Windows 10 Debloat Script
github.com
github.com
I would love to see Windows not take up 4 gigs of RAM out of the box. I don't need Cortana running period. Let me uninstall Cortana please Microsoft. I'm sure there's other crap I don't want but I fear if I can't just hit 'Uninstall' it wont go well, or an update will bring it back.
It... doesn't? I feel like last time I tried it was less than 2? Did you only install Windows or a ton of other things too?
This is what it looks like "out of the box" after disabling memory compression and the pagefile: https://imgur.com/a/D5b8bk5
What I find more interesting is that windows still compresses and swaps on startup even with that much ram available.
Many of the things that are pitched as beneficial, like indexing everything and caching the indexes and keeping all kinds of services alive to "quick start" other things in case you happen to want them, hibernation or sleeping instead of cold boot, etc, these are all cases of adding more crap to counter the harm from previously adding other crap.
Instead of adding foofeature you don't really need, and then adding foofeatureaccelerator to try to disguise the overhead of foofeature, you can just remove both foofeature AND foofeatureaccelerator, and everything is better.
Less total software to break or misbehave or serve as a security opening. Smaller disk footprint. Fewer running processes. Less ram/disk/net resources consumed. Less telemetry. Simpler total system for you to manage, and maybe actually have a hope in hell of grasping more of what all is going on with one human head. More of your resources available for the apps and services YOU actually want, whatever they are.
Whoever wants Pandora, they can totally have it without it coming pre-bundled. If I want Pandora, I would rather install it than find it already built in. In fact, I DO want Pandora, but in fact, I use a 3rd party open source unofficial player. So even though I use it, it's still wrong for it to be built in.
This is my compute "cluster" and I don't usually have windows running on it, just tossed it on there do some bios modifications to my compute cards.
I just thought I would provide some insight to the conversation!
Reason? UWP apps will always suspend if you minimize, for example. They move that to swap. It was basically made for swap.
On a 16 GB Windows it uses about 7.5 GB. All of that seems to swap out or go away somewhere if I get busy with Visual Studio.
On a 64 GB Windows it seems to idle at about 9.6 GB used. Of course, this one isn't a purely work machine and has Steam, Origin, Ubisoft's thing, etc, etc.
So Windows 10 is pretty variable. I imagine it has something to do with running various services in parallel.
Same thing for chrome - often people say "chrome eats your RAM" but it's just being as efficient as it can be - if your OS asks it to free ram, it will and 8GB of webpages can go down to 4GB at the expense of getting rid of cached "back" pages and other cached memory.
Every time a new major update comes out, I do a clean install, put on Office, Visual Studio and a couple of apps and I'm good to go.
On Windows I don't reformat anymore like I used to, and I used to reformat a lot because I would disable "useless" Windows services to save on RAM (back when I had 3GB of RAM, and then 8GB). When I stopped doing that, my OS was working fine for years and years.
Every time I need to get something done, I can instead look at a progress bar slowly filling up.
I like the approach of Arch. I do a clean install, add the applications that I want, and leave virtually all of the settings at their defaults. In one respect it is a highly customized system since the installed software is tailored to my needs. On the other hand, I am not spending time tweaking settings.
When I use systems where the vendor installs a lot of software by default (it doesn't matter whether it's another Linux distribution or Windows), I am easily annoyed by how much stuff gets in my way visually or in terms of performances. That leaves me with an intense desire to debloat. I try to resist the urge, but am usually unsuccessful.
I have no idea what they were thinking. Yes, you can disable it with a policy editing. For a server product, you shouldn't have to.
I'm curious what the rationale was behind that choice.
The closest I had was a LexisNexis product that used to run on a Linux server - until our account manager told us they were dropping Linux because, and I quote, "Linux has too many security problems". I've supported two different EMR (medical) products, and at least five different POS products, all Windows only. Even when we get a SaaS product running in a web browser, half the time it's "IE only".
