So, it's been about 2-3 years since I've daily driven Windows. I regret absolutely nothing about switching to Linux, as it has given me a totally different perspective on computing, but Windows is one of those things that is going to be in your life no matter how you feel about it. Whether at work or fixing people's devices on the side, Windows is something that most people interact with on a daily basis. Of course, as somebody who's gone down the Linux rabbithole, I think that Windows is proprietary spyware trash, but like every other mainstream, closed source technology, it's everywhere and usually necessary to learn if you want to work in professional spaces. And its not like most of us didn't grow up with fond memories of Windows 95-10, I know that I certainly did (2 decades of my life from SimCity 2000 to Fallout 4 flash before my eyes.) Point is, Windows is a thing, but it could be better, even if you have to use it in any setting because its going to happen at some point. Lets make it better, lets fix Windows 11, which I have previously not used for more than 20 minutes, as much as we can. So how do we fix Windows? First and foremost, lets get it installed. Let's compromise my personal info by signing into my Microsoft account, as its part of the installation process. Now lets move on to Privacy settings, where I'm going to turn everything off to increase my privacy. I'm going to skip 'Customizing my Experience' as we're going to do that ourselves. So skip skip, decline, decline, skip and we finally get to an ominous screen saying hi and the installation process has begun. Alright! Now we're in the default Windows environment, lets open up Edge, unclick and decline a bunch of stuff, then we're going to navigate to over to https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ and follow the installation instructions for the Chris Titus Ultimate Windows Utility, which after a bit of research, seemed like a great initial step to debloat Windows. Open PowerShell in Administrator mode, then run 'iwr -useb https://christitus.com/win | iex' to install the utility. Once installed, we're gonna go over to Tweaks, I'm just gonna go ahead and click Standard, then scroll down and Run Tweaks, it may not seem like its doing anything at first but you'll see a Disk Cleanup utility popup at some point and you'll know that its cooking. Once that was done, I navigated over to the Updates tab, and clicked the Security (Recommended) setting. After that, we'll go to Config and check Windows Subsystem for Linux and clickity the Install Features button. Then we'll move over to the extremely impressive install tab, which has a plethora of great packages to get you setup in whatever environment you're going for. As tempted as I was to grab a buttload of packages, this is a temporary VM environment and ultimately I settled for LibreWolf (probably my favorite Firefox fork) and Neovim. Anything else I should be able to take care of once we get our next step taken care of: a package manager. After living with a package manager for so many years, the idea of going online in your web browser, trusting that the link is correct, then downloading and installing any executable just seems SUPER SHADY. Why would you do that to yourself if you have a trusted repository available? Especially considering that a significant portion of Windows users are casuals and normies, it almost feels predatory. You're on the operating system with the most malware written for it, you don't really know what you're doing, and you're expected to go into the internet and find random executable packages to do what you want. These people don't understand how malware or spyware works, they're not worried about OpSec, they're just trying to do the thing. And these people are most people that use computers. They're not stupid (for the most part lol), the field of tech and cybersecurity is just so vast in general that most people trying to get into it are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content, or they don't care and are willing to pay third parties for a sense of security, even if it isn't real. In a better society, this stuff would be taught in grade school, its the modern equivalent of Don't Talk to Strangers and its only gonna get more and more relevant as time progresses. But I digress, I feel like if Microsoft really wanted Windows to be safe, that they would implement some sort of package management solution to help these people not download shady executables online, luckily theres a solution for this. Enter Chocolatey (https://community.chocolatey.org/install) a package manager for Windows and one of the last exes that you'll ever install via your browser. Run the pretty verbose install script listed to copy and enjoy! Go ahead and reboot your PowerShell instance into another Administrator session and run choco install whateveryouwant (I reinstalled Neovim as I was having some issues with the version installed from the previous script) and boom, you have the package. No more navigating the web and all of it's dangers to get your precious packages, just install it via PowerShell and be about your day! Up next is Window Management! Let's make Windows' archaic desktop experience a little bit more intuitive with some tiling window management via GlazeWM (https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm), a tiling window manager for Windows based on i3 and Polybar, and scroll down to downloads, where we find a nice little winget install, which is 'winget install GlazeWM' and we have it! Run it via PowerShell with the glazewm command, which creates the default config, and we're off to the races! The config is a yaml file and is located in a directory in your user directory called .glaze-wim (open PowerShell and ls and you should see it.) Let's Neovim into this baby and get to work. The config.yaml file is pretty straightforward, you can change keybinds, adjust gap size, the usual. The default mod key seems to be alt, since Windows thinks that they own the super key with their stupid logo on it (it doesn't make it yours!) Alt hjkl moves around windows, Alt Enter opens command prompt, which I pretty much immediately switched to PowerShell because why