Microsoft Finally Realizes Nobody Wants Its Windows 11 Preinstalled Bloatware

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1468 points –
Microsoft Finally Realizes Nobody Wants Its Windows 11 Preinstalled Bloatware
pcmag.com
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Tldr: Remote desktop, Cortana, camera, people app are all getting uninstall buttons.

"uninstalled" ... til the first automatic update 🙃

HI! I'm Skype!

uninstall

Hi! I'm Skype!

uninstall

Hi! I'm skype!

"Are you suuuuure you don't want to use Edge? Are you suuuuure you don't want it to be the default handler for .pdf and .svg files? Are you sure? Are you sure you're sure? Just in case, we'll pin it to your start menu again and put a shortcut to it on your desktop. Just until you're sure."

Apple's starting to get more and more into this. Safari pesters you and nobody wants NEWS/Stocks/AppleTv App, Weather, etc. But you can't uninstall them :(

I was able to uninstall all of the apps you just mentioned on iPhone just to cure my curiosity.

Which Apple device is not letting you uninstall those apps?

MacOS not iPhone. Should have specified

No worries! I was just a little confused when I tried it on my iPhone and it worked.

That’s what sudo rm -rf is for 😇. I’m going to try this on my Mac to satisfy my curiosity! Will report back.

If only it were that easy. You have to disable SIP basically permanently if you want to do that and I'm not confident enough to do that quite yet, much as I do love to live dangerously. Maybe someone who understands this all better might chime in on the tradeoffs or risks/benefits.

I’m kinda shocked that it didn’t work (tried it)! From what I’ve come to understand, the system won’t boot after removing a stock app since the checksum of the system partition changes. Whilst I’m in favour of keeping the OS healthy that way, some of the stock apps should definitely not have been included in that partition. However, today I learned!

I can always count on at least one idiot to mention Apple in a Microsoft hate thread.

I think you should go back to Reddit if you want to engage with people like that just crazy right out of the gate

Ew, a gatekeeper.

Weren't you just gatekeeping Microsoft-hate-threads?

Nope.

I pointed out the reliability of such a response.

Big difference between pointing out something vs demanding it stop.

You can do all of that without being an asshole

If calling someone an idiot on the internet is your bar for being an asshole. You're in for a hell of a ride.

Oh okay! just the... reliability... of a... demand? a demand which... starts with "I think"?

Well good thing your pointing is so reliable!

I got so annoyed with the fucking shortcut reappearing that I put it in one corner of one monitor that I hardly look at so it never appears on my main desktop monitor.

Just out of sight and out of mind.

I put it in one corner of one monitor that I hardly look at so it never appears on my main desktop monitor.

lol I did the exact same thing. That and all the unnecessary crap my work installs that I will never use but can't even uninstall the damn shortcuts they slap on my desktop are all jammed in the corner of a monitor off to the side.

And then they made it where you can't just select a different browser, you have to go manually associate each type with the new browser.

Cortana is being killed and replaced with their ChatGPT Bing thing.

Does that mean the AI thing will be unable to be uninstalled?

Probably. It will be an "essential" part of the OS, like Edge.

Which means it'll probably be training on literally everything you do on the computer and reporting it all back to Microsoft

Sounds like a good reason to get rid of windows 😁

I mean, Windows itself has been a good reason to get rid of Windows for a long time.

Windows itself has been a good reason to get rid of Windows for a long time

🤣 ... best sentence i've seen today. +1

Yes, all these imagined outrages are definitely a good reason for that.

Yep. A lot of what you do is already being reported back to Microsoft though.

And most likely they'll come 'round to your house and harvest your organs while you sleep, too.

Where are these "probable" scenarios coming from? This seems kind of overboard.

I mean Windows 11 right now harvests a lot of data about your PC, so I don't think it's a stretch exactly.

"training on literally everything you do on the computer and reporting it all back to Microsoft" is rather a big jump from "report lots of telemetry data."

I'm not saying people shouldn't be paying attention, but this thread is jumping straight from "there's a potential risk here" to "OMG Windows is spyware, delete everything!" There's already a lot of hysteria surrounding AI, let's not go nuts without some kind of actual reason.

"now now, calm down everyone. Let's see what the Orphan-Crushing Machine really does before we start getting upset. Just because it is fully capable of (and seems exclusively designed to) crush all orphans doesn't mean it is actually going to crush ALL the orphans. Probably just a few orphans really."

There is a reason Microsoft stopped caring a long time ago that it is so easy to install and use Windows without paying for a key. You can STILL use any old windows 7 key you have to active windows 10 and 11. You can use the OS nearly in it's entirety (as far as home users are concerned) without even doing that. It is because Windows is no longer Microsoft's biggest product, the user is.

