How to Declutter, Quiet Down, and Take the AI Out of Windows 11 25h2
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The article discusses ways to declutter and remove AI features from Windows 11, sparking a heated discussion among commenters about the frustrations with Windows and the viability of alternative operating systems like Linux.
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One thing I realised when I switched to desktop Linux was just how quiet it was.
It just sits there until I want to do something. It doesn't try and trick me into changing my default browser, or put adverts in my program launcher, or harvest my data.
It just runs my programs when I ask it to.
Of course, you have the option of not using gnome. I myself use xmonad and don't bother with desktop environments anymore.
It was then, now it's about trying to outapple MacOS in braindead minimalism
Yes it is opinionated and there are stuff you can only configure using gconf or extensions if the default conf is not your preference but minimalistic it isn't.
Anyway I don't really understand the Gnome bashing when there are KDE and at least 6 or 7 other complete desktops availables for the users + millions of windows managers and wayland compositors for those that want a more personalized experience. The fact it is proposed as a default desktop by many distros who aren't forced to choose it is a testament at how sane its defaults are.
It is not like the situation in the windows and macOS where the desktop is almost impossible to customize without breaking stuff[1]
[1] I tried litestep on windows decades ago, it was mostly usable but it only changed the shell, windows were still managed the same terrible way as in vanilla windows.
other environments can start as minimalist, but once you have set them up in the way you want, those features will rarely go away. usually that would be considered a bug/regression, not a feature.
Additionally if non breakage and stability is a must for you the long term support distros such as debian, ubuntu LTS or an rhel derivative such as Almalinux are available.
While obtaining and using newer software was annoying on long term support distros in the past, tools such as flatpak, toolbox and distrobox have made it super easy now so you can run a super stable system+desktop basis that doesn't change in 10 years alongside bleeding edge apps.
I changed the panel to mimic OpenSuse (it’s already a preloaded template) and it is perfect for using with a keyboard and mouse with a familiar interface.
If anyone is looking for a desktop environment that does not get in your way, that is the one. Things evolve slowly on Xfce, it is for some of us a feature, not a bug.
This problem is unfortunately also prevalent in websites and it's even harder to evade.
Librewolf doesn't ever say a goddamn thing and that's how it should be.
With the depreciation of my late 2017 Intel iMac 5k incoming, i however wonder how to ditch macOS for Linux and keep the one odd Mac App I kinda depend on - ideas welcome!
If you’re wondering, the App is MoneyMoney and keeps track of all bank accounts automatically, sorts all spendings into categories etc.
There simply seems to be no equivalent, and running Mac Apps on Linux just doesn’t seem to be a thing yet (at least in a half-viable way I know of, and yes, I at least read about Darling).
Again, if anyone does have a pointer (running macOS virtualized? What’s the status there?) would be much appreciated..
Edit: oh and i fully intend to keep using the iMac, its an i7 with 64GB RAM and the 5k display is still so gorgeous to look at.
That's the part that's hiting me the most. Macos and major linux envs are squarely focused on traditional desktop experience, mouse and keyboard, and I sense a "that should be good enough for everybody" patronizing vibe from the designers of the interfaces.
Gnome did a big effort to better support touch, but that's thousand miles away from what win11 supports and I got the sense they didn't actually try to use it day to day with a Z13 with no keyboard attached for instance (dumb anecdote: tried to vim a config, just to realize the stock virtual keyboard has no escape key)
And I get it, the vast majority of the community probably doesn't give a damn about touch or even actively dispises it.
That just leaves people who found actual benefits to the paradigm stuck in dark corner where fighting win11 has a better ROI than fighting a whole community.
I was skeptical at first but after having a phone call with her today and telling me it just works. That made me happy
[0] https://www.revi.cc/
A few weeks ago I told the company our few Windows machines are going to be sunset-ted. No push back (other than a request to have one for the odd thing - but will do that in a VM. Even the devs who have always been on Windows are up for it.
