Bloatynosy has now evolved into BloatynosyAI and it can disable AI features on Windows 11 or Microsoft Edge that a user may consider as bloatware. This new app works on Windows 10 as well.
It's good that these tools exist, but it's so frustrating that it's a constant cat and mouse game of Microsoft trying to make their products as cumbersome and shit as possible and the community trying to salvage Windows to the best of their ability.
At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I'm tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?
At what point do they say fuck it I'm going the Valve route and moving away from a company that wants to undermine my products and my brand?
But it's not like these people actually love ads all over the place, or bing results in start menus, or popups asking them to pwetty pwease use OneDrive, or can you pwetty pwetty pwease use Edge instead of Chrome, they just either:
don't know they can get rid of that stuff
don't trust tools and are afraid they'll break something or the tools will contain a virus
don't care enough to research this crap
view using their PC as a chore anyway, and so power through the annoyances
I don't own a Mac, and don't intend to, but of the biggest things people like about them is that there are far fewer of these types of annoyances.
It's not just extreme power users that can be irked by all this crap - they're just the ones who do things about it and chat on forums about it. A normal person just sighs and thinks ugh I'd rather just do this on my phone
Enough to do much about it, other than maybe buy a MacBook if they have money to burn? Nah.
But enough to use their PC less and try to do as much as possible on their phone/iPad? Honestly, yeah, I think so.
I hear normies complaining about stuff in Windows all the time. It's just when you go "well you could..." they turn off and don't want to do anything about it, because to them you may as well be giving them advice on how they can hack their washing machine to wash clothes faster. It's just an appliance.
At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I’m tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?
LTT put out an (surprisingly insightful) video about ChromeOS and how it's kind of secretly spreading Linux. I don't think its crazy to say that in 5-10 years ChromeOS or similar will be the default and Windows will be a premium add on or something.
I doubt it. Google will squander it away one way or another. It could work on a technical level, I’ve been using flex since before Google bought it for family members, it’s just poorly advertised and explained.
To be fair, Window$ has been bloat since the very day M$ stole it from its Unix roots, and Linux is everything that the OS could've been were it not run by money-grubbin' cringelords.
For me it is so weird, that you have to use extra tools to disable telemetry and unwanted features in windows systems. Why is windows not giving me a central option to decide on those things? Is it maybe because they do not want me to decide for myself and therefore splitting the places where I need to disable all that unwanted stuff as opaque as possible? Can they be more obvious that they do not value your opinion on how you want your OS to behave?
Quit Windows. It is a dead end and get worst with every release.
If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.
It's a shame. I really love Windows 10. It's fast and the UI's ergonomy is near perfect.
On my work laptop we recently had to switch to Windows 11 and it's a fucking pain to use. You have to jump through so many hoops and do extra clicks to do what you want. And the start menu has become completely useless. And I hate the gaps and rounded corners everywhere. And that's just on the surface. Performance is piss poor and you have all that crap spying on you to collect your usage data.
The day Windows 10 becomes unsupported is the day I go 100% Linux.
Forced to use it at work, too, and only by the grace of being in the IT department do I have the ability to make it less shitty.
There's registry entries to restore the full context menu, and PowerToys Run has effectively become my defacto start menu, though obviously you need to use the keyboard so it's not a perfect UI replacement. Meanwhile for searching, I've got Everything running and set global keyboard shortcuts/touchpad gestures to it. Maybe I'll grab an old gaming mouse and shortcut them to the extra buttons.
They finally implemented never combine on the taskbar, and it's...tolerable, but buggy and still resizes things for no reason
Unfortunately I've yet to find a way to get some damn 90° angles back. I can not wait for a few years down the line when we finally swing away from this Apple-chasing "bubbles with an inch between them on a white/black field" design aesthetic. I'm tired of everything looking like a toy, especially at the cost of its actual utility.
And not just a toy, the same toy. It's seriously Corporate Memphis levels of lifeless, forced design with no character, creativity, or ingenuity.
This has been exactly my stance as well apart from ever having used Win11. Never did and never plan to, downloaded Mint a few months ago to start getting familiar with it. Turns out I'm not real great at technical stuff but I'm getting there. Dual monitors was kind of a booger and now I'm trying to figure out how to install some games since Bottles is being a real wiener about Battle.Net.
I'm glad there's so many resources and forums out there but I still hope some version of Linux gets dumbed down a little more before Win10 sunsets to make the transition easier for us blue collar folk
Windows 10 already had telemetry (what you call spying) and what it didn't have in the past got patched in. So when it comes to that both Windows 10 and 11 are the same.
Performance is totally fine for me on Windows 11, but the new right click context menu sucks.
Overall there's really not much difference between the two otherwise.
I switched to linux yeats ago but i now need to build myself a windows 11 base image thats as lightweight as possible for my vms and im dreading that immeansly. I just want onw toll that can kill literally everything thats unessasary. I mean unless proton and wine has gotten good enough to run autocad programs.
Quit for what? Linux is a mess with hardware like fingerprint readers being unsupported, and without the most used commercial software. Mac OS is a buggy mess lately, and it ties your data to a time bomb hardware and that damn walled garden.
Windows is the best general use OS out there, and Microsoft knows it. We need regulation to stop that abuse.
Honestly, I would switch to Linux if it didn't take so much time to learn. I've messed around on a Raspberry π 4th gen board, but have no real experience. To really make the Linux jump, I'd need a tutor or something.
Also I don't know which of my games will be compatible.
My reason for not using them is that they tend to be overly aggressive in what they remove. I only need a few reg tweaks and denying permissions on a few files. These often go whole hog and remove whole components, almost all apps etc. I actually use one drive, I don't want its files also removed.
