Windows10Debloater: Script to remove Windows 10 bloatware (2021)
github.com
github.com
O&O AppBuster | ShutUp 10
[1] https://www.oo-software.com/en/ooappbuster
[2] https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
* Free of charge for private users, companies and educational institutions
(and yes, i ran it frequently, after the previous/last update too.)
However It appears Microsoft still forces certain critical (in their eyes) patches for zero days and can therefore do the sme for less critical things.
For 2+ years I've had a Windows 10 instance with updates (automatic and notifications) disabled .. and it has honoured that setting.
I manually update every few months after reading the details on the pendings and cross reading on Bleeping Computer | elsewhere for patch issues.
Two days ago - I woke to a rebooted computer with a forced "critical security update" applied.
I'm not happy - if microsoft can do that, then so can anyone that infiltrates their patch push ala Solar Winds etc.
Actually reminds me of how you absolutely should not install Windows XP with the ethernet cable plugged in back when more home computers were directly connected to the Internet. That thing would be chock full of worms within minutes, so you had to first install a software firewall while offline.
Simply unplug the internet cable, works in the latest windows 11.
Shift+F10 to open CMD.exe => taskmgr => terminate "Network Connection Flow"
So same as windows 10 then, just a different vendor for the malware?
Not sure if people have just gotten smarter, or some of the default stuff is better, or both - but it is a markedly different time than before.
It's part of why we don't get worm attacks all that often like we used to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm)
> The worm spreads by exploiting a buffer overflow discovered by the Polish security research group Last Stage of Delirium[5] in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026 and later in MS03-039. This allowed the worm to spread without users opening attachments simply by spamming itself to large numbers of random IP addresses. Four versions have been detected in the wild.[6] These are the most well-known exploits of the original flaw in RPC, but there were in fact another 12 different vulnerabilities that did not see as much media attention.[7]
I usually set up my Windows the following way:
1. Offline install. 2. Turn on Internet and leave it alone for a hour or two. It'll install all drivers from Microsoft and also it'll install bloatware. 3. Install additional drivers if needed. I install Nvidia ones because Microsoft drivers are not up to date, but that's optional. 4. Go to Settings/Apps and remove all bloatware and other bundled software I don't need.
That's quite a procedure, but it allows me to have more or less stable and debloated system.
With some laptops it might be necessary to use manufacturer-provided drivers instead of Microsoft ones. I don't really know what's the rule of thumb here.
I have a Windows 7 PC installed like this... and never connected it to the internet. It runs two single players games and works like a charm. Very secure also :)
- make it a priority to avoid Windows and run Linux instead whenever possible.
- strongly criticize Microsoft and Windows on my personal blog
- systematically list the bad stuff Microsoft is doing to ruin Windows, including but not limited to their dismantling of the taskbar with Windows 11.
The mandatory registration of a Microsoft account and included ad-ware is an extremely nasty thing about Windows.
I resubmitted it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32440745 thinking it would bump the karma at least like other duplicate submissions, but it made a new submission, and it looks like it's probably dead as well.
The page does not work without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to use privacy.sexy. There's no shady stuff as 100% of the website is open source.
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Still kind of ironic.
But now that I saw the site, I can understand that the need is justified, given how the page is built (essentially not a web site, but an application that allows dynamically building a script, by injecting snippets that each do a specific function).
No doubt this could have been done with just text and hyperlinks, but the result would have been a completely different UX.
Arch is a better middle ground IMO.
I tried Arch and found the divide between distribution packages and AUR to be strange. I assume distribution packages are trustworthy, but a lot of things aren't available there, so you have to use AUR. But my understanding is that AUR is all user contributed and unvetted, so it's essentially like the olden days of downloading an exe and hoping for the best. Unless you go to the effort of scrutinizing every script, I guess.
Updates seem to be hit or miss too. I had some AUR packages that suddenly failed with circular dependency issues and later a full system update made the machine unbootable, which wasn't tons of fun. That's when I went back to Gentoo. :P
To be fair, though, I stopped using Arch after about a couple of months. I could be remembering things wildly incorrectly when it comes to the package management stuff. Unbootable update, though, I remember vividly!
