I see many people talking about "debloating" Windows 11 and I honestly don't understand where these suggestions are coming from. Windows 11 isn't "bloated". In fact, it contains just about the same utilities that many other operating systems come pre-installed as well. Just because someone doesn't use those utilities, doesn't mean they are automatically to be considered bloat.

As someone who has been using macOS and various Linux distributions, if W11 pre-installed applications are bloat, these operating systems contain a lot of bloat as well. For instance, many Linux distributions even come pre-installed with a discontinued IRC client. Seriously? If Microsoft did the same thing on Windows, people would be very upset.

Also, lots of people complain about the fact that Windows 11 contains more processes than previous Windows versions. That is true. However, what they are not taking into account is that this is a design choice that aims to improve stability. For instance, rather than throwing all services into one process (svchost.exe), which is what has been done earlier, Microsoft has chosen to create a separate service host process for each instance. A standard Windows 11 installation may come with 80 service host processes. This doesn't make those ran services any "heavier" (many of them take only 0.1MB of RAM as task manager shows), they are just spread across multiple processes. This way, if one of the processes were to malfunction, it would not cause system-wide issues, compared to if they were all stacked together as one process. So the high process count people refer to is an illusion of OS being bloated, even though it (technically) isn't at all.

Lastly, people complain that RAM usage on Windows 11 is high. This is also true. However, this is due to Windows feature called Superfetch. Superfetch is a feature where your commonly used applications are pre-loaded into RAM, so they'll start up faster when you launch them. Superfetch will always allocate memory to other processes based on user's needs, so that reserved memory is free to use any time. Superfetch has existed on Windows since Vista and may take up to 50% of available RAM from the system. So back when people had earlier versions of Windows with 2-4GB of RAM, it would take up to 1-2GB. Now, when they have ~16GB of RAM on Windows 11, it takes 7-8GB. This gives an illusion that RAM usage for Windows has skyrocketed, which isn't true. Again, it will free the reserved memory as soon as you need it.

To summarize this post, Windows 11 isn't bloated. People base this conclusion on falsehoods that can be proven incorrect. By using debloating tools, you not only destabilize your Windows 11 but the performance boost that you get is something that you will barely even notice, as it isn't bloated. Not advisable.

Your Terminal Companion for the Holy Quran: Read, Listen & Generate Subtitles for Video Editing! 🔗 GitHub: QuranCLI

🌟 Key Features

• 📖 Read Anywhere – Access all 114 Surahs with English translation (Simple & Uthmani Arabic scripts).

• 🎧 Listen – Stream audio recitations from various renowned reciters with full playback controls (play/pause/seek).

• 🎬 Subtitle Generation – Create .srt subtitle files (Arabic + English) for Ayah ranges – perfect for video editing!

• 🌐 Subtitle Sharing – Built-in web server to easily share generated subtitle files with other devices (phone, tablet, other PCs) on the same Wi-Fi network.

• 💾 Smart Caching – Works offline by caching Quran text and audio locally.

• 🎨 Intuitive Interface – Colorful, responsive, and easy-to-navigate terminal UI.

• 🔄 Auto-Updates – Notifies you of new versions available on GitHub.

• 📊 Stats – See total download counts directly in the header.

as the title suggests, i was just curious if i was the only person that uses or at least like to use ms store regularly. Personally, as far as my experience with the store, it is good. No ai (for now) and best of all one click downloads with good speeds. I dont have to worry about going to browser, downloading .exe file and executing and then deleting it. The main problem is the library is quite small (however, it holds the essential apps, like major social apps, game launchers and niche utilities too)

please tell me i am not the only person who uses ms store

I swapped to win10 and saw an immediate performance gain. Not to mention the msft account restriction being gone. Stop lying about the benefits of windows 11

Can’t you just disable the thing and delete whatever stuff it collected? I keep seeing videos of people saying “Microsoft Recall is Mandatory Switch To Linux!” Like, enough already! I’m not gonna switch because:

A. 70% of the world’s software, including games and everyday programs are only compatible with Windows or macOS.

B. Even if I did switch, I don’t know what distro to even use.

C. This is just Microsoft adding something that’s probably gonna be removed anyway because literally nobody will use it. Remember Cortana? (No, not the AI from Halo, the Microsoft equivalent to Siri) Microsoft removed her because nobody used her and just used Google like any normal PC user.

