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Comment by _nickwhite | Hacker News Reader

Instead of "Making Windows 2000 Usable in 2021" I'd like to see something more along the lines of "Making Windows 11 Usable in 2021". Past attempts at doing this (oftentimes) produced shady utilities (or illegal ISOs) that would hack out "essential" Windows components. If done right, open-source, developed out in the open, I could see this being a hugely successful endeavor. Imagine being able to use a modern Windows system (officially) that had no bloatware or the things we hate about modern Windows. (yes, I know I'm almost describing Linux and MacOS here)

To pull this off, I see a utility (kind of like Chocolatey) with modules that can be run to disable certain annoyances- and changes that can always be fully reverted if necessary. Create some global modules such as "gaming-only" that removes all the bloat needed except for gaming.

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You might be interested in the LTSC versions of Windows 10. I know you said Windows 11, but IMO, Windows 11 currently is missing some usability that's still present in Windows 10 (like the taskbar). Of course you'll also be missing the scheduler updates, but I've witnessed some users disabling efficiency cores on Alder Lake anyway due to bugs or performance.

> LTSC, Long-Term Servicing Channel (which was until 2017 branded as LTSB, Long-Term Servicing Branch), is a unique version of Windows 10 Enterprise. Unlike all the other versions of Windows 10, LTSC has zero bloatware and the least amount of telemetry (data being sent back to Microsoft).

A friendly intro can be found on this Reddit wiki:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/wiki/index

Even buying LTSC requires enormous amounts of hoop-jumping: https://reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/wiki/acquisition

It's not practical for most people.

The main problem with LTSC (assuming you're fine ignoring licensing requirements) is what you touched on - it's LTSC so rarely up to date from a feature perspective. Of course this is it's real purpose and 11 will eventually get an LTSC release as well (once it's fit for said main purpose) but these types of "well there are a few things it doesn't have" are rolling issues not one off things you can just accept up front.

Also it's a pain to get Store stuff working. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal but Minecraft Bedrock is a common dealbreaker.

Hmm.. they're missing an acquisition method. I just checked my "MSDN" subscription and it's right there. I'm going to have to check this out.

Windows serves whichever axe is deemed to need grinding and they're not going to give up that control.

At the moment it's Edge getting shoved down our throats at any opportunity and in some cases it even ignores the "default apps" (looking at you links from the lock screen)

I've also started getting prompts to "restore my web browser" settings as a way to get Edge reset back to the default along with a permanent "restore recommended" banner on the top of the Settings app.

Use Microsoft recommended browser settings: Set the latest Microsoft Edge as your default browser and pin it to your desktop and taskbar. It's the best browser for Windows 10 with enhanced privacy protection.

The "learn more" takes you to https://microsoftedgewelcome.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy and two of the promises are "control" and "respect". It's funny, I don't feel either in control or respected about my choice not to use Edge.

When I was an active Windows user, I always used the server editions as my desktop OS.

Eg, I ran Server 2003 (instead of XP), Server 2012 R2 (instead of 8.1), and finally, Server 2016 (instead of Win 10).

Much less bloat. Not sustainable for an enterprise deployment, but for my home use it worked quite well.

Unfortunately, using Windows Server as a gaming computer is highly frustrating, and rarely works long-term. Biggest issue is driver compatibility (especially video drivers). Direct X used to be an issue, but I think it actually runs fine now in Server 2019. A much better solution in today's world would be to just run Linux. Steam now has >80% of the Top-100 Windows games running on Linux.

> Steam now has >80% of the Top-100 Windows games running on Linux.

When it works. CSGO claims to work on Linux but has stopped working for many months now. There is a fix that includes changing a library but you risk getting banned by anticheat.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/2659

It has been going on for almost a year.

If you want to game, you should just to dual boot Windows or buy a console.

When I was an active Windows flight sim user, I always installed either 98lite, 2000lite, or XPlite on heavily slipstreamed installations:

https://www.litepc.com/

I was ruthless in tearing out cruft. To me this made the consumer versions seem quicker and more stable. I have absolutely no flight sim use case now for any of the Windows OSes, past or present.

> Imagine being able to use a modern Windows system (officially) that had no bloatware

One's feature is another's bloatware.

