And I can almost guarentee you it will magically all turn itself back on/reinstall itself eventually after the OS force updates/reboots itself in the not too distant future.

It's already re-created the OneDrive folder, but it hasn't moved any of my libraries back yet. Knock on wood.

That is truly insidious, but FWIW, you don't need to abandon Windows entirely because of this. There are ways of creating a custom Windows installation disk that removes OneDrive, along with other bloatware, spyware, and pretty much anything else you don't like. Look into tools such as Tiny11 Builder, MSMG Toolkit, NTLite, etc. This is a decent guide[1] for setting all of this up.

The process is quite tedious and takes a few hours, but in the end you end up with a personalized version of Windows, without any of the garbage. You still need to be vigilant of Windows Update undoing some of this, but you can also disable it altogether and manually cherry pick the updates you want to install.

It's insane that Microsoft is building such a user hostile OS that forces users to resort to this, but if you absolutely must use it, the experience after doing the above is not so bad. I've been running a custom install of Windows 11 for about a year now without any issues.

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/create-custom-windows-11...

Thanks, I'll take a look into this! I'm still probably going to move to a linux distro for my desktop, but I'm always down to try breaking things on another system.

Maybe this tool is a bit more comprehensive. After configuring a stripped down image, Windows can be installed in what is almost like a headless mode in literally 5 minutes with no user intervention:

https://www.ntlite.com/

Yes, NTLite is good, but AFAIR, it doesn't allow deep customization of some things. The guide I linked to mentions it as the last step.

They are the house of dark patterns.

After a certain point anyone paying attention can see it's not accidental. Oops sorry! No. Their goal is your technological enslavement. Mis-features like that don't accidentally just always end up being evil and oops sorry when there is a real backlash. They wanted to see if they could get away with it, like they do.

I abandoned MS products in 1998 for good. Win98se pushed me over the edge.

Wim98SE was actually good though! Well, it was way way better than win98. Win2k and 7 (the last windows OS I ever had for personal use) were good too. The writing was on the wall back in the 98 days for sure though. MS decided that your computer was theirs.