In my view, this is unacceptable…
They changed my background (previously there was a default blue window), placed an icon in the bottom corner of the screen that read “Learn more about this photo”, and re-added the search bar that I had previously removed.
Fortunately, I don’t have to deal with this on a daily basis.
It also does it so that you no longer hit the bootloader. My one last dual boot machine is normally a Linux setup, but every so often I have to use the real MS Office tools (some collaborator or publisher demands it), so I boot windows. Then windows patches and stops actually hitting grub so it acts like a windows only machine until I fix whatever Microsoft fucks up yet again.
It’s time to move to a VM for this garbage. I just don’t neet it more than once every other year so I never seem to get around to nuking it.