My mother-in-law bought a new laptop last week and asked me to set it up for her, it came with Win11 by default. I was genuinely flabbergasted at how terrible of an experience it was, screen after screen of "We respect your privacy. Let Microsoft collect every single thing you have ever dared to breath onto this computer?" right in the install screen. After that lovely experience you're greeted with a billion random junkware preinstalled like fucking Candy Crush. I wanted to crash out when I clicked around in explorer and saw every UI element buffer for a split second, and after further research it seems they're using React in explorer these days.

What the hell happened?

My aunt pulled a Windows XP computer out of storage recently because she's sick of Win 11. I'm excited to hear updates from my cousin (though unfortunately, I have to expect this experiment will fail)

Valid. The good news is it's a nicer experience once you click through those. (Be careful; there are a few tricks where the "skip" button changes position and emphasis). Then sometimes a Windows update will make you go through part of it again; once every 3 months or so.

Don't worry, AI's gonna fix it in Rust in Windows 12