[imiric]

That is truly insidious, but FWIW, you don't need to abandon Windows entirely because of this. There are ways of creating a custom Windows installation disk that removes OneDrive, along with other bloatware, spyware, and pretty much anything else you don't like. Look into tools such as Tiny11 Builder, MSMG Toolkit, NTLite, etc. This is a decent guide[1] for setting all of this up.

The process is quite tedious and takes a few hours, but in the end you end up with a personalized version of Windows, without any of the garbage. You still need to be vigilant of Windows Update undoing some of this, but you can also disable it altogether and manually cherry pick the updates you want to install.

It's insane that Microsoft is building such a user hostile OS that forces users to resort to this, but if you absolutely must use it, the experience after doing the above is not so bad. I've been running a custom install of Windows 11 for about a year now without any issues.

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/create-custom-windows-11...

[gond]

Maybe this tool is a bit more comprehensive. After configuring a stripped down image, Windows can be installed in what is almost like a headless mode in literally 5 minutes with no user intervention:

https://www.ntlite.com/

[imiric]

Yes, NTLite is good, but AFAIR, it doesn't allow deep customization of some things. The guide I linked to mentions it as the last step.

[whutsurnaym]

Thanks, I'll take a look into this! I'm still probably going to move to a linux distro for my desktop, but I'm always down to try breaking things on another system.