Edge re-installing itself after I’ve manually taken ownership of its files and purged them from the system 6 fucking times is what’s going to finally drive me to abandon windows and go full linux.

This sort of thing is why I finally switched my gaming PC - I was spending a bunch of time fighting to get Windows to do what I wanted that I figured I might as well be doing all that work on Linux.

At least Linux doesn't deliberately fight me. When I have to spend time getting Linux to do something it's because developers haven't gotten to it yet, not because corporate are enforcing their vision of how I'll use my system.

Were you on a Windows Pro license and did you tried using group policy settings?

I keep hearing people being frustrated that low level solutions don't work, but I've not heard of anyone having these issues who has used the official tools Microsoft provides for Windows sysadmins (and power users) to actually manage this sort of thing.

I get that logically, it shouldn't matter whether you put a sign up telling Edge to fuck off when you've bulldozed it down six times, but Windows sees that it's gone and your settings (by default with no group policy config) indicate it shouldn't be gone, so it "helpfully" rebuilds it.

Power users are not their market for normal home licenses. Those are for the people who don't know the difference between Edge and Chrome and need protection from making dumb mistakes like deleting Edge and ending up without any web browser. Unfortunately, those are the grand majority of computer users, and it makes good business sense to take advantage of "just helping" to provide a locked down ecosystem and push your software on power users who don't know the management options available.

Windows doesn't do a good job advertising these features, and has made them harder to find by getting rid of a lot of their old non-cloud sysadmin training courses, because it doesn't help them make money. But by no means are these options non-existent.

They offer a Windows version for power users. It's the Pro license, and it doesn't cost significantly more if you're buying a cheap "OEM" key.

If you want to make Windows work for you, look at the tools they have for on premises (non-cloud) Windows system administration in small companies.

KMS (key media server) is one way to manage Windows license keys for multiple machines in a domain. KMSpico emulates that setup on a single machine (no server needed), allowing safe spoofing of whatever level Windows license you want, using the same systems and technique meant for actual sysadmins. Last I knew, that was the safest way to spoof a license if you don't have the ~$15 for one.

Group policy is one of a few ways to push consistent Windows configuration and settings to multiple machines in a domain. It is also an option for managing settings on individual Pro licensed Windows machines. Most of the time when you find weird registry key changes online to enable/disable Windows features, those are part of what Group Policy changes when you use it to disable a feature the proper way. Windows respects group policy options through updates, and releases update to group policy templates as needed. They don't want to fuck with their big business clients that can actually hurt their bottom line, so they keep those working.

I moved to Fedora (KDE Plasma) about a year ago. I had researched alternatives for all I needed.

I installed it on a new machine and kept an old windows machine running.

It took a month or so to get things how I liked.

I miss some things in Windows but found some real time saving features in linux, on the whole I am better off.

And I feel a whole lot safer.

To play devil's advocate, that's because Edge is the system web view used for system components. Removing it means certain UI for system components won't be able to be rendered. It's the same reason why uninstalling Chrome from Android breaks a bunch of stuff. They should decouple the web view from the browser but here we are.