Sorry for an emotional expletive-laden post here, but this enrages me so much. My computer is my main professional and creative tool, and for MS to do this shit without my permission or control (like it already does with fucking Edge and OneDrive nags every time it installs an update) feels so exploitative, greedy, and evil.

And stupid - their execs are chasing myopic short term gains with aggressive stongarm tactics, while long-term I and probably a million others are running for the exit, and doing our best to never use Windows, Azure, Outlook, Office etc again.

So few companies out there seen to care about their long term reputation.

Slighted

Microsoft transitioning Windows into a spyware platform filled with advertisements and garbage has been in the making for years at this point. Its absolutely exploitative, greedy, and evil, which is why if you can you should consider switching to a different operating system, like Linux. At the very least you can transition to using Linux for tasks that work on Linux while keeping around Windows for tasks which require windows, either due to a lack of Linux support or poor performance/stability/etc. All of this assuming you aren't doing this already.

leeoniya

i used to do all sorts of stuff with Windows XP/2000 (like sysprepping reg-tweaked/debloated/pre-loaded Windows ISOs for myself). but now i have fully moved away from Windows to EndeavourOS/KDE and haven't looked back; many others have jumped ship to PoP_OS. yes, you do have to slightly limit/research your hardware options to get a great experience, but i've always been an AMD GPU guy (due to their better thermals / power efficiency), and all of my laptops are Thinkpads w/Intel wifi, so take this with those grains of salt.

i do miss Foobar2000 and HeidiSQL (DeaDBeeF and DBeaver aren't quite as polished), and Affinity products are hard to get running without glitches in Wine/Proton, but otherwise it's been fantastic. though i've had to fiddle quite a bit with Chromium and MPV settings to enable GPU hardware acceleration for video decoding.

first straw was slow filesystem access due to Windows Defender, last straw was unstoppable Windows updates full of ad garbage and apps i previously removed with various debloating scripts. i ran Windows 10 with these addons to get back a more Windows XP experience:

disable TPM v2.0 (keep it at v1.2) to forever prevent Windows 11 upgrades: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-o...

debloat: https://github.com/farag2/Sophia-Script-for-Windows. there's also LTSC, but it's basically impossible to purchase an actual license, so you have to pirate it: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...

start menu: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

taskbar: https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

search: https://goffconcepts.com/products/filesearchex/index.html

archives: https://www.7-zip.org/

task manager: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...

Notepad replacement: https://github.com/rizonesoft/Notepad3