At home my kids use computers for playing and making games. Windows was the path of least resistance. I realized it'll make essentially no difference to them to switch to Linux. And boy do kids adapt quickly.
So thanks MS, sincerely. I've never both worked and lived completely Windows free, but your encouragement to drop Windows has made me realize how painless it is, and I should have done it years ago.
Edit: One guy is on mac. And always will be. No issue there IMHO
I wish I could make the full switch, but it's just not possible at the moment.
The reason there is no linux version of Affinity is thus simple: Because there aren't enough linux users to warrant spending the relatively tiny cost it takes to do that. It won't cost much and it won't significantly change Affinity as a product to have a linux release. They just don't bother; not enough paying users.
And why aren't there enough linux users? Because Affinity, for one, doesn't run on it.
That is the self reinforcing cycle that so far kept Windows around as default choice.
But that cycle can be broken. If not through a sudden burst based on some serious hype, then perhaps simply with slow and steady change.
Also, I use Pinta for simple tasks. And Krita for something bigger (or more drawing), but I wish it to be Wayland-ready.
Then again, maybe we just need to wait longer for the market to catch up. Not many Steam games support Linux natively yet, even though Linux is a close second to Windows for how many games run on it through Proton. I guess developers figure that they don't need to do extra work when Valve will do it for them, but maybe that will change after a portion of the market has migrated to Linux, especially if Valve slows down on the compatibility work.
I read on Reddit that some folks experienced latency issues. But I don't know whether it's to do with Linux in general or just some issues with their config / setup.
Personally I prefer having a Mac for music production, the audio stack works flawlessly without any fiddling.
The fact a piece of software is not considered exactly as good as another one doesn't need the work cannot be done.
What is important is the outcome, not the tool. We were editing pictures at the beginning of the century on Photoshop 6 or something when it was not nearly as good as 2025's Gimp or Affinity of 5 years ago.
> And what about apps like Ableton?
Bitwig, Reaper and Waveform are available on Linux as well as Ardour, Renoise, Mixbus, Zrythm and a few others. Ableton is ome of the most popular DAW with Logic but there is not a situation in the music industry where a particular tool/format/protocol forces a monoculture.
GIMP feels clunky and the UI is not as good. I haven't tried out the Photoshop mod. Apparently it matches all the keyboard shortcuts.
Many who tried to switch are complaining about how unintuitive it is. I know you can just try to get used to the different workflows, but unless the UX issues are addressed you won't see professionals making the switch.
Blender managed to completely overhaul their UI and it's now being used to create Oscar winning animated feature films.
Because the same thing happens to me when I am asked to do anything in Microsoft Excel. I am using MS Office so infrequently that it is super unintuitive for me. It takes me less time to convert the file and edit it in libreoffice then convert it back to xlsx than using Excel.
Productivity can also matter: if one tool allows you to get outcome X in 2 hours, but with another it takes 6 hours (or 20 vs 60 minutes), that can also be important.
Also you have to separate the professionals, the hobbyists and the vanity users.
The 1st population has very strong productivity requirements.
For the 2nd population the decision comes down to motivation. As a hobbyist I don't care if it takes me a few minutes more to process an image because my livelihood doesn't depend on it and I know how to appreciate the effort made by the volunteers that are building such a useful product and release it both for free and under an opensource license that nobody can pry out of my hands. The same way my more practical to maintain (because external cable routing) road bicycle is a better option for me and I don't need to ride the same aero bike as the Tour de France winner because those couple of watts gained here and here would only makes me reach home 2 minutes earlier without making the activity any more enjoyable.
It is not worth trying to convince the 3rd population, these are the ones who will buy an Ipad Pro instead of the base model only to use it to doom scroll social medias or lookup kitchen recipes. They just want the perceived best of everything and will look down as anything less than a status symbol.
As for the Ableton comment, I've been a user of Ableton Suite for around 15 years. Bitwig is catching up fast (no surprise - it was started by ex-Ableton developers who were frustrated with Ableton's slow progress), but there's a major problem in that most plugins and many audio interfaces are not compatible.
