Hopefully they continue by removing:

Candy Crush, "Get Office", Minecraft, ... and all other trash that gets installed by default.

When that "Get Office" thing first popped-up, I was sure my PC was infected with malware and came to the brink of formatting my hard drive.

Later came the random console pop-up from the automatic WSL updates [1] and then I did panic enough to actually format all the things but that's another story.

[1]: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/841

The random console popups give me the jeebies! I still don't know what causes them. Never had such things on older Windows/Lenovo machines.

You might want to review the scheduled tasks. My system had "OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration" set to run every hour. It only pops up for an instant, but it would grab input focus and thus do bad things to my blood pressure.

I remember Windows XP where all of the extras were tiny and actually good. From what I've seen even stuff like Solitaire has ads these days :G

...the integrated advertising platform, cloud software, the mandatory spying components...

This is my problem with Windows 10. It is no longer an operating system it is an advertising platform.

This isn't massively new either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

Active Desktop was always optional, wasn't it? And was it really used for advertising by default? I thought it was mostly arbitrary browser windows that you could attach to the desktop.

Active Desktop was on by default in Windows 98 and had channels from content partners that pushed to the desktop.

No. This was something that your PC manufacturer might have done after an install but not by default when installing from scratch.

Also, a completely different thing entirely.

It's both. Having ads on some apps doesn't make it not an OS anymore. I won't deny it's an advertising platform, just like android or ios or television or radio or the internet. And while it's equally annoying on all those media/systems, it doesn't lessen their or usefulness

There are ads in the Windows UI. I've been an iOS user for 9 years and can't recall seeing an ad in the OS. So it does not seem "just like" iOS, at all.

Music has started showing Apple Music ads, and Apple has also advertised its News app with a push notification on one of my devices.

The fact that Apple Watch has its own pre-installed app feels like an ad to me as well.

And don't get me started on App Store ads... https://twitter.com/nuthatch/status/879783700279418881

I've heard this but I've not yet seen these UI ads people keep talking about. Are they in pro?

Not sure iOS belongs on that list.

I'm not a user, but I assume ads exist in some IOS apps?

That is so annoying, in particular that you can't remove a lot of the junk.

They're not bundled with the OS. They're installed automatically after Windows installation is complete.

I'm not sure I would consider paint at the forefront of bloat, given that the base OS runs in the tens of gigs. I wouldn't be surprised if the default background image is larger than mspaint.exe. To say nothing of the store apps they auto install for you.

It's not necessarily the size of the executable but rather that it's another executable the part of the build and test process of the base image.

Pinball had to be removed for this sort of reason.

> Pinball had to be removed for this sort of reason.

What? No. It was removed because it was a 32bit application written by a 3rd party and there was a hard to fix bug on 64bit windows that made it unplayable, so they dropped it.

Source: Raymond Chen - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...

That doesn't make sense, it could be run on WoW64. (even Visual Studio is 32-bit)

Visual Studio is not a part of Windows.

From Raymond Chen's answer to this question in the first comment to the same blog post:

> That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.)

I was under the impression pinball was removed because it was basically unsupportable and too had too much low level hacky graphics code to port across changes in the graphics subsystems. A shame though, it was a fun game.

They're replacing it with "Paint 3D" though, which comes with huge 3D models of smilies built-in. The net result is more bloat, not less.

6.36 MB, that's how much space takes MS Paint. In era when web pages sizes are no longer counted in kilo- but megabytes is this really a meaningful size reduction? Because it's definitely a meaningful feature loss.

"reducing the size of their base OS" is completely irrelevant.

I don't have a Win10 mspaint.exe for comparison, but the one from XP is 336KB.

It's a damn shame that a lot of apps these days seem to be >1MB, yet are even more featureless.

If you want to talk about reducing size, there's plenty of other low-hanging fruit of more questionable utility in the OS.

There's so much more before Paint becomes a blip on the map.