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Comment by kylecazar | Hacker News Reader

I boot into my Windows partition for work-related activities often, and hear about the demise of Windows all the time.

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.

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It’s your install. You aren’t running a consumer machine with all the garbage and bloat ware installed. My wife and I had personal laptops the same hardware level. Mine had a clean windows 10 install I paid some guy to do. Hers wasn’t. Hers became unusable after a year. My kid still uses mine several years later.

> I paid some guy to do

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

Well, built in feature of Reset PC will even download fresh iso for you and will boot in fresh install. Optionally you may ask to keep your files too.

> I have all of the annoying stuff disabled

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)

I will be honest since im with parent here, it took me literally 15m to figure everything out when I reinstalled this week. I just do all the nos on oob, once I get to desktop I uninstall OneDrive (via control panel, etc..), go to settings, activate windows -> disable stuff that I dont want -> customize start menu to my liking (settings button near power button, left-aligned, etc..) -> open start menu and right click uninstall all the apps (whatsapp, netflix, outlook, etc..) -> then go to explorer and change the defaults to my preferences and lastly open gpedit and disable all the AI and cloud search stuff under administrative templates (they are all there and have clean descriptions!!).

> they are all there and have clean descriptions

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

So you documented that work and made it public for the rest of us, right?

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.

People have made exactly such a project .. and one that has open annotated power shell scripts with hyper links to detailed explanations, forums, and rolling release.

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)

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

More information and video about and howto guides via a search for "Chris Titus Win Util"

Oh, thank the maker. I appreciate this immensely!

There also https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat and a few others

People do document all this, and people do create comprehensive projects to remove all this shit.

I can make the same complaint about any Linux desktop environment.

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.

In all Linux desktop environments, you have to spend a bunch of time cleaning out its adware, surveillance, work around its desire to use a remote password to access your local computer, and somehow suppress its desire to move your local files to the cloud?

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.

> In all Linux desktop environments, you have to spend a bunch of time cleaning out its adware, surveillance, work around its desire to use a remote password to access your local computer, and somehow suppress its desire to move your local files to the cloud?

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”

Not the parent, but last year I moved on to Win11 on a new laptop.

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.

I think it took me a week, too, until I ran into the windows debloater in a sibling comment: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

We need to bring back the Windows.CoRe.RePack.iso torrents

> I have all of the annoying stuff disabled, and basically have installed nothing besides the standard productivity/office tools.

Not everyone knows how to do that

I worry that things like ads in the start menu/search, OneDrive/Xbox/Office nags etc will morph into full enshittification, and ads you can't get rid of. It hasn't happened to an intolerable degree yet, but seems to be gradually getting worse.

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