Our great sponsors
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
awesome-windows-privacy
A list of awesome tools, documentation and scripts for better privacy on Microsoft Windows
-
buildroot
Buildroot, making embedded Linux easy. Note that this is not the official repository, but only a mirror. The official Git repository is at http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/. Do not open issues or file pull requests here.
-
Atlas
🚀 An open and lightweight modification to Windows, designed to optimize performance, privacy and security.
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
This tool really improved my Windows 10 experience and lowered the idle load to 5%
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Appx packages are not where the bloat is. These are "store" / UWP apps which are generally sandboxed / very restricted in API access - so they take up disk space but not much else after you close them.
Sure, if your goal is to save a bit of disk space, this will help; but I suspect when most people think about "bloat" they think of things that slow down their computer (things that actively consume memory / cpu / network).
In my experience, that bloat is mostly services and scheduled tasks. I started collecting scripts / documentation on debloating with a primary focus on restoring privacy here: https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy (it's not very maintained but maybe someone finds something useful there)
> I do this for every Windows installation that is used for similar purposes, like embedded machines that has to run a single application, virtual machines, etc.
Have you tried running Linux for these use cases? This sort of thing is an area Linux excels, in my experience.
When you run Windows, you're in for the whole kit and caboodle. Most of the components are proprietary, closed-source black boxes. You can only poke and prod and test and hope things don't break in unexpected ways.
Conversely, Linux can be easy stripped down to a bare bones kernel and a single statically-linked binary. I can run a useful application on top of Linux with the whole system weighing in smaller than bootmgfw.efi.
Something more complex, but still custom, is easily crafted with Buildroot.
https://buildroot.org/
Its for gaming but it has all the 'bullshit' cut out and/or disabled.
Details here: https://atlasos.net/
Regards.