>>512256816I'm quite autistic and have been using Windows for 25 years since I was 5 years old and now have a job where my entire reason to be paid is understanding this OS like the back of my hand. I have dug through so many wireshark and windows logs that you don't even know exist to prevent the possibility of data leaks due to the nature of my company on an OS level.
Literally nothing breaks even if you block most traffic on the firewall or just completely neuter it by disabling various dll and services.
LTSC has most of it stripped out anyways and needs a few fixes to stop Microsoft from stealing the minimal amount of data on that version. So I would like to know exactly what you mean by functionality issues.
Now from a normie level and just a casual Windows user, yes there are a lot of data privacy concerns. But you can easily patch that up in 20 minutes as an extreme casual by installing W11 24H2, bypassing OOBE to create a local account without an internet connection, plugging a USB with a decrapifier script to kill telemetry, connecting to internet and massgraving a Pro key and then carrying on without knowing any better. At worst, you might break a few Windows apps but I can't think of a single one that a casual users absolutely needs that a free alternative cannot do better.
Killing telemetry is the absolute minimum you should do btw. The default photos app for example creates a sql database of any image file not only opened but any .jpg, .png, etc file type that is defaulted to open it and collects all metadata, file hashes, etc and uploads regularly to Microsoft.
If you are really doing activities which might be frowned upon then encryption, airgaps, vpn, linux and constantly wiping internet facing devices should be considered.
