bunsen_h

My employer may be loaning me a new(er) laptop soon, to enable me to do some work from home.  By default, it will probably have Windows 10 installed, though my work will really need to be done in a Linux environment.  Our usual way of handling that is to work in a virtual machine such as VirtualBox.

How hard should I be pushing to get our people to chuck out the Win'10 OS and install Linux directly on the machine?  Or to use some earlier version of Windows, such as 7 or 8 or 8.1?  We've got site licenses for at least some of those.

Originally, Win'10 had a host of "features" that many people considered utterly unacceptable.  Freely sharing network passwords with everyone in one's Outlook contact list; automatic and irrevocable installation of OS upgrades; snooping on user activity and uploading the results to μsoft.  Push advertising.  More.  Some of these have been pulled back, some haven't, but I'm under the impression that I still don't want a Win'10 machine on my home network if I can help it.  Have I got that right?

I suppose that one option would be to make the machine dual-bootable, and simply never boot up the Win'10 side.
 

It's been suggested to me that I should "brush up on" my C++.  I've never learned that language, though I'm good with C.  I'm looking for recommendations for good books to learn C++ from, for someone who has plenty of computer experience and knows several languages but is inexperienced in object-oriented programming.  By way of background, I favour approaches which start with simple working examples and add details and complexity, as (for example) with Donald Knuth's T_EX manual.

Thanks for any suggestions.