I don’t care what you use and I wouldn’t land in the comments just to put you on blast for your personal choices.
The thing is that this isn’t “personal choices”, I don’t even use most of the solutions I cited, but I happen to know a lot of people who do in different industries and that tried Linux countless times and showed me how poorly things are. I’m talking about managers, designers, engineers, architects - a lot of people with a lot of different needs that would love to be on Linux as much as you do but can’t because it simply doesn’t work out.
Yeah, I’ve never understood people making poorly written snide comments with absolutely zero clarification, either.
Do you really want a properly written comment? It looks like you don’t but I’ll give you one anyways. Just don’t complain like you did when I bluntly said what’s the reality of Linux desktop and professional software.
realizing that 11 was only going to bring more ads, force-installed applications, background processes that were nigh-impossible to disable without a lot of tomfoolery, AI bullshit and general bloat,
Microsoft has multiple versions of Windows and if you are smart enough to install Ubuntu you might as well be smart enough to read about them for five minutes and understand that you if you pick Windows 11 Pro you’ll be moderately clean and Windows 11 Enterprise will be very clean. You’ll also find out that with ANY version you can pick English (World) for a cleaner experience:
Selecting the “English (World)” locale during Windows Setup means you’ll receive fewer advertised tiles in your Start menu once Windows is installed, but it doesn’t change the preinstalled apps that come with Windows (also known as bloatware).
The remaining or all ads and spyware can also be disabled via group policy. When it comes to disabling crap Windows offers way better control than Ubuntu and macOS because it was made for that. There are countess companies and government agencies that force Microsoft to have group policy settings to disable all the “special features” otherwise they couldn’t use it.
Microsoft also has very detailed documentation into this (…microsoft.com/…/manage-connections-from-windows-…) that you can follow to disable what you don’t want. Meanwhile Canonical, Apple and others don’t give shit about users disabling the spyware and the systems sometimes break if you block connections.
So before you say unfounded and dumb things such as “impossible”, “forced” and whatnot go teach yourself about how things really work and what can and can’t be done.