Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need
theregister.com
theregister.com
Today’s versions of Windows seem less respectful of the user. Microsoft is treating Windows as a platform to advertise Microsoft’s products rather than as strictly a productivity tool. Even if a lot of users these days use computers more like entertainment and communication devices rather than productivity tools, software should still get out of the user’s way. Software should shut up and do what the user commands.
Unfortunately there are other software systems that have the same philosophy. Google constantly nags me regarding logging in and switching to Chrome. Even macOS has gotten a lot more nag screens in the past decade compared to the glory years of Jobs-era Mac OS X.
It’s amazing how so many organizations are dependent on Windows, macOS, and Google for their productivity, yet these platforms have become more annoying to use over the years, becoming impediments to productivity.
There’s a reason why their stock price is through the roof. Companies in the US have their first and foremost duty towards Shareholders, and only shareholders. This is not an opinion, I am speaking legally.[1] And what the shareholders want is for the company to squeeze out every dollar it possibly can from its products.
[1] Shareholder Primacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Hi, as former member of a board of directors, and also as a current shareholder in a company, you are wrong. The fiduciary duties owed to the company arise from the legal relationship between the directors and the company directed and controlled by them. The fiduciary duties owed to the shareholders do not arise from that legal relationship.
Try again when you actually graduate law school. Maybe then you can speak legally about something I do PROFESSIONALLY.
I did not say I am a lawyer - but that is a Supreme Court case any lawyer would be happy to cite in the court of law.
The legal legal requirement can be questioned but heaven help the modern CEO that doesn't abide by the shareholders-first ethos. Before the 1980s (before Thatcher, Reagan, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek et al era) companies had an understanding that they had a responsibility to both shareholders and the community that they operated in.
That latter notion is long since dead.
I think it's more that the people boards put in charge of businesses know which side of their bread is buttered on and naturally will try to make board members/shareholders happy or they'll be out of a job.
Customers/employees are treated as just means to that end.
Maybe they print money in spite of the user hostile stuff.
But they won’t, because they don’t care.
I don't think that's the right reason. They very much care about the opposite, that is, realizing their strategy of migrating from "buy-once-use-forever" to the subscription model. That's the reason they force everybody to use online user accounts and so on.
LTSC is a direct threat to this model so it's practically impossible to use at home/small business legally.
I bought a new iPad the other day. I've got notifications in System Preferences advertising five different services I don't want, plus more notifications in individual apps (like an advertisement for the Apple TV subscription in the TV app, which is not the same thing as the subscription service). I don't want Apple TV, Apple-filtered News, whatever the Apple exercise thing is, or the Apple Cultural Experience: just the hardware and software I bought.
I’ve made my decisions, leave me alone!
Perhaps you and GP aren't really the target market for their products. Part of why, after many years of Slackware and Arch Linux on desktops I assembled myself, compiling kernel modules, etc etc, I decided to pay Apple for the past decade is exactly because I don't want to make these decisions.
Frankly I pay Apple for the following things, in order or descending importance to me:
1) Decisions / sensible defaults / ecosystem / walled garden;
2) MagSafe cable so I don't trip on cords and/or damage my machines;
3) The subjective feeling that their corporate interests are more aligned with mine than other players in the market, viz. privacy etc.;
4) Pixel density;
5) Well-built aluminum bodies;
6) Large trackpads;
To be fair, I'm not saying the prompting for things I don't want (e.g. I don't consume any media services or exercise stuff) isn't annoying, but it seems to only happen once I switch devices every few years. It's been useful for me to discover services I wouldn't know about otherwise, which I now am a customer of, such as iCloud.
I guess I just wish they weren’t so… pushy. As a consumer, I get nudged by all kinds of companies every day, so I get a little… overstimulated (?) by it all, and sometimes just want to use it the way that I want to use the device.
I’m also the guy that has turned off notifications for almost every phone app, because it feels invasive of my brain space… I want to decide when I will use an app and when I won’t.
A company with plenty of income can invest in all sorts of nice things.
Guess it’s same way I scoff at the Porsche SUVs, but they fund R&D for the 911.
Now the fact that fifteen years later that iCloud is only 5GB for free is inexcusable
Are you saying it's not okay for a user to decide they just plain don't want it? Why shouldn't be they be allowed to dismiss it permanently?
Meanwhile Microsoft kept showing me upsells in File Explorer to move this or that to OneDrive despite me already paying for the damn thing.
Exactly the same here (and I've said so many times over the past 20 or so years). Sure, the W2K UI could be tarted up a little bit but no major functional changes. With security and hardware updates I'd be completely happy.
Microsoft's behavior forced me into migrating to Linux (and in that I'm not alone).
