The performance and battery life impacts of Windows Defender make it just not worth it for me though. I had a few months where I went back to Linux on my ThinkPad (unfortunately with an nvidia gpu - whose Linux drivers I think caused half my troubles) and it was soo much more performant - but it had enough various annoyances where I just went back to Windows 11 and WSL2.

The idea that pushed me over the edge to try it again was that, this time, I'd try disabling Defender (as I was 1/2 convinced the Linux performance boost was not having AV) and keep a fresh/clean install strictly limited to Chrome (now that I had gotten used to just using the web versions of everything like Slack, Spotify, etc.), VS Code, WSL2 and that's it. Basically what I'd been doing with Linux. And so far that's been great - better performance, runs cooler and quieter, longer battery life etc. than I ever used to have with Windows. It is like a whole new machine.

Knowing I don't have Defender I am even more careful about what I download (these days almost nothing - especially on the Windows side rather than the WSL2 Ubuntu dev side) and about ensuring everything is patched. But it is such a game-changer I am not going back...