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.
Any normal install of W11 can be cleaned up a fair bit just by manually refusing permissions and disabling unwanted features. For all the memes, very few of the features people complain about are forced on.
After that the biggest fixes I’d recommend are editing the registry to remove online search in the Start Menu, which makes it very workable (although there is a redesign incoming, not sure how that’ll interact) and installing PowerToys to get a universal search shortcut and a bunch of really nice QoL features.
W11 is actually perfectly usable after some customization, honestly.
Can’t believe lemmy hasn’t buried you for this comment. I don’t have any of the issues I’m told I’m suffering, and I actively look for them when I see articles posted. The circle jerk is strong.
I suspect most of the hate is people running the factory install of 11 Home from their laptop manufacturer. Pulling the crap out of Windows is about the same effort as adding needed crap to Linux.
It depends on what “crap” is involved specifically and your use case, I suppose.
I think it’s worth calling out that Win11 does indeed look extremely different depending on what settings you pick. Even out of the box my Win11 does not look like the mess a lot of the online advocacy likes to show. I’m guessing a bunch of the settings are saved to the MS account (which is again something people insist on considering anathema but I’ve used since before it was cool to hate it for several unrelated reasons).
Win11 has some quirks (where is my vertical dock, MS, it’s been years), some inexplicable technical flaws (how is your indexing so bad, MS, and why is the online search-enabled start menu so slow but the multisearch bar instant) and it is occassionally annoying to have to keep up with poorly communicated new features I don’t care about (what’s new screens, MS, they exist for a reason), but it’s mostly just… you know, Windows.
I’ll say this, if all my system partitions exploded today and I had to reinstall everything I’d definitely have an easier time getting back to where I was from scratch on my Windows devices/drives than on my Linux ones.