I think it's a good thing that Microsoft is reducing the size of their base OS and decoupling many of the apps from the Windows release cycle.
It definitely does, however, feel like the end of a era.
It definitely does, however, feel like the end of a era.
Candy Crush, "Get Office", Minecraft, ... and all other trash that gets installed by default.
Later came the random console pop-up from the automatic WSL updates [1] and then I did panic enough to actually format all the things but that's another story.
Also, a completely different thing entirely.
The fact that Apple Watch has its own pre-installed app feels like an ad to me as well.
And don't get me started on App Store ads... https://twitter.com/nuthatch/status/879783700279418881
Pinball had to be removed for this sort of reason.
What? No. It was removed because it was a 32bit application written by a 3rd party and there was a hard to fix bug on 64bit windows that made it unplayable, so they dropped it.
Source: Raymond Chen - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...
From Raymond Chen's answer to this question in the first comment to the same blog post:
> That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.)
I don't have a Win10 mspaint.exe for comparison, but the one from XP is 336KB.
It's a damn shame that a lot of apps these days seem to be >1MB, yet are even more featureless.
If you want to talk about reducing size, there's plenty of other low-hanging fruit of more questionable utility in the OS.