I will finally get a new PC after quite a few years, and am wondering about the title question. Not planning on using Win 11 any time soon, which I believe requires it. I will probably still use the same high seas win 10 for the foreseeable future.
I have heard quite a few people suggesting to check if TPM is enabled in the BIOS, and to disable it if it is because of privacy concerns.
Thoughts?
I probably would if you're going to be using saltwater software, just for ease of use and not having your computer decide you can't do something. It's really trivial to disable in any BIOS I've ever seen.
I mean there's some useful things in a TPM like a hardware RNG but I'm not sure what software ever actually uses that anyway. I don't believe there's any sort of hardware spying platform within TPM. Generally, the part everyone hates about TPM is it's use in DRM.
Recent versions of the Linux kernel can use it (or any hardware RNG) to seed the software random number generator, to speed up its initialization and improve the quality of random numbers early in the boot process.
Not sure if Windows does something similar.
I bet tons of stuff in Linux uses it then since I think most random stuff just uses the kernel RNG. That's one of my favorite things about Linux, everything works together so well. I guess until it doesn't and that's another story. But when it does it's so low maintenance.
From personal experience: when something doesn't I usually fucked it up. Retrace my steps and fixing it is always an option thankfully. Last time I messed up my drivers to get Starfield going(nvidia gpu currently has issues), I rolled back but that didn't jive well with my other packages(and thus no image outside of terminal prompt). Easy fix.