Windows 7 was fine, but the spammy feature bloat is so frustrating.
Source or example of malicious stuff done?
Things like this[1] should not be possible.
Then you have the black screen with the circle, and then the blue screens "we are configuring your updates and didn't touch your files".
It drives me insane.
In their defense, there was a pretty large subculture of technically knows-enough-to-be-dangerous people who would do everything in their power to totally disable Windows Update for various reasons.
Microsoft looked at this as compromising Windows' security and harming Microsoft's reputation. Their solution in Windows 10 was to make it much more difficult or impossible to delay or turn off updates for Home and Pro users. It's annoying as all hell for those who know what we're doing and do stay up to date. I hate it because it restarts in the middle of the night, then boots up into the Bitlocker screen - so when I get up in the morning I discover my desktop has been running at 100% CPU and blasting fans like a jet engine for god knows how many hours thanks to Windows update.
But at the same time, I can see why they did it, but there had to be a better way.
By itself this isn't horrible, but it (and many other Windows features, for that matter) crosses into malware territory when it treats the user as hostile (like re-enabling itself or working around blocks like DNS)
Or you work for an organization that has an Enterprise license.
The only silver lining is WSL, but it’s a toy at best, not a fully featured POSIX-compliant development environment.
I used to uninstall the things I want gone, but I've given up. Contacts, maps, money, music, mail, news, weather, and the other bloatware just kept coming back. You can't uninstall stuff like Cortana at all, AFAIK.
I'm genuinely curious what the difference is between my install and yours.
Yes, you can turn these advertisements off easily. But considering how much we pay for Pro (~$200), there shouldn't be any advertisements anywhere.
And I don't think they're actually paid ads, for either the suggested apps or the rare occasion they've put an "ad" as the lock screen background. They've promoted the Surface on it before, and then for Tomb Raider, I think they were mostly pushing the idea of "hey, you can get games in the Windows Store now", rather than it necessarily being a paid campaign with the game studio.
So you're saying MS doesn't profit if you buy a Surface or something from the Windows Store?
That's an advertisement. My computer has never had anything related to Fitbit on it. Ever.
Thankfully for now there are still settings to turn off most of it, and removing all squares/tiles form the menu makes the Start menu look like the classic clean concise style, but it's frustrating that most people get stuck with the subpar experience.
Windows 10 home on my hp laptop
Both are in insider branches
Never seen an ad. Never had it update without me telling it to. I never modified anything in Windows to get rid of telemetry.
I have a suspicion that Windows actually gets more strange the more you "fix" it