Indeed. I am told – life is too short to verify – that if you remove all the “modern” apps from Win11, it fails to boot or at least fails to get to the desktop.
Whereas I took a brutal approach to my own relic Win10 builds: I use a Powershell command to remove all the modern apps. Windows Store and all.
(I only keep it around for things like BIOS upgrades on non-UEFI machines, rooting Android devices and so on. I don’t much care if I nuke it.)
The only thing that failed was the “Windows Hello” fingerprint sign-on. Everything else is totally unaffected, AFAICS.
Although taskbar and most of user session UI is still hosted by explorer.exe, the actual applets (Start, Search, Quick Settings, notifications, tray etc) has been rewritten as modern packages and run in separate processes.
StartMenuExperienceHost.exe
ShellExperienceHost.exe
sihost.exe
SearchHost
TextInputHost which is invoked with Win+Period
LockApp
Client.Core
AccountsControl etc
You can find them in Windows\SystemApps. Removing them will break your system.
Windows 11 really is product development in action:
Windows ME
OK, so, nobody wanted this, but we’ve cobbled together another release from bits of Windows 98SE and bits of Windows 2000, and it will confuse customers like hell, but some will buy it by mistake!
Hey, that worked, let’s do it again.
Windows Vista
Right, so, Longhorn didn’t work, so what we’ll do is, we’ll do a knock off of Quartz Extreme and slap it on the Server 2003 kernel, and we’ll put widgets on it!
Wow. They really hated that, but they bought it. Suckers.
Windows 8
OK, listen, what we’ll do is rip out the most famous UI in the business, and slap a tablet interface on it! They’ll love it!
Windows 8.1
Hurrah! 10 million units! OK, OK, update it but put the Start button back, but bolt it to the tablet launcher!
Wow. 100 million units. Awesome.
Windows 11
So… inhales deeply… let’s put widgets like everywhere man and we’ll do ’em in that C# shit that weird Danish dude invented!
I really do love Windows, but it feels like the anti-Linux at this point. By that I mean, Linux is traditionally infamous for requiring some setup to get it the way you want, where Windows has traditionally had an acceptable experience out of the box. Now Windows also needs to be configured, but instead of adding things, you’re forced to remove things, like picking the dirt out of a sandwich you dropped.
I can no longer simply install Windows now. Now, I need to remove Copilot (app, explorer integration, there’s so much you need to configure for that alone), remove bloat like DevHome which can only be uninstalled through the CLI, actually disable automatic forced updates in Group Policy instead of using the pretend switch in the Settings app. Make sure BitLocker isn’t accidentally turned on so it doesn’t essentially ransomware my computer. I borderline have an entire dotfiles repo for Windows at this point, which does nothing but disable things.
This in itself is probably going to be the reason I end up going back to Linux. The whole reason I stopped using Linux in favor of Windows was because I didn’t have to mess with a fresh Windows install like I did any distros like Ubuntu, but now it’s virtually the opposite.
I recently set up a Windows gaming PC and I used an offline account + the oft-recommended Win11 debloat script (https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat) to eliminate the cruft and I think it took care of most of that. It’s definitely not zero setup but I’d still call it less setup than what I had to do to get a Linux to be reasonable.
the headline is a lie if you read to the last paragraph:
Indeed. I am told – life is too short to verify – that if you remove all the “modern” apps from Win11, it fails to boot or at least fails to get to the desktop.
Whereas I took a brutal approach to my own relic Win10 builds: I use a Powershell command to remove all the modern apps. Windows Store and all.
(I only keep it around for things like BIOS upgrades on non-UEFI machines, rooting Android devices and so on. I don’t much care if I nuke it.)
The only thing that failed was the “Windows Hello” fingerprint sign-on. Everything else is totally unaffected, AFAICS.
Although taskbar and most of user session UI is still hosted by explorer.exe, the actual applets (Start, Search, Quick Settings, notifications, tray etc) has been rewritten as modern packages and run in separate processes.
You can find them in Windows\SystemApps. Removing them will break your system.
Dear gods. No wonder it can suck bowling balls through lead water pipes.
Thanks for the info!
Yet more reason to work out how to crack Win10 IoT edition… ;-)
WONTFIX: BYDESIGN
Yes, I reckon so.
Windows 11 really is product development in action:
Windows ME
OK, so, nobody wanted this, but we’ve cobbled together another release from bits of Windows 98SE and bits of Windows 2000, and it will confuse customers like hell, but some will buy it by mistake!
Hey, that worked, let’s do it again.
Windows Vista
Right, so, Longhorn didn’t work, so what we’ll do is, we’ll do a knock off of Quartz Extreme and slap it on the Server 2003 kernel, and we’ll put widgets on it!
Wow. They really hated that, but they bought it. Suckers.
Windows 8
OK, listen, what we’ll do is rip out the most famous UI in the business, and slap a tablet interface on it! They’ll love it!
Windows 8.1
Hurrah! 10 million units! OK, OK, update it but put the Start button back, but bolt it to the tablet launcher!
Wow. 100 million units. Awesome.
Windows 11
So… inhales deeply… let’s put widgets like everywhere man and we’ll do ’em in that C# shit that weird Danish dude invented!
I really do love Windows, but it feels like the anti-Linux at this point. By that I mean, Linux is traditionally infamous for requiring some setup to get it the way you want, where Windows has traditionally had an acceptable experience out of the box. Now Windows also needs to be configured, but instead of adding things, you’re forced to remove things, like picking the dirt out of a sandwich you dropped.
I can no longer simply install Windows now. Now, I need to remove Copilot (app, explorer integration, there’s so much you need to configure for that alone), remove bloat like DevHome which can only be uninstalled through the CLI, actually disable automatic forced updates in Group Policy instead of using the pretend switch in the Settings app. Make sure BitLocker isn’t accidentally turned on so it doesn’t essentially ransomware my computer. I borderline have an entire dotfiles repo for Windows at this point, which does nothing but disable things.
This in itself is probably going to be the reason I end up going back to Linux. The whole reason I stopped using Linux in favor of Windows was because I didn’t have to mess with a fresh Windows install like I did any distros like Ubuntu, but now it’s virtually the opposite.
I recently set up a Windows gaming PC and I used an offline account + the oft-recommended Win11 debloat script (https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat) to eliminate the cruft and I think it took care of most of that. It’s definitely not zero setup but I’d still call it less setup than what I had to do to get a Linux to be reasonable.
I’ve used this with great success: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
I tried their app manager and it worked.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/ooappbuster
On Win10 I found it easier to issue a PS command (then remove PowerShell)