Then for them a bad tool is still the best tool for the job of those available.
OP did say they don't push Linux on others. If you have a specific need that ties you to Windows (due to platform incompatibility that you have no power to change) then you use Windows.
No point the rest of us sticking with Windows if we want to move and don't have reason not to though.
You win, MS. I thought I could keep a Windows box around for the occasional game and as an emergency backup for when I need random peripherals to "just work". I give up. The current Windows box (which I barely use anyway) is my last one.
Microsoft is user hostile and all but there is a good product in there somewhere
I have two perspectives on this, as a user and as a Windows admin. And I apologize in advance that this turned into a bit of a rant.
As a user all these things are at best annoyances to work around and at worst borderline malicious. You can easily remove the ads in the Start menu, uninstall the built-in apps you don't need and turn off the things you don't want. Sure upgrading to Pro offers more options to turn off some (but not all) of the bloat in Windows. However a significant portion of the tweaks needed to turn things off either needs Pro to get access to local group policy or diving into the registry to adjust dozens of values, and this is not something I consider accessible by average users. And there are some things like the constant reminders to sign-in with a Microsoft account that cannot be disabled in any way. I am aware that there are de-bloat scripts which preform these actions automatically for the less technical users, but asking users to run random scripts as the first thing to do on a new system to fix issues sets a bad precedent and is not something that I think should be widely encouraged since that behavior can be easily exploited since the users that need those kinds of tools may not fully appreciate the consequences of their actions.
With regards to malicious behavior take OneDrive. By default OneDrive will start on login then prompt the user with a system notification to sign-in to OneDrive to backup their files and the only options it gives the user is to either say "Yes" or "Remind me later". The only options to stop this are either to uninstall OneDrive or apply a setting via GPO to stop OneDrive from generating network traffic until a user signs-in. And in the security center if you don't sign-in to OneDrive it will always display a warning that your files are not protected because you are not using OneDrive, and as far as I know there is no way to disable that on editions other than Enterprise even if you uninstall OneDrive. For the average user the easiest way to make these annoyances go away is to sign-in to OneDrive. I cannot tell you how many people have come to me complaining that they signed in to OneDrive and now all their files have disappeared because OneDrive moved everything to a different folder then removed all the local copies of files that had been synced to the cloud and because their computer was not connected to the Internet they could not access the files that now lived only in the cloud.
I think OneDrive is a prime example of the issues I have overall with Windows these days, it effectively gives the user as little agency as possible in using their system by constantly nagging them to enable things they may not want or even understand with the only options presented being to just do what it tells you.
As an admin I have a much poorer opinion of the work required to completely de-bloat a "clean" Windows install. In addition to all of the above let's consider the Start menu. In a Windows environment it is not practical to manually remove the offending shortcuts in the Start menu since those are set in each user profile and I am not going to follow every user around to manually clean up their Start menus every time they login to a new computer. Pro editions of Windows 11 actually do have the ability to customize what shortcuts appear in the Start menu by default for new user accounts and this does allow for removing the ads. However that particular Start menu layout policy can only be set by an MDM, it seems Microsoft has made the decision to not provide a group policy option for applying a Start menu layout in Windows 11 like they did with Windows 10. This means if you are exclusively managing Windows with an on-prem Active Directory you can't remove the ads from the Start menu using a managed policy.
You can upgrade to Enterprise which does have a simple option to turn off all the consumer features, however I know of exactly zero businesses that will pay the significant extra for Enterprise just to disable these annoyances that everyone is already used to.
Microsoft has turned Windows into a tool that does everything in its power funnel users to Microsoft cloud services. The user experience is being actively degraded with all the nagging and forced usage of their services such that the path of least resistance to get rid of all that is to give up and just sign-in with a cloud account. Now to be clear, I don't have a problem with Microsoft offering these services and I can see how they can be useful things for some people, the problem I have is the way they are going about it.
