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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

>Windows 10 LTSB omits a lot of the new stuff in Windows 10. It doesn’t come with the Windows Store, Cortana, or Microsoft Edge browser. It also omits other Microsoft apps like Calendar, Camera, Clock, Mail, Money, Music, News, OneNote, Sports, and Weather.

>In fact, the default Start menu on Windows 10 LTSB doesn’t even include a single tile. You won’t find any of those new Windows 10 apps installed, aside from the Settings app.

That sounds fantastic. I use absolutely none of those "features" and would love to be able to remove them from my copy of windows 10.

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A simple checkbox list at install would be nice. Hide it under "Install Windows 10 (Advanced)" Even.

Is it really better to have IE11 and only IE11?

And the ability to use the store is not a bad thing.

You install firefox or chrome ;)

For which you'll ordinarily use the pre-installed browser to grab the installer. It's not clear to me why using IE11 to do that versus using Edge is an actual win.

How about endless nags from the OS about how you're wasting battery power running that boring old Firefox, and how you really should upgrade to the latest Edge experience for whiter teeth, better gas mileage, and more bedroom endurance?

Microsoft brought every last bit of this criticism on themselves.

Endless? I think I saw it only once. Said "nope" and it was gone.

The whole marketing mess still sucks (they sure try their chances every once in a while), but it's not that bad - and at least it's different every time (not sure if this is good or bad, though).

I think the only repeated warnings I even saw with W10 were from Windows Defender discontent with me telling that I don't want automated uploads of whatever it thinks it should.

I love also how the settings amnesia sets in with every update- if this "forgetfulness" sets in on something that Microsoft could benefit from. Throwing away User Works- wasn't that as the Ultimate Insult to the User in some legendary book? Same goes for the registry rip, you have to redo to undo- "repairs" on the Cortana...

The actual win is avoiding bloatware like Cortana

why is having edge present an actual win.

I'm not sure I understand the question.

Edge comes along with other crap, not because it needs to, but because that's the way MS arranges it. If it were just Edge-versus-IE, it wouldn't matter at all if a single use to grab another browser is the end game anyway. But if getting Edge means getting all of the other unwanted stuff, then, yes, IE is a win.

The point made is that the parent commenters don't care about having Edge over IE11, because they're just gonna use the default browser ONCE to install Chrome or Firefox anyway -- not that IE11 is better than Edge to download Chrome/FF...

Isn't it obvious?

I saw nothing in the article that implied LTSB lacked the ability to run binary installers. The same capability to install your company's application to the machine can surely be used to install Firefox.

I have a local account and while store is there, I can't use it without signing in with ms account. I'm not going to, so it's basically just wasting space. I would rather it wasn't there completely.

You could run this script: Make Windows 10 Great Again. https://gist.github.com/IntergalacticApps/675339c2b805b4c9c6...

Does that break Skype and parts of Azure portal and online Office suite?

Most of such scripts break things. And I see the usual suspects, like DNS blocking client-s.gateway.messenger.live.com etc, so I think this one isn't an exception.

You can edit the script to remove what you don't want disabled/blocked.

What a fun way to cripple your OS and disable important stuff like Windows Defender.

I personally have disabled Windows Defender consciously since it tends to perceptibly affect system responsiveness.

That's strange. The store seems to work fine on my local-only account.

That's definitely strange because now that I have checked it is working for me also. I stand corrected than.

In my opinion, good thing about Store apps is that they're are isolated.

I'm not sure how robust this isolation is, but it seems that apps can't just access random files, etc, without a specifically granted permission.

The permission model seems to be immature (no prompts at all, not even at install time - not sure how upgrades work; and everything requested is granted by default but can be revoked later), but the very idea of app sandboxes sounds right. A random document-editing app shouldn't be able to do mess with any parts of user profile, except for the files it was explicitly provided access to.

(I wonder if there's a way to somehow hack things and re-use this sandboxing with non-Store apps...)

The FS access is not so much a permission, as the user picking a folder or drive that the app is allowed to access.

Sadly doing the picking is done via the age old Win32 file picker UI, making it a royal pain to do on touch screens.

It is both. There are install-time capabilities for certain known folders (e.g., music and videos libraries), and then access to arbitrary folders has to be granted by the user via the file picker. The shell provides the file picker UI so it's dependent on what edition of Windows you're using.

It's not Edge or IE11. It's Edge or Chrome or Firefox.

I don't mind Edge, not because I like just, just because once I switch the default browser to chrome it doesn't bug me. Just some dead bytes on a large SSD. I mind a lot more the other features that bug me all the time.

Better is really the wrong word. It's certainly cheaper to only support IE11 than IE11 and Edge.

IE11 is my employer's officially supported browser. We have some dusty decks ahem legacy websites that require it. The legal industry is generally behind the times - there are still many court and government websites that require Java.

We have two types of end users. People who care use Chrome and people who don't use IE.

Here is some of the additional work that Edge required.

  Testing all of the internal web applications with Edge.
  Testing hundreds of business critical websites with Edge.
  Testing our intranet with Edge.

We use Enterprise Mode to redirect sites that are not compatible with Edge.

The results of all of this work is a browsing experience that is more confusing than IE on our Windows 7 image. It is easy for users to confuse Edge for IE and I expect that to cause support tickets for the foreseeable future.

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