Where? I don't see any other than the nagging to update settings after larger updates (couple times a year).

The installer has 3 free trials in it (photos sync, xbox, office 365), and then re-runs that part of the installer periodically.

The start menu shows sponsored articles in it IIRC, although this was something I turned off as soon as I could. It also pushes apps like Candy Crush.

The lock screen has ads literally "dotted" around, again pushing cloud services etc.

I keep being prompted to turn on Copilot, and essentially the only options are "Yes" or "Not yet". Opt-outs aren't respected.

I don't use Edge but the OS keeps advertising Edge, keeps telling me in various places and at various times that Edge is better and that Chrome is dangerous.

These are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head, but it's truly pervasive throughout the whole product. Even just looking through Settings it's not hard to find upsells.

I made my usb install media with Rufus and I it had some option to remove a bunch of frustrating behavior (this option was on by default). For instance it allowed me to create a local account. That seems to have completely removed advertising you mentioned. I had a lot of it in windows 10. Maybe the person you are replying to used Rufus (which is recommended if you want to make the install media from Linux or Mac) and didn’t realize it made changes.

Hasn't MS removed the option to create a local-only account in Win11 and is forcing everyone to sign up for a Microsoft account?

They completely removed it from the installer GUI, yes.

But local-only Windows 11 still works with minimal interference. The most common ways are creating the install medium with Rufus (which has an option to create a local-only installation medium), or by manually dropping into the Windows Command Prompt during setup and running a single command ("ms-cxh:localonly")

and despite the fact you can install AND uninstall numerous web browsers, for some reason Edge is (supposedly) built into the OS and core functionality and it can't be removed - and is the default app for countless file types.

It actually is built in as WebView2. It's like that so apps can use web views without shipping their own browser (Electron) and then it is kept up to date with the system.

Internet Explorer (MSHTML) also still lives on in Windows 11 because older software depends on it to embed browsers in their UI. It'll probably stay there for a long time to preserve backwards compatibility.

> The installer has 3 free trials in it (photos sync, xbox, office 365), and then re-runs that part of the installer periodically.

This is all I see and everything I disabled/uninstalled was done from the Windows settings UI (Windows 11 Pro).

> Even just looking through Settings it's not hard to find upsells.

I guess I see this too? Just a little box saying to get Microsoft 365 or install OneDrive on the home page of the settings UI. There's basically nothing of value there though so it's easily missed.