There are several layers to "turning it off". You can use Personalization -> Taskbar to turn off the "Widgets" icon which takes care of the immediate problem.
But widgets.exe will continue running in the background, and the only way I found to get rid of that is winget uninstall "Windows Web Experience Pack"
The year of the Linux desktop for anyone who regularly browses this site came a long, long time ago.
If you're running Windows today and still telling yourself that you'll switch once it finally gets bad enough, the sad truth is that you'll put up with anything, as long as Microsoft introduces new bad behavior slowly enough to let you acclimate to their successive, increasingly fucked-up 'new normal's. As long as learning how to mitigate Microsoft's next insult to your dignity seems like it'll probably be less work than mastering a whole new operating system, Linux won't seem 'ready' to you.
But accumulating more knowledge about how to partially unfuck Windows only keeps you stuck. So stop. Cleverly, laboriously contending with your OS vendor as a fundamentally hostile party is not a solution— it's the hallmark of serious dysfunction. Don't do it. Don't reward Microsoft's abuse with further investments of your time and energy in 'mastering' their platform. Divest.
Instead of fixing this like it's a benign papercut, let the full badness of Windows wash over you. And then... leave.
But this is a benign papercut that you fix once per a few years here and there, but Linux would have many more and deeper cuts (and your sad truth is not true, there is a limit)
Look at these HN comments about Linux laptop battery life, for example:
- "you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With additional know how you can get it under 3w" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327618
- "It's only a few years ago that we could expect decent battery life without tweaking on Linux, probably just after the T495 series. (-: These days, tweaking with TLP &c could yield worse battery life, in my experience." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35244689
- "I have a Thinkpad T495 which is also AMD based. [...] Kernel release 5.17 greatly helped battery life. Now it is just horrible even with TLP installed." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35219692
- "Not once, regardless of tlp and other tweaks and many hours of twiddling and forum-reading and keeping stats for weeks on end, has Linux ever approached Windows' battery life on the same machine" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33858033
- "Install TLP, uninstall thermald, and make sure turbo mode is off (it's on by default in Linux - probably applies to Intel only)." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33651208
- "by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and disabling cores directly also works extremely well when I know I need a longer battery life" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32965109
- "on Linux, I used https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj all the time for my preferred use cases (eg, setting the temp limit below when fans turn on to get a completely silent laptop on battery, lowering max power limits if I wanted to hit a certain amount of battery life, etc). (TLP has run-on-ac and run-on-bat commands so you can easily set your defaults based on whether you're plugged in or not (udev can see power events too)." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32689327
- "Every release of Ubuntu and Fedora since has caused a lowering of battery life. Current versions of both get me about 2 1/2 hours of battery life extended to 3 hours if I install TLP." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31594346
Tell me that isn't just "accumulating more knowledge of how to partially unfuck Linux"? Stumble upon the magic three letter command you'd never guess, something which you can tune and tweak which ideally requires "additional knowledge", which may not help at all and may make things worse, but several hours of trying will let you know - and to quote one of the other side comments "Can't say anything about quality of Bluetooth stack though since I don't use it".
There's a reason that the thing most people do with Linux is put it in a container, on the end of an SSH session, at the remote end of hundreds of miles of internet link, hand the SSH keys to Ansible, and use it to serve HTTP/S requests to mobile phone users - and that reason is primarily no license fee. There's a reason people use it as a home fileserver and that reason is that installing Asterisk drives a feeling of being clever and getting "something for nothing".
Instead of fixing this like it's a benign papercut, let the full badness wash over you, and then ... leave.
There's a difference between dealing with shortcomings or taking up a DIY project and contending with malice, or buying from a vendor with fundamentally antagonistic incentives. Both may be struggles, but only one is an insult.
There's a practical difference as well, in terms of what is a regression vs. what is intended behavior come back to haunt you. This shapes what's likely to recur as well as what's the longterm trend over time.
What you're doing here is like pretending that a car with a smaller gas tank than you're used to presents the same kind of problem as one that reports every route you take in order to collect a fee on behalf of someone else— never mind the fact that half of those posts are explicitly about running Linux on hardware not intended for it, or that you are inevitably going to find advice about obsessive optimizations on a site called 'Hacker News'. None of the issues those posts raise are about user-hostile behavior from Linux OS vendors, or the exploitation of user data, or the subversion of the user's attention.
You're the real MVP on this thread. Thanks, I'll be moving to 11 on my next computer here shortly and the msn news infection I think will be the most frustrating bit.
There are several layers to "turning it off". You can use Personalization -> Taskbar to turn off the "Widgets" icon which takes care of the immediate problem.
But widgets.exe will continue running in the background, and the only way I found to get rid of that is winget uninstall "Windows Web Experience Pack"