In my country, neopentecostal religions (those with TV preachers asking for money nonstop) have been steadily growing over the last 20 years. Most young people I know are into these cults, and they all want to have many children, they are also all on minimum wage, which barely covers the expenses for diapers alone.

...you know what? In recent years, we've also been ravaged by betting apps. I guess both work the same way, they both promise that if you keep putting money into them, you’re eventually going to get rich.

My father loves '00s and late '90s RTS games, so I built him a Win7 PC. I got a bit jealous of how tight its running lol
Pre-built systems, though, come with way waaay more bloat. To get a free Windows license included in the product, they shove tons of shit in. My mother had a Win10 LG All-in-One, and I recently reset and cleared it to give to my niece, I had to remove a lot of crap, but it was way worse in the Win11 Dell All-in-One she got to replace it. I’ve never seen anything like that, shit came with Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Candy Crush... and, worst of all: McAfee. This Win11 laptop I'm using right now came with Norton hehe - but those Bing News, Bing Weather, Bing Maps, Bing This, Bing That, all the Xbox stuff, which you need to remove through command prompt, they were in all of them. However, I’ve never tested a Win10 or Win11 that wasn't on a pre-built device, my guess is that if you bought a license (or acquired some other way, I don't judge hehe) and installed the OS yourself it is way cleaner... but also surely Win11 is worse than Win10 on bloat.

edit: I had written Avast but it was actually McAfee, it wasn't even full license and it expired, also it constantly hijacked the browser and changed the search engine to Bing... pure malware behavior, crazy stuff.

It happened a few times to me during major updates, but most don’t restore packages you’ve removed. They do change other things, though.
I recently wrote this small guide: https://fuckbigtech.neocities.org/#06, and I was just about to re-read it to update, for example: Last time I was on Win11, the Windows Update had downloaded the HEIF and AV1 codecs, they were even listed in the app list to uninstall if I wanted, but they didn’t come with the laptop I have now, nor were they added through updating it. I just noticed folders weren’t displaying AVIF image thumbnails after I had debloated (and removed Windows Store). Then I discovered you can no longer download Windows utilities through their site, and it won’t work directly through PowerShell either because all download and installation is forced through Windows Store. I had already debloated extensively, so I decided to just factory-reset the laptop. This time, I downloaded both packages before removing Windows Store. Guess what? Removing Windows Store also removed the packages! So here I am, after another factory reset, leaving Windows Store there, hoping the lack of it doesn’t fuck me in the future lol
fun story: I also discovered it no longer comes with Notepad, Paint and Calculator! You have to download all from the Store, and they integrated with Copilot lol - it did come with Outlook, Maps, Teams and other crap, though... even some hidden legacy Zune, IE and Skype packages..

Every site was breaking, looking like they were fighting over DNS resolving, and I guess that was the problem. Once I removed Portmaster's DNS settings, they started working together. Well, I have DNS set in the browser anyway, and I'm using Portmaster just to monitor those non-browser connections. Using Windows, it's crazy that on startup you already have like 9 pages of random Windows processes trying to call home and tell them what you're doing lol

A Roman dodecahedron, it fucks with modern people as well.

I saw that Notepad and Paint have integrated AI now. I didn't check if the same applies to Calculator, but I'm terribly afraid they might collect my Calculator history... far more shameful than any late‑night browsing history.

Thanks. I tested a few and so far I favor PicView (haven't tested ImageGlass yet). A lot of people recommend nomacs, I find it kind of weird because it technically doesn't even support Win11 since its last update was 2020, before Win11's release (Win11 isn't even listed on its site). I wonder if there haven't been any codec updates since then for nomacs to still rank so high.

PicView looking great! Thanks for the recommendation :)

For viewing? :S I tried it for batch conversion and I was very disappointed it somehow skipped files on big batches, but I didn't find a way to view images with it - I mean, trying to open an image with its .exe does nothing.