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Win11Debloat – declutter and improve your Windows experience

72 points| NKosmatos | 3 months ago |github.com

44 comments

order

npteljes|3 months ago

I rather suggest Win 11 LTSC. The Windows 11 IoT Enterprise 2024 LTSC supposedly:

- doesn't have the tpm requirement

- no copilot, recall, edge browser, ms store

- allows local setup

- no feature updates, only security

- built-in options to disable telemetry

Keys go for $300 in some stores, or, one can use an activation emulator, or massgrave.

Scripts can be good for one-time use, but it's swimming against the current. As soon as you stop swimming, the current wins. With the LTSC, you don't swim against the current, but rather choose a different current. In its case, it's MS themselves who provide the debloating.

xeonmc|3 months ago

Just use Rufus+MAS for Win10 IoT LTSC, no need to stoop down to win11

sitzkrieg|3 months ago

why not windows 10 LTSC? higher performance

Krssst|3 months ago

Where can one buy a key? I got denied when I tried buying one because I was not a company.

mock-possum|3 months ago

You can get a legit windows 11 key from a reseller for an order of magnitude less - isn’t it worth a couple hours of your time to save ~$250?

psyclobe|3 months ago

That does sounds like a dream but alas it is not all that “good”. I for one would be first in line though if Microsoft ever made a true bare bones dev focused shell or something or other; maybe a complete rethink on compute.

drnick1|3 months ago

The best way to debloat Windows is to switch to Linux. I think that GNOME3 is now more polished than either Windows or Mac, and 95% of Windows games just run out of the box through Proton.

Night_Thastus|3 months ago

Proton is getting there but even so, it doesn't make Linux+Proton a drop-in replacement for people who have used Windows all their lives.

For people with more technical background, who are enthusiasts about computers and software - sure. For a lot of casual users who need things to 'just work' the way they always have, asking them to swap to an entirely new OS is nonsense.

I'm considering it myself but even with years of experience on Linux I'm still cautious because of a lot of edge cases where something I use now wouldn't work or wouldn't work well in Linux.

watermelon0|3 months ago

While the 95% figure is possibly correct when considering all games since the beginning of Windows, the remaining 5% includes most modern multiplayer games.

pragmatick|3 months ago

I would've expected this kind of inane take on Reddit or X, not here. Or on SO where somebody asks "How do I do X?" and is told "X sucks, you want to use Y".

Saris|3 months ago

IMO Gnome is one of the worst DEs out there, its so ugly and unfriendly to use, everything is hidden and hard to find.

wpm|3 months ago

I can’t take this advice too seriously if you really think GNOME3 is more polished than Windows or macOS. Both of the latter have gotten worse over the years undoubtedly but GNOME3 is fundamentally flawed and bad.

npteljes|3 months ago

Yes and no. No, because sometimes Windows cannot be reasonably substituted, to no fault to the user. The usual suspects, multiplayer games, some software, when you need complete interoperability, etc.

By the way, that 95% is lower actually. If you count ProtonDB's Plat + Gold for the top 1000 played games on Steam, it's 81%. For plat+gold+silver, it's 89%.

Source: https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

vivzkestrel|3 months ago

- I am thinking of writing a very detailed post right here on HN on testing all the windows 11 debloat tools within a VM. My only question is how do I determine or say benchmark or measure which of these debloat tools works the best at the end?

mock-possum|3 months ago

Keep a spreadsheet of all the optional features / bloat you’re looking to remove, rate each solution as a percentage of how many of those columns it ticks, and maybe also do a review on boot time and idle RAM usage?

npteljes|3 months ago

I'd love to see data regarding maintenance. It's nice to debloat once, but does the debloat stick? How does it interplay with updates? Can I count on the script being updated for 1, 2, 5 years?

fastily|3 months ago

Personally I gave up a long time ago and just installed Debian Linux. But it’s wild to me that the average non-technical/casual windows user has to put up with so much bs… it’s an atrocious ux

neighbour|3 months ago

I tried all of these debloating scripts a couple of years back but nowadays I just stick with LTSC

golden-face|3 months ago

I am convinced MS has code in Windows which looks for de-bloating and then purposely slows things down. Or the code base has gotten to the point where things are so entangled that de-bloating leads to the slow down as every app tries to connect to telemetry or hook into Copilot and stumbles when the bloat is not there.

polyterative|3 months ago

this script messes up pen tablet settings and destroyed usability with my wacom pen. Good script just don't use default settings if you use wacom stuff