I find this mildly infuriating, I only use Windows for work, I even personally purchased Windows 11. Local account and disabled as much as I could. I personally do not like Windows or Windows in general.
Well, now I do an update and they throw this up like I need to walk thru these steps (again). Not even a "Skip"/"Don't remind me again". Windows is not what it used to be and after disabling half the Microsoft stuff I'd expect not to be bothered again. It's really a built in ad more then anything.
2023-08 Cumulative Update Preview for Windows 11 Version 22H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5029351)
Keep a backup (quarantined) Windows box for games but don’t use it much.
The last vestige of my Windows install is a disk image that I haven't touched in half a decade. The SSD it was on itself has long since been reused for something else.
It only takes like an evening. Go with Linux Mint and essentially you will be using your computer in a half hour. Everything else is the fun of discovering all the cool stuff that Linux does easier and more flexible than Windows.
Agreed. Linux Mint shows just how turnkey the user-friendly distros are these days. Even though it is not designed as one of the lightweight, speedy and efficient distributions for experts, it absolutely feels that way compared to windows. And that’s with windows running natively and Mint in a VM.
The terminal is essentially arcane magic, with bash scripting out of the box, this is big if you're a programmer. Most Linux desktop environments have workspaces and tiling features which make workflow really easy and fluid. Something that Windows is only getting now on W11. Everything is customizable, so you will learn the meaning of the term “ricing”. Which is to make your desktop look as cool as possible, since everything from the fonts and icons to the color of the taskbars and transparency are 100% customizable. There are several rabbit holes you can choose to go into just on aesthetics. But then you have actual productivity stuff like learning your distro's package manager, backup utilities, etc.
Just wrote myself a bash script that uses ssh to fork to background, authentication via key to an ssh server it creates; forwards to tor; tor OR proxies to socks5; creates a shadowsocks server and client, connects the client; and forwards to a remote socks5 server via ssh dynamic forwarded port.
You could try dual booting to make the migration a little less extreme. I started that around the time Windows 11 came out and realized about a year later I don't use Windows for personal stuff anymore. Windows is now gone and I do not really miss it.