Comment by kentonv
5 hours ago
The UI is full of Bing and Copilot tie-ins that I consider to be essentially ads. Recommended content in the start menu. The weather widget that shows you news headlines. The lock-screen-of-the-day with the text description that if you accidentally click on it, you open some Bing page. The Edge default home page. Everything is trying to push me towards engaging with Microsoft's online services, which I have never used and have no desire to use. These are ads.
It's probably the case that I could turn all of these off by hunting down the right config options, and if I used Windows as my primary desktop I'm sure I would. But it's just on my game machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining, and new crap keeps popping up in updates. It's exhausting.
A Debian Linux desktop, in comparison, is not trying to push you to anything. It's a breath of fresh air (not a term I use often but really fits here).
Note: I never made it to Windows 11, only Windows 10. But my understanding is that these things are getting worse, not better. And while not exactly the same thing, there has been a lot of talk lately about how the file explorer has become so bloated and slow that they have to preload it into memory at startup so that it can respond quickly when you click it... omg, I do not want that.
I'm surprised to hear that you were talking about Windows 10. Windows 11 is MUCH worse than 10 with the ads and seems to be the first one where people are complaining en masse. It also comes with a start menu that's both dumbed down and has performance issues. Yes, the start menu. It's slow.
I just know it from a new laptop where I'm keeping the preinstalled Windows for occasions that require it (very rare these days).