I don't intend to ever run Win11 on personal hardware, based on several of the changes they made - though I barely run Windows 10. I don't believe any of my st

I don't intend to ever run Win11 on personal hardware, based on several of the changes they made - though I barely run Windows 10. I don't believe any of my stuff "fully supports" Win11 anyway, despite being some reasonably recent CPUs (8000 series Intel and a little AMD NUC). Yes, I know about the USB install trick, no, I just don't care. The first major point of concern is the issue during late beta where the chunk of advertising JSON that was malformed took out Explorer entirely, rendering the system unusable. That speaks to how tightly Microsoft has integrated "things I consider worthless crap" (advertising) with the core OS. In my preferred model of computers, the OS is core, and nothing from the internet can render the core OS inoperative (short of actual OS updates being defective). Advertising updates definitely can't render the OS entirely non-usable. They got it fixed before too long, but that tight integration between "core OS" and "advertising delivery" is exceedingly concerning. Microsoft has also been steadily making "offline accounts" harder, and with Win11, has made offline accounts no longer an option for Win11 Home. You are now required to have an online Microsoft account in order to use your local computer (or pay up for the Pro version, because you're not being as profitable on the backend). My read of this, given the advertising tie-in, is that Microsoft has decided that the "behavioral surplus collection" benefits from having what's likely to be your common email tied to your account (and at least your IP address) exceed the small costs of annoying a few technical users - and are therefore almost certainly hoovering up more information about use than they were with Win10. Again, my model of computers is that the local login information, at least for personal computing, has no business being tied to whatever online accounts I care to use or not use, and my OS definitely shouldn't be actively reporting up what I use or not (yes, I know Win10 and MacOS are both doing this in some form or another, and I'm moving away from both of them). These two, combined, tell me that Win11 has diverged so far from what I consider an OS should be (serving me, not using my behavior as a raw material source for the OS company) that I'm just not willing to use it for personal use. I've been heading more completely down the Linux road lately, and will likely continue that, just because of how I think computers should function in relation to my goals. This does mean there are probably certain things I won't be able to do eventually in the context of gaming, though the Steam/Linux/Windows compatibility layers (Proton?) are getting better, from what I hear. But I've accepted that there will be things I can't do with computers if I use computers in the way I think they should behave, and I'm OK with that.