For example, take the FS2020 downloader. Instead of using the game-store downloader, with its highly optimised CDN and streaming package format, they wrote their own downloader.

Okay, fine. Let's accept for a moment that perhaps Steam, or XBox, or whatever couldn't handle the enormous size of their game, despite being roughly the same size as COD5 or Doom Eternal and that the FS2020 team needed the game to load faster to "deliver a good experience".

So the FS2020 team clearly spent effort to write "something better". That something better was atrociously bad. So bad that the game immediately earned the nickname "download simulator", because that was the experience most users had of the game for the first 24-49 hours or so.

It took 5 hours to download on gigabit fibre internet. It should have taken 30 minutes!

The FS2020 downloader makes every mistake possible to make in a downloader. It's synchronous. It downloads tiny files. It doesn't use a local CDN. It decompresses files after downloading them in a single thread, without downloading anything during this time. It downloads the base game and then the patch separately, instead of the pre-patched version. It doesn't recover from interruptions properly.

I could go on and on.

Someone in the development team of this AAA game decided that they know better than the people that operate the Xbox content distribution network.

It's arrogance born of ignorance.

Setting this, I have never had an unexpected restart. Please keep in mind that future Windows updates may adjust this setting. I have had to re-apply the policy at least once.

I’ve also had issues with wake timers which have needed a combination of settings to fix.

Personally, I have moved away from Windows for every device I have excluding a dedicated gaming PC. I agree that this is hostile behavior and is completely unacceptable.

[0] The group policy is located at

  Computer Configuration\ Policies\ Administrative Templates\ Windows Components\ Windows Update

Although if you just want to control updates wumgr [1] still works, check it out. I use windows laptop pretty rarely, like a few times per year maybe and it helps a lot.

[1] https://github.com/DavidXanatos/wumgr

If you mostly play singleplayer games, WINE/lutris/Proton have all gotten pretty good. If you play games with anti-cheat, there's no escaping Windows though.

You may have luck with a GPU passthrough actually, if you've got the hardware.

And then Microsoft elected to save a lot of money by firing the entire QA team.

You are their QA team now, so don't be surprised if you find bugs. It's your job.

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...

Have you tried delaying feature updates? The "higher" your edition, the longer you get to delay them. I got Windows 10 Professional, and the first thing I did was set those updates to be delayed for a year (I figure by then their involuntarily crowdsourced QA will resulted in a relatively stable build). I haven't had any serious problems yet.

Don't get me wrong, though, I hate what Microsoft is doing to Windows and I think this is all stupid and sad.

You seem like the perfect target for a Linux based laptop.

Buy an SSD and install Ubuntu on your current laptop to see if it has any problems?

Otherwise I bought an XPS (despite my long term hatred of Dell hardware) and they have good Linux support.

Installing Windows in a VM is way easier, and you can control updates better in some fairly dirty ways (snapshots, firewall etc).