As Joel Spolsky used to say, 80% of the people use only 20% of the features, the problem is that each one of those 80% uses a different 20%.

Windows 10 ships with Candy Crush.

Windows 11 ships with TikTok.

I wish this was a troll but I'm pretty sure this is real unfortunately.

You may or may not have realized that you only reinforced the previous point.

Sigh, no it doesn’t. The Spolsky argument was directed mainly about supposed feature creep within applications like Excel and Word. This could apply to the OS level - but it was never used to argue for the inclusion of micropayment shitware.

Further countering your argument - minesweeper, solitaire, and paint are no longer included in Windows. If anything had established itself as staple OS accessory “feature” apps those would qualify.

Either it applies to the OS level or it doesn't, micropayments in software are something completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what Spolsky and this thread was talking about one way or the other.

The counterpoint seems tangental as well. Whether or not something is removed or kept isn't what defines it as a staple feature to a portion of the userbase. Most of the uproar about Windows 11 is things people considered core functionality being remove e.g. local accounts during setup on Home or moving the taskbar away from the bottom of the screen. Also iterations of Solitaire and Paint are still default apps anyways.

> Either it applies to the OS level or it doesn't, micropayments in software are something completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what Spolsky and this thread was talking about one way or the other.

You completely miss the point. Candy Crush was never an essential feature of the OS. If removing it will piss off some people such that they have to download it from the App Store, so be it (it is less reasonable to expect people to download individual features into a single app like excel - addons non withstanding). The micropayments comment is not about a feature but pointing out that its inclusion was nothing more than a cynical money grab.

Does Excel not provide other functionality and features even though it has a DRM licensing aspect? Of course it does as such an aspect being present doesn't dismiss everything else outright. The same is true for micropayments, that they are there does not dismiss the idea others could find the app (or games in general) a useful functionality in an OS to the point they would consider a core feature.

As an anecdote I've removed default apps while cleaning many PCs and gotten more pushback about CandyCrush being missing than Calculator. Regardless of how much more base utility I think Calculator provides personally it doesn't mean others don't find the same base value in an entertainment component, even if it has micropayments or other revenue streams built in or could be a click away in an app store (as any component could be anyways).

And 95 shipped with solitare.

It goes back to 3.0 and quite notably did not convey advertising to spend money. It also wasn’t located blatantly in your face in a tiled menu. There’s a very different incentive.

Solitaire had a secret purpose, it taught people how to use a mouse in a way that they would enjoy, an important consideration when most people had never used a mouse before.

Candy Crush teaches you what pay-to-win DLC is.

Windows 10 also ships with Solitaire, except it plays a video ad after every game and the only way to remove the ads is by paying for a $10/month "solitaire premium" subscription.

Do you really think MS would allow that to exist unhindered? Look at what they did recently when people started combating the forced Edge launches.

You might check out a tool called O&O Shut Up 10.

Or Blackbird v6

https://www.getblackbird.net/

It looks like blackbird hasn't been updated since nov 2020, while O&O shut up was updated just last month. One thing I wish O&O had was a feature / taskbar version that watches if any setting has been changed once an hour / restart, alerts you, and asks you if you want to restore that setting, along with auto update.

Everything blackbird claims to disable will be disabled. Shutup has way less features.

Try this out: download SysInternals ProcMon and run both tools and then compare. You'll see.

The reason is that Win11 (and 10, and all the other "still in support" OSs) is still subject to constant change by MS --- including the automatic updates --- so it is quite a moving target to fight. In contrast, "EOL" OSs won't change any more and they start off not fighting you as much in the first place. They're also probably much simpler in many ways. I see many similarities between projects like this and the automotive tuning community; there's a lot of people interested in newer cars, but many of them prefer working on the old stuff (roughly 50s-70s).

That said, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Core exists, so maybe someone could run the UI from older Windows versions on it.

Hacking a platform puts you at odds with the platform vendor, with the consequence that any hacks are likely to be incompatible with subsequent releases of the platform.

Platform vendors want to shunt you down very specific paths. The interests of platform vendors and developers are not always aligned, and are often diametrically opposed — especially with regards to creating portable code that runs on multiple platforms.

The whole point of this submission is that Windows 2000/XP were the last versions before Windows jumped the shark.

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