[II2II]

> Every day I feel like a passive spectator watching the industry move in a direction that is worrying ... What is the strategic move, beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use?

The solution is to stop being a passive spectator and to start making proactive decisions. To make proactive decisions, you will need to decide what is important to you since you will never find the perfect solution. (There never was a perfect solution in any domain, only better and worse ones for a particular situation.)

If you've decided that you need Windows, that's fine. You will have to deal with the consequences of that particular decision, but it does not have to dictate every decision that follows. You can still choose applications that don't impose some sort of consumption model, require online accounts, or depend upon telemetry. I don't know what the situation is like for commercial software under Windows (surely there are some vendors who respect privacy), but there are always open source alternatives to consider. Feel free to choose according to your circumstances. If you're a graphics designer who needs Adobe products for your job, but can get away with LibreOffice for administrative tasks, then choose that mixture. Even though your decision won't put any pressure on Adobe, someone else's decision may (e.g. an office worker who uses Office 365 and Inkscape).

The way I see it, there are two big problems with the computer industry today: people don't like to acknowledge competing products that may better serve their needs when there is already a dominant player, and those who are aware of the alternatives are rarely willing to support them. In effect, this problem is partially the making of consumers who have been behaving as passive spectators.