It will be an “essential” part of the OS, like Edge Internet Explorer 4.

Just like Cortana, however, there will be a way to disable it via Group Policy somehow. That's because government institutions that use Windows will not be happy with there being a feature in the OS that is capable of listening to a microphone and transmitting what it hears to a third party. I know Cortana can take voice commands, and I'd doubt their AI thingy will be much different in the user facing implementation.

Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.

I never got unwanted stuff back after update.

Its seemed... better lately. But I used to get skype back every single update when 11 first came out.

They also fuck with privacy settings too on uodate...

Switched to Linux after that shit.

I don't know about Windows 11, but my Windows 10 instance also reverts my "fast startup" setting on every major update. I know this, because my PC's motherboard does not work with "fast" startup and instead takes about half an hour to get from POST to desktop when it's enabled. Suffice to say that I know when Microsoft changes this setting behind my back. I have it disabled for a reason, fuckheads.

AMD?

I've got a Gigabyte Auros Elite X570 with the 5600. I have to disable fast boot from BIOS because it causes my computer to boot up much more slowly.

I think Fast Boot is more about screwing up anything third party.

If it's on, it bollixes up the wireless card if you reboot into Linux. But even without dual-booting, it seems to leave USB devices active that I don't want (specifically a USB->serial adaptor with a peripheral danging off of it)

What about FUCKING TEAMS

PS> get-appxpackage *teams* | remove-appxpackage

I love PowerShell

I understand that your comment makes sense in context, but wash your mouth out with soap for speaking such vile heresy

PowerShell is one of the best things MS has done. Turning a rich, OO environment into a CLI was smart.

Kind of horrifying to use when you're used to a unixy shell though!

Perhaps, but the same goes the other way. I'll stand by PowerShell even though windows is hit and miss at best.

If lemmy had gold I'd give you some

I'm glad there's no gold. I'll still tell you what I told people about buying gold. Go make a donation to a charity instead.

I like fsf.org, saf.org, or gunowners.org

You could always uninstall Teams and still can, regularly via the Settings app.

Fun fact, if you have Teams uninstalled, hitting Windows key + c will conveniently install it again. Yay!

Why remote desktop? I can understand the rest. But who uninstalls default apps and doesn't use remote desktop?

Very few people use remote desktop.

Very few people bother removing all the default apps in the first place.

The type of high caliber nerd to care about a pre installed app that sits dormant and uses a few MB of storage probably already uses remote desktop often enough they'd want to keep it.

I would have used it but it's only available on Pro/Enterprise versions. But that led me to finding Parsec so all ended well.

Remote Desktop is dead. Azure killed it. TeamViewer is the replacement (and yes you have to pay for it) or you pick another third party vendor for your RDP needs.

People still use team viewer?

Scammers notably of course, but it's Microsoft's sanctioned solution to them removing RDP capability with Azure. I'm super interested in finding out what cut they get or how much TeamViewer payed for that.

The only exposure I have to windows now is in an Amazon virtual environment so I want aware of this. It seems strange seeing as RDP is a simple and robust solution... Unlike TeamViewer.

Great. Now give them a couple more years to learn they shouldn't be installed by default in the first place.

I think the list of "apps" (AKA junk) people would actually like to deinstall is quite a bit longer.

How about uninstalling edge? It is only needed to download Firefox, anyway.

What the hell is wrong with remote desktop and the camera app?

Nothing. But having the option to uninstall them like any other app is nice for whenever it might be relevant.

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It sure took them a while, but they seem to finally allow folks to personalize their experience. I'm not going to complain about it, though – this is definitely a good change.

Not far enough. It'd be lovely if I could scale Windows down to almost 7 gigs or so (what windows 10 is, probably should be lower) But the thing is Windows in general is just a bloated piece of crap that continues to grow.

Maybe someday they'll discover checkboxes and use them to not have to install these apps in the first place.

"What's a checkbox? Oh, you mean that thing we use to trick users into 'consenting' to telemetry?"

I think I've got it! So on install, we make a checkbox that says:

  • do not install web search in the start menu, but also I consent to Microsoft collecting creepy levels of data about me

Wait, so of the five apps they will "let" you uninstall now, one makes little sense to have in the consumer edition (remote desktop - which is effectively enabled in Pro only) and one is getting deprecated (Cortana - bye bye!).

The remote desktop they are talking about is the client app used to connect to remote systems.

The remote desktop feature that's limited to Pro is the ability for the system to receive remote connections.

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