You are not alone in having an intense dislike of Windows 11 and Microsoft's push for advertising income.
I had two laptops enrolled in the Windows 10 "Insider" scheme. Both are from around 2009, so are not speedy by today's standards.
One of them had the first Win11 preview pushed on to it without my intervention. That is worrying, because it was set up to get its updates from my local server, with me hitting "check online" to get the fresh Win10 releases. I did NOT ask it to look for the new stuff that week, and MS pushed it at me anyway. After a couple of monthly updates, Microsoft started telling me that the hardware did not support Win11, and to prove it, the taskbar became inoperative, with continuous disk activity as it attempted, unsuccessfully, to reinstall all its component parts. I gave up and did a clean install of retail Win10. This was annoying, because that laptop used to be my daily driver and so contained lots of "unusual" software, making it good for testing with.
The other laptop refused to install the preview, but happily spent hours downloading it first. No indication of why the install failed, and it would then refuse to look for any other things from my local server, preferring instead to do another download.
For interest, I have installed the released version on this machine (using a spare drive), and it runs at a speed similar to Win10. MS claim that old hardware will suffer a huge performance hit, but I have not seen such - in fact it seems a bit snappier, but that's probably because it has not accumulated lots of rubbish yet.
In its Win10 Insider guise, that laptop refused to leave the Insider scheme, claiming that a clean install was the only way out. I am hoping that Win10 21H2, due in the next couple of weeks, will allow me to "upgrade" in situ to a stable system. Otherwise I will bite the bullet and reinstall Win10.
I find Win11's Start Menu to be the main bugbear. It doesn't hold everything I want to access quickly. It gives a large part of its screen area to advertising. The icons it shows have poor functionality.
On Win10, I can, from the Start Menu icons, access the last dozen Word documents, the last dozen Excel sheets, the last dozen FH trees etc. On Win11, the start menu might occasionally show me as many as SIX recent documents of all types. If I had a huge screen, that might be increased to eight. The rest of its window is given over to "Recommendations".