I used Gentoo around 2002 or earlier and it was everytime an adventure to emerge anything, mostly due to the time it was taking. A kernel rebuild was taking hours.
I was not interested in fine-tuning the binaries so I was emerging with the default configuration, which makes it more or less equivalent to installing something from a repo.
The immense advantage of Gentoo is that you had to install it from the very scratch and it gave you finally an understanding of what was going on, instead of just next next next on install screens. I had everyone from my team go though an installation just for that.
> and found the divide between distribution packages and AUR to be strange
Wasn't this the same thing with Gentoo, where there would be "official" sources, and then the others. With colliding names? (it may have been another distro, sorry if this is the case - my memory is not that good 20 years back). I know that it took me a while to understand that philosophy (but again, maybe it was not Gentoo)
> To be fair, though, I stopped using Arch after about a couple of months.
After having had used Debian/Ubuntu for years on my server, I got fed up with the upgrade cycle and moved to Arch a year or so ago. I did not have any problems and the documentation is top notch. I use my server in a very basic way: an Arch installation, then docker and borg and this is pretty much it. Everything I run is in docker containers (except for borg (backup) for more or less sane reasons - probably less than more)
Office on my M1 macbook air is noticeably more stable and responsive than the dell xps13 bought in January, and the mackbook was like half the price. That XPS is probably the last windows machine we buy ever.
Also most of our employees have fully migrated to libreoffice now.
I install ubuntu on old laptops to utilize them and as VM on my current windows machine.
Macbook is sluggish (mouse moves) and very limited customizations/options. None of the communication software I use work all at the same time on either on ubuntu nor macos. For example, I use Skype, RingCentral, WhatsApp, Teams, Discord open in one 32" monitor. I must communicate with multiple people everyday for business purposes. I can't fanboy and go for Mac or Ubuntu and ruin my businesses. (I have 4 x 32")
Another monitor has KeePass, putty, and winscp running. If a client sends me an excel file for a reason and it has macros in it, office is the only way to open it. OpenOffice or Libre sucks. I also occasionally update company blogs and must edit photos and videos. Adobe works flawlessly on Windows and has many advantages using it on Windows compared to MacOs edition.
For my security cameras, I use the camera system's only supported windows software. There is no other platform supported. SonicWall VPN sucks on mac and unsupported. I won't spend 2 hours each time VPN fails on Ubuntu. Windows works flawlessly and I tried on Ubuntu. Can't connect to client servers remotely with Ubuntu or crappy mac vpn software called MobileConnect.
I use FreeCad but tried AutoCad in the past, only works on Windows properly. FreeCad sucks on Ubuntu, AutoCad is not supported. This is for my another business unrelated to the other software.
I have more computers than I can count but I am always ending up using Windows for work. To make everything work on one computer, I must use windows. If something new comes up, I won't spend hours and days to try to make it work on Ubuntu or feel sad for not even having it for MacOs.
It's not a "Linux can't do it" problem though.
Business founders/entrepreneurs are not exactly a large part of the userbase either...
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Macros/Python_Guide/Intr...
So LO Calc is OK for basic spreadsheets, but any power user will gravitate to Excel due to functionalities.
If by extension that provides similar support for PowerQuery you mean QueryConnector, then no. QueryConnector is similar to the MS Query, not to the PowerQuery. And MS Query was Excel built-in, not extension...
Tables do not exist in LO calc. Dataranges do (and imported excel files with tables are converted to dataranges). Dataranges do not have functionality like Tables do. You cannot even create above mentioned pivot table from a datarange, only from named range or selection.
I even had to google how to create them (the build-in help didn't... help), after I've seen that the import did create something, and not just convert to named ranges as it used to. So much for discoverability.
---
This is not to put down LibreOffice Calc or anything. It is about being honest where the weaknesses are, and how to address them. Sweeping problems under the carpet won't address them, and Calc won't become better.
Also, Excel is the crown jewel of MS Office. Not Word, not Powerpoint, but Excel. Of course it is best of the best that money can buy and competing with it is not easy. But 15 years? Come on.
