve got (thunderbolt, in my case), and installing Mint on there. I’ve got an NVME enclosure with Linux Mint Debian Edition on it, and it has a USB A or C cable, so I can boot into it from several different computers. It’s also great for rescuing files off of non-booting Windows machines. You take a bit of a speed hit, but it’s not as bad as you’d think, and it fits in my pocket. (Good party trick, too.)

If Windows is the only thing you know how to use, don’t use tails. Use something that has a KDE desktop environment which is like Windows. Suggestions for distros in these comments are pretty good. It’ll look and operate like windows, except you install apps from app stores like you do on your phone.

As another commenter suggested, you should probably use Linux Mint for that purpose, since Mint is far easier to use, plus Tails resets itself upon shutdown so you’d need an external drive for permanent storage.

If you absolutely must stay on Windows, there’s a project called Atlas OS that tries to strip a Windows installation of its telemetry and bloat, however there are privacy concerns with that, like up until a little while ago it actually disabled Windows Defender by default