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Comment by buybackoff | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I had to run Windows recovery only once over the last 5+ years, after running some debloating script with many thousands stars on GitHub.

I think the Pro version is enough for reasonable experience, most of the terrible stories originate from the Home version, which should be avoided like the plague.

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I've spent several days trying to get Pro version to usable state. By usable I mean that it doesn't kill my work session because some random app I've never installed, used or asked for fails its auto-update in the middle of the day and kills the WSL process. It still has magically resetting settings so if you are not careful telemetry/ads/spying will be back on the menu. It still has hostile settings to keep your computer connected when it sleeps which are very hard to turn off.

There are multiple settings in Windows that are hidden which only appear in the menu when you add a registry entry. There are so many anti-patterns in Windows it feels like defending against a determined hacker who tries to make your life worse and is hunting for a slight misstep to turn the shit back on.

Group Policy Edit is the way to restrict many things. Disabling automatic updates helps. I have had forced reboots very rarely, I believe that were severe vulnerability fixes.

But my use case is never 24/7, I hibernate it overnight and every time I leave for longer than going to a grocery shop, and I have several Proxmox boxes with proper OSes for hosting stuff. Windows + WSL is my dev/media/web/files/OneDrive machine, a compact silent SFF box that is powerful enough for 90+% of my daily tasks. Lately I try Linux Desktop on Fedora/Ubuntu with every major version, however RDP server and secure boot that I can trust to work and not break myself - these things remain unsatisfactory.

I disabled auto updates by pinning the target version in group policy and then finding some hacks on the web to make it always ask before download. I've run many other random scripts and then found Windhawk to remove more annoyances (taskbar and sections of start menu).

I then shut down more things and disabled Bluetooth on lock. It is now usable and doesn't crash but feels very fragile. I will soon face dilemma of allowing "feature" updates or be out of security ones.

Yeah I don't get the hate. The only issues I have had with the "Pro" version of Windows were hardware related and it wasn't a big deal.

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