Oh geez I just went and disconnected my TV from WiFi, I dunno why I had it connected in the first place, I use a separate box thingy for all the services. I’m getting so sick of constantly being perceived and surveilled by stuff all around me.

The article title is clickbaity. It doesn’t ‘get rid of’ the start menu and explorer. It just makes the processes completely hang so you can’t open any applications, can’t open the menu and can’t open task manager to see wtf is going on. You also can’t access the shutdown function so you have to manually power off.

This happened to me as I was setting up a Windows 11 / Linux dual boot system yesterday, and the Windows side was behaving as described in the article.

I gave up and just installed Linux alone in the end.