That ignore system messages. This post will be anecdotal, but I can’t ever get my systems to suddenly restart or reinstall the bloatware apps like some people claim theirs do. It honestly seems like it’s “power users” fucking with things that they don’t actually understand, and then complaining that things aren’t working the way they expect.

We have 5 Windows 11 systems in our household, and 2 family members that are terrible with computers. None of them act the way some randoms on the Internet claim Windows 11 does with updates all the time. And everyone I personally know doesn’t seem to have these issues either. But we’re also not installing random patches or messing with settings that don’t have a natural and intentional UI element.

All of our systems I help with for family and friends update on their own, and prompt when a restart is needed, including a button to delay the restart. If ignored, it prompts after a day or so again and only if ignored or delayed for an extended period will eventually give a countdown to a forced restart. I only noticed the countdown because I was explicitly trying to reproduce what people online claim about it suddenly restarting while using it. And at that point it WILL restart even in use, but that’s after an extended period, multiple days, of ignoring notifications about it.

I also don’t have issues on my systems with those annoying bloatware app links (like Candy Crush) reinstalling, etc. on their own. I turned off the various advertising settings in the settings menus and uninstalled the app links like normal. They’ve never returned.

Since I’ve been completely unable to reproduce these relatively common complaints on multiple systems myself, I can only assume people are adjusting settings or installing various patches from the Internet that mess with things that aren’t intended to be user-facing and that ends up causing issues. Like the infinite number of patches to remove telemetry, etc. that people don’t know what’s actually being changed by it, but install for privacy.