@skylar @mona @SuperSnekFriend and if you don't know how to do this stuff manually, you have wonderful tools like chris titus' winutil: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
i'd also recommend explorerpatcher for those on windows 11 who want to bring back windows 10 features: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
if you want to go even further, you can use the answer file method when installing windows, customizing it exactly how you want it to start as: https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall
a good windows install using these simple tools is a much better experience than linux is in my personal opinion. that isn't to say that linux is a bad experience if you know what you're doing and really like tinkering around with things, but at the end of the day i just like the way windows works more. it makes it easier for me to do everything that i need to do instead of fiddling with things as much. and as much as it sucks, most software either works better on windows or the commercial software is leagues better than the foss stuff. i still have yet to find a colorblind filter better than windows' for instance, and the one that someone made for me for linux just didn't work and neither of us could figure out why... which seems to be a trend when it comes to me and linux lol.
right now i'm running win11 and i don't even have notifications, the action center, copilot, cortana, bing search, any telemetry garbage, stripped out services, and more and it only took a little bit of work to setup. explorerpatcher was a godsend too, because i'm much more familiar with win10. win11 gets a little toooo modern with things, i think win10 is a really good sweet spot between looking nice and being functional.
that being said, i had to upgrade to windows 11 because my win10 install decided to shit itself. i had that happen with a mint installation though recently too so it's not like linux is free from random issues popping up like that either. don't know what happened to the windows one, but the mint one i think it's because something updated without another thing updating first and it destroyed it to the point i had to just do a fresh install.