Windows ME was peak windows to 2000
This is a massive understatement. These days Microsoft is openly and aggressively hostile to the user and its getting worse every update. This is yet another of the curses of monopoly, the monopolists will eventually hold those under its sway with utter contempt. They are going to do things their way, and you are going to take it.
This is why it's hard to find an affordable dumb modern TV. They do exist, but they are pricy and made in small volumes. The market has spoken loud and clear.
> These days Microsoft is openly and aggressively hostile to the user and its getting worse every update.
In my opinion, the moment at which Microsoft started being actively hostile to the user was when they added WGA in the Windows XP era. Its existence meant that the owner of the computer would no longer be considered a trusted party; that piece of code was actively working against the computer owner. That led Microsoft to gradually adopt a mindset in which the owner of the computer is no longer supposed to be in control of the computer. That mindset got even stronger with the addition of DRM (which treats computer owners as if they were actively malicious), and with malware protection measures like Secure Boot and Kernel Patch Protection (which treat only code explicitly authorized by Microsoft as reliable).
There's also the move from making an application for an OS (for many GUI tools mostly explored what they need to provide, are 'done' and stable by now) towards clients for an online service, cross platform frameworks or websites where you could argue the browser is the OS shell. I'd guess if there's any strategic failing for MS with windows, it's that they haven't given developers much reason to make apps _for windows_ with things that can't be done elsewhere, even for gaming the constraint is loosening, and a lot of that is driven by AMD/nvidia/intel or following what is getting made for consoles.
It wasn't a lack of talent that caused a team to decide to put "Microsoft Rewards" ads that look like phishing scams on start menus and in notifications. Instead, some PM got a bonus or promotion for making and increasing usage of this awful product, degrading the user experience and siphoning off a tiny amount of money. A different organization would have had the ability to realize that's a terrible "feature" to add to the OS.
"Extinguish" is out; "Enshittify" is in. (Maybe the other Es have also changed.)
Exactly, Windows 2000 was such a comfortable workhorse. And lightning fast, it made me doubt why I was a Mac head. I switched briefly until OS X grew up and surpassed any version of Windows in reliability and versatility (for me).
On the plus side of Windows added features, PowerToys has some nice tools!
For the audio device switching mentioned in the article: Try downloading Soundswitch: Fixed this for me. (Note: There's a scammy-looking software that also goes by this name; be careful!)
This is about as dark-pattern-ey as it gets. Pretty sure I'm going to be making the jump to Linux for my next machine, or on this one if W10 becomes unusable after EoL.
There’s probably a way but I haven’t troubleshooted a Windows problem since 2008.
Settings -> System -> Notifications -> Additional Settings
Ofc it's buried.
- The ABI diaspora
- Sudo nominally being for special/power use cases, but being required for many things
- Doesn't feel like it's aimed at single-user PCs, and has associated UX problems
- Non-standard hardware has limited support.
It's possible that you are just experiencing friction moving to Linux because you are used to MS.
Easily writing and launching software is something Linux excels at.
I don't want to go into the details, but I regularly experience UX problems in Ubuntu. Even things like reading/writing a USB port requires sudo, or editing system config files, which is wild to me. And adding a trailing newline to the config file in question will prevent your GUI from booting. Adding an item to the PATH is a combo of unintuitive, or filled with incorrect instructions (Including Go's home page CAO yesterday...).
Or, software I write can't be launched without using having the user go to the CLI, or creating a GUI-specific config file and placing it in a certain location. This leads to the line I hear regularly "You should publish your software on the distro-specific app store", or "You should only install software from the app store". Which immediately leads me to think I have a use-case mismatch.
Now do the same in Windows. Messing with system files, without knowing what you are doing, is a recipe to disaster.
I think I didn't communicate something clearly: My concern isn't that misediting a system file causes disaster. It's that you need to edit system files to do routine things.
On Windows, the solution is simple: USB/serial works without editing system files or requiring launching the program via CLI with sudo. You double-click the program in GUI, and it works.
I use NixOS and I don't have UX problems because my UX is fully customized to work exactly how I want.
Plus, for every but of friction you may experience in Linix, the cons of Microsoft are much greater. They have no concern for your privacy, and exploit their workers and the environment.
Last time I used Microsoft (~8 years ago) I couldn't get that malware OS to stop forcefully suggesting and using their cloud services automatically.
There are many things that MS does that are just unacceptable.
I don't think that would be enough: adding those people to a team won't matter if the overall vision isn't there.
It needs, and I'm about to choke on my words here, a Steve Jobs at the helm saying "No, it needs to be like this".
Yes, I know that won't achieve perfection but there needs to be a coherent vision of what the OS is trying to be, or who it is aiming for.
