you will love cortana. cortana is love, cortana is life.

You can disable all that by adding a reg key under HKCU somewhere (can't remember where exactly off the top of my head). I think you should be able to write to that without admin.

If you can sneak open shell onto your machine I would highly recommend it. It'll give you a classic start menu from the pre-win8 days and then you can just disable the w11 search bar.

Typing in the name of a program I know I have and the first item being “web search” drove me nuts.

Haven't used Microsoft in a while, what the fuck?

I just use PowerToys Run. Works very well and it's FOSS

Everything is incredibly useful, however, let me further recommend everything toolbar. It allows for even easier integration into Windows 10/11. The standalone "everything" is relegated to the little notifications area in the bottom right (whatever that's called. And no I don't care enough to look it up).

I've just started using Linux as my daily OS for non-gaming purposes. MX Linux specifically. It's Debian with some minimal packages added with the idea being speed and low resource usage from the OS. I was using antiX (I think is the name) but it lacked full support for some of the stuff I needed when doing (light) dev stuff. I work with docker engine, re-writing python code, etc. I like MX Linux though. I also like Debian just generally. If you're sick of windows, person who may be reading this, try out Linux. It's come a long way! And there's a billion flavors of it to offer something for anyone.

This removes Copilot and telemetry, I don't remember if it has the option to remove onedrive, though.

Not that I've found. You can uninstall onedrive and cortana. Ads can be mostly disabled. Copilot can be disabled by editing the registry.

Yeah, it's called installing a Linux distro (lmao)

But seriously, you can remove a lot of the annoying stuff, like the "Bing!" integration, etc. through regedit commands in command prompt/windows terminal. However, a lot of it gets reinstalled or restored (Microsoft probably calls it "fixing" registry errors...). Plus, there's an inherent level of "danger" involved when do regedits especially via terminal commands if you're unfamiliar with what the commands do.

I just view Windows as a dead OS at this point. It hogs resources like crazy, installs tons of spyware and what I'd call malware, and hasn't really added anything innovative in over a decade. Maybe longer. The windows experience has been basically the same since Windows 7 later updates until now, except it has gotten more cluttered, more ads, just more shit. I dunno what else to say beyond "Consider Linux."

Group Policy settings with Windows 11 Pro

I installed atlasOS on my desktop this weekend. It seems to be working well. I had to reinstall a bunch of drivers, but all in all it was an easy installation. I haven't had any major problems with it yet, but I've only been using it for a couple days.

There's scripts, but the pattern since Windows 8 is that there's a cat and mouse game between users trying to unshitify Windows and Microsoft reshitifying Windows to make those third party tools no longer work. You pretty much have to constantly monitor those tools, and a lot of times, people eventually burn out, which means that you need to find new tools made by different people.

I really like how they made a new right-click menu worse.

Yes. Yes. This is it. The cracks are starting to form. Microsoft's policy of eternal backwards support is starting to go past the event horizon. The whole windows explorer thing has been a mess of jumbled legacy garbage since at least XP. And now it's just breaking? We're entering the technological cool zone

Oh, that explains what was happening. I also regularly get that bug where if I close my lid to sleep the laptop when it's plugged in, it doesn't actually sleep and instead just overheats in my backpack on the drive home.

What mods did you do to your win10 install?

It's this:

{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}