I tried running this and then I remembered why I stopped tweaking Windows, I wind up running into odd issues. Windows stopped being unstable for me years ago when I stopped fidgeting with features. I'm better off disabling as much as I can through the normal settings they provide. I don't know if it's just I'm doing something wrong but it's been my experience.
I would love to see Windows not take up 4 gigs of RAM out of the box. I don't need Cortana running period. Let me uninstall Cortana please Microsoft. I'm sure there's other crap I don't want but I fear if I can't just hit 'Uninstall' it wont go well, or an update will bring it back.
> I would love to see Windows not take up 4 gigs of RAM out of the box. Let me uninstall Cortana please Microsoft. I'm sure there's other crap I don't want but I fear if I can't just hit 'Uninstall' it wont go well, or an update will bring it back.
So much misinformation in this and the replies that address this. Windows needs a minimum of 2GB RAM to run. But it scales its memory footprint according to the available memory. It will instantly swap this out when a demanding application is launched. For reference, on my Thinkpad with 8GB of RAM, Windows idles at about 3GB. On my PC with 16GB, it idles at around 7.5GB.
For reference, (with a Windows 10 system with 16GB of RAM) after several hours of light use, task manager reports that 2.7GB of RAM is used with 13GB available (other numbers report that 3.3/16.9GB are committed, and 2.8GB cached).
You can verify some of this by examining a lot of the running memory bloat in https://live.sysinternals.com/procexp.exe (official diagnostics tool by sysinternals, a microsoft subsidiary), just make sure to elevate to see full process info with 'show details on all processes'.
On my machine a bunch of UWP apps are loaded passively in the background. A few are UWP apps I use occasionally, a few aren't. I don't know what heuristic they use for this. You might look at that and go - hey, wasted memory and CPU! However:
These apps are fully suspended, so they can't use any CPU at all. You can observe this in the procexp CPU column. Because they are fully suspended the OS can also instantly evict them when it detects memory pressure, similar to how the page caching system in OSes retains cached file contents in scratch memory to speed up I/O - if the memory used for caching files is needed for applications, the cache will be evicted to make space. Cortana, for example, is using 180mb of RAM for me right now but it is fully suspended so it can be evicted immediately to make room for another app. The upside is that when I hit start and begin typing Cortana search responds immediately.
The downside to this automatic eviction setup for background apps is that they will show up in memory usage statistics even though they're not really tying up that memory. It makes your system's available RAM a bit misleading. There are other modern apps that also respond to memory pressure - I believe Firefox will automatically compact its memory, you can manually trigger that in about:memory to see what it does.
I can also confirm that increasing the amount of RAM in my machine increased how much of it Windows was willing to use for preloading apps and caching pages, but I feel like that's not surprising.
Doesn’t this become an issue when your memory intensive apps close? Because after being evicted, wouldn’t Cortana and all the other stuff need a second to be reloaded into memory?
Yes, but the effect is the same as if files were evicted from the page cache: They get reloaded from disk when next used. Better for cortana to take an extra 750ms to load than for your other app to run out of memory.
Are memory-heavy applications able to detect true available memory? I could see an app that tries to scale itself to available memory running with reduced performance or refusing to run if it sees non-page-cache but evictable memory as unavailable.
In general applications don't manage their ram usage based on available resources they just take what they need until your system starts swapping.
The OS manages memory and evicts cache to make use for applications when they request it. The good thing about a cached file is that it is available on disk to be reread any time you like.
I've used applications that will specifically allocate (available memory * x) or similar because they or their plugins can't handle ENOMEM or the Windows equivalent, and they do not want to swap.
If you can't answer this question for yourself, why do you think you'd be capable of modifying the factory default? Memory management is one of the most complex pieces of a modern OS
It's unsurprising to me that *nix systems are the majority on Azure. It is surprising to me that enterprise shops still commission new Windows servers at all in $current_year.
In supporting the enterprise, pretty much every application I deal with is unfortunately "Windows Only". Accounts tends to be managed by MYOB, Quickbooks or in the large firms, Accountants Office (also a MYOB product). All these ship with Windows services, Attache being particularly offensive as it has "known issues" with clients on Windows 8.1 or higher. Pay is often Payglobal or NAV, which again is Windows.
The closest I had was a LexisNexis product that used to run on a Linux server - until our account manager told us they were dropping Linux because, and I quote, "Linux has too many security problems". I've supported two different EMR (medical) products, and at least five different POS products, all Windows only. Even when we get a SaaS product running in a web browser, half the time it's "IE only".
I'd give a lot to live in the type of organisation without this legacy.
Tinfoil theory incoming: NSA pressures windows to have the largest attack surface possible by default. With the hope that any given targeted system will have at least one piece of default bloatware still running, presumably they have 0-days for most all of them.
Even putting aside the tinfoil hat. The NSA would never pressure anyone to have a larger attack surface, that would just make it easier for competing nations and attackers to discover flaws, which would render their own efforts moot
if Russia discovers how to hack Cortana and keeps it private, that in no way impinges on NSA's ability to use the same hack to compromise, say, an Iranian system. The more possible avenues for attack, the better (for attackers).
Windows will grow to fill the available RAM and will also release it when there is memory pressure
Lots of people install 8 or 16 GBs and complain about how much Windows consumes but if you remove RAM, Windows will happily operate at under 50% utilization in 4 or 6 GB situations.
