Sharing here because of the post from 14 hours ago.
In my case, I thought I could survive a few weeks on a Surface with a fresh Windows install because I’d been planning to sell it. Now that it’s turning into my daily driver with no real end in sight (and with all my thumb drives packed away), I have Yet Another Flash Drive™ arriving this evening so I can go back to KDE precisely because of this sort of bullshit.
If you absolutely must use windows for whatever reason you can actually get it pretty good with WSL, Windows Terminal, FancyWM, autohotkey and scoop
That said windows updates still suck, stuff still takes several working days to open and you’re still being spied on