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Try getting rid of the 2GB desktop pictures that come with Catalina then and see how much control you have...

You have control. You can turn off SIP and mount the root partition as read write, then empty out that folder. And modify whatever other system files you like.

I'm sure there are workarounds to disable Windows update too. That's not really the point.

SIP is different. Apple explicitly built these tools with mechanisms to turn them off, for users who wish to do so.

If there’s a Microsoft-created mechanism for disabling automatic updates on non-pro (!) editions of Windows, I would love to know about it. All the methods I’m familiar with are weird hacks that have side effects or don’t always work.

You can disable Windows Update by changing the states of all its services in the registry to "disabled". To my knowledge, this doesn't have any side effects. Updating just no longer works unless you turn the services back on, plain and simple.

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