5 ms·

In my experience, attempts to debloat or fix Windows results in a broken system sooner or later, after a sufficient amount of updates have elapsed. Nowadays I

by suby 4y ago

In my experience, attempts to debloat or fix Windows results in a broken system sooner or later, after a sufficient amount of updates have elapsed. Nowadays I treat Windows as I would a force of nature -- There's no negotiating or changing it, I just let it roll in and do whatever it's going to do.

bipson 4y ago
Well, there are alternatives...
- sentientslug 4y ago
  This is such a trite and unhelpful comment. Everyone on HN knows there are alternatives (which are not even true alternatives as far as compatibility with most software is concerned)
  - bipson 4y ago
    Thanks for your comment. But I disagree -- almost no one has to "just accept his fate" and be stuck with Windows nowadays. Unless you are a gamer or you strictly work with Windows only software, there are plenty of alternatives. And just to be clear, nowadays you might not find everything for Linux or BSD, but there are quite a lot of perfectly fine MacOS alternatives for most Win tools.
smt88 4y ago
> attempts to debloat or fix Windows results in a broken system sooner or later My anecdotal experience is the opposite, after ~20 years of de-bloating and customizing Windows. The updates seem to just reset the de-bloating, rather than breaking things.
- anfilt 4y ago
  I don't use windows as much I used to anymore, but this is my experience as well. Mainly, been using linux for the past 4 years. However, I say part of the problem is that windows updates are pushed out in a big blob instead the update being pushed in a more granular fashion. This ends up in with sometimes an update containing files or setting for something you removed. There is no reason it has be like this, but that is how updates work on windows, and I don't think Microsoft is going to change that any time soon. I am imagine in theory it would be possible for a community to break down each update into smaller discrete chunks. However, the community would have to be a decent size and dedicated enough to keep up with the rate MS rolls out updates. Also there some things like Edge and Cortana that current day windows is not very happy with if you nuke it from the system.
- smileybarry 4y ago
  It depends, the yearly “Feature Updates” essentially do an in-place upgrade instead of patching it. There’s a whole “Windows.old” folder afterwards and all.
  - tech234a 4y ago
    The big ones do that, yeah, but then others are just tiny “enablement packages” that just turn on the new features that were updated into the previous version but disabled. [1]: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/what-is-enablement-package-in-windows-10 https://www.thewindowsclub.com/what-is-enablement-package-in...
- lproven 4y ago
  I agree with this. De-bloating Windows is increasingly useful and helpful, and this is especially true if one dual-boots with Linux. I mainly run Linux these days, and older versions of macOS on the desktop. But I was an early adopter of Windows (v2.01 in the late 1980s) and it was the backbone of my early career: the first ~25 years. For me, the version that drove me away was Windows XP, and I find it amusing that now people look back on XP as a classic lightweight version, when its bloat is what drove me to Linux on the desktop, and spending as little as possible on cheap old Apple kit and judicious upgrades to run the then-new Mac OS X. XP had themes. That's bloat. But they're easy to turn off; reset to the Classic theme, disable the theming service. Getting rid of other bloat, such as Movie Maker, the "files and settings transfer wizard" or whatever it was called, of IE and Outlook Express, of Media Player etc., was harder. In the end, I used NLite and built a custom install CD. Win7's bloat is harder still. Win8 was little _but_ bloat. Win10 is... barely acceptable but it's getting easier to turn all the junk off now. I rarely use it but at least I can uninstall all the Metro/Modern/Store crap, and use Ninite to install a selection of conventional Win32 FOSS apps to replace the MS touchscreen-oriented junk. Having read this post, I will be bolder, bin the Store and all the .NET stuff too. I don't want PowerShell, any version. I don't want .NET apps or a fancy terminal. I don't want VS Code or any of that. If I have to use this mess of an OS, I want it lean and cut down to basic simple apps, preferably FOSS, with as few runtimes as possible. Win11 is, for me, mostly unusable. There's almost nothing left but bloat now. The taskbar is unusable, no longer able to be placed vertically, where it belongs on a widescreen. The Start menu is a sad crippled thing built by graphic designers who didn't know how to use the original one. Explorer Patcher helps, but it can only do so much. Disabling Teams, widgets, all that junk, and every Modern app, leaves something