I'd give a lot to live in the type of organisation without this legacy.
How about decent support for two-factor domain login?
Priorities, guys. (Please don't get me started about the special circle of hell that is deploying Windows. It truly is a misery).
So much misinformation in this and the replies that address this. Windows needs a minimum of 2GB RAM to run. But it scales its memory footprint according to the available memory. It will instantly swap this out when a demanding application is launched. For reference, on my Thinkpad with 8GB of RAM, Windows idles at about 3GB. On my PC with 16GB, it idles at around 7.5GB.
If it was cache then the use would appear to be 98%
On my machine a bunch of UWP apps are loaded passively in the background. A few are UWP apps I use occasionally, a few aren't. I don't know what heuristic they use for this. You might look at that and go - hey, wasted memory and CPU! However:
These apps are fully suspended, so they can't use any CPU at all. You can observe this in the procexp CPU column. Because they are fully suspended the OS can also instantly evict them when it detects memory pressure, similar to how the page caching system in OSes retains cached file contents in scratch memory to speed up I/O - if the memory used for caching files is needed for applications, the cache will be evicted to make space. Cortana, for example, is using 180mb of RAM for me right now but it is fully suspended so it can be evicted immediately to make room for another app. The upside is that when I hit start and begin typing Cortana search responds immediately.
The downside to this automatic eviction setup for background apps is that they will show up in memory usage statistics even though they're not really tying up that memory. It makes your system's available RAM a bit misleading. There are other modern apps that also respond to memory pressure - I believe Firefox will automatically compact its memory, you can manually trigger that in about:memory to see what it does.
I can also confirm that increasing the amount of RAM in my machine increased how much of it Windows was willing to use for preloading apps and caching pages, but I feel like that's not surprising.
In general applications don't manage their ram usage based on available resources they just take what they need until your system starts swapping.
The OS manages memory and evicts cache to make use for applications when they request it. The good thing about a cached file is that it is available on disk to be reread any time you like.
Lots of people install 8 or 16 GBs and complain about how much Windows consumes but if you remove RAM, Windows will happily operate at under 50% utilization in 4 or 6 GB situations.
I did tweak it by removing many packages with:
Get-AppxPackage | Select Name, PackageFullName
Remove-AppxPackage ...
I also did tweak the group policies to prevent Windows 10 for many things, such as not use Cortana and not to auto-update and restart without notice. The software I write needs to run for weeks without leaks, that's one of the things I need to test on that system.
That NUC computer running Windows 10 is a pure joy to use. Once trimmed down Windows boots in seconds and never interrupt me while I am working.
I’d also highly recommend the BoxStarter setup scripts [0]. They remove all of the unnecessary default applications, perform windows updates, apply sane developer defaults and install development tooling depending on your needs. It’s a one click run, so it’s a pretty easy way to bootstrap a new install. No negative side effects and have been using them for several years.
0. https://github.com/microsoft/windows-dev-box-setup-scripts
Specially when his only IT experience is playing Candy Crush with his kids.
The following script is even nicer as it comes with an UI:
https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater
Both are written in powershell.
Do not run these scripts they are always making it worse.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
That lists what it considers "Safe" things to turn off and I generally keep to that.
I would however want to try this in a VM before running it.
Unlike the aforesaid two tools it supports not only Windows 10, but 7,8,8.1 as well.
[1] https://wpd.app/
This is a prime example of "expert user footgun problem".
The phrase "debloat" is a marketing-hype word that's being used to bait you all into someone's personal view of how computers should be. Expect to be forced to reinstall Windows 10 a few days or weeks after running any such script.
Whenever I tech support any of my friends, the first question I ask is "did you do expert-user things to your system?" and they say "well, I mean, I edited some Registry settings" and I just stop and tell them to reinstall Windows because it's time to amputate. I'll have to add "Have you ever opened Windows PowerShell?" to my list, because that'll catch all of these right out of the gate.
