I'm not saying it's a perfect solution, but with Windows 11 Pro and group policy I was able to disable all of the annoying stuff, and because it is group policy it has persisted through several years of updates. It is annoying you have to do this, and it does take some time to get set up right. But it's a solution.
That said I'd pay for a dev edition as you described it, that would be fantastic.
it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.
Why? HN has traditionally always largely been a macOS and Linux crowd. Why do we have to care about fixing an OS that is broken out of the box (that most of us don't use anyway)?
Because someone cannot make informed comments about the "other" party unless they have a reasonably deep knowledge of it, too.
Far too many Linux users, especially, make fun of Windows and if you dig a bit you see that most of their complaints are things that are solved with 5 minutes of googling. Some complaints are philosophical, and those I agree with, but even in that case, I'd be curious how consistent they are with their philosophy when for example Linux desktop environments due weird things.
Summarizing a bit: Linux users with years or decades of experience of tinkering as sysadmins with Linux frequently make junior-level user complaints about Windows usage, frequently based on outdated information about it.
I say this who has been using both Linux and Windows for a few decades now and has a fairly decent level of sysadmin skills on both.
I didn't know about this. My knowledge of Windows is very limited. I use it every day for work, but it's managed by our IT and Security departments. It's locked down. You cannot use external drives. You can't install applications yourself and you can't run un-approved applications. So, I learned over the years to never touch anything that already hasn't been approved, even settings. If you want to apply for something to be approved, you can submit a written justification co-signed by your manager. My manager has never rejected anything I requested, but it's a huge hassle. Most of us just don't bother, even developers.
There is no flavor of Windows 11 that is acceptable. Even the UI itself is a disaster. A cornucopia of libraries and paradigms from React Native to legacy APIs as if an interdimensional wave function of bad ideas had collapsed into an OS, but with ads.
There are literal ads for apps in the Windows 11 start menu. That's unacceptable. Even if one day they roll it back, it will still have been unacceptable. The fact that anyone ever green-lit that decision is unforgivable for a corporation.
macOS isn't perfect but the issue you point out is more of a docker problem, not an OS one. I'm told https://orbstack.dev/ is the solution.
I hear this a lot, and I do seem to remember back when I first got Windows 11 I might have seen something stupid like Candy Crush, but I'll be honest, I literally never see ads anywhere in the OS. Truth be told I hardly ever use the start menu since they ruined it, but this complaint about ads everywhere make it sound like a typical webpage. I just don't see it. Maybe because I'm on Win11 Pro?
That said I'd pay for a dev edition as you described it, that would be fantastic.