I'm now reconsidering if I'm a power user of spreadsheets! For these extra features I'll use R as it's more powerful and reproducible.
You're kidding, right? LibreOffice Calc does not have:
- tables
- powerquery
- dynamic array formulae
- XLOOKUP, LET, FILTER, and the rest of the extremely useful new formulae
These four things completely dominate my Excel workflow. Opening Calc is like stepping back into the dark ages.
When you’re a heavy user of excel, almost nothing else compares. Tho Google sheets does give excel a run for its money, because it has scripts (javascript) to do everything else.
I'm a heavy user of LO calc, but my usage is of course different from yours. For true data wrangling I use R so this statement. I can't imagine the data wrangling and transformations that I perform in R being done in Excel. Its a nightmare waiting to happen!
Which is why windows ships WSL, to keep people who can't work on windows using it. Better yet, to allow their managers to force them to use windows even though they need linux.
Edit: Ubuntu version 18.04.xx (point release) or 20.04.xx and above does not contain the Amazon web app.
For new users the CLI stuff is usually less important. I don't categorically hate snap, but for new users it's bad long-term, too, since it is only controlled by Canonical and therefore a bad reliance. Nobody can add repositories for snap beside Canonical.
If you are an avid CLI user I recommend using containers instead of snap. This way you can even keep the sandbox with dotnet for example.
> flatpack seems to be same RedHat/GNOME crap, pushed by force and not be it's quality.
However it is not controlled by RedHat (and also not solely developed by them). At least everyone can add repositories to flatpak. Which is probably my biggest gripe with snap.
Anyway IMO flatpack and snap are different things, you can't just tell people to replace one with the other. AppImage could have been better but is ahrd to improve if there is no big money behind to force push things.
Btw if you or anyone knows, does any of thios tech solves the issue where your system has an old glibc and you want to try some new app/game that needs a new glibc? For a video game performance is important access to GPU driver is needed. I had a bad experience with a game that updated and stopped working and from my reading there is no way to have 2 glibc on your system(complex shit about how executables and libraries loading works).
In flatpak, the glibc is part of the runtimes; i.e. org.(freedesktop|gnome|kde).Platform. This allows you to run apps on old CentOS/RHEL that you could not natively. Or you can have runtime-less package or use your own runtime, where you put libraries you want. Similarly with snap, you have core18 or core20 runtimes (that correspodents to ubuntu 18.04 or ubuntu 20.04).
Drivers are more interesting. GPU driver has two parts - kernel mode, that shuffles prepared command buffers between userspace and hardware, does mode switching, etc. -- and user mode, which is shared library that implements user APIs like OpenGL or Vulkan, and based on commands from these APIs builds commands buffers, that are then sent to kernel part. The user-mode part may or may not be compatible with multiple versions of the kernel part; the AMD and Intel drivers usually are, as the kernel driver is part of the kernel tree and the user mode driver has to work with any kernel it is run under. Nvidia on the other hand assumes that both user mode and kernel mode are in sync, so packaging specific user mode driver version into container might be problematic.
Flatpak usually ships latest (n or n-1) Mesa and keeps Nvidia driver in sync with the installed kernel mode driver. They are shipped as addons to runtimes.
Debian is a nice snapless alternative bc it'll generally run anything meant for Ubuntu. The only major downside is no PPAs
Does anyone have up to date knowledge on mint's security situation?
It is.
https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.h...
If your last experience was 20 years ago I would sincerely recommend looking into it again.
I could give it a try (not gp but periodically interested), but not sure if my GSync display will work correctly. Last time I tried desktop linux, it couldn’t decide which video driver sucks more after another update, and that was on a pretty dumb graphics card. Thinking of something deeply proprietary like GSync I don’t even know if it’s worth trying.
And I’m not a linux newbie, used it and freebsd since around 2000 on daily basis periodically. It is amazing, but just like Linus, “I still need desktop” that allows me to play my hardware. So when there is a >$100 graphics card I resort to windows + msys2 by default.
Prior to 2018, there were only a handful of native ports, skewed towards indie games. Now 4,582 are classified by Valve as being 'Verified or playable', with 73% of the top 100 games on steam having an out-of-the-box-flawless experience and a further 14% that will work with some tweaks.