In case that's not reason enough to be afraid — check out this random sampling of changes this makes!
* "This script disables Windows Defender" — Because anti-malware protection is "bloat"
* "Disable 'Updates are available' message" — Because you shouldn't have to be notified when security updates are available for your system, for example to address zero-day RCEs
* "Windows Biometric Service" — And suddenly you can't face-login to your Windows 10 computer any longer, but hey, it's "bloat"
* "Disable easy access keyboard stuff" — Because no one would ever use keyboard accessibility, that's just "bloat"
* "Restoring old volume slider" — I would get that this was "debloat" if it removed the volume slider, but simply restoring an older one?
* "PandoraMediaInc.29680B314EFC2", "SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic" — Hope you don't like streaming music, that's just "bloat" anyways
And, consider how easily this repo could be compromised to result in you self-infecting your computer with malware by running all of these scripts without a close review of the steps they take. First step in any persistent Windows infection is to disable Windows Defender and Windows Update notifications so the user doesn't take steps that might uninstall the persistent infection. Repo does that already, so it's not like it'd be difficult.
Linux is a wasteland of terrible security practices that sysadmins excuse as "acceptable" for their own workstations and servers because they think that locking down SSH is sufficient defense against e.g. malicious infections or "curl | bash".
I'm sorry that Defender has harmed you, but that's no excuse to recommend others disable automated Defender scans on some sort of schedule.
It has little to do with the functions of Windows Defender. It was a special purpose function removing one very particular file from a specific location. It was not scanning your whole system, or downloads, for malware signatures.
When you say MacOS includes software that is "almost a carbon copy of Windows Defender," are you talking about something else? I am not aware of anything that comes with MacOS that has similar features to Windows Defender.
https://www.osnews.com/story/22059/snow-leopard-to-include-a...
Stop telling people to turn off Windows Defender.
I leave windows defender on 100% of the time on my personal laptop. It's totally benign in my experience and doesn't have any obvious performance impact that I can see.
I would never tell anyone to turn off windows defender. I have told people to uninstall ageing AVG/avast/Norton et Al installs that have not had definition updates in months/years and really do seem to impact day to day use of the computer.
My view is leave the virus checker that was built by the people who made windows and is built directly into windows there to do the job that the people who built the damn thing designed it to do :)
If nothing else (and there is), mac and linux need anti-malware to make sure they will never spread windows malware. E.g. in mails, or uploaded files.
Today, we consider C and C++ to be inherently unsafe, because nobody ever does the things you need to do to make them safe. It's time we said the same about operating systems. "Oh, just don't run anything sketchy off the web!" Except your user base won't do that.
In 2019, any OS that does not come with strong antimalware protection is inherently unsafe at any speed.
Yes, this means Windows is safer than Linux. Don't @ me.
All "non-bloat" mentioned above is mostly one big pile of shit that you generally do not need and might need only on specific machine AND in specific context. Running this concrete debloater might produce some unwanted side effects which are easy enough to fix, but it sure as heaven makes a system at least x2 faster ALL THE TIME.
Yeah, spotify is a bloat if you don't use it, just as candy crash. Defender slows down computer amazingly and those people that know how to use this are typically not in a line for babysitting and don't go around clicking britni's nude photo.jpg.exe. Windows updates are better if controled, as they more often freck up computer then don't nowdays, I definitely do not want frecking biometric shit on anything that is not surface etc..
Furthermore, scripts can be inspected and quickly fixed/forked to your own desire. Do yourself a favor and run this first thing on fresh OS. I just imagine a world where MS ships barebone OS where stuff should be enabled rather then the opposite.
One more thing should be done for even faster OS - disable MS Store. I lived weeks wondering why my system suddenly becomes slow as a snail until I did this, later to find its a well known not fixed problem.
Or you can just make your brand new machine feel like its 5 years old, once all above and more of the shit starts fighiting for CPU/disk/mem/... attention....
