You can use Win10Privacy to bodily castrate nearly all built-in spyware and telemetry.

Downside is that it’s a damn powerful program, with few guardrails, so if you don’t have good knowledge of Windows internals you run a non-trivial risk of accidentally lobotomizing an important feature of your install by enabling the wrong setting. I mean, all settings can be easily reversed, but you gotta know which specific one did the nerfing in order to undo the oopsie.

For example, even the midrange firewall settings are mostly safe, except… a single one of them completely kills Microsoft Office Click-To-Run. It won’t install, and it won’t launch even if you installed it before you applied Win10Privacy. So if Microsoft Office is an essential (Access or Excel absolutely needed, for example), be careful.

Absolutely disgusting! Literally the only reason why I still use Windows is the fact many games I play have anti-cheat spyware that doesn't work on Linux.

It's like a mini game to get the choices right

Oh and that seems to be ltsc or an older win 10 build too! If you want the creeps get a normal win 11 home iso and try it out with a burner account... You might be surprised what they got in charge for you. (A lot of ads and tracking with up selling, tho I don't know how much Home edition costs, pro costs like 130€ or so and has the same crap built in but the ability to make an offline account(they still ask you to "upgrade" to online))

Chris Titus debloat script is the only thing that makes Windows even remotely usable these days.

All of this exists on Macs too, doesn't it?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I love the "Let's finish setting up your device" popup that prevents me from using my VMs regularly.

Like some condescending peddler trying to slam-dunk your agreement as a foregone conclusion.

Come on, buddy, let's do those remaining tasks, let's have Microsoft scan your face, tell Microsoft about your phone, let's go and install those Microsoft apps missing from your phone, and your laptop, too, and then we go buy that Office subscription and have you store your important files on Microsoft's servers and we really need to get around to switching to Microsoft's web browser now.

And the only option you get is "Yes" or "Remind me later."

If you turn it off (and it needs to be turned off in two places), it'll be back on as soon as Microsoft publishes the tiniest update to any of its unwanted services. Harrghrrr! (artery popping noises)

If linux had all these settings on installation everyone would be saying that it's to hard for normies to install

I still don't get why people keep defending it. Win+e doesn't even open to a panel that lets me open the c drive without clicking other shit and waiting for it to appear first. An update also just put the search bar back on the task bar when I explicitly disabled it as soon as I got through the bad default options for days during the install. It also added copilot. Auto update is also supposed to be disabled.

While I'm at it fuck every dev that uses libraries/framework/etc that is known to not work in wine. There are thousands of better ways to be a shitty dev.

I remember installing Windows XP. sigh.