I used to have a power shell script that a coworker gave me that would uninstall a huge number of services and apps on windows, change a bunch of config settings etc.
I've always wished there were a way to roll out a stripped windows release as an open source project without getting sued.
There’s a pretty funny disconnect on Lemmy of hardcore Linux users that have very very obviously never supported enterprise environments and have no understanding of how important windows is
Although im part of the Linux crowd, if you’re tired of reapplying debloat scripts every update, you could get the W10 IoT LTSC edition that only has security patches with no updates. You will have to pirate it though.
A non pirate solution is Windows Server Essentials 2022. It's like $300, has zero bloat and updates don't ever hijack your settings. Oh and you'll get over 10 years of security patches.
does Windows Server Essentials comes with a desktop GUI? Can you install Steam and things like that like you'd normally do in Windows?
I'm happy with Linux, but my brother who is a gamer has Windows but he's annoyed af by updates and the AI nonsense. This seems like a perfect solution.
I do both and happy with debloated Windows 11 Enterprise with automatic updates restricted to security only. Pirating now is running a powershell command that fetches activation scripts from github.
This might be interesting. I'm looking to have a few installs to test some of my programs in an actual Windows environment without having to daily drive Windows and without having to deal with all the unnecessary changes MS wants to make.
I have no idea why they're even remotely interested in Windows as a product anymore. Surely they can't expect that much revenue from integrated AI services when most of the general public's needs can be covered by web services that will severely outmatch Microsoft's development speed (y'know because of juggling legacy code and all).
Considering the fact that they gain most of their revenue by far from their Azure cloud services and enterprise customers, it just seems like a stupid business decision to invest this much into all kinds of random features for their desktop OS aimed at consumers.
In proper systems architectecture theory, we generally try to avoid mixing up functionality this much because a modular design allows your system to evolve without too much pain. Why build all this crap into Windows when you can just opt-in by installing an application for it?
"Gaming contributed $7.11 billion in revenue for the quarter, more than the $5.26 billion from Windows, but behind the $13.47 billion from Office and cloud services and the giant $23.95 billion from server products and cloud services."
I literally have a windows 10 installed that I haven't logged in since before AI came up. WTF! I can only imagine the massive update when I try to login next time.
Now how do you: CAD, exchange, Publisher, Access, Excel (no, open versions of excel still don't come close, they can't even do tables), Onenote/SharePoint, etc, etc.
And Linux is as messed up in its own way. Power management is off by default, so it kills your laptop battery (at least on every version I've tested). Notifications that you can't silence without looking up a command line.
No, the learning curve is still too steep to recommend to people who I will have to support.
And while the Open/Libre office apps are "compatible", people don't have time to waste dealing with the ways they whack a document. Libre couldn't even properly display the spreadsheet I use to setup a new machine, with 3 sheets and a few hundred lines, because tables.
"Switch to Linux" is a simplistic answer that doesn't address the needs of users. And I use Linux every day, as a serverOS, running VM's and docker.
“Switch to Linux” is a simplistic answer that doesn’t address the needs of users. And I use Linux every day, as a serverOS, running VM’s and docker.
"Let me debate you about why you shouldn't use Windows" as if I want to use Windows, people who have no experience with the software in my industry dropping alternatives. Even had someone debate me after saying I'm a sysadmin in a mixed environment, and how I alone should just move the whole company and all our software vendors to Linux.
Just as a minor correction - Librecalc can do tables. Why they didn't call it tables and bind it to CTRL&T is beyond me though. link
select the cells -> Data -> AutoFilter
I create them with CTRL&T through the custom shortcuts in options. They work about the same as Excel.
Librecalc is a little rough, but I'm actually starting to find it superior in functionality and customization compared to MS. And it's about 10x faster on very large spreadsheets for me.
I would also definitely recommend using use dark mode if you're going to use calc. Options -> Application Colors -> LibreOffice Dark
uh hu, you locked yourself in. Imo if you dont need Excel, OneNote or any of that shit, its perfectly cool. For devs its even nicer not to have to deal with all the windows shit ways of doing things. As for documents, LaTeX is great.
Also, in the end, the command line is even easier than having to learn shitty user interfaces. And you get much faster with command line too. Windows likes to have 3 different design languages from different decades for no reason.
Using it as OS and as Server, it has been perfect for years.
People who don't use it either have a life and simply dont want things to change, or are too foolish to realise they are getting trolled with every update.
For people starting, just dual boot a Linux Distro. For the shit that requires windows boot into it. The rest can all be done in linux. Even boots faster.
And for average people probably the google documents / slides [...] will be more than enough.
Rip to people that need windows shit to be in their life for work. Though they could also use a windows vm.
Is it the monopoly Microsoft has on all PC hardware and strong relationships it has with desktop software partners that make leaving windows near impossible?
On a personal level, I installed Ubuntu for the first time in over a decade and found the experience worse. Previously I could download everything I needed either through the package manager or deb file easily. Ow I ran into a new flat pack type installer that has failing dependencies that weren’t found through command line either. The new mouse driver in gnome was hot garbage too with the touchpad sensitivity so high I couldn’t scroll more than a page and a half at even the lightest touch. No settings to change it either. Windows is far easier at this point.
or use the enterprise edition which is the only windows edition with an option to disable telemetry using group policy editor. in the other versions, you have to resort to terrible hacks.
It is bad the AMD support in windows. In Linux is better in my case. For sysadmin sorry but powershell is overengineered garbage. You need a very long command when in shell you got in three pipes. Even what are your proposing its hard to do, and sincerely i think it is better to just use a sane linux distro.