You can remove or disable Windows 11 and 10's AI 'bloat' with new BloatynosyAI

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 560 points –
You can remove or disable Windows 11 and 10's AI 'bloat' with new BloatynosyAI
neowin.net
190

You are viewing a single comment

It's good that these tools exist, but it's so frustrating that it's a constant cat and mouse game of Microsoft trying to make their products as cumbersome and shit as possible and the community trying to salvage Windows to the best of their ability.

At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I'm tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?

At what point do they say fuck it I'm going the Valve route and moving away from a company that wants to undermine my products and my brand?

The people who use tools like this are in the minority. The majority (probably the vast majority) of people use Windows as it is out of the box.

The number for people I have seen with search box still enabled in taskbar tells me that's true.

Everyone. Everywhere.

It blows my mind, but then I realise that we here on Lemmy are the 1% of IT users.

Yeah rightā€½ Why do people keep the full search box enabled? It takes up so much space. I usually switch to the search button.

I even see quite a lot of people in IT (not talking about tech or devs) that keep it enabled.

I think it's one of those things that just becomes mentally invisible after a while. Like Microsoft slowly just drops in a new bar here, a stock ticker there, and there's a point where a majority of folks are like "...Was that always there?" and don't bother hunting for a way to turn it off like we do lol.

Yes, I know.

But it's not like these people actually love ads all over the place, or bing results in start menus, or popups asking them to pwetty pwease use OneDrive, or can you pwetty pwetty pwease use Edge instead of Chrome, they just either:

  • don't know they can get rid of that stuff

  • don't trust tools and are afraid they'll break something or the tools will contain a virus

  • don't care enough to research this crap

  • view using their PC as a chore anyway, and so power through the annoyances

I don't own a Mac, and don't intend to, but of the biggest things people like about them is that there are far fewer of these types of annoyances.

It's not just extreme power users that can be irked by all this crap - they're just the ones who do things about it and chat on forums about it. A normal person just sighs and thinks ugh I'd rather just do this on my phone

View using their PC as a chore anyway, and so power through the annoyances

Damn, good one.

At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I'm tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?

You're under the impression that most people care about the horrible parts of windows?

I think they do.

Enough to do much about it, other than maybe buy a MacBook if they have money to burn? Nah.

But enough to use their PC less and try to do as much as possible on their phone/iPad? Honestly, yeah, I think so.

I hear normies complaining about stuff in Windows all the time. It's just when you go "well you could..." they turn off and don't want to do anything about it, because to them you may as well be giving them advice on how they can hack their washing machine to wash clothes faster. It's just an appliance.

Is your point that you think laptop and desktop makers could increase sales by ditching windows? That feels like suicide to me and I am a Linux lover. At what point do they do that is what you asked. When they're desperate enough to take a risk, if ever, would be my guess

At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, Iā€™m tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?

LTT put out an (surprisingly insightful) video about ChromeOS and how it's kind of secretly spreading Linux. I don't think its crazy to say that in 5-10 years ChromeOS or similar will be the default and Windows will be a premium add on or something.

"premium"

lol honestly maybe competition will force them to reverse the ehittification of their product

I doubt it. Google will squander it away one way or another. It could work on a technical level, Iā€™ve been using flex since before Google bought it for family members, itā€™s just poorly advertised and explained.

To be fair, Window$ has been bloat since the very day M$ stole it from its Unix roots, and Linux is everything that the OS could've been were it not run by money-grubbin' cringelords.

Unix roots? Lol wtf

Why wtf?

Microsoft started as a UNIX-based programming company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Hell you see remnants of it in the reserved filename list.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file?redirectedfrom=MSDN

Devices in windows are not typically "files" like they are in unix/linux... So why CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COMĀ¹, COMĀ², COMĀ³, LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPTĀ¹, LPTĀ², and LPTĀ³ are all reserved? Because they maintained compatibility with features businesses used at the time... and never deprecated the function.

Edit:

image of downvotes on this post as of Feb 14 2024
Why are we downvoting literal computer history? It is a known fact that Windows started on Unix systems. It's a known fact that they released their own BSD-based software up to and including a full fledged Unix-based OS, and it's a known fact that MS-DOS 1 and 2 were both Unix compatible. This is LITERALLY the definition of "roots". Are we so touchy here that we can't acknowledge actual computing history?

Hmm, I always thought MS was founded to steal/modify MS DOS. Interesting that they briefly did Unix stuff, but I still take issue with the way op phrased it. "Their Unix roots" makes it sound like they were heavily invested in Unix and carried that forward even into windows. I don't know if they used any of that code in windows, but if they did you'd never know it by using dos or any windows version I've seen. Even despite both having command line interfaces, almost everything is different from Unix except the command "cd", to my recollection.

ā€œStarted asā€

Yeah, no. Yes Xenix was a thing but it would be incorrect to say that it ever was their main product.

I donā€™t think anyone has ever hinted on that NT has a unix code base except for some ā€œborrowedā€ networking code from bsd.

it would be incorrect to say that it ever was their main product.

They made several full versions of it... It was not simply a one off product.

While Xenix 2.0 was still based on Version 7 Unix,[30] version 3.0 was upgraded to a Unix System III code base,[12]:ā€Š9ā€Š[31][32] a 1984 Intel manual for Xenix 286 noted that the Xenix kernel had about 10,000 lines at this time.[10]:ā€Š1ā€“7ā€Š It was followed by a System V R2 codebase in Xenix 5.0 (a.k.a. Xenix System V).[33]

Also,

Microsoft's Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0's Xenix compatibility as "the second most important feature".[38] His company advertised DOS and Xenix together, describing MS-DOS 2.0 (its "single-user OS") as sharing features and system calls with Xenix ("the multi-user, multi-tasking, Unix-derived operating system"), and promising easy porting between them.[39]

So they were simultaneously created AND interoperable (from a program development perspective). This was a full fledged item.

Edit: to elaborate a little better. If they were simultaneously developed... and interoperable. And one item is Unix-based outright. Then it's safe to say that the other item (MS-DOS) in this case is also pretty steeped in Unix roots.

2 more...
2 more...
2 more...