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Comment by azeemba | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't heard of this command. `Get-AppxPackage` seems to enumerate all the packages that the post talks about so its a good way to explore in a non-destructive way.

It does remove the Microsoft Store and WSL with it which is important to me. Maybe a safer strategy is to look through that list and remove specifically the ones that are annoying

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The advantage of including everything, or the problem with trying to cherry-pick, is that many problems are only the result of the partial but incomplete sets of interoperating components.

If service A is always trying to use service B, but you removed service B, you can have annoying problems caused by service A hanging and timing out behind the scenes or presenting buttons that don't work etc.

One way to avoid that is never remove anything, but another way is to remove both A and B.

One way to get both A and B without knowing what they are, is get everything.

And this particular method, using an actually fairly managed and graceful command (managed/graceful meaning not just removing files and editing the registry, but only running a user-facing command and interface) is like an automatic filter to include only things that don't actually break the OS.

Have you tried this method yet? Appx packages tend to be very good about declaring their dependencies so that removal is easy and safe.

They’re not suggesting deleting individual files or mucking with the registry, they’re talking about using a clean, user-facing tool just in a more surgical and thoughtful manner.

That's what I said? Did you mean to reply to the same parent comment I did? I fully agree this is a quite good trick, or at least is a solid theory, not claiming to have done it.

It's probably easier to just remove everything and then add back what you want.

It is incredibly difficult to re-add the MS store if you remove it. Consider it non-revert-able. Just a warning in case someone thinks that is what you meant by your comment.

Get-AppXPackage *WindowsStore* -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

Did you have this command memorized, or are you natively highly competent in PowerShell?

(I'm a BASH loving freak and haven't spent any time learning WinPS.)

In my experience, most greybeards on this forum will be able to recall that command from memory. It's part of the reason why HN is the place to be, these days.

Sheeeeeit, I had grey in my beard before the Windows store even _existed_.

These days, if you're serious about tech in itself, and not just its money-making potential, you're bound to get stress-induced grey hair and beard very fast...

Every time I tried to learn poweshell I am always put off by the capitalization and verbosity of commands. Not sure if I'd be feeling this way had I used poweshell first before being exposed to bash and windows cmd.

It's verbose, sure, but it has great autocomplete support to go along with it.

It's case-insensitive, so the capitalization is just to make it easier on the reader. Add mentioned there's enough auto-complete that you don't really have to care.

I think once you understand what the individual bits do, it's easy to memorize them, then reconstruct the command from what you've memorized. The only part specific to the Store app is "WindowsStore", the rest can be used for installing any app.

Yeah, I don’t understand the laziness of this option. The list isn’t that long, just figure out which packages you don’t want, put them in a text file, then iterate over that file and remove them. Repeatable and easy to back out out because you know what you removed. All in you’re talking less than an hour if you decide to google every single package in the list.

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