wouldn't you just default to that? The default gaps are set to 20px on both sides, which I feel is way too much, especially on a laptop. I knocked it down to 10 and I'm much happier with it. I removed the system try options on the top bar so it looks less cramped, and navigated over to the Dracula's contribution page to get some colors to add as they don't have an offical GlazeWM package, which I'm fine with as I feel like making your own window manager config is akin to building your own lightsaber as a Jedi, its a very personal process. I also just really like Dracula theme and use the colors often, I would totally drive a Honda Civic decked out in Dracula colors if I could (license plate reads 'ARCHBTW'.) But basically, if you've ever used i3, qtile, dwm, or any of the other hundred or so tiling window managers in existence, this is super straightforward, and the just the comments in the config serve as pretty good documentation on the fly. Plus its not written on Haskell or anything crazy, just saying. I'm sure its possible, but I'm not figuring out how to make the windows not all be uniformly horizontal or vertical when they're not floating, kinda like the default qtile tiling.Oh well, not too important so we'll move on. Honestly, I would mess around more with this config if I planned on daily driving Windows anytime soon (I don't) but it works well enough for me the way it is. And last but not least, lets get WSL set up for Windows to really feel at home up in here. Windows Subsystem for Linux is honestly one of the main things that I've been wanting to try since I left the Microsoft desktop environment a few years ago, its a compatibility layer that allows Linux binaries to run on Windows, and allows you to install distros inside of Windows. I already installed WSL via the Chris Titus script, but I'm gonna need to run a wsl.exe --update inPowerShell, then we can wsl.exe --install -d debian to install good old Debian onto this baby (you can run wsl.exe --install without any additional flags to see the list of OSs available.) NOTE: I forgot to enable virtualization in Windows, which is just opening a PowerShell instance as Administrator and pasting in dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart and after a few seconds you'll be done. Note that if this is on a baremetal install, and not a VM like I'm using, you may need to go into your BIOS and enable Virtualization. If you ARE doing this in VirtualBox, you may have to shut down your VM, then right click on it in VirtualBox, go to Settings, go to the System tab, and the Processor tab within that, and clickity the little box that says Enable Nested VT-x/AMD-V. Click okay, then reboot the VM....and we're still getting an error when starting Debian, lets dig deeper into this.After trying about half a dozen different things, it appears that VirtualBox is the issue and I'd have to switch to a different Hypervisor to get my Debian instance to run. Alas, the fact that WSL exists makes me happy, just not enough to dedicate a full baremetal device to Windows 11 or spinning up another VM thats going to take up a 5th of my laptop's HD. I'll take my L on this one and be happy that I made Windows at least a little bit better. INCOMING RANT! Something that I used to talk about when I "made it" in the tech world was building a dope ass gaming PC and have that be the only Windows device on my network, with its own comfy subnet to itself and everything, but honestly with the increased viability of Linux gaming and the quality of Triple-A games (there used to be this thing called beta testing and we didn't have to pay $70 for it then shill out another 50 for the alpha...erm expansion) I could honestly care less about that. If I was gifted a gaming PC today, I would probably throw Debian on it and turn it into an Ollama server. Windows 11 is a thing, and I'll use it if I absolutely have to, I don't like it. It's the Operating System equivalent of a smart TV (which I do not own) and takes a device that's suppost to do certain tasks, and just bloating it up with spyware and ads. As long as our data is profitable and shareholders want their quarterly earnings in the green, this problem will not go away. Cannonical has been called out for making Ubuntu the Linux version of Windows, and RedHat quite literally sold out. Linux is most definitely becoming mainstream, but like all things, its at a cost. I don't think it'll ever be on the level of the trash fire that I just reviewed, but I've been wrong. In the meantime, I'm going to delete this VM as I'm not going to pay Microsoft a dime to be a product to whomever is getting my data. Software, in my eyes, is meant to be inclusive. You're an artist who can't afford Photoshop and doesn't want shady cracked software, use Gimp. Passionate about technology but all you have is a dated laptop and a dream? Throw Linux on that baby and let your dreams come true. Suffering from the results of half a century of defunding American education? The world is at your fingertips if you know how to find it. Unfortunately, you can't even search Google these days without getting a half a page of spam ads before you see anything actually relevant to what you searched (StartPage is a great alternative if you're not trying to set up your own searxng instance.) The Internet today is not the internet that I grew up with in the early 2000s, but thats to be expected. The Internet is a society, and society changes, it evolves. We've been able to do some amazing things, but the dystopian trade off is very apparent. Your phone is more powerful than most computers were a decade ago, but what does it do for you? It does what you need: facilitates communication, gives you the time, a camera, and a flashlight, basically a technological swiss army knife. Who controls the software and setup of these devices? Apple and Google, who are all about the money. One had to remind itself to "Not Be Evil" then kinda just shrugged and kept going, and the other had to literally be sanctioned by the EU so that they would stop robbing trust fund kids with their proprietary chargers. These companies are digital drug lords, and we're their clients. Your iPhone is slow? Better do whatever you can