Steam baked this new technology into their client, so the installation process for a Windows game on Linux is identical to Windows (click 'Install' then play. There is one additional popup to inform the user that a translation layer is being used).
In addition to this, Easy Anti-Cheat and Battleye have now (as of Nov 2021) announced anti-cheat support for Proton - both technologies require the developers to enable support either with tweaks (EAC) or by emailing for the supplier to enable support (battleye).
And that's only gaming. In the last 12 years (with the 20 year limit specified by OP) we have seen a transformation in web technologies which have moved from proprietary codecs and add-ons to open standards. Video, streaming and all other things that Windows users take for granted are now available on Linux. This also means that the trend in apps moving to electron also implies that by-and-large Linux is also functional (with notable exceptions e.g. Discord audio).
There's also been a large development of drivers included in the kernel, most peripherals including game controllers etc all now work out of the box. Bluetooth and Wifi - the traditional enemies of Linux users, now work flawlessly and don't come up at all in support requests anymore. AMD drivers have improved, even Nvidia have open-sourced the kernel-land components of their proprietary driver which will help the development of nouveau and other open source alternatives (plus make the Nvidia driver much easier to install and maintain in server set ups, which I think was their goal).
Vulkan was released in 2016 which has driven a whole new raft of graphics capability, providing a strong alternative to the clunky OpenGL. Wayland is making serious progress against X, with Gnome-wayland and KDE-wayland both becoming default on some distros. Valve also have a minimalist wayland compositor that is used in Game Mode on the steam deck.
And that isn't even to mention the plethora of usability improvements to Desktop environments or helper apps such as Heroic, Lutris, Protonup, Nobara which have improved the Linux desktop experience immeasurably.
So yes, in short a lot has changed. When I hear someone say 'I have heard the same for 20 years' they are either ignorant or ignoring the progress that has been made in bad faith.
If you know about gsync and/or fps tax on linux, I’d be glad to trust and try. Otherwise this comment looks like yet another marketing booklet that doesn’t address any of my doubts and creates no reason to find out, cause last few times I fell for, it was the waste of time.
Edit: I don’t want to downplay this tech, you or anything else. Currently I just want to play Witcher 3 with gsync and have no time for fixing the issues longer than 10 minutes under my expertise.
And for what it's worth, I'm not writing off your concerns as ignorant or bad faith, but aimed at OP's "That's what I'm hearing since 20 years". That comment is either ignorant or just trying to bash Linux from a point of prejudice.
I have no experience with the issues you raise so I'm unable to address them specifically.
It is still the case that if you have recent bad experience with Linux then Windows may still be the best option for you.
Part of your issue is having to wrangle with Nvidia drivers. I am just using the default open source driver for AMD that comes built into the kernel and the experience is seamless. I know the nightmare of getting graphics on Linux working right which is why I avoid Nvidia.
are you sure this is covered?
There's definitely still a mindset that the command line is much easier from a documentation/support point of view which means that forum responses and tutorials will still refer to the command line a lot.
However, compared to when I started in 2011 there isn't a need to use the terminal like there was back then. The terminal is only really needed if you're doing something new or niche
Proton is great, but getting non-steam games on it is about as fiddly as the rest of Wine/Lutris/Crossover/etc. Especially with older games, alternate launchers, etc.
If you're fine with having a slightly smaller selection of games (mostly AAA suffers), then it's great. If you're into mod-heavy games, Windows still fares better IMO.
I put Win11 on my new machine to get more bang for buck with gaming, but I despise the OS in its current state. Purely from a DE UX perspective it doesn't seem very productive with its more limited shortcuts.
Those debloaters/registry cleaners always make more problems than they solve.
It also does a lot more than „debloat“ which is a loaded term on itself because tastes are different. Someone might like having certain things included in their installation, some don’t.
I know, I know. Not an option for many for corporate reasons or because you need some Win-only apps that don't work with Wine. But more people should consider it.
It's not everyone's cup of tea, but neither is Linux. I don't have the patience to find and maintain a Linux laptop, personally.