Linux, right now is pure techie-driven. There isn't any vision at all! Every distro is subtly different and reflects the wants of the team that work on it.
It needs a company to take a distro and pick a direction, e.g. Linux for normies would have to remove almost all traces of command line, hard disk partitions, configs, package managers etc. All that shit would have to be hidden away, still in the background and available if wanted, but to use the OS it should not be a requirement.
Anyway, Linux is what it is :)
Several people at the Gnome Foundation seem to believe themselves to be this person.
The problem is, there are several such people, and they all seem to have terrible ideas on balance.
None of this sounds like anything I've experienced, or heard described, in 3 years of using the Ubuntu-derived Mint.
> Or, software I write can't be launched without using having the user go to the CLI, or creating a GUI-specific config file and placing it in a certain location.
How exactly are you distributing it? If the problem is e.g. that your users download an AppImage and it isn't executable, they can most likely change the permissions from the GUI. I don't know what you mean about GUI-specific config files. I had thought that https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/la... was pretty widely recognized.
Distros don't generally have "app stores" but rather package repositories, modulo branding. Publishing there isn't about making your launcher work; it's about letting the system handle dependencies and letting the distro maintainers patch (and build trust in) your code.
> None of this sounds like anything I've experienced, or heard described, in 3 years of using the Ubuntu-derived Mint.
To be more specific on those anecdotes I mentioned due to having hit them recently:
- Create an embedded device that talks to a PC over USB-serial. (Here you are not constrained to the whims of a GPOS! RTOSs are a dream in comparison, or forego entirely and use bare metal)
- Write PC software that talks to it (gets data from sensors etc)
- Try to run the program without Sudo on Linux. The USB won't work unless. I've heard the justification for this is that the USB might be a storage device, and storage devices should be restricted by the OS etc.
PATH works the same way in Bash, sh, zsh etc. etc. Various shells do offer some additional ways to manipulate environment variables, but you can rely on things like export.
If you meant "specific to a shell process", then yes:
> You regularly read instructions (I saw this in Go's official instructions yesterday) indicating to use the EXPORT command. This only works until you reboot
See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1158091 . The export command is essential. But of course settings that persist between sessions, between reboots etc. will be stored in a file. How else could it work? The point is that you aren't forced to use a GUI and you can examine the file as plain text and comprehend it.
> you have to hand-edit a sudo-protected file (bashrc, .profile etc), and there's a learning curve to it.
It's only root-owned (what I guess you mean by "sudo-protected") if it's system-wide. Per-user settings only require that user's rights, exactly as one would expect. That's not different from having to be an admin user on Windows to change system environment variables. Most of these config files are actually auto-run scripts, and understanding the system is an important part of familiarizing yourself with Linux as a developer. Trust me, Bash is much more pleasant to program in than Windows Batch files.
> I don't remember the details, but I've screwed it up multiple times.
If you want a wrapper for the process, it's not hard to make one if you can't already find one. It's strange to me how many developers don't seem to have any interest in building or customizing their own toolchain.
We choose which things we want to tinker with and improve, and which we would like to use as-is for that and other goals. For me, the OS is in the latter category.
I'm also more willing to solve problems in Linux. Because I primarily write web software, I've also found "Linux debugging" skills more useful to learn than "Windows debugging skills" - the Linux skills tend to translate almost directly to my career. And it usually feels worthwhile to contribute good bug reports/fixes upstream; in stark contrast to Windows OS issues (and some of the more popular Windows software).
Just the fact that installing user software still requires sudo in most distributions is very irritating to me.
Hence the rise of `curl <something> | bash` I think
The permissions are required because you will put the files in places that can be seen by all users of the system.
It's not different from UAC on Windows getting in the way of installing "for all users".
Why does software installed by a user puts stuff where it will be seen by all users?
> It's not different from UAC on Windows getting in the way of installing "for all users".
When I'm not installing "for all users" UAC isn't there, right?
Edit
For the purposes of installing software Linux is a single-user OS masquerading as multi-user.
Because the software package has its install paths predetermined. But other distribution methods absolutely are available. Flatpak works much more like what you're accustomed to; you can supply --user at the command line. Of course, this also means you get the bloat you're accustomed to; it still tries to share dependencies, but it's much harder in that world.
Also, because it is a good thing to think twice before installing any software.
> When I'm not installing "for all users" UAC isn't there, right?
Yes, and you can correspondingly put an Appimage in ~/.local/bin (or anywhere, if you don't care about having it on your PATH) without sudo, or run flatpak install --user without sudo.
> For the purposes of installing software Linux is a single-user OS masquerading as multi-user.
