All I want is to be able to give companies my money in exchange for not being spied on, manipulated, or locked into some walled garden. I can't for my OS - I have to use free gnu/Linux because everyone else treats me like crap.

Is my money not good enough for them? This is getting absurd

I had to spend several days manually ripping out huge chunks of Win10 to get something resembling the usability of XP. That included removing all of the updating utilities, hosts-file blocking of microsoft servers, removal of most of the preinstalled apps, as well as disabling and deleting all of the scheduled tasks which try to re-install and re-enable those settings.

All this trouble so I can play modern PC games... Next system upgrade cycle I think I'll be moving to linux.

twalla

i recommend https://boxstarter.org/ and something like https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 for dealing with installing win10

source: configured windows10 manually once, decided i'd like to never experience that particular circle of hell again