Do you understand what a drive-by attack is? Defender is the last line of defense against unknown vulnerabilities, assuming you have the latest security patches...
> Windows updates are better if controled
^ One time I cloned it to an SSD and tried some fancy ACPI patching to hack eGPU support into my old hardware, but I ended up deleting it because it offered no improvement over “boring stock install” after days of work.
^^ There was a Windows update in 2017 that assumed your system has only one EFI bootable partition, and would panic if you had 2+, so I taught myself how to hide the rescue partition from Windows to avoid a reinstall.
Powershell drama, I like it :)
No drama really, just slow machine is all.
I am the kind of person that goes through settings and turns off as many things as I can and uninstalls anything I don't use. I figure every single app and service has vulnerabilities and if I don't have a 3d printer or hololens, then I'm safer with that stuff gone.
I would want to get rid of this even if it didn't cost any resources.
Looking at just the block-telemetry.ps1 script in this repo tells me the creator is a novice. Changing the Group Policy does NOT block telemetry in Win10 Home or Pro. Furthermore, adding MS's own domains to the hosts file or firewall aren't great techniques either, since the OS doesn't have to honor them and those domains may serve other functions.
In disable-services.ps1:
- Home Groups was discontinued and these services aren't installed by default anymore. Even if they are present, the default config is manual and they'll use zero resources if you don't have a HomeGroup set up
- Futzing with remote access services is a minefield and could kill VPNs, network shares/printers, and domain access. It's one piece in a set of dependencies that might be okay to disable, but tends to pop up in unexpected situations. RaRA is disabled by default, so if it is enabled, there is probably a reason.
- Distributed Link Tracking Client - I mean, I like my shortcuts working, but okay.
- Windows Security Center Service - Disabling this basically makes it harder for you to actually access the security center and will break 3rd party AV/firewall/security tools.
- Xbox services - Disabling kills any games bought via the Windows Store and possibly controllers. Doesn't use resources, since it's set to manual.
Almost everything else the scripts say they're doing can be done within the Settings app. I phrased it that way because the toggles may be changing multiple settings to get the desired effect and changing a single registry value isn't enough. There are some sound tweaks mixed in (some that I use myself), but nothing new and nothing to make me think the author is particularly knowledgeable about Windows configurations. I prefer something like http://www.blackviper.com/
I wanted to add that I've been pretty heavily tweaking Windows since the Win9x days, and modern Windows is a different beast compared to even Win7. Lots of services and features have not-so-obvious dependencies.
For example, the Your Phone App can't be uninstalled via normal means, but there are plenty of articles that detail the steps to uninstall it with Powershell. The problem is that this app also hooks into the experience continuity features MS is pushing heavily, and forcing an uninstall will cause issues with syncing settings across devices and the timeline feature.
Also worth noting is that simply undoing some tweaks isn't always straightforward. Delete a registry entry? Hope you noted that it was owned by Installer, because adding it back as owned by admin ain't gonna cut it.
Lastly, 90%+ of the tweak guides/scripts I've seen would completely break programming IDEs, VPN access, and systems on a corporate network. They assume you want everything stripped and will add back individual pieces as situations present themselves, but it never works out that way. Instead, the whole process approaching those situations gets borked (e.g.- program checks for a service at launch, can't find it, and closes immediately or dumps the user into some config that's not appropriate once they untweak their OS).
Most of my tweaking now is simply changing settings, disabling a few scheduled tasks and services I'm familiar with, and making a couple dozen registry changes that are reversible and not tied to vital components.
Presumably they - or some script they didn't really understand - turned off the "Let Windows track app launches to improve Start and search results" setting.
Settings -> Background Apps -> "Let apps run in the background"
It would disable search even though nothing related to search was in the apps list (along with other presumably hidden items). The workaround was to leave background apps globally enabled and manually disable every app that showed in the list (including any that got added over time). I think this was finally fixed in 1809.
