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Comment by xerox13ster | Hacker News Reader

It can be ripped out using regedit, I'm sure.

It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.

If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.

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I used to bother with things like registry edits, until I eventually realized the technical difficulty of operating Windows has surpassed that of Linux.

Of course I still have to use Windows for work and even a few edge cases at home. But otherwise I've been quite happy since I swiched to Linux as my primary driver.

Win11debloat solves 99% of annoyances with Windows 11 in <5 minutes. I’ve used in as the first step on every Win 11 install for years. It’s mostly just a bunch of Powershell commands disabling/configuring features.

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

Nothing has ever reverted after an update for me, so it’s a one-and-done thing. Ironically, afterwards Windows 11 has fewer noticeable ads than my MacBook which still continually pushes Apple services/shows/etc in settings/push notifications.

The only setting that I’ve ever seen sneakily disabled in recent years is the Edge default search engine but that's out-of-scope for Win11debloat.

It's better to get rid of Windows completely. You should try Arch if you enjoy tinkering.

I know I can because I've done it on my home machine, but my work computer is restricted by IT. I can't open regedit or install most software unfortunately.

Yeah I asked my director if I could rip out the shell and replace it with X Server running in WSL2 and he said it would make the IT people very upset.

If you use an X Server and environment to launch programs inside WSL2, what part produced by Microsoft is still providing some value to that setup? Wouldn't you just exec ELF programs to be run on top of the Linux kernel and Windows would be just some useless abstraction layer between the Linux kernel and the hardware? Or would you still use some actual Windows programs? How would that work with the X Server?

There was some utility I found a few years ago that would let me start an X Server and use it to replace the main explorer process. There was some support for standard Windows apps due to the background System processes still running. I think it ended up running the Windows desktop shell as a window in and of itself.

I wanted to use a tiled window manager and my dot files for continuity purposes. The Windows apps I need to use are stuff like anyconnect and Teams.

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