Recently, I bought myself a new laptop - a Razer Blade 14 with AMD chipset - and had to relive the pain of stock Windows 11 all over. In no particular order:

Recently, I bought myself a new laptop - a Razer Blade 14 with AMD chipset - and had to relive the pain of stock Windows 11 all over. In no particular order: * The amount of “feature” bloat is ridiculous. Widgets, AI assistant, a whole bunch of packages that I have no use for. Uninstalling all this stuff takes TIME and quite some tech savviness. * Speaking of useless things, there’s Edge and its own myriad of annoyances. In the US, Windows won’t let you uninstall it and even claims it’s an integral part of the OS… but did you know that’s not the case in the EU? I don’t remember exactly how I did it, but there’s a config file in System32 (I think) that you must edit to add “US” to a list of country-gated features… which includes uninstalling Edge. * No matter how much I edit the registry or group policies, Windows will still try to contact telemetry services. In the end I got fed up and blocked them at the Host files level. My Pi-hole’s blocked traffic got reduced from 20% to like 5%. I should stop whining and switch to Linux already, but right now I got Windows working more or less the way I want it to.