So this popped up on my timeline today... AyUp by MightyBenihana posted 2 Jan 2025 at 21:08 That's a lot of likes.
The first thing I do on a new Win 11 install, other than right-click "uninstall" all the crap I don't use, is winget install ofgb, run it as admin (sudo ofgb-deps), disable everything, then winget uninstall ofgb it. It for the most part does what G wants. https://github.com/xM4ddy/OFGB
I don't suppose you have a handy link or guide to this, do you? Bearing in mind my upcoming PC build...
You would be amazed (or maybe not) at how many replyguys have told me I should try this thing called Linux(!) Surprisingly, only a couple suggested macOS. And one suggested Haiku. He's my favourite.
Open Terminal, run the command mentioned here to install it, open another Terminal as admin, run ofgb-deps, click all the checkboxes, Bob's your uncle.
In addition to this: Also check the Local Group Policy Editor (Win+R, gpedit.msc) if you have a Pro edition of Windows. And if you don't have a Pro edition of Windows... go outside, take a moment, touch grass, have a calm word with yourself, then come back in and bloody well upgrade to a Pro edition. Specifically, look for User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Copilot > Turn off Windows Copilot - set that sucker to 'Enabled' EDIT: Also do be careful what you play with in Group Policy Editor... Don't go flipping random settings off and on unless you're prepared to re-install from scratch
So your answer to the problem of Microsoft ruining Windows is... to give Microsoft more money as a punishment? (The only Windows machine 'ere is that laptop I bought from the Marketplace, which has a Windows 11 Home licence on it. Took a bit of fighting, but it's pared down nicely now!)
That, Mr H, was not what I said, and you know it Honestly, if anyone on this forum actually pays the full retail price of £220 for Windows then they really do need to have a word with themselves! If you - as in 'you, in general, not 'you specifically, Gareth' - run Windows day-to-day, whether out of choice or necessity, then chances are that you've been using the same digital license for a long time. It's entirely possible that the last time you actually bought a Windows license was in the Win7 days. If the ethics of 'grey market' key resellers selling Win11 Pro licenses for £5-£10 bothers you that much then you've got two options: suck it up and pay the full £220 to Microsoft run Linux Microsoft sure as **** don't have any 'ethics' with how they approach making money any more, so I've got no problem with using key resellers (so long as I use a payment method that has strong buyer protections and doesn't require me to give my card details to the reseller). But the last Windows license I bought for my own use was a Win7 key years ago.
This year will see me making Mint look as much like W10 as possible and make it ''just work' for my other half (her actual requirements are for it to not just pish her off) Preemptively got her on Libre software a few years back. Will be doing the same on my secondary and trying it on my gaming rig once I get a new GPU. I'm a few years behind the curve on pc games so hopefully that will go smooth-ish. If I have to have it it will only be on the gaming rig otherwise W11 and it's spyware recording everything can go do one.
This is a great tip, thanks for this! I've also done a few other things to make using PowerShell just a little bit closer to using bash: I've installed oh-my-posh for a nicer theme and a few extras I've installed neovim and created aliases for vi and vim I've installed GNU wget2 and created an alias for wget I've set ctrl+d to close the terminal. Here's my profile (can be modified with notepad.exe $profile, or code, neovim, etc): Code: Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key ctrl+d -Function ViExit New-Alias -Name vi nvim New-Alias -Name vim nvim New-Alias -Name wget wget2 New-Alias -Name ll dir [console]::InputEncoding = [console]::OutputEncoding = New-Object System.Text.UTF8Encoding oh-my-posh init pwsh --config "$env:POSH_THEMES_PATH/agnoster.omp.json" | Invoke-Expression There's already built-in aliases for cat, rm, ls. That quite frankly covers most common cli usages, together with winget.
My trick for that is to... use bash... I was so used to using bash that I never really "got" PowerShell at all... But I've had very little need to do Windows/PowerShell command-line stuff, only the occasional bit of scripting in a DevOps pipeline when there was no native operator for what I wanted to do. These days all my command line stuff is either zsh (work macbook) or bash (WSL, personal projects, homelab, etc), and for my needs there's very little practical difference between bash and zsh. The main difference is just the profile & config file naming...
I mostly just need to ssh, occasionally open some txt files, so the overhead of a full blown linux in a virtualized environment seems unnecessary. Making PowerShell do my bidding makes much more sense for my situation.
