Linux

Because people cannot block darn windows updates. Its a real malware only allowed by law

I'm not sure I follow that analogy, if you get a ride to a hospital you don't expect it to lock off all other destinations. What happens in the hospital is irrelevant.

From reading the article, this is more like if you walk into a hotel and they burn down your house so you have no choice but to stay. I suppose in theory you could argue in very bad faith that this is a problem with the house since it's the house that burned, but in reality the problem is the fact they're the ones who started the fire.

If you have trouble make a rEFInd USB stick and boot that

Can you install windows in a VM instead? VirtualBox is easy to set up.

Out of curiosity, have you tried Fade In?

Sorry idk specifically how to avoid the update, but the linked ArsTechnica article has some advice

Someone here advised & I’d agree: use a Windows VM, for things you haven’t found the Linux version of yet.

Windows’s plan to screenshot everything will include your private artistic work too, so you’ll be doing yourself a favor

What do you use? Maybe there is a Linux alternative to that so you don't have to bother with a VM.

When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that "raw disk" mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you'd want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don't require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.

Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM's disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn't erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can't see the bootloader from within the VM, it can't fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn't have particularly high graphics requirement, too.

I was also able to just "restart in Windows" if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.

However bad that sounds, you're probably best off disabling all updates in windows. O&O shutup10 has a setting for that. Download it to a pendrive with Linux, and boot windows with network unplugged.

Does that screenwriting software require a lot of performance? You might opt to install Windows into a virtual machine, as described here: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-setup-windows-10-virtual-machine-linux

Essentially you're using some software to emulate a computer inside your computer that can run any operating system you want. It doesn't need to touch your actual operating system installation, you can treat it as just another program. For your use case that sounds appropriate; you occasionally need to run specific software that has low system requirements. This way you can do that without risking Microsoft borking your Linux machine any time it feels like it.

You should worry about your writing skills. Try some punctuation, for starters.