O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11(oo-software.com) |
O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11(oo-software.com) |
https://wpd.app works well too for extra telemetry and https://github.com/builtbybel/privatezilla still works with Windows 11 but again autounattend.xml works magic.
Unattended is no "magic". Go ahead and inspect the xml file created by that utility, all the customization and debloating is practically same as running a script post install.
If you really want to debloat before it's installed you want this: https://ntlite.com/
There was another one too at some point called MSMG Toolkit (IIRC) that worked wonders but who knows what happened to that.
After 30+ years of using every OS I just don't want to deal with an OS that constantly fights with you just to try to make it usable, unattended.xml is MY path of least resistance, configure once, check/update every now and then, no need to learn new tricks.
- WinScript: https://winscript.cc/
- Winhance: https://winhance.net/
I find O&O ShutUp10 easier to use and understand.
https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk is also worth mentioning, I use it to unfuck the Taskbar.
WTF happened? I have some old versions.
1.9 from 2024 1.8MB
1.3 from 2016 480KB
Did they start bunding web browser with debloat scripts?
- 100% minimal designed for absolute performance coded ground up in rust
- backward compatibility by required drivers on the fly instead of bloating the OS with 30 yrs of support for all the. 456257963423512 hardware device types
- Its called "Windows Maximal" priced 4x the cost of Windows Home
- when are we getting this version of windows?
Since then, computing has only deteriorated.
Rust didn't exist in 90s yet Windows' performance was pretty good speed, consumption or bloat-wise.
There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately. It’s a good time to be wary of any if you don’t trust the author 100%.
It’s like when HIV emerged in the 80s - the disco days of free love are over. Be wary of who you’re sleeping with, and always wear a condom.
FWIW, O&O ShutUp10 dates back to 2015, with the launch of Windows 10. This isn't v10, it's "Shut Up, [Windows] 10!".
O&O Defrag has been a trusted tool since 1998.
That said, I largely agree with "No source code? No thanks." as I don't want to worry about a private equity group buying O&O Software and doing with it what they will.
To be frank we're still running dubious and janky software, but at least it tends to be a bit more transparent.
Oh and you will love Powershell 7 on Windows Terminal. It is a delight and a breath of fresh air if you ask me.
I started using it with Windows 10 because I could disable most of the crap Microsoft was using with a few clicks. When I reinstalled Windows 11, this was one of the first things I ran because of how much shit there's now (weather, news, recommended apps, ai, etc). I have almost everything disabled.
We can do the same by following some guides, setting up system policies and go to 20 different menus, but this does the same in 1 or 2 minutes.
Unfortunately, over the years, ShutUp10 has also suffered from some enshittification itself. Now there's a message tell you to buy the premium version, more branding, etc. I understand why, and considering it still does the job and still runs without having to install it, perhaps I shouldn't complain too much especially when it's free, but it used to be more "bare-bones"... something that I prefer on these tools.
(And no, I simply do not like Linux or even macOS enough to switch over, despite being perfectly competent. That, and I play video games that will never be compatible.)
This tool is equivalent to dating an alcoholic that beats you whenever they're drunk, so you keep trying to take away all the alcohol instead of dumping them and finding a new partner. The signs were always there and they just keep getting worse, it's time to move on.
They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.
A random closed-source black-box "privacy" tool though? You have zero guarantees.
Yes, it does.
>O&O has been making tools like these for a long time.
Microsoft has made Windows for a long time. Longer, even.
ShutUp has also been around for a while and always seemed to me like a O&O side project by someone who got really pissed at Windows taking the spyware tangent. The distribution model is still that of shareware / freeware (no source), because that's what O&O does. But as far as closed software goes, that's _probably_ as clean as it gets.
Support the original, not the copy: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
But thanks for the link, wasn't aware about that open source project.
Ableton is probably the biggest reason I still have a Windows installation, and the one I try to get working (properly and well) with Wine/Proton maybe once a month or so. Cascadeur, Unreal Engine Editor, rekordbox are some of the other software I can't get to run well enough on Linux (yet) to fully migrate.
But, on the other hand, lots of other software I use professionally works amazingly on Linux, better than Windows in fact, like Houdini, Unreal Engine (the runtime, not the Editor), DaVinci Resolve and Blender.