I am the only actual person who uses my system, but I made 7 user accounts (so far) and use at least 2 of them regularly. To say nothing of all the non-privileged users the system creates automatically, specifically so that certain background processes can run without violating privacy or corrupting anything important if they go haywire.
That really doesn't explain why this still is the case for the vast majority of distributions in 2025.
Or why these "predetermined paths" could not be transparently provided to the package and actually lead wherever.
> Flatpak works much more like what you're accustomed to
It's not "what I'm accustomed to". It's how it's supposed to work.
I, the user, am installing some software for me, myself, the user. I am not installing it for all users of the system. And that is the primary case for installing almost anything, especially in a user-facing system.
And yet...
> I am the only actual person who uses my system, but I made 7 user accounts (so far) and use at least 2 of them regularly. To say nothing of all the non-privileged users the system creates automatically
And... this somehow makes any of my points invalid?
> specifically so that certain background processes can run without violating privacy or corrupting anything important if they go haywire.
What does this have to do with a user installing software? Literally nothing. Besides implying that Linux is a single-user system masquerading as multi-user. Where the simple act of installing user software for a user can apparently break the entire system because it's always installed for all users.
If Windows of all systems could figure it out...
If you absolutely refuse to handle your own system's security ("Enter a password to do something on my own computer? No thank you!"), you really should leave the management of your computer to Microsoft, and ask their permission personally to view your own files. They'll faceid you, consider the merits of your request, and decide how much access you should have to your own life.
In that way you can avoid sudo, or the concept of a multiuser computer entirely.
As for the last one, it is simply untrue. Linux supports as much as or more hardware than Windows. Windows will more likely support the latest greatest stuff because people don't release hardware specs. But once Linux catches up, it keeps that hardware compatibility longer, and can always be reverted back to by using an old kernel even a decade or two after a piece of hardware is dropped.
Many things are special/power use cases. Freedom is power, and with power comes responsibility.
> Doesn't feel like it's aimed at single-user PCs
It isn't. But what you think of as problems, I consider opportunities. Switching between multiple user accounts is useful for identity management.
> I'm not trying to administer anything; I just want to write and launch software.
If you test and package and distribute your software, you necessarily administrate the environments in which the tests and builds occur.
I would argue that more time was spent on thinking "how we do hotplug CPU on our machine" than on "how that user will work with USB drives".
Most non-gamers probably only need a web browser, so I think a lot of people could get away with this (maybe with a distro that pre-installs drivers they need).
Microsoft is due righteous criticism as here, but let's be realistic about Linux as well.
of course there is. its just a matter of familiarity. if you only know Linux Windows is very hard to use as well.
I recently showed a client of mine how Ubuntu works out of the box. No hours of rebooting, no ads in any menus, no online account requirement, no persistent anti-malware scanning, no UI elements from the 90s showing through. Drivers can be an issue, power usage perhaps, maybe sleep is annoying (especially on shit hardware) on laptops but apart from that I don't know how you can even compare the frustration from a recent Windows system with a modern Linux desktop.
I helped some elderly friends and neighbours switch to Linux and they love it. Just a handful of programs, everything works, and nothing ever changes.
The ARCH/UBUNTU/DEBIAN triad have been consecutively producing a bottom contender for your desktop 30 years in a row. Slavery comes in different forms.
1. 3060Ti - I want to play games with all the bells and whistles that I get on Windows. I understand that for some games I'll need to boot Windows, but by and large I expect smooth experience.
2. I am familiar with Terminal and basic Linux commands because I've used Ubuntu a little, but god I love the UI of Windows 10. It's decline from Windows 7, but still miles ahead of either Ubuntu (used once in a while) or MacOS (used at work for five years, still super confused).
3. I want things to "just work".
I'm on AMD and play very little (Quake Champions, Doom Dark Ages, Tempest Dawn) but some anecdotal evidence points to nvidia working okay: https://nerdburglars.net/question/is-gaming-on-linux-with-an...
Arch, once setup, is 99% "just works" with some "update and peek at what's changed every now and then".
I wouldn't recommend diving right in. There are guides that show you how to shrink existing disk partitions or boot off external drives so you don't break your existing system. Once you're comfortable enough, then you can consider making the switch permanent.
XP/Window 7 were peak end-user OS's, once you got over the Fisher-Price look of XP.
The constraints you had in terms of user-UI were a massive advantage in terms of user-understanding. Now we're in a stupid era of the browser is the UI and everything is non-conformant with everything else in terms of looks/expectation/behaviour.
The version of MS-Office prior to the stupid ribbon-shit were also the peak versions. It's all been downhill since then with Windows ME and Windows 8 being exceptionally low points.