With Win10, they'd keep accidentally moving/hiding the taskbar around, toggling fullscreen, toggling the screen reader, changing it to weird resolutions, etc... Then when my wife tries to bring one of their school websites up for them, she gets frustrated by the whole mess, & calls me to straighten it out--since she's a mac person and has no patience with any of this windows nonsense.
Many years ago, a certain English professor told me about people who like to shove sticks up their urethras for fun. This article just reminded me of that. Memories!
Or just delete packages you don't need. Linux package managers are not that bad.
For example, I might want to disable telemetry or certain app permissions, also disable the OneDrive integration with Explorer (because I use NextCloud or something else), but leave automatic driver updates on and allow Windows Defender to work.
It doesn't really remove software on its own, but it's a nice tool to have, and even illustrates how certain settings have changed across Windows updates (they just keep enabling telemetry with each update).
Addendum: on a slightly less related note, it feels like Windows 10 is the new Windows 7, a decent OS that people will stick with for a while in lieu of migrating over to Windows 11. In my case, it's because the redesign feels wholly unnecessary but also breaks things like my vertical taskbar (about which the developers said that they don't care because people like me are niche users[1]) and then there was the whole TPM fiasco.
Honestly, the only things keeping me on Windows at this point are gaming (around 25% of my Steam games can run on Linux) and software like MobaXTerm, for which I haven't found capable alternatives (e.g. GUI SSH/RDP/VNC/... client with integrated FTP/SFTP and the ability to split terminals, whilst being able to do simultaneous input in all of them, or disable either with a checkbox, e.g. send input to 7/9 open sessions).
[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/vertic...
I don't know, but this feels really illegal. It probably isn't, but this alone made me really nervous about using Windows. It feels like using Spyware.
I for one also personally only use Windows for gaming at this point and even then I’m astounded with how well SteamOS works on a steamdeck to play games.
Now let's see if I can buy a copy....
You can split windows and broadcast to all terminal windows with several terminal emulators available for Linux. Examples include wezterm, Kitty, Terminator, Alacritty
I…what. Disabling Windows Update, and billing it as improving security?!
I haven't audited the scripts they use, but I'm always concerned about running any custom Windows version cooked up by a random person.
Zorin OS is basically Ubuntu with sugar coating but in my view it does address all the usability/UX criticism coming from people transioning away from Windows/Mac.
I am a long time Debian user but I transioned both my parents away from Windows using Zorin OS.
Really happy with the experience overall. I am not sure they really grasp it but they love it, for them it's just a "free Windows my son installed".
The profit incentives are what brought Windows to the state it is today.
For the vast majority of debloating I use Sophia[1] and just use the defaults so it's basically fire-and-forget, which I very much like. For any additional de-bloating, like removing OneDrive integration, I use individual scripts from [2].
I've recently switched my development laptop to a Macbook Pro and it's hilarious to note the difference in installation process between the two. The MacOS experience is embracing the "it just works"-concept, no configuration required and everything is taken care off. Whereas the Windows experience is basically you get a thin shell and you need to install these 20(!) updates in order to start configuring your drivers, installing packages and "debloating".
In the end I've accepted that Windows and MacOS both have a place in this world and neither have the perfect approach to an operating system. OS's are such a personal experience.
i have a problem with LTSC though, it constantly wants to install "security updates" which fucks up my rdpwrap....
is there a way to disable that?
https://www.cdw.com/product/windows-enterprise-ltsc-upgrade-...
As the post explains, it's a good idea to confirm the details with a rep before buying.
Honestly I wish Microsoft would just take my money and avoid advertising in paid products.
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/core-infrastructure-a...
Not needed AFAIC.
I only keep windows around to run the oddball app. that doesn't run either on the web or native on Linux.
These are increasingly rarer, typically of the gaming persuasion (e.g. MS Flight Simulator).
For these, I run a windows instance inside a VM, one distinct VM for each app.
The spyware crap and all the other useless shit windows comes bundled with only gets to see me use a single app, through a different IP each time (VPN), usually once every couple of months.
Only downside is it uses up a bit of disk space, but that's dirt cheap these days.
