I suspect they allowed notifications from some application. When I installed 11 I did it with the offline/local account login instead of the Microsoft account and skipped activation with all optional “features” disabled, then on first login immediately installed Firefox as default, and then disabled telemetry, tracking, targeted ads, location settings, updates, Defender, crash reporting, phoning home, and all unused devices and services that are turned on by default that I don’t use. It’s a shame those are the defaults but I have no complaints about Windows performance after that.
But I finally got speedy with i3 keyboard shortcuts and my games all work great on Linux (perfunctory “btw I use Arch”), so now the only use I have for Windows is in VirtualBox to run ShareMouse until I can find a linux <-> macos KVM alternative that doesn’t require sudo on macos (rip input-leap).
I’m on W11 and have never seen an ad in the OS.
I suspect they allowed notifications from some application. When I installed 11 I did it with the offline/local account login instead of the Microsoft account and skipped activation with all optional “features” disabled, then on first login immediately installed Firefox as default, and then disabled telemetry, tracking, targeted ads, location settings, updates, Defender, crash reporting, phoning home, and all unused devices and services that are turned on by default that I don’t use. It’s a shame those are the defaults but I have no complaints about Windows performance after that.
But I finally got speedy with i3 keyboard shortcuts and my games all work great on Linux (perfunctory “btw I use Arch”), so now the only use I have for Windows is in VirtualBox to run ShareMouse until I can find a linux <-> macos KVM alternative that doesn’t require sudo on macos (rip input-leap).