Mostly the same experience having had 10+ years on Mac before a switch to Windows. Powertoys[0] are great although some are slow (especially the one acting like Mac's Spotlight). UI is different but not a bad experience once you've used it for a couple weeks. I didn't see any mention of file explorers (i.e. Explorer vs Finder) in your articles but it's fascinating how those two concepts are the same thing yet so different in their strengths and weaknesses - and to be honest, my explorer experience improved once I started using QTTabbar[1] to customize everything to my liking.
I'm surprised your WSL article is so short, because WSL2 is so incredibly convenient for Linux and keeps on improving steadily.
I've been able to set up and practice on virtual kubernetes cluster using KinD[2] (Kubernetes in Docker) thanks to the seamless integration of Docker for Windows into the WSL subsystem. VSCode can tap into Linux VMs with pretty much no delays too. Shutting down the whole thing to free up resources takes one line in Powershell and happens within a few seconds. The terminal app despite having a bit of a clunky UI is highly configurable and just works, etc.
There are things that scare me about Windows though, for example the mandatory real-time "defender" file scanning that you have to disable either manually at every boot or disable entirely through registry thus losing the virus scanning functionality. The amount of clunky Cortana stuff that really took a while to remove. The store app that feels flimsy, the games dependency on Xbox apps and subsystems which can lead to annoying bugs, and certain UI delays that make the system sometimes feel not so fast compared to the tricks Macs can pull to make you feel at ease. Consequently I'm not very likely to touch Windows 11 as Microsoft is seemingly trying to enforce more things in configurations and UI.
Since you mentioned that the tool that act's like Mac's Spotlight was very slow. I have found two better alternative which works wonders:
1. FluentSearch: https://www.fluentsearch.net/. I highly recommend trying this out. It's magically and amazing, and I think this is the closest a tool has got to Spotlight on windows and also has amazing amounts of customizability. I recommend using Everything as the Search Provider, which is tried and tested solution for searching on windows.
2. Keypirinha: https://keypirinha.com/. This is another amazing tool. I believe it's would be a bit faster compared to FluentSearch with my initial tryout, but it is customized using a text file.
Yeah, I'm also concerned about some of the things you mention, as I described in the finale. But about Defender, it cannot be disabled at all? I didn't know that. I have just whitelisted the few directories where I do builds to keep things speedy...
The Spotlight-esque tool in PowerToys - PowerToys Run - is unbelieeeeeeeevably slow compared to other things I've used. I've been trying it for a couple months now and it feels really clunky and awkward. Previously I was using the excellent (and open source) Launchy[0] which I simply loved but it hasn't been updated for a while and isn't so great on high DPI monitors and has a few quirks (there are some forks which are more recently updated).
I know there are other alternatives that are apparently much better (another poster mentioned Keypirinha and Fluent Search, both of which look great but not OSS), but I really hope they keep tweaking PowerToys Run to try to make it a little nicer.
I'm surprised your WSL article is so short, because WSL2 is so incredibly convenient for Linux and keeps on improving steadily. I've been able to set up and practice on virtual kubernetes cluster using KinD[2] (Kubernetes in Docker) thanks to the seamless integration of Docker for Windows into the WSL subsystem. VSCode can tap into Linux VMs with pretty much no delays too. Shutting down the whole thing to free up resources takes one line in Powershell and happens within a few seconds. The terminal app despite having a bit of a clunky UI is highly configurable and just works, etc.
There are things that scare me about Windows though, for example the mandatory real-time "defender" file scanning that you have to disable either manually at every boot or disable entirely through registry thus losing the virus scanning functionality. The amount of clunky Cortana stuff that really took a while to remove. The store app that feels flimsy, the games dependency on Xbox apps and subsystems which can lead to annoying bugs, and certain UI delays that make the system sometimes feel not so fast compared to the tricks Macs can pull to make you feel at ease. Consequently I'm not very likely to touch Windows 11 as Microsoft is seemingly trying to enforce more things in configurations and UI.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
[1] https://github.com/indiff/qttabbar
[2] https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/05/21/wsl-docker-kubernetes-...