I feel like it's a thing in the EU, where we don't have ads or shit like that in Windows. Been using Windows 11 for like a month now and haven't seen a single ad.

Recently I had two major problems with Windows updates that needed manual intervention in a very user unfriendly way.

Earlier this year one of the security updates for 22H2 broke my computer's recovery partition and prevented the update to install and constantly fail. It took like a week for Microsoft to acknowledge the issue, at which point they said they would post a fix shortly. Then a whole month later they said they wouldn't/couldn't fix it automatically and anyone affected would have to manually delete the partition, shrink your main disk partition, and recreate the recovery partition. On top of that, there was no notification of the issue or how to fix it, one would have to notice the update keeps failing, look up the error, and dig up the instructions from their blog. And then go through the ugly process of editing partitions which I can't imagine most users doing.

Either that or just live with no recovery until the next time you reinstall the os.

https://superuser.com/questions/1837245/kb5034441-and-changing-the-recovery-partition-starting-offset-in-order-to-be-abl

The second issue this year was halfway through a windows update (when it just reboots a couple times) my computer just simply stopped booting. I could power cycle and everything and after the bios it would just black screen forever. The only way I got around it was to hop into the bios and change the boot order. Another thing I wouldn't expect normal users should have to do to just boot the computer

And I personally have seen all the ads in Windows explorer, the start menu, the lock screen, etc. and the massive pushing of Copilot being added to the toolbar even after removing it manually. And readding OneDrive. I'm in the US though so that's probably why (it's nice to know the only reason Microsoft does all this because they're not legally pressured not to. Gives me so much trust in them to do the right thing with my computer and data)

I've since moved to Linux (which I've used on my work machine for many years) and have had near zero issues. It's very nice not worrying how my computer is going to make itself worse without my consent next

edit: I definitely wouldn't consider myself a fanatic that tries to convert everyone to Linux. For a lot of people Windows is the best choice, but in my case in particular it really has made things easier

My last experience with Windows was with Windows 10, but updates were always taking an extremely long time both to download (my internet is a bit slow, Linux updates have way smaller download sizes) and to install, and update installation often failed.