Hacker News Reader

Comment by herbst | Hacker News Reader

Is that true? No stock tickers, no ads, no ai nags? No "news"? No weird notifications that ask for my attention? I guess no regular weird update windows would be the case, but the rest?

View on HN

Yes, your MDM lets you do almost everything you want to Windows. You can really tell that it is a commercial first offering, or at least used to be. And given that as a company you are also paying them I guess they don't care that much that there are fewer ads.

On any Windows release, you can switch all of those off, and GPE out the update channels for non-system-critical changes. Windows Enterprise doesn't even get the so-called 'fun stuff'.

I only have this one windows PC and I hate it, so correct me if I am wrong but I can't simply turn these off. First I either need to understand the registry or trust some third party software, and second windows just turns it on again in the next updates where I have to go back and trust random third party software again.

Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all.

And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications.

You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?

Yes; as a home user you have to use some 3rd party script or software to achieve the same outcome, but there are examples that are well-regarded and open-source.

e.g. https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

This looks less sketchy than what I used. Surprised I found so much sketchy stuff and not simply that.

Guess that's like adblock these days. You need domain specific knowledge or you get not what you expect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com