Hah, indeed. "An all knowing colleague" suggested in Slack to use DisableWinTracking* tool for greater privacy and security. I had already done the most of the usual privacy enhancing stuff manually to Windows 10, but decided to try if the tool would know something more. Some weeks later IT realized there are several desktops in our domain which stopped installing Windows updates on a same day. And some administration tool couldn't reach those computers anymore. Basically we ended up wasting about 20-30 man hours on getting those desktops to function properly again without reinstalling.
I can echo this. On a security assessment I found an organisation was a long way behind in Windows Updates. I eventually tracked this to the AppReadiness service being disabled, which someone thought was a cool debloat option. The end result is that machines just claim to be up to date despite not being.
Exactly. People get mad when things on their system are using the memory they purchased. The only problem is when it's actually using the memory and Windows starts dying because other programs aren't freeing up enough memory.
Same thing for chrome - often people say "chrome eats your RAM" but it's just being as efficient as it can be - if your OS asks it to free ram, it will and 8GB of webpages can go down to 4GB at the expense of getting rid of cached "back" pages and other cached memory.
The problem is, that at least in my experience chrome never does that. Which is why I recently had only 5g "available" (not free), and it was all swap, because Chrome had been a degenerate example of resource mismanagement on all of my computers since it was first released. I have yet to see Chrome free memory in way other than murdering the render process myself or closing the tabs and hoping it wasn't a shared process one, at least on Linux.
On Windows 10? I closed everything except Firefox (and this HN tab), which is taking up 600MB of RAM, and now it's at 4.6GB of RAM. Before with two instances of GoLand, Slack and Discord open it was over at 8GB of RAM.
On a Windows 10 VM set to 2 GB of RAM, Windows idles at about 1.1 GB.
On a 16 GB Windows it uses about 7.5 GB. All of that seems to swap out or go away somewhere if I get busy with Visual Studio.
On a 64 GB Windows it seems to idle at about 9.6 GB used. Of course, this one isn't a purely work machine and has Steam, Origin, Ubisoft's thing, etc, etc.
So Windows 10 is pretty variable. I imagine it has something to do with running various services in parallel.
What quantity are you measuring that's 7.5 GB... and what else do you have on that machine? I quit Chrome on my current machine which has a bunch of other stuff and has no less RAM than yours, and even then I was left with <4GB of anything I could regard as usage. It can't possibly be just Windows itself idling at 7.5 GB?
Except my system has 16GB and it idles at 4GB. My old system with 8GB idles at 4GB even my system at home with 16GB idles at 4GB. I dont understand why it would idle at 8GB.
4gb does seem excessive. Win10 is using closer to 2gb right now on my system. Chrome and Firefox, both doing very little, are taking 1gb together by comparison.
I've got 256GB and a fresh install of windows use about 4 with a few things running on startup(mostly just the amd+nvidia drivers). There is indeed some scaling with availability but with diminishing returns after probably 8/16gb of available ram.
What I find more interesting is that windows still compresses and swaps on startup even with that much ram available.
Disable swap (pagefile) when you have that much ram, or even when you only have 8 or more. You lose hibernate but that's fine by me. Modern cpu and ssd cold boots pretty fast, especially if you have debloated things similar to this script.
Many of the things that are pitched as beneficial, like indexing everything and caching the indexes and keeping all kinds of services alive to "quick start" other things in case you happen to want them, hibernation or sleeping instead of cold boot, etc, these are all cases of adding more crap to counter the harm from previously adding other crap.
Instead of adding foofeature you don't really need, and then adding foofeatureaccelerator to try to disguise the overhead of foofeature, you can just remove both foofeature AND foofeatureaccelerator, and everything is better.
Less total software to break or misbehave or serve as a security opening. Smaller disk footprint. Fewer running processes. Less ram/disk/net resources consumed. Less telemetry. Simpler total system for you to manage, and maybe actually have a hope in hell of grasping more of what all is going on with one human head. More of your resources available for the apps and services YOU actually want, whatever they are.
Whoever wants Pandora, they can totally have it without it coming pre-bundled. If I want Pandora, I would rather install it than find it already built in. In fact, I DO want Pandora, but in fact, I use a 3rd party open source unofficial player. So even though I use it, it's still wrong for it to be built in.
Heh I feel you, when a new Ubuntu comes out sometimes I just fresh install just cause you never know, though I have upgraded in the past. If you install Ubuntu and then want a new Desktop Environment, it doesn't feel quite right, because the original install defined defaults that the new DE isn't setting itself for / against.
On Windows I don't reformat anymore like I used to, and I used to reformat a lot because I would disable "useless" Windows services to save on RAM (back when I had 3GB of RAM, and then 8GB). When I stopped doing that, my OS was working fine for years and years.
I like the approach of Arch. I do a clean install, add the applications that I want, and leave virtually all of the settings at their defaults. In one respect it is a highly customized system since the installed software is tailored to my needs. On the other hand, I am not spending time tweaking settings.
When I use systems where the vendor installs a lot of software by default (it doesn't matter whether it's another Linux distribution or Windows), I am easily annoyed by how much stuff gets in my way visually or in terms of performances. That leaves me with an intense desire to debloat. I try to resist the urge, but am usually unsuccessful.
