And the demolition plans are in a disused washroom in the basement behind a sign that says "beware of the leopard." That's an absurd justification.

Normal users are not going to root around in the registry and twiddle things to mske the OS treat them with respect. Most of them won't search for it, and many of those that do won't have the skills to deploy a registry hack or identify legit info instead of malware or pranks.

The right answer is a third button-- "No, forever." We all know it's the right answer; I'm sure even Microsoft has focus group data. It doesn't exist because someone in Redmond's bonus is tied to how many people are cowed into signing up for OneDtive.

I've got a CS degree and 15 years of dev experience, and have come to the conclusion that you can't negotiate in good faith with Windows anymore. It is going to take you down whichever hellpath their biz-dev team demands, and any attempts to fight it are going to be undermined and replaced with a new set of hacks or a differeny gauntlet of dark patterns for a few months later.

Maybe LTSC and Enterprise versions are a bit better, where they might have to preserve the goodwill of big dollar corporate customers instead of chasing some trifling revenue hack, but do we as ordinary users on home/pro licenses not deserve the same respect? And even there, don't those business customers have to spend undue effort crafting and deploying policies to cram the endless stream of spam back in the box?

"Simply find the registry value and know to change it from 0 to 2 to turn off this specific recurring ad on your own machine." No thanks, I can actually just begin adless and remain adless with one simple trick.

Windows is way more shitty than Linux is difficult to learn, because it isn't. You just need to understand how computers actually work to be able to use Linux.