You can turn all of that crap off with some effort.
Contrast that to the Linux desktop where you can't turn off the "it just doesn't work" (unless you mean just disable the GUI completely and only use the CLI), and the enthusiast who says they have it working just the way they want probably has "just not working" more thoroughly than the defaults.
The thing is that those ads are: (1) almost always for other Microsoft products, (2) frequently are for MSN articles aimed at Trump Voters, (3) probably destroy Microsoft products more than they promote them.
As an example of (3), consider how Microsoft launched a product called SkyDrive without doing a Trademark check, had to rename it OneDrive (just like they had to call the third XBOX the XBOX ONE, contrast that to Sony where even Mom can tell a PS5 is better than a PS4) then made Office save to OneDrive by default and leave you not being able to save at all if it couldn't connect to OneDrive.
That's like killing your product with 900 cyanide laced bullets, if they ever want me to use OneDrive again there is no amount of heavy handed marketing tactics that will work, even if I have to click 500 times and edit 30 registry entries to disable OneDrive I'll do that.
> Contrast that to the Linux desktop where you can't turn off the "it just doesn't work"
The modern Linux desktop is pretty damn usable, especially if you go with something like PopOS. It's got to be covering 99% of non-workstation-type of use cases out of the box.
I was shocked when I was able to install Office 97 at work on a Windows 11 machine and… it “just worked”, paperclip and all the lame ways it tries to take over your desktop…
