So glad I recently removed Windows from my former dual boot system completely. Was sick of getting errors during Linux boot up after running Windows for that one piece of software I couldn’t get to work in Wine or Bottles. The culprit I assumed was Windows updates, which I attempted to disable through the registry on several occasions. It would work for a short period and then Microsoft, in all their wisdom, would just reenable updates because clearly they know better than I what I want my system to do. The last time it happened was the final straw for me when I wanted to boot into Windows briefly only to be left waiting half an hour for Windows to apply updates on shutdown. Pissed me off so much I killed the power mid-update, booted up a live partition tool and wiped Windows off my system completely (updating the grub to remove dual boot). That’s when I discovered that not properly shutting down Windows would mark my other drives dirty and make them read only. To fix this I ended up having to insert Windows installation media and pretend like I wanted to reinstall Windows 10 again. Once it got to the stage when it was about to write to the drive I cancelled the installation and rebooted back into Linux. Voilà! Could write to my drives again. To hell with Windows. I’d rather live without that one piece of software and have my system do what I want it to do rather than it second guess me and disregard my instructions. This whole automatic update thing really boiled my piss. At least with Linux I can choose to apply updates when it’s convenient for me to do so.

Don’t know if this fits your criteria, but I’ve been using Gruble a lot recently. You can personalise the look and language in the settings, plus it’s open source.

Aye, it’s a good educational tool for sure. It’s nice to be playing around with Linux again. Installed Linux Mint to dual boot on my desktop about 2 months ago and liked it so much I installed it on my laptop then revamped an old desktop with Lxle in my shed. Booted into Windows two days ago just to check something and the damned thing decided to spend half an hour updating. That was the last straw for me. Shut it down, deleted the Windows partitions and updated the grub to remove any sign of the offending item. Apart from a couple of pieces of software that I haven’t used in years, I’m now a fully-fledged Linux user. F*ck Windows!