Well, my personal view of that topic is certainly a lot more valid than Microsoft's.
I found it being around half cases of “windows update 100 cpu” issue (yes, that is still a thing in 2019). The silly fact is that windows configuration only works in almost-default state and fails with everything else. The entire system is full of hardcoded crap that doesn’t even assume configs and modes exist. The complete absence of readable diagnostics adds to this heavily, not to mention KB articles that officially suggest magic reinstall/fix steps that never work.
Otoh, I understand streamers who periodically see this idiotic “hey, pay some attention, i found no virus” in their gaming hours.
I know the usual argument is that you need Windows to game, but why make your gaming instance your main work instance too? Why not dual boot and use Linux for work and Windows for gaming?
Having to reboot (even with an SSD) is a very destructive action because it means suddenly all of your work is shut down and unless you script a way to rebuild your environment (which never works flawlessly even with a lot of effort), you'll have to set everything up again when you come back. So even if it only took 2 seconds to dual boot, you'd still have to deal with that tear down / set up process.
But, it's also not just gaming that keeps people on Windows. For example I do screencast recording and editing where I record software dev related videos but the tools I use only run on Windows, and they can't be run in a VM because the thing I want to record is my dev environment (I use WSL in Windows).
And in my case, it wouldn't work because I need to be able to record a Linux environment but record / edit videos in a Windows environment, so both OSs need to be running at once.
Exactly. I have one sole system running Win10 + Steam and Linux runs all the rest of my systems. Best setup.
I still ran a similar type of debloat on my Win10 system though... just because f*ck MS and their telemetry.
Some common reasons:
I need that Office document to look presentable when opened from Windows.
Skype for Business being the default, whenever there is a conference call I need Windows.
Even in 1-on-1 calls, if screen sharing is required, I need Windows.
I could do without Win32 but I'm a freelance, work from home, and sometimes I like to open a game to unwind for a couple minutes. That makes dual boot unfeasible.
I have windows for gaming/VR but zero development.
I have Fedora for literally everything else including C#/WPF development (I run my dev environment for windows inside a VM as it makes it very simple to backup and I know that the somewhat irritating setup is perfectly replicated).
Essentially at this point Win10 is relegated to been a massive console OS.
I could likely run a lot of my games on Linux but I'm not enough of a purist that the hassle makes it worth it, down time is precious and I'd rather not fight it debugging why a particular game is been weird.
I'm likely to upgrade my 2700X soon so I might slap an ATI card in alongside my RTX2080 so I can use the 2080 with an iommu pass through and then I could game on a separate windows VM inside Fedora.
I was encouraged to try it after I saw its platinum rating on ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/
I don't think I'll ever do GPU passthru though; that's 3hard5me.
I may play with Proton at some point though if the games I play are properly supported, mostly though my gaming time is spent on the Rift S playing Project Cars 2, combined with a nice force feedback wheel and pedals (Logitech G920) its a really good experience, I didn’t expect VR to be so compelling actually, it’s not perfect but damn is it impressive when you are going the Nurburgring in the dark as snow blows past your car and you look left and see a car coming up in your mirrors.
I think I’m a convert and I’m eagerly waiting for what the next generation can bring.
Elite Dangerous is incredible in VR as well btw.
Visual studio for mac might cut it, but I don't have a mac. My other laptop runs Linux and that's where I prefer to be.
But the truth is that while Microsoft have been spending lots of money and effort on making on-windows-for-linux dev simple, the reverse (understandably?) isn't viable.
But then I realized typing on a computer also sucks. And then I realized that there's no voice-to-text software available for Linux.
And then I realized that it's not readily-available for computers in general. You can go out of your way to get it, but it's on our phones by default. How weird. Apparently, Cortana can't easily be used for voice-to-text dictation though, and it'd be limited to Edge. So I still don't really understand the point of Cortana.
But it'd be nice if there was some generic, voice-to-text functionality in regular OSes. It'd be super nice if it was locally-processed too. Is the hardware power not there yet?
