Nah, I’ve done my share of home brewed ISOs in my day. That was fun for younger me. Work is standard Enterprise MS stuff. At home for lab, customization and trying the bleeding edge features a standard manually de bloated windows is fine. I’m too old, practical stuff to make work just work is fine. Plus I can toss on a game without having to jump through hoops.

You youngsters can rebel against the big corps. I’ll cheer you on from my rocking chair.

Hey, thanks for the laptop IT guy! Yeah everyone around the office has been very welcoming, I’m happy to be here. I’m pretty handy with computers so hopefully I won’t be bothering you too much haha…. Yeah anyway, I know you just imaged this laptop, but the thing is, I really don’t like all the fluff in the Windows updates, can I instead provide my own Windows image? It’s straight from Microsoft but you get it through a site called MASS GRAVE. And then you can apply the group policies and enable the drive mapping scripts and reinstall the secure company network client infrastructure —

I think when most people mean work they mean corporate where you have zero control. I’m just happy they let me use PowerTools. At home, manually amputating pieces of Windows has been a bit fiddly but no less fiddly than what people think configuring is still like.

It’s annoying, but for most people, even among the technically inclined, it’s fine. For now. I’m more likely to pivot to Linux than to OSX eventually.