I'm not worried though, eventually it'll be runnable on Linux no doubt, but personally we're not quite there yet, sadly.
Getting your plugins working is a different story. A small but growing number of mainstream audio plugins have native Linux builds available, a wide swath of them work quite well with yabridge (https://yabridge.org/ - so shim to expose Windows audio plugins running in WINE prefixes to Linux audio plugin hosts), and a few required alternatives to be found.
I found the workflow decent enough to use, but as one might expect, some plugins not working well via yabridge/WINE made things a little janky, and once I picked up a Mac device again, that became my production machine. That said, WINE's come a long say since I last tried this out a few years ago, and I'd be interested to see if things work better.
My point, I suppose, is to share a reasonably good success story (though perhaps still not of a grade that you'd be comfortable switching to for paid work), and perhaps to encourage you to consider some alternatives to the tools you use. Tool changes are expensive, sure in cost, but moreso in time, so I don't suggest it lightly. That being said, I think that it might be worth it to grab a Bitwig trial and see how you like it. I'd grab it both on Windows and Linux, so you can try it "how it should work" when your plugins and the DAW are working in harmony while also getting the Linux toolchain working. And from the cost perspective, Bitwig does not have crossgrade licenses, so you can buy Studio once, and run it on any supported platform.
I mean, that seems universally truer than not.
Since then I started realizing how parasitic the proprietary software industry really is.
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-w...
Each system has pros and cons.
I'm daily driving both Windows and Linux, and each has its own issues unfortunately, so using tools like OO is a necessity of making my(and others) life bit less miserable.
For Linux I have bunch of custom repair scripts because of certain bugs I encounter(which are tracked too but not solved).
Unfortunately this is the game no one will ever win, unless you will move, drop tech, and start breeding dogs, but then you need to sell them, and where would you advertise? :)
I like the issues faced on Linux more, since I can solve them. I too have a handful of repair scripts.
I feel like an adult to be given access all the internals. I don’t feel that way on Windows (and any other locked down OS).
We should put in the volunteer hours to upstream these fixes to make it nicer for normies :^)
Perhaps that wouldn't happen if more people switched...
It's cross-platform, so could switch file manager on Windows first to make it easier to switch to Linux later.
I'm mostly on Ableton because everyone else around me is on Ableton too, and we're sending projects between each other and sometimes sit together with each other and jam and such, and I basically chose Ableton over other DAWs to make it easier for us to collaborate, and now we're all basically stuck here :) Basically the same reason I use US input language on the keyboard when programming, although I'm Swedish living in Spain, with no Americans in sight around me.
Neat to know about the non-crossgrade license though, if I ever end up spending more time working by myself, it seems worth it to maybe do a deeper dive into it.
People don’t read the source. And chief among them, statistically, is you.
Open Source is ideal but not a deal breaker.
and people won't switch if there is no way to switch, it's like asking people to go on a hunger strike
What’s the difference between backdooring for the US gov’t and directly robbing/bugging you (assuming for the sake of argument that they don’t already do at least the latter)?
Used to be that you’d only ask that question if you were brown and/or write your name from right to left. Doesn’t matter much whether you were from Svalbard or Sanaa these days…
That may or may not be true, but I feel like the former would be a whole lot harder to hide, and the risk of having to reveal it in court would likely mean they aren't going to blow their cover over someone who wasn't worth it.
Like PRISM, Boundless Informant, Stellar Wind, etc?
Windows has had built in defrag since at least WinXP. I can't remember if Win2000 had it - I think it did. It runs in the background and you don't have to worry about it. 3rd party defrag tools are snake oil, like registry cleaners and so on.
Also, a watching a proper defragmenter run was an OCD soothing experience before we had stray kitten and powerwashing videos galore. I know I'm not alone with this experience.
>OCD soothing experience
I've always felt it was a certain kind of person who found amusement in watching a defragger work. I'm absolutely sure that 3rd party tools made sure to incorporate the equivalent blinkenlights to give the impression that their tool did something useful.
It's packaged in Debian and Ubuntu as "doublecmd-qt" and "doublecmd-gtk", so Linux Mint ought to have it as well.
> Can it filter-as-you-type the file list?
Yes.
> Does it have chainable script button bars?
I don't know what that is.