I've started embracing the defaults too. At least, when I can stand them. Having to spend all day configuring an OS is not great. I love the freedom of being able to settle into any workstation and feel comfortable with it.
Yuuuup. I ran into an issue where it became completely impossible to install a .net redistributable. Basically every possible method I found to install it would fail silently. So my computer became incapable of playing a ton of video games.
The thing that amazes me is just how much more bloated Windows 10 has become, compared to e.g. Vista. Even modern Linux won't really run all that well (on a desktop workload) with less than 1GB of installed RAM, but if you have that much it's incredibly snappy and smooth. Every time I have to use Windows 10 I just don't find it usable, and OS X also has its issues.
1903 decoupled cortana from search. I would have her or just deleted the executable a long time ago, but they had them bundled. Now, I can do that, no issues.
I have a small Windows 10 Intel NUC that I use for Visual Studio to pull code to test and debug.
I did tweak it by removing many packages with:
Get-AppxPackage | Select Name, PackageFullName
Remove-AppxPackage ...
I also did tweak the group policies to prevent Windows 10 for many things, such as not use Cortana and not to auto-update and restart without notice. The software I write needs to run for weeks without leaks, that's one of the things I need to test on that system.
That NUC computer running Windows 10 is a pure joy to use. Once trimmed down Windows boots in seconds and never interrupt me while I am working.
The Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) contains most of the important settings to disable (Cortana, having your searches uploaded to Bing, Windows Update, Defender...) and it's perfectly safe to use, unlike these scripts.
I was surprised to find on a recent reinstall of Windows 10 that it no longer included the start menu full of sponsored apps and games. It was a pretty minimal install, all things considered. This was with the Education edition which is a derivative of the Pro edition I believe.
I’d also highly recommend the BoxStarter setup scripts [0]. They remove all of the unnecessary default applications, perform windows updates, apply sane developer defaults and install development tooling depending on your needs. It’s a one click run, so it’s a pretty easy way to bootstrap a new install. No negative side effects and have been using them for several years.
This is marginally less terrible, but it's still terrible — for example, it considers Skype "bloat" so hopefully you didn't need that! — and the list goes on as you read through the (thankfully, fewer) scripts.
Just needs to stamp registry with, ran this script on X date, so I can tell the user exactly when and what time they broke windows before reinstalling the OS.
Do not run these scripts they are always making it worse.
Do your friends a favor and never run this or any like it on their systems "for their benefit".
This is a prime example of "expert user footgun problem".
The phrase "debloat" is a marketing-hype word that's being used to bait you all into someone's personal view of how computers should be. Expect to be forced to reinstall Windows 10 a few days or weeks after running any such script.
Whenever I tech support any of my friends, the first question I ask is "did you do expert-user things to your system?" and they say "well, I mean, I edited some Registry settings" and I just stop and tell them to reinstall Windows because it's time to amputate. I'll have to add "Have you ever opened Windows PowerShell?" to my list, because that'll catch all of these right out of the gate.
In case that's not reason enough to be afraid — check out this random sampling of changes this makes!
* "This script disables Windows Defender" — Because anti-malware protection is "bloat"
* "Disable 'Updates are available' message" — Because you shouldn't have to be notified when security updates are available for your system, for example to address zero-day RCEs
* "Windows Biometric Service" — And suddenly you can't face-login to your Windows 10 computer any longer, but hey, it's "bloat"
* "Disable easy access keyboard stuff" — Because no one would ever use keyboard accessibility, that's just "bloat"
* "Restoring old volume slider" — I would get that this was "debloat" if it removed the volume slider, but simply restoring an older one?
* "PandoraMediaInc.29680B314EFC2", "SpotifyAB.SpotifyMusic" — Hope you don't like streaming music, that's just "bloat" anyways
And, consider how easily this repo could be compromised to result in you self-infecting your computer with malware by running all of these scripts without a close review of the steps they take. First step in any persistent Windows infection is to disable Windows Defender and Windows Update notifications so the user doesn't take steps that might uninstall the persistent infection. Repo does that already, so it's not like it'd be difficult.
Don't forget the fact it's firewalling or null routing Akamai's CDN, which will cause seemingly-random services/programs to fail. There doesn't seem to have been a lot of homework performed either; some of those IPs resolve to host names that will be blocked by the HOSTS file changes. I came across one of these scripts with typos in host names which I submitted pull requests for, which were ignored, and then copied to other similar scripts...
Agreed. You are better off trying out Linux and using that if it meets your needs than breaking your system if thats an option. Or even considering using a Mac if its an option you can afford. Anything above breaking your OS.
I agree with most of what you wrote but have a question about the last one. Is Microsoft shipping Pandora and Spotify clients? To me, that doesn't seem like it belongs in the OS.
I am the kind of person that goes through settings and turns off as many things as I can and uninstalls anything I don't use. I figure every single app and service has vulnerabilities and if I don't have a 3d printer or hololens, then I'm safer with that stuff gone.
Just like all those threads about searching in the Windows 10 Start Menu, where some commenters always say that search is broken because it never remembers their most used apps and always brings up something obscure.
Presumably they - or some script they didn't really understand - turned off the "Let Windows track app launches to improve Start and search results" setting.