OTOH, it's very easy to manage, every app gets installed on its own clean windows environment, and uninstalling is as easy as dumping the VM.
For my main work env. and anything privacy related, I run on a bare-bone, heavily trimmed Debian with a Cinnamon desktop.
There are still plenty of titles that don't work, though. Personally, I don't care enough about them to find out if there are any fixes or workarounds, I generally just add the game to my "broken" list and play something else until the game developers fix their problems.
If you stick to Steam, though, there's a good chance your favourite games library will just work out of the box. Epic is actively anti-Linux so don't expect games on the Epic store to work and god forbid you try to use the crapware EA and Ubisoft force you to install. N=1, but I've been doing all of my gaming on Linux and almost everything on Steam just works for me. I've only had trouble running Halo but I found out that that was because of some kind of DRM sabotage by Microsoft, so I just ignored the game and moved on.
Just tonight I was mucking around with Remote Play from my Linux desktop to an Android phone.
* Lock screen got in the way. Attempts to unlock remotely froze the client.
* Game launched in windowed mode, ended up shifted and cropped. At least it launched! Putting it into borderless mode got it to fill the client screen properly, but rendered at a higher than optimal resolution.
* Sound didn't work on the client, only the host. Checking "play sound on host" fixed it?!
At least I eventually got it all to work.
SteamVR in Linux sort of works too.
* Async reprojection doesn't work and leads to horrible artifacts. The option to disable it globally is missing, and you have to go deep into the per-app settings.
* Sound has a 50% chance of being borked. Unplugging the headset sometimes fixes it.
* If you have an AMD GPU, its automatic power profile causes latency spikes several times per second. You either need to write to sysfs entries, or install third party daemons, and you need to add a kernel option in grub. Fun!
* Bluetooth power management for base stations doesn't exist, except for some third party scripts.
* If I have multiple monitors enabled, the headset fails to go into direct mode.
* The virtual controllers shown in the base environment are rendered as if the z-buffer is inverted, or maybe the normals are backwards. I'm pretty sure it's a bug in AMD's openGL implementation.
Google Earth works great. Attempts to launch Star Wars: Squadrons so far have failed.
Not enough.
Many games don't run yet.
e.g MS FlightSim won't run
For one, you will ultimately not win. For another, past a certain point, it should become clear that the tool you are using is not made for your use case.
I figure the script started as a Windows 8 debloater, and when updating it they went "well, surely nobody would want those installed" without worrying if they ever were installed.
In particular the Windows Store is not always possible to reinstall once removed.
For us lot? VLC. Just be sure to turn down the ridiculous 300ms buffer when you open your device.
I've used this one in the past. Works pretty well.
j/k of course
Whenever I run XP in a VM, I'm amazed that explorer windows not only open instantly, but fully drawn! In W10 it takes half a second to even respond, and then another half second while it draws the UI elements one by one.
If I move a folder, Sublime Text detects it instantly, but the same explorer window I used to move it takes several seconds to register the change it itself made...
My preferred UI:
Location bar Sidebar (file tree) | File List
Would be nice if each feature you don't need could be removed from the purchase price. I think the version I want would end up having a negative price tag ;)
Oh the horror... :)
Other things similarly take a while, like registering an update made elsewhere. These can be quite arbitrary, sometimes pretty instant, sometimes taking many seconds, and sometimes not updating at all until I explicitly refresh. I've even copied a small file to the same directory and waited several seconds before it showed up.
> Did you try to reinstall Windows?
For no sane desktop/similar operating system should “completely reinstall” be an off-hand answer for any but a massively significant error…
Windows 9x was a strange beast, being a VM running on top of a DOS hypervisor, but it was mostly C and inline assembly and felt fast, even with 8MB of memory and a 75MHz processor. Windows 2000 was quite less efficient and would have taken eight times the memory and twice the processor speed to achieve the same responsiveness. Even more with XP.
Nowadays Windows, the mere operating system, feels slow even on computers as powerful as datacenters of the 90s. Twenty five years of abstraction layers, subsystems, processes and libraries adding up, and it's getting worse (W11 vs W10).
