In my view, this is unacceptable…
They changed my background (previously there was a default blue window), placed an icon in the bottom corner of the screen that read “Learn more about this photo”, and re-added the search bar that I had previously removed.
Fortunately, I don’t have to deal with this on a daily basis.
There are definitely ways of configuring Linux systems. For many organizations Ansible or Puppet works completely fine. However, they require a significant amount of knowledge and aren’t completely standardized. Group policy on Windows has been around for a long time and will be much easier to deploy, at least in the short term.