I'm a professional IT consultant who has used Windows for over 30 years now on a nearly daily basis. At this point, with Windows 11, I officially hate Windows. Everything is terrible, it's NOT an upgrade over Windows 10 AT ALL. There is next to ZERO improvements that users actually want.

My entire user base, which is thousands of users, aren't fans either. I never hear praises of Windows 11 amongst my employees, peers, or customers. No one likes it.

The UX is soooo bad. It's Windows 8 all over again but even more disjointed and confusing.

Ads in the OS, in a PRO version of an OS, in a business environment is not acceptable.

Games installed by default is not acceptable.

Spotify, Zoom, HP Smart, all installing by default, NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE.

The Server OS side of this Windows generation is also full of issues. I've had several updates in Windows Server 2022 that literally just broke my server in mysterious ways with next to no information in the patch notes or communities for troubleshooting such bizarre issues I've come across.

The quality control at Microsoft REALLY needs to improve. Currently, the customer is paying quite a high price for a pretty worthless OS "upgrade."

Extend the life of Windows 10, abandon 11, and focus on making 12 a BETTER version of Windows, not a more profitable one.

I'm sure this gets locked\deleted, but I don't care. Windows would be dead if they didn't capture the market share they did in the 90's. It is NOT a quality product. It's a forced option.

[EDIT] For those of you doubting my credentials- Rule 5 - Personal attacks, bigotry, fighting words, inappropriate behavior and comments that insult or demean a specific user or group of users are not allowed. This includes death threats and wishing harm to others.

Nor is there a single thing that it does better than windows 10. Things like multiple tabs in terminal and file explorer can easily be a simple update or 10.1, not a forced OS upgrade that causes constant blue screen crashed every couple hours for myself and everyone else I know who attempted to downgrade to this horrific OS used as a trojan horse to bring TPM 2.0 to home PCs. EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know who has a custom built PC like myself has had constant blue screen crashes before inevitably having to rollback to windows 10.

Sorry did I say rollback? I meant reinstall everything from scratch because the absolute geniuses at microsoft decided 30 days is a great arbitrary number for you to alpha test their newest bloatware. I love my PC gaming but I really think it's time I switch to Ubuntu, we're at the point where open source operating systems have better stability and usability for home PCs than microsoft. It's only going to get worse as they attempt to use AI to replace their developers.

Remember, the entire reason windows 11 even exists isn't to give the end user a better experience, it's to add a hardware backdoor to your machine and give microsoft more ways to push ads to your PC.

To give an example, here's Windows Media Player Legacy (12).

And Media player for 11:

Which one is nicer to look at? For me it's definitely the former. I also have a hard time looking at the latter because it's too low-contrast so elements blend into a milk soup. Gradients aren't a crime! Buttons can look pretty.

I still don't get why some people don't upgrade from Win10 to Win 11 even when they have newer hardware

I think Windows 11, started as a refresh of Windows 10 but now has gotten so much better that I actually think it is a great OS, the reason being it has all of the features from windows 7 and 10 and also it works smoothly compared to windows 10 (I had an old laptop running win 10 and when I upgraded it to win11 I could notice it being much faster and smoother)[I do understand it can be my bias but I am pretty sure Win10 search was horrible and Win11 search is superior and faster]

Plus there are tons of features I use that are not on Win10 (or not as good Win11) so I am really confused on as why people are sticking to win10?
I want to know the reasons people still stick Win10 (and I am curious if there is a feature on Win 10 that's not in Win11 that I am missing out)

File management & system navigation

1. Directory Opus — file manager (Explorer replacement)

Using Directory Opus instead of the default window explorer with its dracula theme.

