Yeah, TPM and secure boot aren’t a big deal at all. I use them on Linux as a security enhancement.

Neither is the whole “React” thing. Microsoft using web technologies that are compiled to native code is a sensible decision. It’s a lot better than being completely unable to update the operating system at a reasonable pace like how Microsoft struggled for decades to modernize the control panel.

No, the start menu doesn’t open as fast as it does on windows 95…not a big deal. You can replace it entirely if you want. I even installed a complete windows explorer replacement. It’s just not a big deal, the OS is extremely customizable.

The Microsoft account thing is lame, although before I switched to Linux I used it anyway since it was needed to play games on my Xbox account anyway. To this day it’s trivial to bypass the MS account requirement if you know what you’re doing - one checkbox in Rufus when you flash your USB image.

I never used Windows as a serious personal system besides as a game machine, so some of these “dealbreakers” just weren’t.

And in order to get the Windows 10 updates in the article, you need to sign up for an MS account, or pay them $30 a year not to spy on you.

Also the constant turning on despite my prior explicitly disabling of spyware (memory ‘live sampling’ to the cloud for ‘virus protection’, one drive ‘auto backup’), and features I’ve explicitly disabled like copilot.

It’s creepy as fuck, and for no real benefit to me that I can tell.