The tips, ads, and recommendations you see will be more generic and may be less relevant to you.
And this is treated as a bad thing?!
The number of ads you see won't change, but they may be less relevant to you.
Send only info about your device, its settings and capabilities, and whether it is performing properly.
In other words, even after turning off all the settings, your data still gets collected.
The rest of the installation process wasn't fun either. It was worded in this weird, condescending tone, like "Let's get everything set up for you", and "Let Cortana help you get things done!".
Thank goodness for FLOSS and GNU/Linux.
Yeah, Windows sucks. I recommend the LTSC version for minimized tracking. But even then, I had to use third-party software and hacks to minimize it further. I don't ever plan to go back after switching to Linux.
LTSC sounds great or else there must be something like MicroXP for windows 10/11 where someone has debloated it down to the bare bones.
@BananaOnionJuice @Neon_Shadow Tiny11 is a project where windows 11 has been stripped down to the absolute barebones, there may still be some telemetry that needs to be disabled (O&O shutup is good for that). It's designed to work on older machines with as little as 4gb ram, so it would be perfect for running in a VM, in fact that's what I'm planning to do.