I'm about to shift to FreeBSD as my main driver as the Linux distribution fragmentation and wane in reliability/dependability and repeatability has given me the shits (how many apt-get equivalents are there now...?) I used to like Debian back in the day but now it and its derivatives (e.g. Ubuntu) give me the shits and Red-Hat and Fedora likewise, and Debian itself won't even install a working desktop. Apparently raising a bug for Fedora gets put into "Closed - not a bug" because IBM don't give a shit about quality anymore - even though the install resulted in an unbootable OS and I spent hours raising a proper bug report. Pop-OS was reasonable, but scaling where some apps have both big and little font sizes intermixed still mean its a clusterfuck of a kludge.
It's 2025 and apparently trying to mount network shares in fstab before the network interface is up isn't a bug. It's still not year of the desktop for Linux.
FWIW, I liked Apple in the 1980's - not so much since then.
I still appreciate all the contributions of those individuals out there is both GNU/Linux and the BSD'd trying to make the world a better place for themselves/others and sharing the results.
65k rows was a feature, not a bug...
I remember the original dev's for the Excel application used to pride themselves on its performance. I don't know what happened, except probably upper-management overrule.
I then used 2010 (least bad new version it seemed) until now... mixed feelings about even more "nu" excel...
I look forward to when I'm no longer using excel
At that point I had a choice. I could buy a new version of Windows 11 for $200 which is much worse than the Windows 7 I gave up. Or I could switch to Linux. Hello Linux! There's one application I miss dearly that was Windows-only, but overall I'm a happy camper now.
Some of the remaining warts are because it is wedded to the .NET CLR, so if the CLR says you can't do that then, too bad C# can't do that. It would not be practical to do anything about those.
I don’t like that there are 3+ ways of checking if a value is null tho.
We're discussing Windows and all its ad-ware/invasive changes, and someone brings up C# without giving a real explanation or examples.
The last few C# versions brought primary constructors, collection expressions, records(!), tons of Span<T> improvements/support, etc. I just flicked through the list, and nothing that stuck out to me as being bloated.
The main bloat C# has is older stuff that you really shouldn't be using anymore (e.g. ArrayList, dynamic, Thread, delegate keyword, etc).
I brought up C# because the article discusses a Microsoft Windows design philosophy that I feel is also reflected in their approach to C#. It’s a Microsoft thing.
I agree with you that the examples you mention were great additions to the language! But I still think the C# design team has some seriously screwed up priorities. My theory is that this one year cycle they are on is hampering their ability to make changes (like sum types) that require more than a year of work.
I understand that you shouldn’t always give users what they ask for - but this is something that has picked up steam in other languages because it’s actually useful and makes code bases easier to maintain.
I've used C# since 2008 for business software and high performance computing. I've not missed sum types at all. Most of what was added is something I see a lot of value in. I don't like that it, by design, obsoletes some older parts of the language, but that's about it.
I'm now using C# on linux almost exclusively. No complaints from me!
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...
All it takes is a method signature like:
Z read<Z>(Func<A,Z> readA, Func<B,Z> readB)
Presumably, you use a function like this to represent your sum type containing the value "avalue":
(readA, readB) => readA(avalue)
How do you get this to work?
I mean you could return a sum type if you really need to.
Formally a sum type is just something that turns a pair of functions to Z into a single function from the sum type to Z. In fact it shouldn't do more than that.
But when I want to use the value in two different places I don't want Z to be the same in both places.
That's where I'm stuck. When I instantiate the function that represents a value of the sum type I need to choose a return type Z, which is locked in for every use of the value.
I think I understand the idea. I don't see how to make it work in C#.
They continue to fiddle with design approaches to solve this. See https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/meetings/2025...
There is value in a language with minimal syntax like Go, but it's not the only choice. C# is a pretty nice language overall, even with all the warts. But every language people actually use does have ugly stuff somewhere.
but it does show how the suggestion for a more expensive version of a thing without ads is niche at best, since even the people complaining about it aren't aware when it does exist.
I unfortunately signed up to iCloud while traveling because I wanted my photos backed up (I've had phones stolen and broken while traveling so I know the value of backing up). It was a nightmare to downgrade to no backup. Persistent email reminders and other nags for months. Difficult to downsize icloud storage with prompts warning of data loss. Had to delete stuff on the phone because it was simplest way to downgrade. I'm still left with a permanent red badge on the settings app to "update payment details". I changed from Android to Apple because I liked the iPhone security features. But I'm unsure the nagging is worth it. The nagging is annoying enough that there's a good chance I'll change back to Android (although I'm no fanboi of Apple or Google).
Microsoft prioritises nagging about OneDrive because they want the income from signups. And nagging takes priority over other needs like lockdown (profit centers run businesses).
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
Windows 11 Pro still has ads, telemetry, and all the other misfeatures that professionals can do without.