Actually for the longest time if you simply toggled:
Settings -> Background Apps -> "Let apps run in the background"
It would disable search even though nothing related to search was in the apps list (along with other presumably hidden items). The workaround was to leave background apps globally enabled and manually disable every app that showed in the list (including any that got added over time). I think this was finally fixed in 1809.
Looking at just the block-telemetry.ps1 script in this repo tells me the creator is a novice. Changing the Group Policy does NOT block telemetry in Win10 Home or Pro. Furthermore, adding MS's own domains to the hosts file or firewall aren't great techniques either, since the OS doesn't have to honor them and those domains may serve other functions.
In disable-services.ps1:
- Home Groups was discontinued and these services aren't installed by default anymore. Even if they are present, the default config is manual and they'll use zero resources if you don't have a HomeGroup set up
- Futzing with remote access services is a minefield and could kill VPNs, network shares/printers, and domain access. It's one piece in a set of dependencies that might be okay to disable, but tends to pop up in unexpected situations. RaRA is disabled by default, so if it is enabled, there is probably a reason.
- Distributed Link Tracking Client - I mean, I like my shortcuts working, but okay.
- Windows Security Center Service - Disabling this basically makes it harder for you to actually access the security center and will break 3rd party AV/firewall/security tools.
- Xbox services - Disabling kills any games bought via the Windows Store and possibly controllers. Doesn't use resources, since it's set to manual.
Almost everything else the scripts say they're doing can be done within the Settings app. I phrased it that way because the toggles may be changing multiple settings to get the desired effect and changing a single registry value isn't enough. There are some sound tweaks mixed in (some that I use myself), but nothing new and nothing to make me think the author is particularly knowledgeable about Windows configurations. I prefer something like http://www.blackviper.com/
I wanted to add that I've been pretty heavily tweaking Windows since the Win9x days, and modern Windows is a different beast compared to even Win7. Lots of services and features have not-so-obvious dependencies.
For example, the Your Phone App can't be uninstalled via normal means, but there are plenty of articles that detail the steps to uninstall it with Powershell. The problem is that this app also hooks into the experience continuity features MS is pushing heavily, and forcing an uninstall will cause issues with syncing settings across devices and the timeline feature.
Also worth noting is that simply undoing some tweaks isn't always straightforward. Delete a registry entry? Hope you noted that it was owned by Installer, because adding it back as owned by admin ain't gonna cut it.
Lastly, 90%+ of the tweak guides/scripts I've seen would completely break programming IDEs, VPN access, and systems on a corporate network. They assume you want everything stripped and will add back individual pieces as situations present themselves, but it never works out that way. Instead, the whole process approaching those situations gets borked (e.g.- program checks for a service at launch, can't find it, and closes immediately or dumps the user into some config that's not appropriate once they untweak their OS).
Most of my tweaking now is simply changing settings, disabling a few scheduled tasks and services I'm familiar with, and making a couple dozen registry changes that are reversible and not tied to vital components.
"This script disables Windows Defender" — Because anti-malware protection is "bloat"
I found it being around half cases of “windows update 100 cpu” issue (yes, that is still a thing in 2019). The silly fact is that windows configuration only works in almost-default state and fails with everything else. The entire system is full of hardcoded crap that doesn’t even assume configs and modes exist. The complete absence of readable diagnostics adds to this heavily, not to mention KB articles that officially suggest magic reinstall/fix steps that never work.
Otoh, I understand streamers who periodically see this idiotic “hey, pay some attention, i found no virus” in their gaming hours.
A friend I know who can code circles around me depends on it everyday. Your desire against it is no sole excuse to label it “bloat” when it sees real-word usage and has value to others than you.
The only valid complains in this post are about Windows defender and updates notifications, all the others are indeed bloatware because you can reinstall Spotify if you want it that much, and the "accessibility keyboard" should just ask you if you really want to uninstall that, which 99% of users don't need at all.
All "non-bloat" mentioned above is mostly one big pile of shit that you generally do not need and might need only on specific machine AND in specific context. Running this concrete debloater might produce some unwanted side effects which are easy enough to fix, but it sure as heaven makes a system at least x2 faster ALL THE TIME.
Yeah, spotify is a bloat if you don't use it, just as candy crash. Defender slows down computer amazingly and those people that know how to use this are typically not in a line for babysitting and don't go around clicking britni's nude photo.jpg.exe. Windows updates are better if controled, as they more often freck up computer then don't nowdays, I definitely do not want frecking biometric shit on anything that is not surface etc..
Furthermore, scripts can be inspected and quickly fixed/forked to your own desire. Do yourself a favor and run this first thing on fresh OS. I just imagine a world where MS ships barebone OS where stuff should be enabled rather then the opposite.
One more thing should be done for even faster OS - disable MS Store. I lived weeks wondering why my system suddenly becomes slow as a snail until I did this, later to find its a well known not fixed problem.
Or you can just make your brand new machine feel like its 5 years old, once all above and more of the shit starts fighiting for CPU/disk/mem/... attention....
My years-old iMac runs Windows 1904 just fine, and about three years ago Defender stopping thrashing my disk to death. I’m not sure what they improved but clearly it’s a lot more at peace with itself. I’ve made a point never^ to expert user pebcak it, and last April’s update was quite chill and this April’s as well. I did a pass at install time to remove apps I don’t plan to use. The most dramatic things to happen have been an EFI bug in Windows back in 2017 that I had to workaround^^ and when I found that PUBG’s uninstaller left some stupid DRM thing behind years ago that I had to extract manually from the 1904 updates logs to find and remove earlier this year. It just works, otherwise, cloned forward through three Macs to date! And if it can work on an iMac without powershell drama, then surely it can work on any normal PC.
