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Comment by herbst | Hacker News Reader

This was an issue, but at this point Microsoft is placing ads everywhere, negative news on my desktop, and update nags with changing buttons in every other start. Nothing about it is smooth or consistent anymore.

Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in

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None of those issues are a problem for corporate managed Windows installations, which would be the proper comparator in the case given in the article.

There are other reasons that Windows sucks, even (or especially?) in a corporate environment, just not those.

Is that true? No stock tickers, no ads, no ai nags? No "news"? No weird notifications that ask for my attention? I guess no regular weird update windows would be the case, but the rest?

On any Windows release, you can switch all of those off, and GPE out the update channels for non-system-critical changes. Windows Enterprise doesn't even get the so-called 'fun stuff'.

I only have this one windows PC and I hate it, so correct me if I am wrong but I can't simply turn these off. First I either need to understand the registry or trust some third party software, and second windows just turns it on again in the next updates where I have to go back and trust random third party software again.

Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all.

And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications.

You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?

Yes; as a home user you have to use some 3rd party script or software to achieve the same outcome, but there are examples that are well-regarded and open-source.

e.g. https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

This looks less sketchy than what I used. Surprised I found so much sketchy stuff and not simply that.

Guess that's like adblock these days. You need domain specific knowledge or you get not what you expect.

Yes, your MDM lets you do almost everything you want to Windows. You can really tell that it is a commercial first offering, or at least used to be. And given that as a company you are also paying them I guess they don't care that much that there are fewer ads.

I do see the same kind of ads (and many many other issues) on corporate computers at the Hospitals I work in. And to think we pay immensely for all this...

Have you considered going offline for the music PC? I took an old rig off and stuck it with win10.

I have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.

I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.

Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.

Not that hard to get rid of windows bloat.

When you have no windows experience? Barely anyone to ask for expertise and only depend on Google, Chatgpt and sketchy third party tools and does feel hard tho. And it doesn't end, it just keeps coming up with new bloat.

Imo windows users are just blind for all the bloat

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