I immediately started to think: but old behavior was so simple and obvious, what is there to change? The I right clicked to check. Immediately was hit with the wtf changes. Why? Why MS?
I use it to keep my apps (tools) in. I use the apps (hammer, saw, screwdriver etc.) to get a job done, then I put them away. The job of the OS isn't to recommend that I use Hammer v2.0 or to update my toolbox to the latest version.
The OS is, or should be, out of my way.
I agree with others here: Windows 2000 was peak OS for me!
Am I the only one who doesn't see it? I have all of the annoying stuff disabled, and basically have installed nothing besides the standard productivity/office tools. For me it's just a clean setup that stays out of my way. I'm running an 11 EAP build, and even then it doesn't crash, the software just works, and I never tinker with configuration or anything.
I trust people are in fact having issues, I just can't relate. Maybe it's how I'm using it.
Not everyone knows how to do that
Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
Download ISO
Use RuFus (if you are lazy) or manually write it a thumb drive or even just unpack it on your primary drive, launch install.
Here, your fresh and clean (almost, some stuff would get in through the WU if you are running a branded machine) install. 3
How long did it take you to disable everything, and in you many places? Are you sure you've disabled everything, or just learned to live with it (e.g. Win+S search defaults to first searching the internet, and only then showing local results)
But to answer your question, about 45 seconds with https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
> or just learned to live with it
If I’ve learned to live with it it’s not annoying stuff anymore.
This is not actually true in any way. When you install Debian, or most distros, you spend no time on this. If Ubuntu or Firefox slips something in that looks anything like an ad or a necessary cloud or telemetry, you scream it to the hills.
edit: if you consider your sibling replies, the time that it takes for a very technical person to get their Windows system usable is between 15 minutes and a week, and it involves dozens of steps.
Hold on a second, that’s not what I said. I said that Linux environments have “annoying stuff”. Firefox has been “slipping in” stuff for the past decade, Ubuntu and gentoo have terminal ads, Debian required extra steps to get my hardware working, and arch is the epitome of “I will never be done tweaking stuff”
Key word: all there.
There ate hundreds of templates in several categories.
It's good when you know all the places you have to turn shit off, as it's spread all over the place. It took me over a week and furious googling
Were we collectively using the same setup that turned all this stuff off — and I’m talking a real project to cleanup Windows installations — we’d be in a better spot. Unfortunately people want to profit from doing so, so nah we don’t really do that.
O&O shutup seems to take on a lot of this AND its free! This is what I usually recommend.
It's front ended by a powershell "Text" UI with broad function tab groupings of clickable installs, tweaks, update behavior options, and Build Your Own install disk / ISO image for VM's or reset.
( Includes install and run O&O Shutup and O&O AppBuster with other similar third party tools )
From a powershell admin prompt it's:
irm "https://christitus.com/win" | iex (stable) OR
irm "https://christitus.com/windev" | iex (bleeding edge dev version)
More information and video about and howto guides via a search for "Chris Titus Win Util"
People do document all this, and people do create comprehensive projects to remove all this shit.
It took... about a week at worst, I think.
Just run the bundled distribution to look how it goes, note the things you need to throw out, do a clean install (see my other comment in this thread), apply the tweaks.
The longest one was to disable the effing F23 (aka Copilot) key, PowerToys weren't helping so I used the trusted SharpKeys, which I already use for 10+ years to remap idiotic PrtSc to ContextMenu on ThinkPads.
Sure, I'm not your average computer illiterate Joe, but if we are talking about a comparison with a typical *nix distribution... like in a sibling comment there is "Not everyone knows how to do that" about tweaking, but the same applies to *nix too.
We need to bring back the Windows.CoRe.RePack.iso torrents
So I went through a period of distro hopping and ended up choosing the distro I used to make the most memes about: Arch. Very solid, always on the latest drivers and kernel, everything works out of the box, and I can play pretty much any game without issues. I’d recommend it 10/10.
To be fair, I did run into one problem: in the Red Dead Redemption remake, the game would freeze on the initial screen, but that got resolved.
Basically set you region to Ireland while installing the OS and edge can be removed, start menu bing search can be removed, ai crap and all ads can be removed.
> Make audio device switching easy
> One of the biggest unresolved hassles in Windows 11 is how difficult it is to switch audio output and input devices at the OS level. It seems like almost every day I have a problem where I want to listen to audio on my desktop speaker, but instead the sound starts coming out of my USB headset. A good chunk of the time, my computer also wants to send audio out of my monitors, which have 3.5mm audio jacks, but nothing is connected to them.
They (finally!) added this in Windows 11, and it's one of my favourite quality of life improvements. Ctrl + Win + V.