For me no it isn't. I am a nomadic VB/C# .NET developer and while most things now run cross platform flawlessly, there are many components that don't.
e.g. SQL Server is a major sticking point. Visual Studio on Windows has a concept of a SQL Server project. There is simply no cross platform equivalent. SQL Server projects typically serve two purposes 1. Let you easily develop a local database 2. Let you easily deploy your database changes (the deployment profile can be configured per environment that your organisation has).
Well I get the linux dev tools, which is all I really want from linux, in wsl. Windows works well on my machine, and I find it less trouble than linux. I wouldn't say I like it, but there isn't a good desktop OS in 2019 - it's a matter only of 'least worst'
(That said, I'd never run this silly script)
Bonus: much fewer online multiplayer cheaters on a current-gen console.
One, when I bothered trying to debloat my Windows gaming machine in the past, many of the changes would be undone when windows updated from time to time and this was frustrating.
Second, I don't know what the advisability of running a bunch of unvetted scripts is. Sure it's open source, but who is actually going to go thru and read all those scripts one-by-one before running them.
Linux on servers (mostly because of price), Windows for regular everyday use.
Although, I admit, now Linux vs Windows is less relevant as most of the good stuff MS does is now cross-platform and Win ships with Linux kernel. I personally can't live without pwsh.
I do run an "optimizer" on Windows 10 called Kerish Doctor. It's cheap and in my experience one of the few programs in that category that work well.
Most annoying on my laptop there is some input issue with the keyboard where it would drop a couple of key inputs per minute, usually grouped. I spent a month trying to figure out why and trying different solutions, never did find out.
But more than all of that... even on the hardware where everything worked out of the box and none of the above limitations were a problem... I still have to customize the install. Sure, I may not have to remove sleezy/privacy invading stuff like on Windows but it's not like I just click one button and get the exact packages I want.
I love Linux but only as a VM or single purpose bare metal box, for a daily driver (work or home) it's simply easier to use Windows and run WSL or Hyper-V if I need something Linux specific.
That phenomenon is what keeps me from using Linux as my main laptop OS. I have done, for long stretches (and probably will again), but I'm always driven to either OS X or Windows by a waning desire to spend time troubleshooting or on sysadmin. If not for that I'd use Linux f/t as I prefer many of its traits.
A couple of years ago (when Skylake was new CPU) I tried dual-booting Linux with the then-current version of Arch and it crashed (completely froze) when using integrated intel graphics. Tweaking kernel boot parameters (turning on experimental support for the chipset) as suggested in the documentation didn't help either. Not to mention I have a HiDPI display and tweaking appearance of everything was a pain.
Suspend didn't work. With windows, I don't turn off the computer, I choose "sleep". Uptime regularly over 1 month, usually interrupted only by Windows updates.
Wiped the whole thing. Now, if I need Linux tools, I boot up WSL.
EDIT: Before I was a long-term Linux user. Never worked smoothly (e.g., concurrent audio playback/mixing from different programs), always had to tweak this and that. It was fun when I was younger, Linux was newer, and less bloated and more easily understandable. Now I just need to get shit done w/o OS getting in my face all the time, so I use Windows.
Windows 10 N LTSB / LTSC
LTSB / LTSC = Long-Term Servicing Branch / Long-Term Servicing Channel. This is really the killer thing but it comes with catches. You'll get an absolutely stable Windows and to achieve that a load of things are removed by Microsoft.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3250464/faq-windows-10...
> LTSB does not include Edge nor any Microsoft Store (Universal Windows Platform, or UWP) apps, whether Redmond-made or third-part, because the browser and those apps constantly change and need updating. Also AWOL: the Cortana voice-activated digital assistant and access to the Microsoft Store.
And for the HN community... lack of Microsoft Store means that you are not running Ubuntu on Windows.
