Oops, I forgot to mention the OS, it’s Win11 (I edited the main post now).

thanks, going to try it :)

I’m also in no way qualified to check code, so I just trust that if something has a lot of forks it means a lot of people are looking at it.

I read it once and couldn’t find the post again, but I managed to find some stuff:

The kernel hack was in 2003:
https://lwn.net/Articles/57135/

There is no official communication between the NSA and Linus Torvalds. In 2013 when he was asked about a Linux backdoor for the NSA and said no while shaking his head yes, it’s officially considered just a joke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gRsgkdfYJ8

Later that year his father mentioned it again… is it an official hearing? It seems like they are also questioning people from Microsoft, but I didn’t find info on that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwRYyWn7BEo

In 2022 a lot of information about Bvp47 came to light, a Linux backdoor NSA was using for more than 10 years - I didn’t find any info about this exploit being possibly because of systemd or not.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nsa-linked-bvp47-linux-backdoor-widely-undetected-for-10-years/

Red Hat introduced systemd in 2010. My info about it being a subsidiary of a Big Tech was incorrect and I removed from my original message. It was only bought by IBM in 2018.

From what I heard, people hate systemd because Linus Torvald was approached by the NSA to create a backdoor on Linux, he said it wouldn’t be possible to change the kernel because there were too many eyes on it, there was a mysterious hack of kernel.org introduced a mysterious code but it was spotted and removed… well, what was the only other thing common to all Linux? The sysv-init, but it was too small, too tight, too specific for them to create a backdoor there, they needed something big, bloated, doing way more than it should do, like it was just supposed to start the system but it can also do unrelated stuff like handling DNS, and an American company shows up bringing systemd, that solved all the problems the NSA had to create a backdoor on Linux, and all distros jumped into the honeypot :)

I saw that Notepad and Paint have integrated AI now. I didn’t check if the same applies to Calculator, but I’m terribly afraid they might collect my Calculator history… far more shameful than any late‑night browsing history.

Thanks. I tested a few and so far I favor PicView (haven’t tested ImageGlass yet). A lot of people recommend nomacs, I find it kind of weird because it technically doesn’t even support Win11 since its last update was 2020, before Win11’s release (Win11 isn’t even listed on its site). I wonder if there haven’t been any codec updates since then for nomacs to still rank so high.

PicView looking great! Thanks for the recommendation :)

For viewing? :S I tried it for batch conversion and I was very disappointed it somehow skipped files on big batches, but I didn’t find a way to view images with it - I mean, trying to open an image with its .exe does nothing.