that is just about functional, but uglier than ever, and less friendly and less convenient than ever before. I'm not a gamer, so I don't care about games performance. I'm not a developer so I don't care about that, either. So, yes, go for it, remove absolutely everything you can, disable hibernation, disable Fast Boot, remove all the Modern junk, cut that OS back hard, delete every temp file in every folder, turn off System Restore, turn off all the chrome, and then you can leave a smaller C drive and have a parallel install of a slightly leaner meaner OS that doesn't waste CPU and GPU cycles on shiny. That means no GNOME, no Cinnamon, no KDE, no Budgie. No Snaps, no Flatpaks, and I'm increasingly leaning towards no systemd either. Xfce or LXDE and native packages of native apps. It's a sad day that this seems to be the case, but Java apps look small and fast compared to modern abominations such as Electron.
chaosbolt 4y ago
Yeah but my Windows 11 powerful laptop takes longer to boot than my old Windows 10 pc... there is no way you can just accept the bloatware and telemetry on top of the price of the OS.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Upgrading from Windows 10 to 11 (on an unsupported cpu on top of that) stopped me from upgrading my workstation because performance improved so much due to better memory management. I don't know if it takes longer to boot since I rarely restart.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    I don't understand. Performance improved, so you didn't upgrade your workstation? What?
    - smileybarry 4y ago
      They meant they gave up on their hardware upgrade plans, not software. Stuff ran faster so suddenly the CPU upgrade wasn’t needed, etc.
- xist 4y ago
  How are you attributing the longer boot time to 'bloatware' and 'telemetry'? I'm assuming you've measured this can you provide stats I'd be curious which components of Windows 11 is causing this. I'm assuming you've downgraded to Windows 10 on this machine with the exact software versions loaded to determine this? Causation and correlation are 2 separate things so I would caution you from making sweeping statements.
  - chaosbolt 4y ago
    >Causation and correlation are 2 separate things so I would caution you from making sweeping statements. This is like 50% of answers on HN now, reread my comment, I didn't say Win 11 was slower because of my experience, I said that for me in my 2 laptops the newer one with windows 11 was slower, didn't make any conclusions out of it. About the bloat and telemetry read the comment I was replying to, they said they just accept it as a force of nature, I said why accept it when you pay for it already, that's like having ads on a smart tv. Now your problem is that you're so quick to try and prove other people's logic as wrong that you add imaginary statements to it so you can disprove them.
FirstLvR 4y ago
Hmmm I have de bloated several windows 10 machines, just be careful and don’t do 100% what a script does. Titus tech has a good sample on his blog, just go step by step. Don’t need Cortana then disable that and so on
alpaca128 4y ago
In my experience, unmodified Windows 10 is just as capable of demolishing itself, repeatedly if needed to destroy one's will to continue using it. So capable in fact, that I don't believe any debloating measures could possibly make it any worse. Then again I seem to have had less luck than most, with all kinds of bugs from keyboard layouts to USB ports. And even a period where an updated, freshly installed Windows 10 would not even boot on my machine.
LightHugger 4y ago
unmodified windows results in a broken system sooner or later, since windows 8.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
I live in a building rather than let nature do whatever it's going to do. This argument is more along the lines of paying protection racket enforcers.
rolenthedeep 4y ago
A while back, windows tried to do updates in the middle of my workday and crashed. Digging through the logs, the only error I could find was that it failed to update the calculator app. Cute.
seanw444 4y ago
Agreed. It sits almost entirely vanilla in a high-performance virtual machine on my home PC. Constraining it to virtual disks and vCPUs, and using qcow2 snapshots in case I need to rollback, is amazing. I have one VM for my music production, and one for gaming. And another for miscellaneous tasks. The boot disks all branch off of one disk, so they don't unnecessarily repeat data. Same goes for my work computer. Only Linux is allowed to touch my hardware directly, whenever. If I need to test something in a Windows environment, I pop a VM open. It's actually amazing how great VMs have gotten lately. Even on my work PC's modest hardware (i5 10400, 12 GB RAM, GT 710), I can pass the GT 710 through for native graphics performance, and the VM feels like it's running on hardware. Remember, when using Windows, always wear protection!

