TrustingZebra

Brave Search is awful for non-English results. Startpage is decent but only because it's basically Google results.

Spooky

It's included with the 8 Pro.

They had that YouTube Premium Lite tier in a few regions, which was basically that. But Google just killed it.

It's a great tool but note that by default it upgrades EVERYTHING, up to and including production cloud environments if you are connected to any.

Windows has billions of users, I guarantee you more than a few care about FOSS.

Also FOSS repos for Windows do exist, as explained in other comments here.

I still use it on nearly every new Windows install (including when helping others setup). Although Ninite itself is not FOSS, it has many of the best open source Windows software in its curated list.

There are a ton of great FOSS for Windows. Even before I moved to Linux as my primary OS, I used many of these because they were often just better than the proprietary alternatives.

Will it be in 8K?

The other thing is just how much I hate Windows Update. I can tolerate most parts of Windows, but WU is objectively terrible. It's incredibly slow, requires multiple restarts (sometimes forced!) amd sometimes fails with random errors that are impossible to troubleshoot.

It goes without saying that most Linux package managers work incredibly well in comparison.

Linux?

It's so nice to be excited about my OS again. I remember as a kid, I used to be really excited about Windows updates. People were cynical about Microsoft even back then, but I remained loyal to Windows for years.

Only last year did I finally move to Linux as my OS (although I still use Windows for gaming). Since then every following Linux news is always exciting. New versions of distros, desktop environments and software always bring interesting improvements.

Meanwhile on the Windows side, most noticeable updates just bring more ads, tracking, forced Edge recommendations and forced logins. Ironically the last Windows feature I remember being genuinely excited for was WSL 2.