Is an understatement, if you play games expect to install the media pack or have many break. Some apps in the office suite also rely on them so if you use that you've created trouble for yourself. Also RDP client/server can't run hardware accelerated since that uses the video playback API.
> And for the HN community... lack of Microsoft Store means that you are not running Ubuntu on Windows.
Not true, the store is a front end and LTSB still supports appx: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-manual
It's purely Powershell based unlike some other binary based tools out there, clean, in a single file. I'd say it doesn't use any hacks either to stop telemetry.
Keep in mind Windows will revert some settings occasionally after a Windows update.
I just don’t see the point with fiddling around with little hacks trying to disable telemetry and stuff when you can just install a Linux distro and be done with it.
I mean sure depending on your use case that may not be possible, but if you don’t have a certain software or hardware limitation holding you to Windows, I really don’t see why you wouldn’t just use a Linux distro.
It all boils down to what the user needs from Windows; migrating to a Linux machine plus Libreoffice for document work is one thing, moving complex vertical solutions to it is a whole different story. BTW, I'm totally in favor of ditching windows for good, but 30 years of technical and cultural lock-in are hard to fight.
But I am still required HAVE a windows install, and use it occasionally, and not even for games, as I don't game.
So, since I must have a wondows install and actually use it, even if only infrequently, I want it to be as close to sane as I can make it.
This particular debloat script might be questionable, but the concept of debloating is not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/wiki/index
It can be downloaded from one of these mirrors:
Classic Shell is dead, long live its successor Open Shell [1]
£300 is quite the premium though.
It's a free trial for 90 days too.
The only thing I noticed so far was forced-auto updates and reboots...
The question is: Why can't Microsoft just release Windows 10 Core?
Used this one:
https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater
This one does not affect anything to do with Windows Update and any important system stuff from my experience.
https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst
:-)
https://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-ma...
Here, I prefer something like this.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/files/dban/dban-2.3.0/...
Darik's Boot and Nuke — A hard drive disk wipe and data clearing utility
And then download and install KDE Neon User Edition from https://neon.kde.org/download
KDE Neon is a Linux distro based on Ubuntu.
Yes I am being a bit facetious, sorry.
But I am actually curious, how many people on HN run Windows on their computers vs the number of people that run macOS, Linux or one of the BSDs?
I no longer game, but as I understand it, support for Linux has greatly improved. Also I used to watch Sky (UK), which is only available for Windows users (first because they were literally using Silverlight up until about a year ago, and now because its only available as an Electron app...).
For my next machine I think I'll just move to Ubuntu. Having said that, looking at some of the apps I do still use (such as VPNs, Google Drive, Spotify), many of them would either work less well, or simply not work at all. It's a shame, but what can you do?
Linux has excellent support for VPN. VPN providers on the other hand may be bad at providing proper guidance for Linux users. In that case I suggest either switching to a VPN provider that has the guides you need, or searching for good guides made by others about how to do it with your provider of choice.
Google Drive you are right about. If acceptable to you you might consider switching to Dropbox instead. Dropbox worked great on Linux last time I used Dropbox.
Keep in mind that it is a good idea to pick hardware that has good Linux support. The problem for a lot of people is that they buy some random laptop without taking this into consideration, and then try to run Linux on it and might be unlucky.
Personally I run Linux on my desktop with hardware that I chose specifically based on finding out that it would work.
And my laptop now is a MacBook Air running macOS.
Linux desktop. macOS laptop. Great combo IMO.
VPN support would be fine wrt OpenVPN, but I'm using NordVPN. To be fair I just checked and they also have a .deb so that's fine too.
Drive is a pain, Dropbox suggestion is good. IIRC I've used "Grive" before, and it worked, but wasn't a delight to use.
Definitely agree on hardware. Even the XPS range from Dell which offers Linux pre-installed has been pretty choppy in the past. I'm using a Thinkpad now and imo it's the best option.
I can't do macs, that's the one thing!