I use it by choice because it suits me fine. I forgot it even had widgets because I turned those off a couple of years ago, along with any other annoying services. It's weird to me that people will spend all kinds of geeky time setting up their Linux desktop but balk at spending an hour setting up Windows 11 to their liking.

You can always refuse the job. Life is too short for adversarial computing.

Has anyone noticed that the windows first boot wizard is like 13 questions where they try to trick you into doing things not in your best interests? It’s a mini primer in dark patterns.

Every time I read about what Windows users experience daily I think “oh, this must be parody, they wouldn’t literally put random tabloid news headlines on your desktop”. But no, it’s real. It is so bizarre that people put up with this.