I downloaded a cracked install from tpb (haxnode). It was a loader exe that loaded the original exe and supposedly removed the drm in RAM. It required admin permissions, I didn't trust it, but i ran in a vm and nothing happened.
Then i told myself "i have microsoft defender and windows firewall control, they will warn me" and I ran it in my main laptop, and still nothing happened. Like, literally nothing happened. The original program would not start. It would simply exit. Nothing. The other 6 almost identical torrents from the same uploader but with a different program version had a similar result. I gave up.
Then i reboot, and firstly i notice a couple DOS prompts flashing on the screen, and windows firewall control asking me if "aspnet_compiler.exe" is allowed to access the internet or not.
Suspicious, i go to check that "aspnet_compiler.exe" and it's located in the .net system folder, i scan it with microsoft defender and it doesn't report as a virus. I do not pay attention to the fact that it doesn't have a valid Microsoft signature, and i tell myself "probably just a windows update" and i whitelist it on the firewall.
After a few hours I realize "wait a minute: it's impossible that an official windows exe isn't signed by microsoft!" I go back to scan it, not infected... or it looks like, defender says "ignored because in whitelist". What? The "loader" put c:* in the whitelist!
The "crack loader" wasn't a virus per se. It dropped an obfuscated batch in startup, which had a base64 encoded attachment of the actual malware, that was copied in the .net framework directory with unassuming names...
And this for a $60 perpetual license program that i should buy anyway because it's for work
It took over twenty years just for Linux to enter the conversation at the enthusiast level, it took a lot, and I do mean a lot, of enshittification on Microsoft's part and decades of campaigning by free software ideologues for us to get to this point, and if Windows still worked like Windows 7 we still wouldn't be anywhere close.
OpenBSD is super niche relative to FreeBSD, which is super niche relative to Linux. I don't even know if it was built for desktop use, or if it happens to be usable as one thanks to Linux DEs being compatible so long as they don't heavily depend on Linux specific stuff. Though I guess it can be a desktop OS in the most conservative sense of that term even without all that stuff.