Very useful, just like my dedicated Cortana key. 🤡

The number for people I have seen with search box still enabled in taskbar tells me that's true.

Yes, I know.

But it's not like these people actually love ads all over the place, or bing results in start menus, or popups asking them to pwetty pwease use OneDrive, or can you pwetty pwetty pwease use Edge instead of Chrome, they just either:

• don't know they can get rid of that stuff

• don't trust tools and are afraid they'll break something or the tools will contain a virus

• don't care enough to research this crap

• view using their PC as a chore anyway, and so power through the annoyances

I don't own a Mac, and don't intend to, but of the biggest things people like about them is that there are far fewer of these types of annoyances.

It's not just extreme power users that can be irked by all this crap - they're just the ones who do things about it and chat on forums about it. A normal person just sighs and thinks ugh I'd rather just do this on my phone

Forced to use it at work, too, and only by the grace of being in the IT department do I have the ability to make it less shitty.

There's registry entries to restore the full context menu, and PowerToys Run has effectively become my defacto start menu, though obviously you need to use the keyboard so it's not a perfect UI replacement. Meanwhile for searching, I've got Everything running and set global keyboard shortcuts/touchpad gestures to it. Maybe I'll grab an old gaming mouse and shortcut them to the extra buttons.

They finally implemented never combine on the taskbar, and it's...tolerable, but buggy and still resizes things for no reason

Unfortunately I've yet to find a way to get some damn 90° angles back. I can not wait for a few years down the line when we finally swing away from this Apple-chasing "bubbles with an inch between them on a white/black field" design aesthetic. I'm tired of everything looking like a toy, especially at the cost of its actual utility.

And not just a toy, the same toy. It's seriously Corporate Memphis levels of lifeless, forced design with no character, creativity, or ingenuity.

This has been exactly my stance as well apart from ever having used Win11. Never did and never plan to, downloaded Mint a few months ago to start getting familiar with it. Turns out I'm not real great at technical stuff but I'm getting there. Dual monitors was kind of a booger and now I'm trying to figure out how to install some games since Bottles is being a real wiener about Battle.Net. I'm glad there's so many resources and forums out there but I still hope some version of Linux gets dumbed down a little more before Win10 sunsets to make the transition easier for us blue collar folk

Use Windows LTSC, it doesn't have this stuff. Then permanently license it with the MAS tool on github (let me go find a link)

https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

Courtesy of subtext

Like clockwork! Almost as reliable as the OS /s

Linux has no mainstream advertising so word-of-mouth is the only way it gets adopted.

Install linux :)