It definitely won't run as fast as a VM on a modern host with a much more powerful CPU, significantly faster IO (especially if the VM is hosted on an SSD).
Also, once you hit the point where the guest OS can't cache as much as it wants (as you've allocated a realistic amount of RAM from time) the host layer may be caching reads at least in the extra memory it has.
[though I do get the point: if it can be as fast as it was on old kit, why can't Win10/Win11 be faster on modern kit]
You could say its a matter of getting used to given tool - but consistently when I watch colleagues doing similar tasks, I am so much faster, easily 2-10x depending on task. And thats folks with 20+ years of experience. Yet whenever I try to show my ways to others, nobody picks it up. Its like some mental blind spot, people generally are happy to learn more effective ways for their work, but not this one.
You can technically get a new window by launching a new instance of the app, but it takes as long to open as Windows 10's Explorer. Plus you get a nagging shareware screen ;)
I want to say "close but no cigar", but this thing isn't even on the right planet...
It might just run...
Interesting idea, I hadn't thought about ReactOS as a possible source of FOSS programs for windows - but why not? We run Gnu user land various places after all.
Curious about why it crashes. Did you build from source?
Or it could be because of the compatibility: XP's explorer doesn't run on 10, so we shouldn't expect its clone to run either! But I had to try :)
Still, considering it's open source and the closest thing what I do want, starting with this and stripping out the taskbar might get me a good result.
Same with MSPaint: just spent several days trying to get the leaked XP MSPaint to compile, to no avail. Looks like I'd have better luck starting with ReactOS's paint clone and modifying it so it's feature complete and has the original icons :)
https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile/
Edit: Also available on the microsoft store https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9p7vbbbc49rb?ocid=badge
PowerShell. It's builtin, uses little resources, is fast, has pattern globbing, autocompletion, and can be as efficient as using the coreutils on *nix.
Unfortunately nnn and Ranger don't work on Windows, and the WSL uses more resources than explorer so this workaround isn't resource efficient. Cygwin is very efficient and could be a better solution to run them, I haven't tried it.
edit: Looks like lf works on Windows: https://github.com/gokcehan/lf
Obviously running Windows in a VM will be slower, but besides, Explorer is more than just the file manager.
It used to be very easy to replace the shell (Explorer.exe) with your own binary, but while this is now harder in later Windows versions it is still doable. I loved to play around with that when I was younger, and before I got seriously into Linux.
Now, there is actually a few options:
- Aston Shell used to be my favorite, but it does not seem like it is actively developed anymore. It is also closed source, which is potentially a security concern.
- Classic Shell (Works for Windows 10)
- ExplorerPatcher (taskbar enhancements for Windows 11)
- StartIsAllBack (taskbar enhancements for Windows 11)
I do not recommend replacing the default file manager, because Explorer is already extremely good. If this is slow for you, most likely something else is causing it to be slow. E.g. Waiting for a external/internal storage device to respond perhaps?
Now, talk about Finder on Mac – while not slow, its UI is truly horrendous compared to Explorer on Windows or file managers in Linux.
If your system is slow, then keep in mind that a lot of things are going on with later versions of Windows that can make the system slow. I hate the "blackbox" nature of it, but fact is, you probably have a bottleneck somewhere, possibly you are still using a mechanical hard disk and/or do not have enough RAM for things to load properly. Windows prefetch should help speed things up, given enough RAM, but if you have too little, then it actually might make it worse.
I remember fiddling a lot with Windows services, like prefetch, search indexing. Etc. Basically turning these off will make a slow system feel more responsive. And, of course, Windows update and Windows defender should also be turned off entirely on older systems, because they will constantly pest you with updates and slow the system down. With bloatware added from the computer's manufacturer this only gets worse. Everything unnecessary running in the background should be purged from the system.
Typically things open near instantly for me. But, keep in mind in a VM, things is just horrible slow. Probably even more so if you run Windows 10 from a Linux host OS – I have had a lot of problems with that, and eventually I just gave up, because it was not fast enough for me.
For Windows, it is much, much better to setup dual boot.
The free version (discontinued but the last version is available) itself works great.