to get the new one. Want to have basic device functionality? Better sign into the device with your Google account, and go ahead and get the QR code tattoo'd on your wrist while your at it. We've gotten to the point where this is considered normal by society, we give our kids Google'd-up Android devices to pacify them and its considered the norm, they grow up seeing adults staring at their phones doomscrolling for hours and think that's life and people question it less and less as times moves on, joining the digital flock. A sheep does not know that it is captive, for captivity has always been a way of life. Ads have always been on personal devices, and they've always spied on you. Social media has always existed and I must use it to be accepted by my peers, video games have always had in-game purchases, we have always been at war with Eastasia. You see what I'm getting at, the ultimate slave is one that believes that they are free. One who celebrates their shackles, posts opinions fed to them by the Youtube algorhythm to their social media and thinking that any of what they did was actually freedom of expression. Youtube has probably been more effective than Mien Kampf in radicalizing youth into sympathize with Nazi values. People spend hours a day on social media doing literally nothing because it's been designed to feed you enough dopamine to keep you around and notify you enough to not forget about it. I remember when I first quit using Facebook, it was like quitting nicotine. I kept wanting to reach for it, regardless of the fact that it had nothing to offer me and is actually terrible for my health. It seems ridiculous to me today, my time is much too valuable to scroll through other people's mental diarreah or to feel any way about it. Even when I get on Linkedin, I'll catch myself scrolling for 5 seconds after acceping a friend request and it feels like I'm strangling my brain cells. Why do I need to keep up with people that I went to high school with? I hated high school, and anybody that I still talk to knows how to get ahold of me. I form my own thoughts and opinions based on as many unbiased sources as I can, and try to sharpen my mind every day to make sure that they're the best ones that I can muster. If I want to do something, I do it and I'm not worried about anybody else's feelings or opinions on the matter. Just the amount of mental overhead saved right there is a game changer, and has skyrocketed my productivity over the last few years. I've ready dozens of books, taught myself Linux, Networking, and Programming, as well as cactus grafting and many other skills, rediscovered my love for writing, started a website, developed actual social skills, got some decent bass guitar chops, got more health conscious, and overal done a complete 180 on my mental health and my outlook on life. I'm not concerned about being as well off as the kids who were mean to me in school or some 4 year old that shreds circles around me on guitar, I'm concerned with my personal growth, making up for lost time, and being the absolute best that I possibly can in my chosen field and in life in general. If I pull out my phone to pass time in public, I'm usually reading a book or looking up something that I don't know yet. I shoot for the stars on a daily basis because anything less is unforgivable and unacceptable, because I know how far I've come and the day that I go back is the day that I lay down to die. I just try to remember that the only reason that I can see where to aim in the night sky is because I broke out of the barn, tore down the walls and and gained the clarity to see my surroundings for what they really are. Refined sugar kills, but its in everything because its profitable. Does the board care if their customers get diabetes? Only if they have stock in the pharaceutical industry. Assume that nobody in power has your best interests in mind, because they don't. We live in an extremely predatory, cut throat world run by monsters that have power that no man should have and wield it with no concern for anything but what they want. No rules, just more. Money, power, influence, enough of all of it to convince the authors of the DSM that this isn't a pyschological disorder. These are the forces in control of not only every major tech corporation, but pretty much every seat of power on the planet. Child labor? If we can get away with it and its cheap enough. The environment? Not before quarterly earnings. Quality Public Education? I'm not gonna get blue shelled out of my wealth by a poor person playing their cards right. Giving back to society on any level? Only if theres a tax write-off and headlines involved, otherwise its all going to an overshore account. Why would you allow an entity that only sees you as something to use in whatever way it can for it's advantage, to have anything that they're not already actively robbing from you? The Internet is becoming a for profit prison, we're told that we're criminals for wanting freedom, that we need transparency to keep us safe from terrorists and pedos and that we support that by supporting freedom when the Powers submitting this bs arguement are significatly more likely to actually be involved in such things. These are the rulers of society, and they've been at their game for years and have used every innovation of man to refine it into something that keeps them where they're at. I like to think that I've taken my mind back by quitting social media, always learning, watching what I consume, and investing in myself and others that compliment the growth of this mindset. I'm far from perfect, but I've come leaps and bounds from where I was. Well! You can't write an article about Windows 11 without going on a lengthy, Stallman-esque rant about the state of technology today riddled with 1984 references and using the word Dystopian at least once. For anybody that made it through this whole thing, you're great and I appreciate it. For any Microsoft enthusiasts that I may have upset, sorry not sorry your OS is the embodiment of what I hate about the future. Have a great rest of your day and never stop fighting for your freedom because they will never stop fighting to take it away from you. Peace.