by suby 4y ago

bipson 4y ago

Well, there are alternatives...

sentientslug 4y ago
This is such a trite and unhelpful comment. Everyone on HN knows there are alternatives (which are not even true alternatives as far as compatibility with most software is concerned)
- bipson 4y ago
  Thanks for your comment. But I disagree -- almost no one has to "just accept his fate" and be stuck with Windows nowadays. Unless you are a gamer or you strictly work with Windows only software, there are plenty of alternatives. And just to be clear, nowadays you might not find everything for Linux or BSD, but there are quite a lot of perfectly fine MacOS alternatives for most Win tools.

smt88 4y ago

> attempts to debloat or fix Windows results in a broken system sooner or later My anecdotal experience is the opposite, after ~20 years of de-bloating and customizing Windows. The updates seem to just reset the de-bloating, rather than breaking things.

anfilt 4y ago
I don't use windows as much I used to anymore, but this is my experience as well. Mainly, been using linux for the past 4 years. However, I say part of the problem is that windows updates are pushed out in a big blob instead the update being pushed in a more granular fashion. This ends up in with sometimes an update containing files or setting for something you removed. There is no reason it has be like this, but that is how updates work on windows, and I don't think Microsoft is going to change that any time soon. I am imagine in theory it would be possible for a community to break down each update into smaller discrete chunks. However, the community would have to be a decent size and dedicated enough to keep up with the rate MS rolls out updates. Also there some things like Edge and Cortana that current day windows is not very happy with if you nuke it from the system.
smileybarry 4y ago
It depends, the yearly “Feature Updates” essentially do an in-place upgrade instead of patching it. There’s a whole “Windows.old” folder afterwards and all.
- tech234a 4y ago
  The big ones do that, yeah, but then others are just tiny “enablement packages” that just turn on the new features that were updated into the previous version but disabled. [1]: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/what-is-enablement-package-in-windows-10 https://www.thewindowsclub.com/what-is-enablement-package-in...
lproven 4y ago
I agree with this. De-bloating Windows is increasingly useful and helpful, and this is especially true if one dual-boots with Linux. I mainly run Linux these days, and older versions of macOS on the desktop. But I was an early adopter of Windows (v2.01 in the late 1980s) and it was the backbone of my early career: the first ~25 years. For me, the version that drove me away was Windows XP, and I find it amusing that now people look back on XP as a classic lightweight version, when its bloat is what drove me to Linux on the desktop, and spending as little as possible on cheap old Apple kit and judicious upgrades to run the then-new Mac OS X. XP had themes. That's bloat. But they're easy to turn off; reset to the Classic theme, disable the theming service. Getting rid of other bloat, such as Movie Maker, the "files and settings transfer wizard" or whatever it was called, of IE and Outlook Express, of Media Player etc., was harder. In the end, I used NLite and built a custom install CD. Win7's bloat is harder still. Win8 was little _but_ bloat. Win10 is... barely acceptable but it's getting easier to turn all the junk off now. I rarely use it but at least I can uninstall all the Metro/Modern/Store crap, and use Ninite to install a selection of conventional Win32 FOSS apps to replace the MS touchscreen-oriented junk. Having read this post, I will be bolder, bin the Store and all the .NET stuff too. I don't want PowerShell, any version. I don't want .NET apps or a fancy terminal. I don't want VS Code or any of that. If I have to use this mess of an OS, I want it lean and cut down to basic simple apps, preferably FOSS, with as few runtimes as possible. Win11 is, for me, mostly unusable. There's almost nothing left but bloat now. The taskbar is unusable, no longer able to be placed vertically, where it belongs on a widescreen. The Start menu is a sad crippled thing built by graphic designers who didn't know how to use the original one. Explorer Patcher helps, but it can only do so much. Disabling Teams, widgets, all that junk, and every Modern app, leaves something that is just about functional, but uglier than ever, and less friendly and less convenient than ever before. I'm not a gamer, so I don't care about games performance. I'm not a developer so I don't care about that, either. So, yes, go for it, remove absolutely everything you can, disable hibernation, disable Fast Boot, remove all the Modern junk, cut that OS back hard, delete every temp file in every folder, turn off System Restore, turn off all the chrome, and then you can leave a smaller C drive and have a parallel install of a slightly leaner meaner OS that doesn't waste CPU and GPU cycles on shiny. That means no GNOME, no Cinnamon, no KDE, no Budgie. No Snaps, no Flatpaks, and I'm increasingly leaning towards no systemd either. Xfce or LXDE and native packages of native apps. It's a sad day that this seems to be the case, but Java apps look small and fast compared to modern abominations such as Electron.

