TL;DR:
The Windows File Explorer is now dependent on Microsoft Recall being installed on Windows 11 24H2 editions and likely later.
This means that if you wish to use newer versions of the Window file explorer, you have to install recall on your system. Recall is a deeply-rooted, non-negotiable feature on all modern versions of Windows.
Solution
If you wish to strip out recall from your system, you are no longer able to use the built-in graphical file explorer and must use a third-party tool, and if you’re not allowed to do that on the machine, then you are forced to have recall running on the system as it doesn’t appear on any graphical settings pages.
The other solution is to prepare for transitioning into a free operating system such as GNU/Linux with distributions such as Linux Mint which is designed specifically for that transition. You can also run an older version of Windows and refuse to update.
Errata
Turns out that this issue has been exaggerated and that there are ways to disable co-pilot on Windows machines (or at the very least, command Windows to do so). Also it’s debatable whether this program does any harm on non “copilot” computers but you can be the judge of that.
Is dual booting worth trying? I’ve seen people claim multiple times that this leads to issues.
How do you make it look like Windows 7 with the windows xp theme?
Is there a place to check for software and hardware compatibility?
I’ve dual booted for 8 years now. It’s very handy for me, but it is not without its complications - The main one being Microsoft’s illegal anticompetitive behaviour by making Windows regularly overwrite the boot entries, so I have to force a legacy boot to Linux so it can recreate its own entries.
The second one being that Microsoft doesn’t abide by its own official NTFS specification, and will mark drives dirty when it shouldn’t, forcing Linux to be careful and mark the drive as read-only unless you force it or boot back and make Microsoft re-unmark it.
If you want a Windows-y theme, I’d point to Plasma/KDE for your desktop type. Plenty of themes around too.
Honestly I’ve not had an issue with hardware drivers on Linux for a long time, that issue is largely historical. Except for nvidia graphics cards, which may prove a bit finicky depending on the model. Hardware which is very recent may take a while if they don’t release official linux drivers.
As for software, obviously just check if your software has a Linux binary, if it does they’re generally all-distro supporting these days.
A lot of games are Linux native now, but for other Games on Steam with Proton (or the more complex effort of running software in WINE), they have appDBs that list compatibility here: https://appdb.winehq.org/ and here: https://www.protondb.com/
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Lots of people do it without issues, but it can sometimes lead to issues, most likely that a windows update overwrites the bootloader and you get locked out of the Linux partition. It’s worth trying if you’re not sure about it, but you can also just run Linux from an external drive while testing it out, which I might recommend more, although it’ll be slower to start up/run programs.
Can’t help you with the theme sorry, but I have seen some in the past so I guess it’s possible.
The website for each distro often has comparability information, the Arch wiki has a huge amount, which more or less applies to other distributions too.