Windows
Not installed on club hardware, and not something we build workshops or laptop setups around — here's why, and what we do instead.
Windows isn’t offered on any refurbished laptop sold or lent by prepping.club, and it isn’t something our training, workshops, or hackathons are built around. This isn’t a claim that Windows is unsafe or unusable — it runs on the large majority of the world’s PCs, and plenty of serious, capable people use it every day.
It’s a deliberate choice about what this club spends its limited time teaching. A lot of what we care about — understanding what’s actually running on a machine, auditing and modifying the software you depend on, being able to fix or repurpose old hardware instead of replacing it, running services yourself instead of trusting a vendor by default — is easiest to learn hands-on on an open, Unix-like system, where the source is available and the system’s behavior isn’t a black box. Linux and the BSDs (see the other operating systems here) are what we actually use, teach, and refurbish hardware with.
If you’re coming from Windows, that’s the normal starting point for most people who join — the club exists to help you build comfort and real skill with these systems, not to assume you already have it.