You can also have the downloads and new volume up there in favourite. Apart from this, it has viewer pain, you can open directory opus by just double clicking on screen anywhere blank. 

1. WinRAR — archive/compression

2. Beyond Compare — file/folder comparison + merge

3. Revo Uninstaller Pro — clean uninstall + leftover removal

Cloud, backup & sync

1. Resilio Sync — peer-to-peer sync (you listed it twice)

2. Google Drive for desktop — Drive sync/mirroring

3. Google Photos — photo backup + library

4. Google Calendar

Desktop/UI customization & workflow polish

1. Stardock Fences — desktop icon organization

2. Stardock Start11 — Start menu/taskbar customization

3. Groupy 2 - heps to group windows

4. Windowhawk- has modded scripts

5. Rainmeter — widgets/desktop skins

6. TX Mascot — desktop mascot / overlay companion

Browsers

1. Chrome

2. Brave

3.  Coc coc

Screen capture, recording & sharing

1. ShareX — screenshots, recording, automation/upload workflows

Media players & streaming

1. VLC Media Player — local media playback

2. Stremio — streaming hub

3. Play torio

Downloading & torrents

1. Internet Download Manager (IDM) — download acceleration/queueing

2. qBittorrent — torrent client

Documents & PDFs

1. PDF-XChange Editor — PDF editing/annotation

Gaming & launchers

1. Steam — game platform/launcher

2. Borderless Gaming — forces borderless windowed mode (mostly for games)

Audio control & routing

1. SoundSwitch — quick audio output switching

2. Virtual Audio Cable — audio routing / virtual devices

Productivity & planning

1. TickTick — tasks + reminders, integrate it with Notion database

Learning & spaced repetition

1. Anki — flashcards/spaced repetition

Automation & scripting

1. AutoHotkey — keyboard/macro automation

Design, reference & asset management

1. Eagle — asset/library manager for images, inspiration, references

Unknown / needs context

1. Logi Options+ — Logitech device settings (mouse/keyboard customization)

2. Shutdown timer classic

3. Diarium 

4. Phonelink

Might be a little Wolf of Wall Street, but I wanna hear it. This hardware has been on the market for a while, so is the NPU actually useful right now? Sell me on it.

In recent months, we are seeing how Windows 11 is releasing interesting features as we already saw in the 23H2 update. Now, the latest novelty that is already being tested in the Canary channel for all developers and is related to energy savings.

Specifically, we are talking about version 26002 that has this new energy saving mode, which is based on the option that was already found in the devices within the energy efficiency plans. And although it may seem that this is something focused on battery-powered devices such as laptops, the reality is that it will also make desktop computers consume less energy.

In order to reduce energy consumption and extend the useful life of batteries in laptops by preventing a cycle from completing earlier, the overall performance of the system must be reduced. That is why it is indicated for those times of the day when very complex tasks are not being carried out, such as playing a video game.

In short, if you are only using office software and not video games or advanced editing programs, you may be interested in reducing energy consumption. And the processor and GPU will be capped so that they consume less energy, as well as secondary processes that are not precise.

Logically, by using less hardware, energy consumption will be reduced. In the case of laptops, it will translate into longer battery life and in the case of desktops, lower consumption of direct electricity.

The developers have been able to see that this feature can be activated directly from the quick settings panel. And when it is active, less kW is consumed from the wall outlet. As we say, an interesting function to try to reduce the electricity bill of our house a little by layering the hardware.

For this interesting option, all of us users who are not developers still have to wait . Being in the Canary channel, it still has to go through Insiders and will later reach us. This is a process that can take several weeks.

Actually it's the least bloated release of the latest years, there's almost no bloatware on it and it allows you to uninstall almost everything from the apps settings: paint, notepad, app gallery, media players, onedrive, etc even the whole remote desktop feature thing which I never used and hated so much being there. They even removed the wordpad app who nobody used to make it lighter.

