> I can still hear the fans.

I could not deal with that I’m sorry. I’d have to turn it off.

The only way I could make Windows usable day after day in a previous job was to shut it down every night, and then I had the BIOS configured to start it up again and iterate through my extensive startup list before I got into work. Was quite effective like that.

My Ubuntu machine is also noisy. I’m fairly certain it has nothing to do with system activity.

Fans are probably either a rogue service you can find in the task manager or hardware problem (maybe it needs some new thermal paste or a good air blow to remove dust).

That has usually nothing to do with the OS itself.

Recent Windows releases are notable for not running software without the consent or wishes of the user :)

And what about rogue services that come with the OS itself? Things like Windows Update, Windows Defender, the Phone app thingy, diagnostics policy service, the Xbox game bar or whatever it's called, the .NET optimization thingy and a dozen other things that like to wake up randomly and start consuming resources whenever they feel like it. Most of these things you can only disable temporarily, if at all, without resorting to dubious 3rd party tools.

Counterpoint: I bought a System76 laptop last year. As it came, the CPU fan was never off for longer than a few seconds, even when there was no load at all. The fans are not very loud, but the coil whine just before re-enabling the fan was disturbing.

The motherboard's firmware is open, however, so I rebuilt it with a slightly adjusted "CPU fan curve." After flashing it, the fans now go online when there's an actual need, which is to say - rarely. The coil whine still happens, but hearing it once or twice a day is much less irritating than hearing it every 10 seconds.

So it's possible the problem is on the OS side (I think we can agree the firmware is part of the OS) and it's sometimes possible to fix the problem in software... as long as you have control over it.

> That has usually nothing to do with the OS itself.

More often than not this mystical rogue service ends up being something internal to windows.