Memes

Convoluted set-up process involving multiple consents regarding user telemetry.

Read and un-tick. Not convoluted or hard. If you care about telemetry (or even know what telemetry is) then you can't call this convoluted or hard.

Moving traditionally-owned software packages to SaaS e.g. Microsoft Office -> Office 365.

Office still sells as a standalone version if that's what you want. That's also not a Windows thing.

Heavy pressure towards setting up an online Microsoft Account and associating that with your local user account.

"Heavy pressure" lol. Most people like this because it gives you things like full background backups of your data and ease of use.

Taking away customisation options such as moving the position of the Taskbar with no discernible benefit or alternative.

But windows being windows means you can move it wherever you want with third party software.

It’s impossible to configure Windows search to open links in any browser other than Microsoft Edge. In spite of the existence of a ‘default browser’ setting.

Good thing edge is installed by default then. Windows Search is intrinsically tied to Bing because that's their search engine, and their browser uses bing by default.

Attempts at vendor lock-in through services such as OneDrive.

lol come on, this is ridiculous. You don't have to use OneDrive at all.

Storage bloat and excessive hardware requirements (TPM modules) forcing people to buy new hardware or lose support.

What "storage bloat"? "Excessive hardware requirements"? lol the language you use is so intentionally inflammatory to try and make even the tiniest thing seem like a show stopper. Most people don't even care about "support" - they run whatever version of windows is on their machine until it dies. Again - if you care about support, you can't complain about this stuff.

It’s not necessarily easier but it’s what they’ve grown accustomed to.

It's definitely easier too though.

Frankly the install process for most Linux distros is far, far more pleasant anyway.

Windows installs are like 5 mouse clicks lol.

Most Linux distros will provide you a Live Environment on a USB so you can experiment with the entire UX without having to install anything.

Yeah, because the OS is barebones and useless to most people.

If I install Windows, I have to boot for the first time before Nvidia drivers get installed.

Oh no, you have to log in to a computer that you've just installed windows on? The nerve of these people!

If you gave someone a pre-installed Linux environment they’d get used to it very quickly.

Sure, because it vaguely resembles an old Windows UI. Then they'd start using it and realize that doing anything other than using what's pre-installed is much harder.