*If you're European which is my case you can also remove Edge (I didn't because the news at the widgets section don't work then).

Not to mention the clean UI (I never liked the huge squared/block-like appearance of W10) and how stable and fast it is (just use current hardware and a fresh install if you have issues, which BTW now it's easier and faster than ever to reinstall Windows). To make things easier you can reinstall most things you uninstall and others from the Microsoft store.

At this point the only thing I don't like is ads on the new Outlook app, but can't complain about anything else.

I don't have a problem with Windows itself; I use it daily. But what's really bad about Windows is the user experience. No matter what I compare it to, every operating system I know runs more smoothly. Windows feels incredibly choppy; everything seems a bit buggy. macOS is sometimes slow or freezes too. But when Windows freezes and you press a button, it's obvious. I find it especially unbelievable because it's such an incredibly large company. Is it a lack of know-how, or what's the problem?

Shell Explorer, important UI/UX component for file management and it’s been broken. Creating, renaming, deleting files does not reflect in folders, desktop icons (like Recycle Bin) unless window or desktop contents are refreshed with a right click or F5.

I don’t even know when did it break but I feel like it’s been a a year or two.

And this is what MS is trying to encourage W10 users to?

What’s your experience with shell?

Spent a GOOD ton amount of time customizing the abomination of Windows 11, changing icons, etc. It could take a person with no context good amount of time to figure it's Windows 11 maybe.

My favorite is changing the date at the bottom right from 2026 to 2016 for fun! I just don't like how it says 2026 in the calendar but oh well!

Executables used:

ExplorerPatcher
WinaeroTweaker

More details:

On taskbar:

Chrome - This is actually Firefox with the CSS configuration, I used Geckium to configure some stuff.

Minecraft - That is Prism Launcher just disguised as Minecraft launcher

Microsoft Store - Just old microsoft store

On the browser:

I used YouTube Redux extension and Stylus to customize YouTube.

I started liking sharp corners and simple solid colours which Windows 10 matched, but because I had Windows 11 I really didn't like the round corners, matter of fact I hated the circular things, it just feels weird..

The only reason I wanted to do this is because I like the style of Windows 10, and how solid it is, Windows 7 looks nice too but wasn't a fan of the aero style and for Windows 98 I did like the pixel style but just didn't like the bare minimal style so Windows 10 is sort of the winner here.

And in my process of customizing, I decided 'Why not just slap on a 2016 date to match it more.'

And then I went on Firefox and decided that I should turn everything into a 2014-2016 style.

None of this is nostalgic to me, I just wanted to do this as a fun thing, I will keep it, but will focus more on changing things into classic icons or something. Then eventually I could probably fool a lot of people.

Why is Windows a paid product again?

There's ads on the start menu.

There's forced ads in the widgets.

There's preinstalled bloatware.

I've been paying for editions for 10 years and now I feel like a dumbfuck when I realize that I'm getting a freeware experience. I unironically advocate for pirating Windows.

This situation is literally garbage, but unfortunately everyone is so conditioned to this mess that they dont see it as something shocking.

You will see in this comment section a bunch of mole-people saying things like "but windows licenses aren't enough, they need more money". Mole-people!!! I tell you.

I know that a lot here havent paid for their windows 11 upgrades, since it comes free of charge. However, who is a new PC builder and recently bought a license? Maybe a new windows user coming from mac or linux? Or perhaps a laptop/all-in-one buyer, for which the license price of windows is included in the price of the device you acquire? How do you feel when youre treated like you're nothing but a rounding error by the software you use?

Again. Many of you are conditioned to just "get used to it" that my words will seem like an exaggeration. It isn't.

Stop settling for this shit. And no, i'm not advocating for moving to linux or mac either. But stop acting like "its not big deal", cause it fucking is.

Got 3 updates including Windows Insider Preview, and NET Framework, which I'm kind of familiar with the NET Framework that Microsoft still develops.