It's not all that hard to add Linux to an existing Windows machine, then set it up to dual-boot. You can activate Windows to do your photo processing, then close and open Linux for other functions including web browsing. I set up a Win 7 laptop that way and turned off wifi in windows. That way wifi turns on automatically in Linux and off in Windows, protecting your machine when using an expired Windows with no security updates. You have to manually set up your drives so that Linux can access you Windows files. If you google Linux dual boot you can find plenty of info. You can also use Wine to run Windows programs on Linux, but that didn't work that well for me.
Might be worth a try.

After a heavy computer crash, which I traced back to a motherboard failure, I decided to upgrade my main computer.

So I purchased a brand new i9-13900K CPU, a good Gigabyte B760 motherboard, a couple of 2TG SSD's, a couple of 40TB HDD's , a 4090 GPU, 128 GB DDR5 RAM and 1 KW PSU for good measure.

Because of the amount of purchase, my supplier tossed in a Windows 11 license for free.

Reluctant, after building my system and playing around with that pesky Windows 11 sticker, I decided to give it a try.

What a rubbish!

Bad, really bad user interface if you need many programs for work. No way to organize, change, customize, no nothing. I had to purchase "Start11" ap to make it almost as usable as Windows 10.

It does nasty things to the files. Without asking: for example: I copied all my photos and videos to the E: drive (the 40 TB's HDD's configured as RAID) ... the next morning I had a "no sapce left on drive" error on the C: drive. What had happened? Windows decided that photos should be backed up in OneDrive, so it moved everything to C:\Users \<my_user>\Onedrive\Pictures **without asking **

As I tried to move them back, Windows 11 refused with a stupid error message stating that it was an amovible linkl included. ** I HAD TO MANUALLY SHUT DOWN ONE DRIVE, AND PERFORM A REGISTRY TRICK TO BRING ALL THE FILES BACK TO WHERE THEY BELONG**

After that, Windows complained that there was a Backup error, every time I accessed the folder. So I killed OneDrive altogether and deleted it from disk (after another PoweShell+Registry hack)

Windows 11 came with Copilot installed and activated (It's a MS rebranding of ChatGPT ), so I asked this question to the bot: "Why is Windows 11 so bad?"

And this was it sincere answer:

Windows 11 is the latest operating system from Microsoft, released on October 5, 2021. It has been praised for its clean design and improved performance, but it has also received a lot of criticism from users who are unhappy with some of its features and limitations. Some of the reasons why Windows 11 is so bad are:

High hardware requirements: Windows 11 demands some minimum hardware requirements that many current computers do not meet, such as a 64-bit processor with at least two cores and 1 GHz of frequency, 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage space, a graphics card compatible with DirectX 12 and a TPM 2.0 security module. These requirements exclude many old or low-end devices that work perfectly with Windows 10, and force users to buy a new PC or stick with the previous system12.
Performance and compatibility issues: Windows 11 has arrived with several bugs and errors that affect the performance and compatibility of the devices that install it. For example, a performance loss has been detected in AMD Ryzen processors, which is due to a problem with the power plan of Windows 112. There have also been problems with printers, which stop working or give errors when printing2. In addition, some applications and games do not work properly or simply do not run on Windows 11, such as some Android emulators3.
Changes in the interface and functions: Windows 11 has introduced some changes in the interface and functions that nobody asked for and that make the user experience worse. For example, the taskbar is less customizable and functional, the context menus are inconsistent and cluttered, the default apps settings are complicated and tedious, and the Microsoft account is mandatory to use the system124.
These are some of the main complaints that users have about Windows 11. However, there may be more issues that have not been discovered or reported yet. Windows 11 is still a new and unfinished system, and it may improve over time with updates and fixes. However, for now, many users prefer to stay with Windows 10 or look for alternatives.

*** BOTTOM LINE ***

For or those folks which are asking about upgrading to Windows 11, ** DO NOT DARE TO **

Beware, I found many more problems as the one described above.

End of the experiment. I'll be throwing Windows 11 away... together with Windows 95, Vista and Windows 8.

All in all I'm a Linux sysadmin and developer, I don't need to go through this s**t.

Understood.

About OneDrive on by default, that's so weird - are you using the standard version of Windows, by any chance? All I've ever used are the Pro versions, so wondering whether that's the difference. What happens if you uninstall OneDrive?

Also, be careful about saving your .psts in OneDrive. If it's connected to Outlook and "live", OneDrive won't back it up. One of my clients found that out the hard way!

I do agree that OneDrive is messed up, especially the naming convention (OneDrive for Business, etc.). I wish Microsoft had just made it something you can install if you want to.

I despise computer created directories that IT thinks files should reside.....
I put Photos and Downloads off the root. Why drill down for everything.....
I set the default save location for my browsers to the directory I want it to use, as well as set "Ask where to store" so I have the option to use a different directory.
I left Documents under User though, I think a lot of programs expect them there.

It is Win 11 Pro on the machine I’m referring to I did successfully uninstall OneDrive (with some difficulty) and moved all the data back where I wanted it, but there were casualties in Office - such as losing the “recently opened files” in PPT, Excel and Word (which I often rely on) as well as making a mess of Outllook.

A company I consult for uses One Drive and SharePoint, which I despise. The file naming conventions are a mess and you’re never quite sure where a file actually resides unless OneDrive has just been synced. One of my machines in Linux based, and I run Windows in a VM. From the benchmarking I’ve done, I take about a 5% performance hit running it in a VM as opposed to native. BTW, there are actually OSs with virtualization built in without a performance penalty like VMWare - new versions of Solaris being one (yes, Solaris is still alive and well as is SPARC.)

No worries on backing up .pst files (or anything else) - I back up to a separate local machine on the local network and to Amazon S3 for DR. I also implement VSS (volume shadow copy) for point in time snapshots of the FS as well as restore points for the OS.