While it takes about 8-16 hours of concerted effort, there are ways to castrate Windows into a mild approximation of what it was before.

The big question mark is Windows 12… and whether AI and spyware/malware features such as Recall will be baked into core functionality such that it will be impossible to remove or reliably deactivate.

I’m still with Windows for now, owing to requirements that have no non-Windows alternative (which include supporting and actually opening client data files for the desktop version of Quicken, for example), but I do foresee a time when I would reliably extract my last foot out of the Windows ecosystem.

Thankfully, their server products still appear to be enshittification-free. For now.