Hey y’all
I’m taking a college course which is hell bent that its students use Windows 11. Currently my laptop is still using Windows 10 and if there is no bloatware/AI free way to install Windows 11, I’m just going to bite the bullet and install it the regular way. So if anyone knows of a relatively bloatware free way of installing Windows 11, please let me know.
p.s. For those who would encourage me to use Linux. For my desktop I already use Linux Mint.


Is it your laptop bought with your own money? If so, how the fuck can they dictate what OS you use?
If not, why the fuck is it your problem to install the OS?
All of this sounds fucked up to me. You’re being forced to use the shittiest os filled to the brim with the shittiest ai.
They are probably running some specific software that requires it.
“You need this software, which requires Windows.”
Okay. I’ll run it on wine and if that doesn’t work, i will run it in a VM.
As other people have mentioned, works fine until you need it for exams.
Some professional software licensing options dint work in vms, either.
Solidworks single-seat licenses won’t activate in a VM, for instance.
Not saying that’s OPs specific use case, but it’s an example of another constraint
I agree that they shouldn’t have picked Windows but it makes sense to keep everyone on the same software stack to avoid wasting time helping people install basic stuff that might or might not run on their systems
Well yeah, it’s your laptop and your responsibility to install stuff.
So the main reason you’re going for windows is because you’re afraid you won’t know how to install stuff on linux and won’t get any support from the college?
Fair enough, but you did say you are a Linux user, so that shouldn’t really be a big problem. Things like wine and VMs also exist to help running windows apps.
Wine is by no means a stable option for all windows software. Some windows stuff just will not run on Linux. And not all laptops are capable of virtualization.
My uni let me use linux alternatives but I had to do some serious debugging by myself. The biggest issue was caused by snap LOL
Yeah. From experience, even moderately powerful laptops can run a win11 ltsc iot VM pretty easy, and that runs everything you need that wine can’t.
For reference, my current laptop has an 8th gen i5, 32 GB RAM. I use the VM for Lightroom, affinity. Runs perfectly fine with 4 Threads and 16 gigs of RAM.
You have no idea what is going on behind the scenes, and neither do I, so we can’t call it bullshit by default.