When I stopped using Windows, it was because it required so much constant upkeep and maintenance to stay usable. You had to stay on top of the latest tool that disables tracking, things like Cortana you'd want to remove, the latest toggles you have to disable, what toggles revert themselves when you update. These all exist behind different shifting UI toggles which are not accessibly automatable. And all the while, you have to hope your registry edits don't force you to a lengthy reinstall where you have to redo all of these.

I could be wrong, but as far as I know there's not one "Fix Windows 11" tool maintained to do all this for you.

"You have to toggle AI features off in Notepad, and they changed the name to Advanced Features now," is just another heaving brick on the pile.

I really think MS should have just resurrected the "Wordpad" app name for what the new "Nptepad" does. It would be far less annoying if they'd just done that.

I’d argue it is Microsoft’s own damn fault. They seem to have completely abandoned improving their system, in favour of dumping everything in their apps. Apple has introduced writing tools at the OS level, so you can use their LLM in TextEdit and no one complains.

I don't need anything more than a simple text editor. Notepad worked fine for a long time, but the bloat is real. I tried a bunch of replacement editors, but none really scratched that Notepad itch. Surprisingly, I'm now a fan of MS Edit:

https://github.com/microsoft/edit

It's very simple and here's hoping they don't bloat this one out, too.

Reminder that this is the company that decided to replace Paint with something called "Paint 3D", the laggiest and bloatiest "literally nobody wanted this" drawing app I've ever seen.

> Everyone has always expected Notepad to be a simple utility as it has always been

Except the youngest of the demography who don't have this expectation, and live in AI hype era since they're kids.