Oh, didn't you know? It's not really your PC any longer.

Well yea, you turned off the windows search/Cortana/Bing bar, but now it's called copilot/recall bar which you haven't turned off yet.

/S

I hate that goddamn searchbar

Your computer? You mean Microsoft's bitch box?

Face it, they can do whatever they want with your computer and you're powerless to stop them. They've also been looking through your photos and adding them to their AI model.

All it did to you was cosmetic.

Windows 10's "feature" updates consistently also re-enable the "fast startup" option on my machine when they install. Which, on my particular motherboard and SSD combination, causes Windows to take about 30 minutes to boot when left enabled for reasons I have never been able to comprehend. A regular cold boot only takes like 20 seconds, so... I definitely tend to notice when it does this behind my back yet again.

When they tell you they're walking back Recall and it's "off by default", remember that they constantly do this shit.

don't look now but they've probably installed a new version to Teams along with everything else, lol

It even did the same thing with enterprise customers. All our machines suddenly started asking us to enable search. Like why do I need another thing when opening the Start Menu and typing is the same fucking thing?? And to fuck with my group policies and undo the customization I had is mega infuriating.

This is why you should not trust them regarding Recall. They will not let it go. It will be forced on you eventually.

no no no, it asked your permission. It's just that the "we added back the search bar, is that ok" dialog defaults to "yes" after some short time. Extremely fucking annoying change

the dialog:

article: https://www.c-amie.co.uk/technical/windows-10-patch-for-october-2023-kb5015684-re-enables-the-taskbar-search-box/

And they've made Bing your standard browser and activated Copilot.

It's a nice wallpaper though for what it's worth.

Sweet wallpaper though

your background? Since when is this Windows computer your computer? Microsoft has been very clear that we no longer own our computers if we choose to use Windows.

My windows vm runs Cairo shell as the desktop and I've replaced the file manager with Dolphin and the command prompt with Konsole and notepad with Kate and it almost feels like a usable operating system

Get used to it. It is not your machine, its Microsofts.

I'm not sure how you messed up, because this has never happened to me, and I stay up to date.

I love to extol the virtues of ReviOS. You’ll never have to worry about windows doing things ever again as it rips the guts out of windows. Seriously check it out.

It’s real easy to install.

Also what Linux and theme are you running there?

They're trying to tell you to go outside