I have also in the past made the same comments regarding my Windows 10/11 Professional experience.

What I forgot for a long time is that on new computers I do a quick registry tweak (also possible from group policy editor) to disable web search results from my Start Menu:

> reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer /v DisableSearchBoxSuggestions /t reg_dword /d 1

I cannot emphasize enough how the 10 seconds of effort to apply the above key changes your life on Windows. Likely all Start Menu search problems you've ever experienced disappear.

The other main things I do:

- Turn off widgets from the regular Windows Settings "app".

- Change my Microsoft Edge home screen settings to make it completely uncluttered, it shows nothing except my recently visited/pinned websites. Most notably I see no MSN News trash.

Other things which make me not see adverts:

My personal PC has a personal and my work PC has a business Microsoft 365 subscription meaning that I have premium OneDrive, meaning no adverts related to it at all. But if you have no subscription and uninstall OneDrive then you see nothing about it anymore. It's worth mentioning that I find Microsoft no worse than Apple in this regard which will incessantly push you to use iCloud.

Very recently I noticed my Start menu showing results from the Windows Store, but I was able to get rid of that by following this advice: https://superuser.com/a/1933000

I find Windows bashing which I regularly see online (here and elsewhere) very tedious and not really indicative at all of the experience of people like me, I spend < 10 minutes configuring new Windows computers to my preferences and then for months or years at a time I just get on with using it to do the actual things I want without worrying about the OS at all, drivers just work, most software supports it, and WSL is awesome for when I need to do Linux stuff.

None of the recent headline Windows Update bugs have affected me personally (and I do updates promptly), while I guess it's partially luck, it may also be that only a minority of Windows users are actually affected by bad updates, while any update issues are still unforgiveable by MS, these incidents are not as broadly affecting as they may seem from seeing the news stories.

Final thing worth mentioning is that PCs pre-loaded with Windows often come pre-loaded with additional crap, so I also always format, completely remove all partitions and re-install Windows fresh using an ISO from the Microsoft website.

The full history of Windows widgets, from 1997 to today