^ One time I cloned it to an SSD and tried some fancy ACPI patching to hack eGPU support into my old hardware, but I ended up deleting it because it offered no improvement over “boring stock install” after days of work.
^^ There was a Windows update in 2017 that assumed your system has only one EFI bootable partition, and would panic if you had 2+, so I taught myself how to hide the rescue partition from Windows to avoid a reinstall.
> typically not in a line for babysitting and don't go around clicking britni's nude photo.jpg.exe
Do you understand what a drive-by attack is? Defender is the last line of defense against unknown vulnerabilities, assuming you have the latest security patches...
I question why Windows continues to need increasingly demanding and intrusive anti-malware when Mac and Linux get along just fine without it. The architecture of Windows must be aging terribly if the only way one can keep it safe is by humongous and intrusive real time scanning. My experiences with Windows Defender's realtime protection has not been pleasant. Almost one core being used exclusively to check every network and filesystem operation. I recommend if users have any security common sense whatsoever they can safely disable Defender and manually run it once a month.
The best way to keep it safe is let it auto install patches, and don't download or run anything dodgy. Same as it had always been.
I leave windows defender on 100% of the time on my personal laptop. It's totally benign in my experience and doesn't have any obvious performance impact that I can see.
I would never tell anyone to turn off windows defender. I have told people to uninstall ageing AVG/avast/Norton et Al installs that have not had definition updates in months/years and really do seem to impact day to day use of the computer.
My view is leave the virus checker that was built by the people who made windows and is built directly into windows there to do the job that the people who built the damn thing designed it to do :)
Mac has intrusive anti-malware that is almost a carbon copy of Windows Defender, or used to be anyways (perhaps one or the other have changed in the past few years!). See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20407233
Linux is a wasteland of terrible security practices that sysadmins excuse as "acceptable" for their own workstations and servers because they think that locking down SSH is sufficient defense against e.g. malicious infections or "curl | bash".
I'm sorry that Defender has harmed you, but that's no excuse to recommend others disable automated Defender scans on some sort of schedule.
The link you link to is "Apple has pushed a silent Mac update to remove hidden Zoom web server."
It has little to do with the functions of Windows Defender. It was a special purpose function removing one very particular file from a specific location. It was not scanning your whole system, or downloads, for malware signatures.
When you say MacOS includes software that is "almost a carbon copy of Windows Defender," are you talking about something else? I am not aware of anything that comes with MacOS that has similar features to Windows Defender.
You misunderstand how this system works. The Zoom removals were malware signature definition file update #45 and #46, iirc, since the feature went live years ago. I encourage further research.
"I question why Rust continues to need increasingly demanding and intrusive borrow checking when C and C++ get along just fine without it."
Today, we consider C and C++ to be inherently unsafe, because nobody ever does the things you need to do to make them safe. It's time we said the same about operating systems. "Oh, just don't run anything sketchy off the web!" Except your user base won't do that.
In 2019, any OS that does not come with strong antimalware protection is inherently unsafe at any speed.
Yes, this means Windows is safer than Linux. Don't @ me.
Windows 10 started out snappy (boot and usage) and responsive and has remained so for me w/o changing any defaults and taking all updates -- IMHO the best Win yet. I'm sure there is bloat there, but if I don't see it, disk/ssd is cheap. (Resharper is the only beast that seems to cause issues.)
I have to ask, for anyone that cares this much, why bother with Windows at this point? Wouldn't it be easier to just use Linux?
I know the usual argument is that you need Windows to game, but why make your gaming instance your main work instance too? Why not dual boot and use Linux for work and Windows for gaming?
I use Linux heavily (work and home) but it's never played as well with hardware as I'd have liked. HDR is basically non-existent, G-Sync is basically impossible in windowed mode, 150% high DPI is only really functional in KDE, it's extremely painful to use a custom keyboard layout (and the method seems to change yearly), both Firefox and Chrome run significantly slower/use significantly more power, not all of the non-Linux apps I need work well in WINE, and when new hardware is timely supported I still have to upgrade the kernel (many of the times manually).
Most annoying on my laptop there is some input issue with the keyboard where it would drop a couple of key inputs per minute, usually grouped. I spent a month trying to figure out why and trying different solutions, never did find out.
But more than all of that... even on the hardware where everything worked out of the box and none of the above limitations were a problem... I still have to customize the install. Sure, I may not have to remove sleezy/privacy invading stuff like on Windows but it's not like I just click one button and get the exact packages I want.
I love Linux but only as a VM or single purpose bare metal box, for a daily driver (work or home) it's simply easier to use Windows and run WSL or Hyper-V if I need something Linux specific.
That phenomenon is what keeps me from using Linux as my main laptop OS. I have done, for long stretches (and probably will again), but I'm always driven to either OS X or Windows by a waning desire to spend time troubleshooting or on sysadmin. If not for that I'd use Linux f/t as I prefer many of its traits.
Dual booting is something I used to do. It's not a fun work flow.
