I haven't used a MBP. However, I do own a Surface Book 2. I have never received a BSOD, and AFAIK it has never executed an update without my permission. BSOD wa

I haven't used a MBP. However, I do own a Surface Book 2. I have never received a BSOD, and AFAIK it has never executed an update without my permission. BSOD was most commonly a driver panicking the kernel, and that doesn't happen often with MS hardware. It's also a lot less common now in general, because MS has hardened Windows against drivers panicking. As far as bloatware goes, it does have the crap like Candy Crush or whatever in my start menu, even though I have never touched that game on any platform. But there aren't really a lot of installed applications that you wouldn't expect to be present in an OS. If you do switch, take some time to learn PowerShell. Yes, it's not a -nix command line environment. It follows a completely different paradigm; it's object-oriented instead of text-oriented. But there is tremendous power there, if you learn to harness it. And if you really do need your -nix command line, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux.