We Were Forced to Switched to Windows 11 At Work

you will love cortana. cortana is love, cortana is life.

You can disable all that by adding a reg key under HKCU somewhere (can't remember where exactly off the top of my head). I think you should be able to write to that without admin.

If you can sneak open shell onto your machine I would highly recommend it. It'll give you a classic start menu from the pre-win8 days and then you can just disable the w11 search bar.

Typing in the name of a program I know I have and the first item being “web search” drove me nuts.

Haven't used Microsoft in a while, what the fuck?

Everything is incredibly useful, however, let me further recommend everything toolbar. It allows for even easier integration into Windows 10/11. The standalone "everything" is relegated to the little notifications area in the bottom right (whatever that's called. And no I don't care enough to look it up).

I've just started using Linux as my daily OS for non-gaming purposes. MX Linux specifically. It's Debian with some minimal packages added with the idea being speed and low resource usage from the OS. I was using antiX (I think is the name) but it lacked full support for some of the stuff I needed when doing (light) dev stuff. I work with docker engine, re-writing python code, etc. I like MX Linux though. I also like Debian just generally. If you're sick of windows, person who may be reading this, try out Linux. It's come a long way! And there's a billion flavors of it to offer something for anyone.

Discovered something horrific while doing support for a tech illiterate friend. Was trying to go to the desktop folder in explorer but C:\Users\Name\Desktop was nowhere to be found. Instead it was at C:\Users\Name\OneDrive\Desktop.

Not that I've found. You can uninstall onedrive and cortana. Ads can be mostly disabled. Copilot can be disabled by editing the registry.

Yeah, it's called installing a Linux distro (lmao)

But seriously, you can remove a lot of the annoying stuff, like the "Bing!" integration, etc. through regedit commands in command prompt/windows terminal. However, a lot of it gets reinstalled or restored (Microsoft probably calls it "fixing" registry errors...). Plus, there's an inherent level of "danger" involved when do regedits especially via terminal commands if you're unfamiliar with what the commands do.

I just view Windows as a dead OS at this point. It hogs resources like crazy, installs tons of spyware and what I'd call malware, and hasn't really added anything innovative in over a decade. Maybe longer. The windows experience has been basically the same since Windows 7 later updates until now, except it has gotten more cluttered, more ads, just more shit. I dunno what else to say beyond "Consider Linux."

I really like how they made a new right-click menu worse.

What mods did you do to your win10 install?

It's this:

{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}