It’s not entirely clear from the post, but allow me to provide some further context as I received this same pop-up myself.

I had purchased a legit Windows 10 Pro license with my own money for a custom built PC. Was always a trim installation because that’s how I roll. Still got this out of nowhere when I booted back into my Windows partition the other day, was unclear what app or process pushed it. Some update either added a new app responsible for pushing these desktop level ads or enabled a pre-existing notification feature I had previously disabled. Just a typical Win10 toast notification a few moments after logging in. Dismissed it quickly and did not care to investigate, but that’s about as bad as you can really get, IMHO. They’ve slowly been pushing the bounds, but here we are: ads straight to the desktop.

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Recently I installed Linux mint on my laptop, and then my main PC died so I replaced it with windows 11. I’ve had the unique experience of setting them both up from scratch alongside each other.

Windows 11 took longer to set up (4 days), but was 80% via GUI, and the 20% I did in PowerShell was mostly using winget with very few failures. I used ChatGPT for some planning and checklist and also used it to craft a PowerShell script that would silently install about 35 applications that I was too lazy to do manually by downloading the exe’s, but I could have gotten there without it.

Mint took 2 days to set up but was 80% terminal, and I would not have been able to install half the things I wanted without the help of ChatGPT crafting baffling workarounds for me that I would not have found on my own.

In the end, both systems are 95% how I want them, with 5% unattainable due to their own unique issues.

I’ll continue to use both for now, and see how I go in a year or so.

Edit: I must add that I am extraordinarily fussy about my OS configuration, it needs to look, act, and respond exactly how I want it to or I’m dissatisfied