I don't know how much was trimmed down but ads are gone and reportedly it has better performance.
I work in the networking space, and regularly tweak the IP settings to do my job.
Over the last 25 years, I have been utterly confounded as the number of clicks it takes to get from the Desktop to changing an IP address or DNS setting seemed to jump from 2 or 3 to something like 5 or 6 with all these intermediate settings pages that don't appear to serve any real purpose.
Just show me my damn adapters and let me configure them!
Win 11 seems to be moving back in the right direction, but I switched my daily driver long ago and won't be coming back.
If Microsoft wanted to fix Windows it would be an easy task. Step 1: Delete everything added since Windows 7. Step 2: Delete all dotnet crap. Step 3: Make the APIs good by deleting almost everything and making new plain C89 APIs. Step 4: Realize we need a new operating system and delete all of Windows and start over.
And you can't complain about the API. It's so good and established that games can now just use the Windows API to run on Linux.
This destructive attitude will just turn people off your cause.
The sad part is that I'd gladly pay Microsoft double what they currently charge for something that basically works like Windows 7 did. It's like a theme park where I pay admission for the privilege to be upsold various add-ons. So now I just don't pay them anything.
Other issue is that some things just cannot be uninstalled. Because of the GDPR I've seen companies run AppLocker & Co. to block Microsoft sh*t from running that they couldn't get a hold of otherwise.
I can see ReactOS getting a lot more developers and a huge budget if this goes on...
They even added a typical dark pattern that on clicking "No" another "But... We recommend it, are you sure?" appeared.
What a disgrace to push such an ad on people's computers. This abusive behavior is their company culture.
I tend to have (on two monitors): Built in monitor, any desktop- MŚ teams, Outlook and Notepad.
Second (4K) monitor, Desktop 1-tmux in WSL. Desktop 2-Web browsers Desktop 3-spare Desktop 4-My Ide (10+ Windows if vscode with WSL plugin) Desktop 5-Excel,Word etc.
AutoHotKey let's me change between desktops with win+X key (where X is a number) and moving an app to a specific desktop is only win+shift+X away.
I've been using a similar setup on Linux for many years, except outlook/teams is replaced by my Cctv window. The only problem is on Linux if you have focus let's say in desktop 1 monitor 2 (tmux in alactity), you them do win+2 to go to screen 2 into a browser(still monitor 2), you then press win+2 hoping to go back to desktop 1 alacritty... Your focus ends up on monitor 1 in the Cctv window.
This never happens on Windows. When I go back to a desktop X the focus stays with where I've left it.
Of course they are.
Copilot and Recall are not what most users want, but they are what Microsoft wants:
The longer a product goes, the more features it gets (or loses) that some people want, some people don't.
It would be nice to have an easy to modify checklist of what stuff you want to keep/remove on a default installation.
I think the current state of iOS is pretty good in regards to that: You get a somewhat-sane default pack out of the box, and you can remove crap like Freeform and Journal (which should have been part of Notes to begin with) and install other Apple apps from the App Store if you need em.
Having arbitrary features that connect to arbitrary web-services which could extremely easily be an optional application is not fine.
That ship has long sailed my good sir/sirette.
But it is an easy trap to fall into.
Edit: lol, I got down voted. Do you think these things are not possible on linux?
On the other hand corp forced me to move from pc to mac, hardware is awesome but I need to get used to software (keyboard shortcuts), it looks and feels like linux with drivers that actually work (I know it technically it's not linux, I'm just saying that it feels like it, probably due to history of unix/bsd/linux).
Same with a Wacom tablet, ext4-formatted drive, Xbox/Nintendo controllers, DAC software, Sony LDAC headphones... much of Linux' driver support is best-in-class. It just depends on what you own (like all OSes).
That meta commentary was part of the substance of my comment. And it relates to the article.
To be more specific, I feel strongly against people who defend Microsoft, and their massively immoral actions like their military ties, and invasion of privacy.
I think these people defend Microsoft largely because they are used to it, therefore have a bias towards it, and because they feel attacked when linux users point out that they are supporting an evil megacorporation.
It's sort of like how members of one religion often feel attacked by the mere existence of people who follow other religions, or no religion at all.
I think that people with sufficient technical capability shouldn't support microsoft, and should use open source software.
As for stuff "we" do not need, who is "we"? MS needs the stuff, which really means some decision maker within MS is persuaded it is needed, and their incentives do align all the well with those of users.
With all the crap taken out Windows 11 is a pleasant os experience for me.
When a user opens a 2nd file explorer, it should open next to the existing one, not on top of it.
