Yup, my Linux adventure once again ended in tragedy. I won't go into details 'cause it'll turn into a rant. It's too soon after the disaster. The TL;DR of it is that my WINE setup had been showing signs of slow corruption for weeks and then yesterday after a normal operation (deleting an unneeded profile in the Vortex mod manager), the window flashed and next thing I knew everything was reset as if it was a new install of Vortex. Moreover, replacing the "Bottles" WINE bottle (self-contained ecosystem that's supposed to be isolated and safe) from my Pika backup (poor man's Time Machine) didn't restore things to how they were earlier in the day when the incremental backup was made. What the heck?!
There's more but that's the gist. And sure, I could have set it up again... But why would I want to when it'll almost certainly happen again? Maybe not the exact scenario, but I've gone through this dozens of times before. I just thought that this one would work. I did make it almost three months!
So, here I am with a fresh Windows 11 install on my Lenovo Legion Slim 5 gaming laptop. A little different this time: I did the stripped-down method of installation. Mostly following this guide and script:
No bloat, no Edge, no Copilot, etc. And it seems to be fine. So far so good. I might be able to live with an ad- and nag-free Windows. Just need to finish by disabling auto Updates in the Registry like I did last time I had Windows. If it all blows up in my face down the road then, well, nothing new. Linux got me used to it. 😅
Y'know what? I'm not even annoyed anymore. Bazzite updates to Fedora 41 and my setup breaks. It wasn't the kernel since a rollback didn't help. Probably WINE or Flatpak or something.
Anyway, my 1TB SSD has a debloated Windows 10 on it now. Not 11 even though the laptop came with it. I read that all the "Windows 11" drivers actually were fine for Windows 10 and that seems to be the case.
[Edit: Probably not a good idea after all. I was having all kinds of display/graphic cards issues. e.g.--couldn't run Skyrim SE fullscreen after the usual tweaks that I've done dozens of times before with no issues; for some reason the incorrect Radeon drivers/Adrenaline software was installed, which might have screwed things up even after I installed the correct version. Anyway, unaltered Windows 11 is now installed and updating.]
After updating Windows 10 I got a little surprise: they put CoPilot on the task bar!
Resistance is futile.
This drive is purely for Skyrim. The 2TB SSD has Linux on it and will remain so because everything else except my complicated modding setup works just great in Linux.