They Have a Key to Your House

Interview with Jed, Founder of Design/OS · Conducted by River · March 2026

The following is a satirical transcript of a conversation with Jed — founder of Design/OS, VM loyalist, and a man who learned something important about data ownership the same way most people learn important things: through a completely mundane inconvenience that refused to stay mundane.

What started as a gaming save file problem in the Documents folder of a very expensive PC became, over roughly a decade, a fairly coherent theory about who actually owns your computer. The answer, it turns out, is complicated. And in at least one major case, it is not you.

This interview is satire. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. The fury has been preserved in full.

The Inconvenience

River

Let's start at the beginning. Data privacy, data ownership — big abstract terms a lot of people nod at without really feeling. But you clearly feel it. Was there a specific moment where this stopped being a concept and became personal?

Jed

Like many things, it started with an inconvenience. A small friction point. I was a big gamer, playing on Windows, and my user files all started backing up to the cloud. I was playing across different devices and it created a complete mess of my save files in Documents. So I started looking into how to fix it.

River

The most important realizations always start as annoyances. What did you actually find when you started looking?

Jed

I found that once OneDrive syncs to your user folders, it is nearly impossible to fully remove. You can disable it. You can uninstall it. But the file paths will still be OneDrive file paths. Then Windows starts bothering you to reactivate it. It felt really weird — I paid a lot of money for my gaming rig. Why was Microsoft telling me how I had to use it?

The Updates

River

That stopped being a technical question and became a property question. Then you got to the updates.

Jed

The updates. When the things you've fixed, adjusted, customized — they all get reverted. If you use the OS like a regular person, maybe you never notice. But when you take the time to disable the ads, dial back the tracking, and then one day you boot up and it's all back — that's a moment.

But it really came to a head when I bought a new PC. It was one thing when I'd finally gotten everything the way I wanted. The prospect of doing it again? No way.

The Wife's Laptop

River

So Linux started haunting you. But you said the final straw wasn't your machine.

Jed

It was my wife's.

She'd been on Windows 10 right up until end of life. One day she boots her laptop: no hard drive detected. Blue screen. I was already dabbling in Linux and live boots. I told her I could live boot a distro from USB and see what was actually going on — but she was skeptical. She wanted to take it to a shop.

River

Right — because to her, this is just a broken laptop. She doesn't have a decade of personal grievances with an operating system to draw on. What happened?

Jed

BitLocker. They encrypted her hard drive during a Windows 11 update she never requested. The drive was encrypted with a key she didn't know she had. When something went wrong with the boot, she was locked out of her own files on her own machine.

River

That's not a feature. That's someone else deciding they have authority over your data without asking. How did that land?

Jed

I'm pretty technical — comfortable navigating these things. But I also know 90% of people in that situation conclude: laptop is five years old, probably time for a new one. They spend $800. The old files are gone. And they have no idea what actually happened.

It felt like a scam. A company that size doesn't make a mistake that big. No email. No notification. Just encryption.

We were able to recover it. And I'm now in the process of convincing her to switch to Linux. I still run Windows — but only in a VM. Sudo for life.

The Other Side

River

Around the same time you were having a very different experience at work. Tell me about that.

Jed

We use Macs at work. My boss told us something that stopped me cold: we could use our work laptops personally. They were encrypted to our Apple IDs and the data in our personal Apple folders was ours.

River

Same technology. Encryption. Completely opposite relationship to the user. One company does it silently, as a trap. The other does it transparently, as a promise. That proves it wasn't inevitable.

The Crystallization

Jed

That's when it crystallized. I have root access on my Linux OS and no one supersedes that. I have root access on my Mac and no one supersedes that. But on a Windows device? Microsoft can supersede your root access.

It's "This device." Not "My PC." And that is true for every person, every company, every government running Windows anywhere in the world. In a technical sense, Microsoft owns the device. So what started as an inconvenience became a crusade. People should at least understand this.

The Ask

River

Last question. Most people can't make the leap to Linux. What do you want from the companies and IT departments reading this? What's the actual ask?

Jed

It's companies I really want to reach. They have a stake in their hardware. They should know their data and devices are subject to a privacy policy that can change at any time, applied silently, through an update.

Microsoft built this reputation as the most trustworthy OS for business. But I ask you — what OS does almost every server in the world run on? What does the literal internet run on? Who is actually the most trustworthy?

River

Linux. And the institutions that can least afford to be wrong — the banks, the hospitals, the infrastructure that keeps the lights on — already know it. They just didn't issue a press release.

Jed

Exactly. The reputation and the reality have been inverted for thirty years. You already trust Linux with everything that matters. You just don't know it yet.