Windows 11 was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me as an MS specialist with 20+ years of experience.

Under Windows 10, making a golden image was all you needed to make sure that malware (yes some MS services share the same traits as malware!), bloatware and telemetry were not active, even on major updates (a couple of exceptions but overall that was the case)

Windows 11 no matter what you do, on a major update it will reset to Microsoft’s “recommend” settings even wiping out task scheduler scripts and reg entries. That is malware behaviour and should be treated as such.

Honestly, I know I will sound like a broken record but if you have any value on your privacy, get on Linux. There are distros out there that are very friendly but remember with anything new, there is a learning curve and the steepness is based on how willing you are to learn, don’t be afraid.

I like the wishes of the creators saying they want to be used for good causes, but we all know the true case of these types of machines, military, which is exactly what gundam is.

Get Mozilla Firefox and add uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Ghostery plugins.

For over the top action, but a Raspberry Pi with an ethernet port and install PiHole and change your router DNS to the IP address of the PiHole and bask in glory that 99.999% of the crap out there, will not come or go out of your household.