The new Godzilla Minus 1 movie actually goes over this, >!they even use it against Godzilla to try and defeat him.!<

Whataburger's A1 sauce burger with bacon. They got bought out by another company and it vanished 😥

That sounds like a great gift though.

The IoT LTSC does not have this requirement. Or a USB made in Rufus can have it disabled.

Just burn the ISO to a USB drive with Rufus, a window full of options with check boxes will pop up, with a lot of options to turn installation bullshit.

Look up TPUs, like a coral tensor. Extremely efficient at machine learning, only, and cheap. If NPUs use anything like a TPU, then it absolutely can do local "AI." Then once the heavy lifting is done, then I'd imagine all that data is uploaded.

Check out Windows Xlite, they have 10 and 11. Their install iso's are stripped of all Microsoft's bullshit.

Check out Windows Xlite's windows 11 .iso's. Post install almost feels like a fresh Win7 install.

I'm in the same boat, of needing to still use Windows.

Check out Windows XLite. Its a highly customized iso that gets rid of all the bullshit. No automatic updates (they're provided as cumulative installers), no windows defender, no edge, no cortana, no store, no Xbox, etc. Those things are all stil available, too. Also, all the telemetry is disabled from registry and gpolicy, and since no auto updates, they won't mess with those entries to "uh oh we turned on our spying again, and didn't tell you."

Its a massive breath of fresh air, feels like going back to XP and 7, when your fresh install has nothing at all. Not even dot.net and vcredist, which are also available.

Looks really sleek with the new floating panels, and being able to turn a panel into an icon task manger is still nice, and the new overview window is great for workflow.

However multi monitor support is still garbage. Like 3/4 of programs will never remember their size and position, so you have to make a never ending list of kwin window rules, which then end up affecting other windows you don't want to. Other things like right click menus will show up on the wrong monitor way off in a corner get old real fast. Its like the cartoon spiderman meme of 3 Spiderman's pointing at each other. Qt6, Wayland, and kwin all pointing the blame of why its like the way it is, while bug reports rack up another year of no fixes.

HDR having a toggle and working is really nice, but when it was on and I booted up a game, the in game options wouldn't allow me to turn on HDR.

I DEFINITELY shared that worry, but I found it on an invite only forum that has a track record of clean isos and modded OS'es, and any uploaded files are scanned by multiple anti-malware/viruses. Plus I could see the dude FBConan had a long very active history there. He + someone else used to make Phoenix Lite, but other dude wanted to get greedy, so he ditched him and went solo. Now he just takes donations from Patreon, and makes downloading easy from his own website.

Multiple displays are always a shit show. Once a year I try out a current distro, and within a week I'm back on Windows. This time was Bazzite, and the exact same problems as always, both Plasma and Gnome, just last week. After all this time windows still don't remember their size and position, and right click context menus randomly break and show up on the opposite monitor. Go and look up the bugs, and I can see they've been a problem for like 5-15 years.

If you give up on Linux for the time being, I HIGHLY recommend looking up Windows Xlite. It is a highly modified Windows 10 or 11 iso. They even have the option to install without Windows Defender, its such a breath of fresh air, almost feels like being back on XP or 7.