It’s no secret that a default Windows installation is… Hefty. In more ways than one, Windows is a bit on the obese side of the spectrum, from taking up a lot of disk space, to requiring hefty system requirements (artificial or not), to coming with a lot of stuff preinstalled not everyone wants to have to deal with. As such, there’s a huge cottage industry of applications, scripts, modified installers, custom ISOs, and more, that try to slim Windows down to a more manageable size.
As it turns out, even Microsoft itself wants in on this action. The company that develops and sells Windows also provides a Windows debloat script. Over on GitHub, Microsoft maintains a repository of scripts simplify setting up Windows as a development environment, and amid the collection of scripts we find RemoveDefaultApps.ps1, a PowerShell script to “Uninstall unnecessary applications that come with Windows out of the box”.
The script is about two years old, and as such it includes a few applications no longer part of Windows, but looking through the list is a sad reminder of the kind of junk Windows comes with, most notably mobile casino games for children like Bubble Witch and March of Empires, but also other nonsense like the Mixed Reality Portal or Duolingo. It also removes something called “ActiproSoftwareLLC“, which are apparently a set of third-party, non-Microsoft UI controls for WPF? Which comes preinstalled with Windows sometimes? What is even happening over there?
The entire set of scripts makes use of Chocolatey wrapped in Boxstarter, which is “a wrapper for Chocolatey and includes features like managing reboots for you”, because of course, the people at Microsoft working on Windows can’t be bothered to fix application management and required reboots themselves. Silly me, expecting Microsoft’s Windows developers to address these shortcomings internally instead of using third-party tools.
The repository seems to be mostly defunct, but the fact it even exists in the first place is such a damning indictment of the state of Windows. People keep telling us Windows is fine, but if even Microsoft itself needs to resort to scripts and third-party tools to make it usable, I find it hard to take claims of Windows being fine seriously in any way, shape, or form.
I really wish Microsoft would open up Enterprise licensing for regular old power users and gamers. After Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC dropped I gave it a spin on a spare computer and it’s so, SO much better than retail or even OEM 11 Pro. I can’t (legally) activate it of course, so it’s strictly an evaluation, but it’s just so clean and free of all the garbage shoveled into the consumer SKUs, it’s night and day. No Store, no CoPilot, no Xbox garbage, no Microsoft account requirement, no 20+ malware shortcuts in the Start menu that have to be removed one at a time. It’s a clean slate, ready to get work done or be built into a sleek and nimble gaming OS. It’s what Windows was in the days of 7 Pro/Ultimate, and it’s a crying shame they are so rent-seeking these days that they won’t let you pay for a true operating system because they make so much money off of the shovelware included in the retail versions.
Honestly, if Microsoft would sell Enterprise to individuals even at an inflated cost of US$200, I’d gladly pay for it to run on a dedicated gaming computer. Linux gaming is 95% there, but that 5% is pretty damn annoying. Thankfully Valve is continuously improving Steam and Proton, and the benefits are trickling down to non-Steam games as well.
You can get enterprise with E3. You just need to talk to a reseller. Now, a reseller Can sell you a single licence, but they might equally decide you arnt worth the effort for the revenue. It’s completely up to them.
https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-365/enterprise/microsoft365-plans-and-pricing?market=af
Thom could sign up to be a reseller as OSnews and sell us all copies, with proceeds supporting the site.
Update Part 2.5
Had a try with this as I was intrigued.
Looks like you can signup for E3 trial with a single user and it converts to paid after the month. The limit is now the trial is a max of 25 but no minimum.
Now I have to decide if it’s worth the effort to reinstall my systems to take advantage of the debloat or not
The only challenge with Valve’s effort, is they need the ecosystem around them to understand the new model. With Wintel the name of the game was commodities. Intel mass produced commodity CPUs, and Microsoft produced commodity operating software – Windows. The rest of the industry was oriented around that way of thinking, and I’d argue the PC industry is kind of stuck right here in this place, even on sites like this.
The new model is more hands on, more customization, leading to differentiation, on the full stack – the hardware side, and the software side (even if on the hardware side that’s lead to less end user flexibility). Apple has always done that on the software side, but is doing that with their entire stack now, with ARM at its core.
Valve is now doing something of a hybrid approach, using semi-custom designs (which Gabe still calls “commodity hardware”) on the hardware side, completely differentiated design on the product side, and semi-custom Linux distro on the software side. They are taking up this nice middle ground between something completely custom, while still leveraging and supporting standard hardware interfaces. It’s a beautiful merger of the old and new, in terms of business approach. Nintendo is doing something similar in their hardware/software approach, but they are locking out interoperability, for no good reason – I’d argue it hurts their scale, but whatevs.
The problem though, is the rest of the PC industry is still stuck in 1990s, and thinks about platforms like commodities, as finished products – a la Intel and Windows. Any one of Steam Deck’s competitors, could take what Valve is doing, and build their own customized distro for their own handhelds, or new PC platform of any kind really, and make them not suck the way they do when running Windows. But most of them are holding out for Valve or Microsoft to do the work – but the thing is, they are never going to do it, not in any kind of way that looks like the old Wintel approach. And that’s fine – that’s kind of how Linux and open source, and open hardware is meant to work.
In the ARM space, that part of the industry seems to get it. You can’t really run Windows on those devices, so they’ve been shipping semi-custom Linux (or Freebsd, etc.) distros for ages, and will continue to do so.
Microsoft used to sell a deblaoted pc at its stores called the Microsoft Signature Edition PC. Why they couldn’t just sell this edition of Windows to eveyone.
Microsoft doesn’t really “develop” Windows, so much as “lightly maintains as a side-gig” – they don’t even have a dedicated team for Windows…
Who could blame them.
Like an alcoholic in charge of rationing his own drinks.