The amount of work required, post installation, to make Windows usable, is one of the things that pushed me towards Linux on the desktop.

I used to do a few of the regular tweaks decades ago to squeeze out the maximum frame rate of Quake, etc. but getting rid of the basic shit that I don't want modern Windows to be doing was a bigger job than tweaking old Windows for gaming. That, to me, indicates a severe bloat problem.

Went with windows 10 for a VM, less cow manure to deal with (still bloated and useless without debloating). After booting nearly all of the calls home got rejected anyway because they were marked as spyware related. I would imagine they got that close to 100% on windows 11.

Gaming on linux is fine, framerates and cpu usage are higher and less despite the wine/proton wrappers.

Is there a checklist of things that would be better to uninstall or switch off?

I leaped to Linux a few years back. One of the best moves in my life. The speed, the reaction time, the lack of bloat.

I side-car'ed a Mac for some apps that could not go through (e.g. for audio work, which Linux has some difficulties with, and lacks a lot of good apps for), but even that went smoothly because it had far less bloat and was already very UNIX-y.

And then you get responses like this. It's like they can't be arsed to post about the article, they go on some completely different topic, i.e. gaming. At least make the anecdote no one really cares about related to this piss poor excuse of an article.

Like, seriously?