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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

> locking users into bloatware.

microsoft doesn’t lock you in anything. you can uninstall all bloatware and they don’t come back ever.

That is simply untrue. You can uninstall approximately half of the bloatware, and on occasion they do reappear after 'feature updates'.

Win 10 Pro comes with the following, all of which have the "Uninstall" disabled:

  Xbox Game Bar
  Your Phone
  Maps
  Camera

And this is after removing many other apps that are objectively bloatware. Myself and many others I've spoken to simply want Win10Pro to be closer to LTSB than Home. It doesn't need to be stable enough to run unattended for years at a time, it just needs to be lightweight and without the Start Menu being populated with dozens of things a power user will never touch.

I'm sure if I cared enough there's some hacky way to remove them (at least superficially), but I've been down that road enough times only to have it all reversed after an update.

You can remove those by saving the below in a cleanup.ps1 file and running it via Powershell after the feature updates every six months.

    Get-AppxPackage *XboxGamingOverlay* | Remove-AppxPackage
    Get-AppxPackage *YourPhone* | Remove-AppxPackage
    Get-AppxPackage *WindowsMaps* | Remove-AppxPackage
    Get-AppxPackage *WindowsCamera* | Remove-AppxPackage

To get the names of other apps, run Get-AppxPackage > Apps.txt and inspect the resulting file.

I agree completely that it would be better if they didn't include the bloatware in the first place, but removing it is pretty straightforward.

Straightforward only if you know these commands. I've never heard of the Get/Remove-AppxPackage commands before, but thanks for the tip!

The modern style for shell commands on Windows is to name them exactly “Verb-Noun”, where neither “Verb” nor “Noun” have hyphens. If you are interested in what is possible, spend some time investigating the available nouns in whatever problem domain you are working with.

I found this list of available Powershell modules: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/?view=win...

Straightforward in the same sense that "getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" is "trivial"[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Boot usb linux, delete whatever programs you don't want in windows, including windows update, windows update repair services, and whatever else. Boot windows without internet, use the firewall to make sure nothing gets updated or reinstalled.

I’d rather not to do that in the system I supposed to pay for. Have no problem with free version.

Have you ever tried to permanently uninstall microsoft teams or the xbox app or onedrive?

Guess not :)

Back when I still had windows I had a powershell script just for deleting the apps it kept reinstalling after each update.

Old info.

Teams doesn't ever come back after uninstallation, and you have to install it yourself to have it in the first place. It isn't bundled.

For about two years now, with any OS upgrade or patch, bundled apps are not installed if you've uninstalled them prior to that OS upgrade or patch.

It's important to keep your complaints up to date with new information, or at least admit that your information is old.

I guess you missed the "Back when I still had windows" text in my comment, but I could quantify this.

I removed windows a year ago from my last machine and it still had this behaviour. If they now allow uninstalling all bundled apps easily without them coming back after updates then props to them. It's not what I hear from colleagues that still have windows though.

Very literally just went through fixing Teams on a family member's laptop. They kept uninstalling it, and upon next boot, their computer was unresponsive for 10+ minutes as Teams reinstalled itself.

After some digging, it turns out there's a separate installer you have to uninstall. Since when do you have to uninstall installers?

This was on a fully up to date, modern Windows laptop.

It's not quite that simple: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...

Windows gives you a lot of control, but some of the stuff requires going to the registry to stop windows bs. But, we have a registry.

I don't see how the Windows registry is markedly different from dwrites in macOS. And on the Mac, there's about an order of magnitude less BS to begin with. Maybe two orders.

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