Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone
theverge.com
theverge.com
EDIT: Ah, I'm seeing the sarcasm now. I guess I didn't read it closely enough.
Back in Detroit's "Malaise Era", all of the executives received company cars that had first gone through the workshop to correct defects. The executives had no way to personally experience the problems that regular customers saw and felt; even worse was that they only experienced a product that had been worked over and prepped - leading them to think that their product was better than it really was.
MS (and probably even Apple) is heading for disaster, and their cloud revenue is probably going to mask it until it is too late.
I would love to read/listen the internal conversations at Microsoft about this thing.
Win11 is clearly the new Win8. Still hoping it can be skipped entirely and that a more desirable Win12 will eventually be announced.
10 was full of spyware from the outset but for some reason people argue that it is better than 11 in this regard in a weird bit of revisionist history. The biggest problem with Windows 11 is it dumps hardware support for anything remotely old.
If you use an alternate shell then you get an error msg as it expects explorer/start menu.
A lot of the unwanted parts of Win8 lived on, but they could mostly be ignored, they weren't aggressively shoved into your face
Right now it looks like Win12 will just be Win11, but with more integrated "AI"-stuff.
-- EDIT --
After all, Windows is just a set of executables and registry entries. The former or the latter can be removed or replaced somehow.
So now it's "Tiny11 Builder" which is like a template script you select your features from, and you have to supply your own Windows ISO which you download from Microsoft:
https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder
After the process is complete you end up with your own custom Tiny11 ISO, debloated according to the Powershell builder script.
Using your Tiny11 ISO no differently than the original ISO from Microsoft, you can then clean-install that same debloated version on target PC's instead.
Once installed, it does have a smaller resource footprint, but this is Windows 11 so it's never going to be exactly "tiny".
Alternatively, Ameliorated seems to have taken a similar path to Tiny11, also for Windows 10 as well:
But it’s not.
My low-end Xiaomi backup phone is a good example. It’s so dirt cheap I’m quite sure most of my money goes into the hardware itself.
I could debloat it, but eh, it’s just a cheap backup phone so I can tolerate the ads and bloats.
I like that. I am going to use this moving forward.
So, here I am, with a Win10 VM at my fingertips. Do you have any advice or suggestions on how to tweak or configure the machine or the installation, preferably in such a way that gives me control over what the OS does? One interesting example is, can I configure the network to discard stuff sent to Microsoft servers with minimal disruption?
Beyond that, there are also custom versions of Windows that come preconfigured with the bloat and spyware removed. I've been using ReviOS[2] on a mini gaming PC for the past year and have had no issues so far.
[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...
Pipewire being decent at JACK helps, so does using Arch's `linux-rt` kernel package.
Linux can do the same thing. The Linux desktop can beat Windows just by sitting still while MS destroys its product.