> Is there a poweful rename tool?
There's a Multi-Rename Tool, yes.
> Can it look pretty
You'll have to be the judge of that. It looks good to me. It uses the Lazarus component library, so it can be built with either Qt or GTK (or native win32 on Windows) and uses whatever themes and configuration applies to those.
Ah, I found it now. I must have misspelled it, just saw the language files earlier. Yes, this seems to be a valid alternative to Total Commander. It has what I need, including script buttons, very nice. There are still a few bugs, like the buttons are currently all light grey. I will see if I can resolve that. Thanks for this tip.
You are not the first Linux user claiming that to me, but it is not true. you never actually tried, admit it.
> TC can be run on Wine absolutely everywhere
I just tried again on Linux Mint. The folder tabs overlay the path to the current dir and the window can just be full screen. Those are the bugs detected after a minute of usage.
> DoubleCommander is a near-direct replacement
Okay, I was just able to install that, and it seems to have what I need. So thats a valid Point, Linux has something comparable to Total Commander.
> Log in as Administrator (...) Sure, it's trivial
Yes it is, I just did that. I give you that.
That's a nice claim you just made up there, out of thin air.
> If you have something specific in mind, you can say it.
I need something to hack together a solution and then go on. I don't want to
* Create GitHub issues and hope and then wait.
* Learn how this GUI was written and fix it by modifying and compiling the source.
What I need is the ability to:
* Activate windows
* Detect the active window
* Move and rescale the active window
* Move the mouse relative to the active window
* Move the mouse absolutely to the screen (if the relative method is broken)
* Sometimes move the mouse relative to itself
* Press mouse buttons, including WheelUp, and WheelDown (and that is sent to the active window)
* press keyboard button combinations (and that is sent to the active window)
* Send text (yep, many tools can do that)
* activate menu entries in the active window
* Get the text of active menu entries in the active window
* Find icons in the active window by providing an image, rarely used, when all above attempts fail.
* Finally, define shortcuts that do combined actions of the above.
I won't walk with you through every concrete possible application, but I give an example for Scid, which is also a Linux tool. Both on Windows and Linux, it happens that the save game dialog is partly moved outside the view rectangle of my screen. No idea why that is so. I need to drag the save dialog to the middle of the screen first. AutoHotkey to the rescue:
#HotIf exe_active("scid") ; `exe_active` is a shortcut
^s:: {
Send("^+s")
WinWait("Scid: Partie speichern...")
WinMove(19, 95, 660, 651) ; place it over the board.
}
; ...
#HotIf
I hope I’ve managed to clarify my point regarding the need for an AutoHotkey on Linux. There are simply too many bugs, idiots, and unimplemented features to get back into the flow quickly without AutoHotkey.
Just when sending this text, noticing that this site does not properly handle markdown bullet list, I found another great use case for Autohotkey, when pressing the Enter key on Hacker News ...
The only Linux Software I miss on Windows is Timeshift. Thats not enough.
Edit: I just have set up root login on Linux Mint. Okay, thats actually not much more difficult than on Windows.
The only valid holdup for Linux at this point is kernel anticheats and some larger commercial software that is deeply engrained in the windows ecosystem eg most desktop offline CAD software. But once again AI is going to help you get that running under wine. I am already working on a series of wine patches and a custom runner to allow me to run ProE/Creo under wine without issues.
Sure I did, but what particular annoyances in what software that you want to take with you into another ecosystem? I just don't get it, as you're being vague about it. Every environment has its own ways to solve your actual goals, and has its own quirks that need entirely different workarounds, not necessarily AHK.
There's a myriad of tools for blind input macros.
DE manipulation is generally done with DBus and CLI tools.
UI element manipulation (menus, icons, widgets) is done through a11y, with things like accerciser, dogtail, etc. AT-SPI makes it unified.
Providing an image... do you mean OCR? Use SikuliX, however that's just a Rube Goldberg machine like way to do things if you ask me. Not if deep UI automation to fix things is any better, though.
And of course you can script all that in any industry standard scripting language instead of janky DSLs.
>Just when sending this text, noticing that this site does not properly handle markdown bullet list, I found another great use case for Autohotkey, when pressing the Enter key on Hacker News ...
I think that's easier done with a userscript.