chaosbolt 4y ago

Yeah but my Windows 11 powerful laptop takes longer to boot than my old Windows 10 pc... there is no way you can just accept the bloatware and telemetry on top of the price of the OS.

kyriakos 4y ago
Upgrading from Windows 10 to 11 (on an unsupported cpu on top of that) stopped me from upgrading my workstation because performance improved so much due to better memory management. I don't know if it takes longer to boot since I rarely restart.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- moron4hire 4y ago
  I don't understand. Performance improved, so you didn't upgrade your workstation? What?
  - smileybarry 4y ago
    They meant they gave up on their hardware upgrade plans, not software. Stuff ran faster so suddenly the CPU upgrade wasn’t needed, etc.
xist 4y ago
How are you attributing the longer boot time to 'bloatware' and 'telemetry'? I'm assuming you've measured this can you provide stats I'd be curious which components of Windows 11 is causing this. I'm assuming you've downgraded to Windows 10 on this machine with the exact software versions loaded to determine this? Causation and correlation are 2 separate things so I would caution you from making sweeping statements.
- chaosbolt 4y ago
  >Causation and correlation are 2 separate things so I would caution you from making sweeping statements. This is like 50% of answers on HN now, reread my comment, I didn't say Win 11 was slower because of my experience, I said that for me in my 2 laptops the newer one with windows 11 was slower, didn't make any conclusions out of it. About the bloat and telemetry read the comment I was replying to, they said they just accept it as a force of nature, I said why accept it when you pay for it already, that's like having ads on a smart tv. Now your problem is that you're so quick to try and prove other people's logic as wrong that you add imaginary statements to it so you can disprove them.

FirstLvR 4y ago

Hmmm I have de bloated several windows 10 machines, just be careful and don’t do 100% what a script does. Titus tech has a good sample on his blog, just go step by step. Don’t need Cortana then disable that and so on

alpaca128 4y ago

In my experience, unmodified Windows 10 is just as capable of demolishing itself, repeatedly if needed to destroy one's will to continue using it. So capable in fact, that I don't believe any debloating measures could possibly make it any worse. Then again I seem to have had less luck than most, with all kinds of bugs from keyboard layouts to USB ports. And even a period where an updated, freshly installed Windows 10 would not even boot on my machine.

LightHugger 4y ago

unmodified windows results in a broken system sooner or later, since windows 8.

Brian_K_White 4y ago

I live in a building rather than let nature do whatever it's going to do. This argument is more along the lines of paying protection racket enforcers.

rolenthedeep 4y ago

A while back, windows tried to do updates in the middle of my workday and crashed. Digging through the logs, the only error I could find was that it failed to update the calculator app. Cute.

seanw444 4y ago

Agreed. It sits almost entirely vanilla in a high-performance virtual machine on my home PC. Constraining it to virtual disks and vCPUs, and using qcow2 snapshots in case I need to rollback, is amazing. I have one VM for my music production, and one for gaming. And another for miscellaneous tasks. The boot disks all branch off of one disk, so they don't unnecessarily repeat data. Same goes for my work computer. Only Linux is allowed to touch my hardware directly, whenever. If I need to test something in a Windows environment, I pop a VM open. It's actually amazing how great VMs have gotten lately. Even on my work PC's modest hardware (i5 10400, 12 GB RAM, GT 710), I can pass the GT 710 through for native graphics performance, and the VM feels like it's running on hardware. Remember, when using Windows, always wear protection!