Having to reboot (even with an SSD) is a very destructive action because it means suddenly all of your work is shut down and unless you script a way to rebuild your environment (which never works flawlessly even with a lot of effort), you'll have to set everything up again when you come back. So even if it only took 2 seconds to dual boot, you'd still have to deal with that tear down / set up process.
But, it's also not just gaming that keeps people on Windows. For example I do screencast recording and editing where I record software dev related videos but the tools I use only run on Windows, and they can't be run in a VM because the thing I want to record is my dev environment (I use WSL in Windows).
Yeah that's not a bad idea. It's still a big context switch to dual boot tho. Also dumping your entire machine's RAM to disk on an SSD seems questionable for the lifespan of your SSD. That's a huge amount of writes, especially if you're dual booting a few times a day. But maybe it wouldn't matter? I haven't measured how much of an impact that would have.
And in my case, it wouldn't work because I need to be able to record a Linux environment but record / edit videos in a Windows environment, so both OSs need to be running at once.
I think the SSD write cycle fears are overrated. I might be wrong. I've been doing it for years with extremely cheap Kingston SSD's. I also need to edit videos, not too often, hence I need windows. Switching takes like 6 seconds, most of the time from waiting for the grub menu. It might be worth to try out the workflow.
I have used Windows, Linux and macOS fairly regularly over decades, and Linux is a clear loser when it comes to the internationalization---the ability to use softwares in any locales. Note that I don't even care about the localization---the translation and tweak of softwares to suit a particular locale; I have to write my own language in the desktop after all. The Linux input method story is still suboptimal (I can't believe that I had to use my own toy VIM IME [1] as I couldn't easily fix the basic IME issue) and I expect that it won't be any better in the foreseeable future.
I have windows for gaming/VR but zero development.
I have Fedora for literally everything else including C#/WPF development (I run my dev environment for windows inside a VM as it makes it very simple to backup and I know that the somewhat irritating setup is perfectly replicated).
Essentially at this point Win10 is relegated to been a massive console OS.
I could likely run a lot of my games on Linux but I'm not enough of a purist that the hassle makes it worth it, down time is precious and I'd rather not fight it debugging why a particular game is been weird.
I'm likely to upgrade my 2700X soon so I might slap an ATI card in alongside my RTX2080 so I can use the 2080 with an iommu pass through and then I could game on a separate windows VM inside Fedora.
I doubted Proton for so long. It's not problem-free, but I get 144 Hz in Elite Dangerous, and all it takes is the "force this game to run in Proton" checkbox in Steam. Wow.
It’s gotten better but yeah there still issues, that’s why I like dual booting, windows gives me no issues for gaming if that’s all you do and Fedora has been rocksteady back to 25 when I switched, my work machine has gone from 26 to 30 via in place upgrades which I always expect to fail but so far never have.
I may play with Proton at some point though if the games I play are properly supported, mostly though my gaming time is spent on the Rift S playing Project Cars 2, combined with a nice force feedback wheel and pedals (Logitech G920) its a really good experience, I didn’t expect VR to be so compelling actually, it’s not perfect but damn is it impressive when you are going the Nurburgring in the dark as snow blows past your car and you look left and see a car coming up in your mirrors.
I think I’m a convert and I’m eagerly waiting for what the next generation can bring.
I would absolutely love to get iommu VM pass through working for gaming, but it’s never been a good experience for me with nvidia cards (vbios is usually the problem I think). AMD cards seem to be much more successful for that.
I've relied upon Unraid and its awesome community, and now I'm a happy NVidia on AMD gamer in my Win 10VM and code in Debian. There were still hurdles to get IOMMU working with Threadripper boards, but it all eventually worked. With that I have a NAS and "app store" like Docker experience I use for databases, testing new OSS projects, and game servers. Best $60 I've ever spent! Dual booting sucks.
I used all systems A LOT. Windows is clear winner for me in all aspects except community. I can do almost anything as on Linux (I do love it too, but I love Windows more) and there are many things Win exclusive (Autohotkey, Total Commander, Everything search engine...). OS X feel like Windows 95 to me (used it for about a year with great pain and hated it almost every moment).
Linux on servers (mostly because of price), Windows for regular everyday use.
Although, I admit, now Linux vs Windows is less relevant as most of the good stuff MS does is now cross-platform and Win ships with Linux kernel. I personally can't live without pwsh.
> I have to ask, for anyone that cares this much, why bother with Windows at this point? Wouldn't it be easier to just use Linux?
For me no it isn't. I am a nomadic VB/C# .NET developer and while most things now run cross platform flawlessly, there are many components that don't.
e.g. SQL Server is a major sticking point. Visual Studio on Windows has a concept of a SQL Server project. There is simply no cross platform equivalent. SQL Server projects typically serve two purposes 1. Let you easily develop a local database 2. Let you easily deploy your database changes (the deployment profile can be configured per environment that your organisation has).
> why bother with Windows at this point? Wouldn't it be easier to just use Linux?
Well I get the linux dev tools, which is all I really want from linux, in wsl. Windows works well on my machine, and I find it less trouble than linux. I wouldn't say I like it, but there isn't a good desktop OS in 2019 - it's a matter only of 'least worst'
Maybe this is a good time to point out that Windows now comes with a Linux kernel. Not sure how this effects VM workflows. I used to run Mac with Parallels but now I just use pure Windows, just much less of a hassle especially with the release of tools such as VS Code.
