I’ve seen a lot of complaints and Windows 11 on Lemmy, (ads in the OS, intrusive AI, SSD damage, privacy issues, etc.) I’ve gone to Linux on my laptop, but I don’t believe I can do this for my daily driver desktop. So if I’m forced to update to 11, I’d like to do so in the “safest possible manner.” Any guidance would be appreciated.
What I do is a clean installation with Rufus (disabling ram limitation, bitlocker among other things), then I run Crapfixer, next I remove Bing, OneDrive, default video player, etc. with RevoUninstaller. Finally I do install my own drop-in replacements for video player, image viewer, and so on.
And then you have to re-verify your changes after every update.
I started with Rufus as well, but then I just uninstalled things directly through Windows and went through the settings to disable everything I didn’t want. Probably safer than using 3rd party applications to remove things. I also use Openshell to replace the start menu. If you change the time and currency settings during install, that apparently disabled some things as well. See here And if you don’t want to set up a Microsoft account, just stay disconnected from Internet during install, it will let you just set up a local account.