Seriously, has no one thought of the shareholders!??!

Even the windows 10 startmenu didn't suck if you took the time to customize it - The Metro tiles were nice, with grouping and folders making everything pretty neat and reducing the need for the standard program list to a minimum; I made mine 3 columns wide, which made pretty much every app i regularly needed available on the fly, using horizontal space that's much more available than vertical one.

I'm not saying that my Linux installation was super easy to set up, but once set up, I've had fewer problems than Windows.

The descent into advanced Advanced menus really is the cherry on top of this shit muffin.

As I say, when you're hunting around for something in Windows and you come across a dialog box that came straight from Windows XP.... you're getting close.

at this point arch linux is more user-friendly

All this yes. If you're actually looking for help, you have to also click "set" after changing the page file settings.

I empathize with this slightly non-ideal situation.

But can you imagine how insane it would be if you were told to do something like copy/paste swapoff /swap && truncate -s 8G /swap && swapon /swap into a terminal? TEXT? Like a caveman? The horror! The heresy! How can anyone be expected to do something so complicated! This is entirely unreasonable UX and the reason why Linux is straight up unusable.

Btw here's 15 bazillion commands in a .ps to perhaps disable some of the ads in your start menu until the next time your computer reboots.

By find apps, do you mean the ones I installed already or ones in their marketplace or whatever?

Because I've never been able to have it find my own god damn programs that I installed locally and fully given up on ever using the start menu.

I'm more of a shift-right click > PowerShell kind of person, but this is good to know

Mine too:

FYI, you don't have to use any third party tools and I didn't, either. Step 1 is to run the Enterprise LTSC IoT version of Windows (either 10 or 11). The consumer versions of Windows are extra bullshit, as we all know by now.

Remove the Windows Store via Powershell (you probably have to run as an administrator):

Get-AppxPackage -allusers *WindowsStore* | Remove-Appxpackage

That removes the store suggestions. It also removes the store entirely, as well as the ability to install store apps. Obviously don't do this if you are one of the 0.1% of users who actually use the Windows Store for some twisted reason.

Then in gpedit.msc / Group Policy Editor:

Local Computer Policy \ Computer Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Search

• Allow Cloud Search → Disabled
• Allow Cortana → Disalbed
• Allow Search Highlights → Disabled
• Do Not Allow Web Search → Enabled (gets rid of the internet search)
• Don't search the web or display web results in search → Enabled (probably overridden by the above, I set it anyway)

Local Computer Policy \ User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Start Menu And Taskbar

• Remove Personalized Website Recommendations From The Start Menu → Enabled
• Do Not Search Internet → Enabled

There are settings for other nags and irritations in here that you may also want to configure to your tastes as well.

Also:

Local Computer Policy \ User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Windows Copilot

• Turn off Windows Copilot → Enabled

Might as well link a few:

• DoNotSpy11
• O&O ShutUp10++

However, do note the massive caveat of these tools is that they are proprietary, closed-source tools that must be run with administrative access to your PC, and I have yet to find a satisfactory open-source alternative.

If it works, it works, but I do question the security implications of allowing these tools that level of unfettered access to your system. If possible, I highly recommend giving Linux Mint a try, rather than relying on sketchy tools to debloat a sketchy OS.

All the problems these people bitch about with Windows never happen to me. Maybe it's because I started with a plain vanilla ISO, no preloaded crap. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Best part? When I mention that I'm not having these problems I get downvoted.

This is the same kind of response when someone denies global warming/climate change because they looked outside and the weather around them appears normal.

A lot of these annoyances can be disabled somewhere in the Settings, but the problem is that there are so many of them tucked away all over the place. Windows 10 (I haven't used 11) was better than Windows 8 in terms of how unified the settings were, but I remember a few instances where I had to go rummaging through the skeletons in Windows' closet in order to change some stuff (e.g. having to go through the old-style control panel rather than the Settings).

Furthermore, Windows has the annoying habit of changing settings after updates, and it's an unnecessary inconvenience to have to go traipsing through the settings again and again to revert unwelcome changes. Even if it's only the minority of settings that get changed, and if those changes aren't too frequent, it's still draining on one's executive function to make your PC actually behave how you want it to. People get burnt out, and then this contributes to them struggling to find the time and brain to go through changing things.

Mostly though, I am just irked that it's necessary to go into the settings to turn this stuff off. I am a very techy person, and thus I enjoy tinkering (or perhaps "I enjoy tinkering, and thus I am a very techy person), and stuff like this annoys me so much because I know that I'm in the minority when it comes to willingness to wrestle my tech into the shape I want it. Most people won't go to that effort, even if it'll only take 2 minutes — the key thing here is that many of them don't know it'll only take a couple of minutes, and I don't blame them for that.

Good software needs to have sensible default settings. If that were the case, then I think we'd see more non-techy people figuring out what particular settings align with their preferences. As it stands though, configuring Windows to work in a sensible manner is a Task, and the activation energy required for that means that many won't do it.