Dual boot is a hassle. If you want to use linux and occasionally need windows or want to play games under windows it's more convenient to go through the hassle of setting up GPU passthrough once so you can run it in a VM.
That's what I do. I use a mostly unmodified Windows 10 for gaming and audio, and Linux for work. If there is something wrong with Windows, it doesn't affect me. The Linux system, on the other hand, is constantly backed up.
I do run an "optimizer" on Windows 10 called Kerish Doctor. It's cheap and in my experience one of the few programs in that category that work well.
I keep an older windows laptop around for maintaining a couple of wpf and Xamarin apps.
Visual studio for mac might cut it, but I don't have a mac. My other laptop runs Linux and that's where I prefer to be.
But the truth is that while Microsoft have been spending lots of money and effort on making on-windows-for-linux dev simple, the reverse (understandably?) isn't viable.
A couple of years ago (when Skylake was new CPU) I tried dual-booting Linux with the then-current version of Arch and it crashed (completely froze) when using integrated intel graphics. Tweaking kernel boot parameters (turning on experimental support for the chipset) as suggested in the documentation didn't help either. Not to mention I have a HiDPI display and tweaking appearance of everything was a pain.
Suspend didn't work. With windows, I don't turn off the computer, I choose "sleep". Uptime regularly over 1 month, usually interrupted only by Windows updates.
Wiped the whole thing. Now, if I need Linux tools, I boot up WSL.
EDIT: Before I was a long-term Linux user. Never worked smoothly (e.g., concurrent audio playback/mixing from different programs), always had to tweak this and that. It was fun when I was younger, Linux was newer, and less bloated and more easily understandable. Now I just need to get shit done w/o OS getting in my face all the time, so I use Windows.
That is an interesting take on it. I guess my problem with debloating is two fold.
One, when I bothered trying to debloat my Windows gaming machine in the past, many of the changes would be undone when windows updated from time to time and this was frustrating.
Second, I don't know what the advisability of running a bunch of unvetted scripts is. Sure it's open source, but who is actually going to go thru and read all those scripts one-by-one before running them.
I could do without Win32 but I'm a freelance, work from home, and sometimes I like to open a game to unwind for a couple minutes. That makes dual boot unfeasible.
I've heard this argument many times. I have some games I want to play. I don't want to replace them with other games. In other words, it's not that I can't play games, but that I can't play the games I want to play.
I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in nearly a decade. I have to use it occasionally for work reasons and I'm always shocked by the Stockholm syndrome Windows users must have. Even just booting an OEM Windows machine for the first time raises my blood pressure. I hear that Cortana monologue in my nightmares.
I used to not really understand the point of Cortana. Typing on a phone sucks, so I only used my phone's voice assistant when I wanted to search a moderately-long series of words or something.
But then I realized typing on a computer also sucks. And then I realized that there's no voice-to-text software available for Linux.
And then I realized that it's not readily-available for computers in general. You can go out of your way to get it, but it's on our phones by default. How weird. Apparently, Cortana can't easily be used for voice-to-text dictation though, and it'd be limited to Edge. So I still don't really understand the point of Cortana.
But it'd be nice if there was some generic, voice-to-text functionality in regular OSes. It'd be super nice if it was locally-processed too. Is the hardware power not there yet?
I would also like to plug O&O Shutup10 here, allows you to disable (seemingly safely, in my experience) most annoying Windowz 'features:' https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
There is an easier way (for those with access to the version of Windows involved):
Windows 10 N LTSB / LTSC
N = No media things built-in, so you'll need to install VLC if that's a concern.
LTSB / LTSC = Long-Term Servicing Branch / Long-Term Servicing Channel. This is really the killer thing but it comes with catches. You'll get an absolutely stable Windows and to achieve that a load of things are removed by Microsoft.
> LTSB does not include Edge nor any Microsoft Store (Universal Windows Platform, or UWP) apps, whether Redmond-made or third-part, because the browser and those apps constantly change and need updating. Also AWOL: the Cortana voice-activated digital assistant and access to the Microsoft Store.
And for the HN community... lack of Microsoft Store means that you are not running Ubuntu on Windows.
> N = No media things built-in, so you'll need to install VLC if that's a concern.
Is an understatement, if you play games expect to install the media pack or have many break. Some apps in the office suite also rely on them so if you use that you've created trouble for yourself. Also RDP client/server can't run hardware accelerated since that uses the video playback API.
> And for the HN community... lack of Microsoft Store means that you are not running Ubuntu on Windows.
It's purely Powershell based unlike some other binary based tools out there, clean, in a single file. I'd say it doesn't use any hacks either to stop telemetry.
Keep in mind Windows will revert some settings occasionally after a Windows update.
If you’re going go to all this trouble to “debloat” Windows, why not just install Fedora/Ubuntu/PopOS/Debian/Manjaro or something?
I just don’t see the point with fiddling around with little hacks trying to disable telemetry and stuff when you can just install a Linux distro and be done with it.
I mean sure depending on your use case that may not be possible, but if you don’t have a certain software or hardware limitation holding you to Windows, I really don’t see why you wouldn’t just use a Linux distro.