It is great that we have so many people working to make sure we can de-bloat Windows and turn it back into a usable platform for those of us who don't want any of these forced features. But at the end of the day this is software that we are paying for that does not respect its users.
It is like the old “Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing”.
Windows only costs what-ever-portion-of-you-new-machine's-price-it-is⁰, if your time, privacy¹, attention², and just your general desire to be given some respect³, are all worth nothing.
I kept Windows on my main home PC when 10 tuned up (I very nearly switched then) because of games & DayJob compatibility, and a side-order of laziness. These days I game very little⁴, DayJob stuff never touches my personal equipment, and panel-beating Windows into being less annoying is much more effort than Linux on the desktop⁵, so that is the way I've gone.
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[0] Very few people buy Windows directly. Standard UK pricing for Win11 Home is £119, but I doubt more than a few people pay close to that much.
[1] Even if you pay for Enterprise licensing, I'd easily believe that without jumping a few hoops there are still potential issues here for the truly concerned.
[2] Adverts on the 'king start menu and elsewhere? Get stuffed. No, I didn't want to consider installing “Keeper of the Golden Bollock”, or whatever that game was that popped up as an option when I was starting keepass on the [day job] laptop the other day…
[3] I consider the pop-ups and other nagging inserts, for adverts and extolling the virtues of CoPilot & other things, that only have “yes” and “maybe later” buttons with no “leave me alone, I know it exists, when/if I want to look at it I'll let you know” option, as signs of disrespect.
[4] That industry has pushed me away with irritations too, and I have significant other hobbies now.
[5] Linux has been my core OS server-side for decades, but aside from my University years and the netbook era that MS killed, I've not used it significantly elsewhere⁶ for long periods.
[6] caveat: I'm counting Android as different enough to be considered something else, more so as the walls around that garden are slowly inching up.
I put Arch on it last week and couldn't be happier. My 3080 is working just fine. Rocket League is even better on Proton than native Windows; turns out Java MC is a nice switch from bedrock, and my kid that I play with agrees, so we'll play that version together instead.
I have a tiny partition with unregistered Win 11 just for Roblox now. I tired to put MC on there, in case we wanted to do bedrock once in a while, but now the MC launcher is, for some reason, tightly coupled to the Microsoft Store, and if you're not logged into that, you can't play MC, not even the Java Edition, so that's the end of Windows MC for me.
The only way to win this game is not to play. Use a different OS. It will hit Microsoft where it hurts.
Although that may hasten Linux's demise, since it is only by Microsoft's good graces that Linux is allowed to run on PCs in the first place. Linux is Zion (The Matrix)—not a true resistance, but controlled opposition that reinfirces dominance. Once it gets too big, the Architect can wipe it and start again.
Ps yes I'm using the IoT Enterprise LTSC. Not the non IoT
> there's still a Windows store in the latest version.
There is? Not in mine.
I just double checked, I'm running Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024, which appears to still be the latest.
And I do want updates, I just want to decide when to install them. Not that "install before next tuesday or we will do it for you" mafia bullshit.
You may know this, and we agree it would be better if there was a GUI option, but to disable automatic updates just save this as a .reg file and run it:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU] "NoAutoUpdate"=dword:00000001
This single feature is almost certain to kill off the use of Windows for any important use cases, like kiosk-type softwares in non-trivial environments. It's impossible to control software updates deterministically.
Plus: I also recommend running O&O ShutUp10++ (ShutUpWin11) for quick privacy hardening. It’s portable and includes a good default preset that makes Windows less intrusive. From the same developer, O&O AppBuster lets you remove bundled apps that can’t normally be uninstalled. Both are one-time portable tools, and while Windows updates may re-enable some settings or reinstall apps, it’s still a solid baseline to start from.
Or of course, ditch Windows for Ubuntu, Mint, Zorin or other solid distro, but you can't always do that for friends and family without causing issues for them.
Didn't think it would end up being the perfect time to stop taking feature updates and use security updates alone