with all of the news about the awful new stuff that they're adding into windows, plus my own experience with regular flavour windows 11 (plus some oem bloat; i guess that part's not non-negligible in my lack of enjoyment towards using the machine), i was dreading what would come out of this. turns out, it installed pretty quickly, installing drivers from the manufacturer's site works fine, and never once i felt the need to do registry tweaks or use debloat scripts for unneeded features. (for instance, this version doesn't have bing results on search. i didn't like windows hello (their face recognition thing) so i just removed it from optional features and it stays removed.)

in fact, the only stumbles i experienced were kinda self-inflicted, e.g., i experienced very loud popping every time sounds start and stop playing. i found that that's due to a driver's very aggressive power management behaviour, i.e., it cuts off power to the earphones/speakers when it's deemed idle, and those power spikes are what's responsible for the popping. on one hand, i shouldn't be installing drivers without knowing what they do and understanding if i really need them. on the other hand, how was i supposed to conclude that a driver that purports itself as a storage controller was the one doing this. although, if any, this is another plus point to windows: i shouldn't have installed unnecessary drivers, the default ones work fine.

despite obviously partaking in it, i'm not actually too hot about casual piracy culture. like, "photoshop is free" type of stuff. i guess economically i can think of it as people who can actually afford software subsidizing it for the masses, in some kind of a janky cross-subsidy scheme. but you tend to lose sight of how cool some stuff that are actually free are. you've got folks complaining about open-source software not having the same features as paid ones, even though folks are working for free and still bust out stuff like bespoke synth or blender.

although, having said that, if you for example can't afford an "unproductive" summer trying to learn linux from scratch (instead of banging your head against the wall trying to use it like a drop-in replacement for windows), switching from csp to krita and whatnot, if you really have to use windows: i cannot just let you use retail. you really should figure out how to install the enterprise ltsc versions. obviously it sucks i guess kinda that it's difficult to legally give microsoft money for a product of theirs that you actually want as a retail consumer, but it is what it is.

(wait for the update to this post where windows ends up installing copilot behind my back anyway and i hate myself forever for even trying)

update 6/3: it did install copilot on me. for some reason the right-click context menu of the copilot app on the start menu has an "uninstall" option on it. i clicked it. it seemed to actually remove the thing. no harm no foul?