I was capable enough to be professionally effective with Linux but I stayed on Windows because it was the path of least resistance. I had decades of conditioning and habits built around how Windows worked. Everything was installed and configured and setup and familiar. So I just accepted the nuisance of the injected ads and data harvesting and bloatware because it was the path of least resistance. But despite all that, I finally had enough of Microsoft's shenanigans and resolved I was done.
I used ChatGPT to successfully navigate some of the more esoteric errors, installation headaches, and software setup stumbles I've encountered getting Linux set up. No Wine or VMs either, RhythmBox and LibreOffice and MakeMKV and Steam all work great on Linux. If I need Office I've got the Office web apps. PC game support has gradually improved on Linux. The availability of emulators and Emulation Station means I don't miss my extensive LaunchBox setup that sits on my Windows partition. The end result is a setup that has kept me out of my Windows partition for months at a time.
I don't really care who wins, whatever that means, but Linux is polished and fantastic and performant. I wish I'd made the jump a decade ago.
Out of interest, any specific issues that stand out in your memory?
Also, you're aware of https://forums.linuxmint.com/, yes?
In terms of issues, getting certain mounts to persist took some time. I had jump back into Windows and change some settings to get Windows to give up control.
I tried to install a few packages, like Emulation Station, that presented some headaches but I worked through it.
I tried installing SpaceDrive and it was a slog that eventually went nowhere. It took a lot of effort to get it compiled and running and then it didn't really work, so I gave up. It's alpha software, but given the press (and investment) it's received I expected a smoother experience.
Installing MakeMKV took a small bit of gymnastics to install, but once it was installed it worked great. Setting up backups on Mint didn’t behave as I expected at first, but I figured it out.
I didn’t really have any issues, per se, with Mint. It was a breeze. I’m sure the forums are great, but GPT hit enough that it wasn't too terrible when it missed. And it has a lot less latency than searching a forum or posting and waiting for responses.
Would it work? Would there be demand?
Hell, I'll run it for them: I just want Windows 2000 with some security fixes :-)
Just a crazy thought but hey, you never know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Please, just point to a good Windows alternative and I'll leave, Microsoft can play these stupid games because they know their marketshare. We are stuck with them.
Well, someone inside the company definitely asked for them. Their Microsoft lackeys then delivered the "new features", as they always do.
"In recent years, we've seen Redmond push for useless local AI features, in a bid to sell everyone Copilot+ PCs that they don't need."
Microsoft has been selling computer users on "features" they don't need since at least the 1990s.
"The house Bill Gates built has turned Windows into a piece of spyware, insisting that you sign in with a Microsoft account so it can gather more data about you, and cajoling you to run Recall, which takes snapshots of your sensitive personal information."
Wager: Thus author is not switching away from Windows. Ever. He will jump through any hoop. What choice does he have. None. He may even be paid to keep using it
Microsoft collects vast amounts of data both from and about computer users, including computer user behaviour, and yet the author claims Microsoft "isn't a good listener". I beg to differ.
With all the data it collects why would Microsoft ever need to "listen" to tech journalists' opinions, including ones who purport to speak for other computer users.
The company has ample data about what computer users are willing to endure. It is most certainly "listening", i.e., monitoring. It began acquiring companies just to get more data. It's collecting vast amounts of data _from a variety of sources_ about computer users every second.
Over thirty years of complaining about Microsoft Windows, and to what end. Windows users generally cannot and do not switch to another OS. Truthfully, very few complain or request features. Those who do are a "vocal minority". There used to be entire websites such as annoyances.org devoted to complaints about Windows. Not anymore.
Perhaps the true goal of "articles" such as this is not to obtain changes to Windows (probability: almost zero) but to garner an audience of frustrated Windows users and boost online ads revenue. With onlilne ads as the driving incentive, the author and Redmond are part of the same problem.
"If you were to go back in time to the DOS era and tell people staring at their blue WordPerfect 5.1 screens that they could move text, images, videos, or even files between applications with a couple of keystrokes, they'd be blown away."
For me, the solution to clipboards in VGA textmode (not "terminal") was and still is tmux buffers
Combined with UNIX pipes this is more powerful and flexible than anything possible using Windows
"2. Two or three clocks in the Taskbar
3. Add a fourth modifier key
4. Allow remapping of all keyboard shortcuts
5. Bring back the movable, resizable taskbar
6. Firewall for audio
7. Pin apps to specific screens
8. Program groups launch multiple, related apps at once
9. Make audio device switching easy
10. Cut the Microsoft-induced distractions"
I have none of these problems using a UNIX-like OS but let's assume that's irrelevant
The relevant difference is that if there is something I do not like in the UNIX-like OS, I can edit the source and recompile
Not possible with Windows; the author is stuck with whatever Microsoft decides to do next
Futile appeals to Redmond may continue for another three decades