WTF, its not like you don't customize your linux system, is it ? Default Ubuntu is just as bad as default anything. I customize the shit out of it and lots of people do - just serach for dot files on github...
The point is that Linux distros are customizable by default, whereas you need to work against Windows to customize it, and all your changes will probably be reverted in the next update.
Vendor lock-in. If the PP spent some good money for a Windows only software very specific to his job, then there's no chance to migrate: that would simply be too costly. In due time, maybe, should exist a Linux port/equivalent, the user should carefully weight the costs/benefits of say a FOSS solution that would cost zero, but would have no warranty and be community supported.
(Actually isn't that extreme: support can be bought for Linux software as well)
It all boils down to what the user needs from Windows; migrating to a Linux machine plus Libreoffice for document work is one thing, moving complex vertical solutions to it is a whole different story.
BTW, I'm totally in favor of ditching windows for good, but 30 years of technical and cultural lock-in are hard to fight.
Some people use Windows for games. Yes, I know you can run a lot of Windows games on Linux using Wine or PlayOnLinux, but some just prefer vanilla Windows. Scripts like these are great for freeing up memory and decluttering Windows 10 specifically for running games (typically offline) as connecting Windows to the Internet is generally not a good idea.
The main things holding me to Windows is SQL Server and some other bits and pieces around that where there is simply no cross platform equivalent that will work with it.
Great debloater, I use it for years, along with bunch of other developers I know. It may produce a problem here and there but its well worth it and produces lighting fast system. Highly recommended and kudos to W4RHRWK for maintaining it so long.
There is a ton of overlap and they all cargo-cult copy-paste from each other's tools, complete with "fixes" for bugs that one or the other introduces (for example, "whitelist Windows Calculator" is quite hilarious to see in the errata).
I'm considering my first Windows workstation in more than a decade and was planning on Windows for Workstations precisely because I don't want to remove all the packaged crap.
It's astonishing how many de-bloat scripts, tools or functions of other tools this OS spawned. That should make the developers think...if it wasn't intended and they didn't give a damn because monopoly...
People have been installing pointless and bad tune-up apps for PCs for decades. People were installing RAM doublers for Windows 95 that just changed the size of the hard disk cache. All of those registry cleaners were awful. And I'm continually shocked at how many people will just run some random Powershell script off the Internet with elevated access rights. You don't trust Microsoft, but you trust some random Github repo? 'Kay.
Windows has gone from operating system to value-added-service driver. No wonder they yank shit like Microsoft Store from GPOs and move others into the Enterprise level only.
Funny coincidence, I recently debloated my W10 with a script as well. I saw the one in the OP during my search, but ultimately didn't go with it as it didn't look legit to me compared to another one that I found mentioned in a article guide.
What's the Linux hack/solution to changing the battery charging thresholds? I really enjoy that feature with this W10/Laptop right now. Battery has been at 75% for the last two days, so it's not charging and just being sustained while my laptop is running entirely from the plugged in charger unless I'm mistaken. I really enjoy that. Windows also seems to have gotten much better at power efficiency overall.
There's a utility called TLP that can get you most of the way there. It's not perfect, but I've found it useful on the newer thinkpads with dual batteries (one embedded + one removable).
I run Windows on my personal laptop - not because I love it, but because it certainly used to have a huge strong-hold on media and games apps, which I wanted a way of consuming.
I no longer game, but as I understand it, support for Linux has greatly improved. Also I used to watch Sky (UK), which is only available for Windows users (first because they were literally using Silverlight up until about a year ago, and now because its only available as an Electron app...).
For my next machine I think I'll just move to Ubuntu. Having said that, looking at some of the apps I do still use (such as VPNs, Google Drive, Spotify), many of them would either work less well, or simply not work at all. It's a shame, but what can you do?
Spotify works fine on Linux in my experience though I mostly use Spotify on my iPhone, not on my Linux desktop but I sometimes use it there and don’t have any complaints.
Linux has excellent support for VPN. VPN providers on the other hand may be bad at providing proper guidance for Linux users. In that case I suggest either switching to a VPN provider that has the guides you need, or searching for good guides made by others about how to do it with your provider of choice.
Google Drive you are right about. If acceptable to you you might consider switching to Dropbox instead. Dropbox worked great on Linux last time I used Dropbox.
Keep in mind that it is a good idea to pick hardware that has good Linux support. The problem for a lot of people is that they buy some random laptop without taking this into consideration, and then try to run Linux on it and might be unlucky.
Personally I run Linux on my desktop with hardware that I chose specifically based on finding out that it would work.
Yep, Spotify I use every day on Linux and it does work fine, but it's not quite as easy to install (though this is the best it gets on my list).
VPN support would be fine wrt OpenVPN, but I'm using NordVPN. To be fair I just checked and they also have a .deb so that's fine too.
Drive is a pain, Dropbox suggestion is good. IIRC I've used "Grive" before, and it worked, but wasn't a delight to use.
Definitely agree on hardware. Even the XPS range from Dell which offers Linux pre-installed has been pretty choppy in the past. I'm using a Thinkpad now and imo it's the best option.
I would love to see Windows not take up 4 gigs of RAM out of the box. I don't need Cortana running period. Let me uninstall Cortana please Microsoft. I'm sure there's other crap I don't want but I fear if I can't just hit 'Uninstall' it wont go well, or an update will bring it back.