I find Windows somewhat more palatable if you have the liberty to run that entire suite of horseshit killing scripts and co you can find online.
I would link the one I used last year but I have long since forgotten, I only know that it was a collection of commands I had to copypasta manually and the quick search I did just now only featured one script solutions.

Still, might be worth your time to look into those, as long as you remember NO WARRANTY.

Oh, really? And what does portage require, if not a fast internet connection or a lot of patience?
I had neither when I first tried it, so I dropped it in favor of other distros.
My two cent's worth, right or wrong.

Any chance of a link or links to the killing scripts you mention? I can't exactly search for 'horseshit killing scripts.'

Ohh yeah, I could have been more helpful on that front, lol. My bad.

https://github.com/builtbybel/debotnet
Seems to be the evolution of the thing I used back then, if the name of the directory I created for the scripts is any hint.
At first I didn't really recognize the name 'builtbybel' it was mirinsoft before but after some search on the web, the links to the mirinsoft github are now 'builtbybel', so it seems to be what they're called now.

Edit:
Also, the name mirinsoft is plastered all over that gitpage, hahaha.

I'll give it a go. It's the best offer I have had thus far. If windows falls over - who cares? My RazPi 4 on 1 core is faster.

This may be due to drivers which are fetched from windows update. 7 used to do this as well. You can disable it... If you then download and install the driver from the vendor, e g. Synaptic, that should resolve it.

It's a tool or a means to an end which many have to use/suffer simply because most production software and games are developed for Windows. I doubt many love it, they simply put up with it. But once properly configured it "just works" - a phrase I see applied to Linux a lot nowadays by its fans.

The 3rd party tools for disabling telemetry etc aren't really needed if you're prepared to do a bit of research, hack the registry, set a few system policies and disable a few services.

They actually let you do that?

Apparently all that VB stuff in deprecated in favour of sharpapp, written in C#

I see, thanks for pointing that out.

Seeing as everybody in the know seems to be subscribed here:

I deleted my VM taking 120%-130% cpu on top, and replaced the old one, ehich is only comsuming 90-100% & 75% of memory :-/.
I downloaded this. Sharpapp seems to be an extractor for Powershell scripts. So after grabbing Sharpapp, extracting the scripts, I get these little subdirs with powershell scripts in them. I ran 2 subdirs (3 scripts total)from the powershell, after which they're opened in notePad instead of powershell. Powershell seems AWOL or not invoked. How do I sort that?