I'm wary of telemetry, but willing to accept it. It's the lack of respect that gets to me. "Yes/Maybe Later"? Showing me a fake Windows update screen once a month to try to get me to use an online account and switch to Edge? Starting a Bing search when the start menu doesn't recognize an application's name? Pre-installing games with advertisement and microtransactions?

It's a commercial operating system, for Christ's sake, stop pushing sleazy features. They are quickly burning through all the trust acquired over decades.

Yeah, Windows 8 was kind of ineffably bad. I know exactly effing why Windows 10 is bad; nothing ineffable about it.

The only thing I will credit Win8 for is that it felt really good on a Surface--Win10 was actually a step back on that platform. Which is natural, because 8 was clearly designed for the Surface to the exclusion of everything else, and they rightfully had to walk it back because the choices they made were ridiculous on the majority of Windows machines.

My favorite was when they wanted everyone to switch over from Internet Explorer to Edge (this was before support was dropped), so attempting to search "Internet Explorer" in the start menu caused it to override it with Edge instead.

This of course was quite annoying because we still had many applications at the time that (unfortunately) required Internet Explorer. It was even more annoying because when attempting to get to "Internet Options" or "File Explorer", it automatically replaced those with Edge, which is not at all helpful.

This effort was also completely undone by the fact that if you misspelled Internet Explorer it would still come right up as the first option.

I'm still upset that they've removed most Control Panel results from the start menu search as well, because after all these years the Settings app is still incomplete.

> My favorite was when they wanted everyone to switch over from Internet Explorer to Edge (this was before support was dropped), so attempting to search "Internet Explorer" in the start menu caused it to override it with Edge instead.

Was this before or after they actually removed iexplore.exe?

This was at least several months before, maybe more.

I'm not actually sure they even fully removed it. It seems pretty impossible to open, but as one of our users showed me if they open one of our HTA files and clicked a link in it, Internet Explorer happily opens up despite even being blocked with Group Policy.

> Starting a Bing search when the start menu doesn't recognize an application's name

Seriously though wtf is up with this? So actively hostile to user experience

>Starting a Bing search when the start menu doesn't recognize an application's name? Pre-installing games with advertisement and microtransactions?

I'm always surprised when I see things like this on HN. Also complaints about it auto-rebooting to install updates, requiring an MSN account, etc.

I turn all that stuff off when I first install it, so I see none of those problems. I just kind of assume any tech-savvy person or power-user would also do so.

And we might think the defaults suck. Rightfully, they would for us. But for granny or a gen-Z kid with no computer knowledge? Somebody who isn't going to know to make backups, run scheduled updates, or know the difference between local search and internet search? Those defaults probably make sense.

For me, it works great because I turn that stuff off and I know how to manage a computer. For people who don't, it also probably mostly works great, because they don't have to know how to do that.

Seems like there's just this one odd slice of people caught in the middle who know enough to get irritated by the defaults, but not enough to configure their system the way they want it. If you're in that group, then you're tech-savvy enough to look up how to change the settings to make it work the way you want. I encourage you to do so and make those changes to save yourself some stress and irritation.

what's handy guide to disable it all?

cheers

Some things can only be disabled on Windows Enterprise, not on Home or even Pro. For example for some aspects you need Group Policy, which isn't available in Home.

The defaults might make sense from a usability perspective, but are predatory and plainly spy on the user, with the majority of users not even aware of it.

This resonates with me. Whenever I use a windows machine, it really doesn't feel like I am in control and treated as a adult. Adding to the list, click-baity AI-aggregated sex&crime news delivered to you by default. It offends me.

While your list of changes is impressive, I noticed it took you years. So maybe you're a little like me: I find change hard, a cognitive burden that needs a good-enough reason above a certain pain threshold.

I was lucky enough to have been forced to work with Linux in Uni, and when I first set it up myself (trying out two or three distros because I actually managed to bork the first installation somehow), it was in an environment that embraced discovery and I wasn't on my own. Now at work, it's an uphill battle you don't use Windows. Confidence is a must.

I've been getting dialog boxes for default applications a lot lately. Ie, I've associated, say, .png with an image viewer (which is not MS), but lately when opening a .png I'd get the "what application do you want to open with?"-box, with a "Windows suggested"-app as the number two choice. That's disrespecting the choice I've made. Then, this goes for basically all non-MS default apps I've associated with.

Best thing I did for privacy was to use things like nextdns and pihole, they block alot of the stuff with minimal effort.

Heh. Man, you are going to love Linux. Stop waiting and drop that Windows shit like a hot potato.

The only lockin I have remaining to windows is video games really

Check out Proton.

Dosbox + Steam with Proton is the best PC gaming I've ever encountered.

There's a tiny gap in the early windows 9x days that I've been thinking of filling by upgrading my Dosbox Win 3.11 to Win 98. Overall though, it runs a greater percentage of dos/windows games than any dos/windows machine I've ever had access to.

(I'm considering moving to FreeBSD though. Dosbox runs fine, and Steam + Proton sort of works there, apparently. Checking it out in more depth soon.)

The Steam Deck is Linux and runs a large majority of games. You can do it on your laptop with Proton. It's amazing. Even weird stuff like Mass Effect Remastered (which requires EA Play client) works on Linux now.

Unfortunately 'the majority of games' wont include whatever fotm rando game my friends are inviting me to this time. If gaming was strictly a solo activity for me I would have gotten rid of windows a long time ago.

Almost all the games I play are these random multiplayer games with friends. In my experience, proton is only a blocker around 5% of the time. I still have a windows partition for those times (and I always laugh when I boot it and am "welcomed" by their "Let's take a moment to configure windows" garbage).

Just saying, if you have the HDD space, I'd say give dual booting a shot. you'll probably be surprised how usable Linux is for gaming these days.

I hear you. Hopefully with the Deck getting more popular, developers will be forced to ensure compatability.

I've moved 95% of my gaming to Linux entirely, after the steam deck convinced me it had gotten this good, and I barely miss Windows. Occasionally I'll still boot over to Windows for something like iRacing or to just experience some of the better graphics features, but honestly I find I don't really miss them and the Linux gaming experience these days is pretty seamless, even with my wacky setup of i3 and nvidia.

Even as recently as 2021, I still kept around a Windows partition for the occasional game that wouldn't run on Proton. I was still able to play the majority of what I wanted, but brand new titles often required patches after release, or some games would crash on occasion.

Now? I haven't even thought about compatibility in months. I don't even look at the user tweaks anymore, when it used to be a constant factor. Granted, I don't play multiplayer games with anticheat, which last I heard was still a lingering issue. Your mileage may vary, but I completely removed my Windows partition a while ago, and haven't even thought about since.

You'd be surprised how many games run perfectly well on Linux. Unless you're playing something with ridiculous anticheat like Valorant it will most likely run fine.

That was my position 5 years ago. For the last 3ish years I've been gaming on Linux with very few issues.

I'll be the first to say it's not perfect, but it's 100x better than it was 5 years ago. I'd say at least 70% of steam games just work when you hit play, 25% require a bit of configuring to get working, and only around 5% refuse to work at all.

I regularly game with Steam and Lutris on Fedora and it's really good - I wouldn't say perfect but the only problems I've had have been with one or two much older titles. No way I'm going back to Windows.

I actually bought my first Windows machine since 2005 a couple of weeks ago. It’s been surprisingly better than I expected although it took a bit to work through some WSL quirks with SSH.

I haven’t gotten a machine with a proper graphics card in years and I wanted one to experiment with LLMs locally, so I got a gaming PC setup.