Windows 11 tweaks and usability improvements

Oh my! That's an amazing list. I used to perform many of these changes by hand on every new windows installation. It's such a slog.

And while some of my systems now run linux, as the post says: "Sometimes using Windows is inevitable."

In defense of the much maligned Windows registry, I'll say: isn't it amazing that you can make such a wide array of changes via a single tool (regedit)? If you had to automate such changes on Linux, you would probably need a whole suite of tools. In some cases, you'd write a file into a `.d` directory. In other cases, you can `echo '...' >> subsystem.cfg`. In yet other cases, you'll need `sed -i`. Maybe `awk` gets the job done where `sed` is too simple. Maybe there are more complex cases, where you'd need the power of `perl` (or python or ...) to make the edit. And some subsystems come with their own suite of manipulation tools (ZFS, systemd, etc.) where editing text files would be the more difficult option.

I will need to take a look at this list later. I just run Windows 11 LTSC and it’s great (previously ran 10 LTSC), curious how many of these are still relevant.

Honestly LTSC has been great for gaming. Highly recommend if you don’t want any compatibility issues and are running a dedicated gaming machine (so no need for any other crap on there)

I don't know if I have a unique configuration on my Windows 11 machine besides having several OneDrive and SharePoint folders mapped to various places on disk (with every folder always downloading everything so it's available offline) but the Windows 11 file explorer has a completely borked search function which:

A: will reset the text content of the search bar as I'm typing when it finishes a search from 3 keystrokes ago and

B: doesn't show exact string matches, "no results found", but when I delete a few letters from the query, the exact match suddenly appears

So my favorite tweak and usability improvement is that you can pull up Control Panel and type "Desktop" into the address bar and it will transmogrify into the classic windows 7 file explorer that doesn't have a broken search box. Wish I had a way to map this to be my default file explorer.

There is also https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil, which works for Windows 10 too

A lot of these can be done with O&O ShutUp10 with a GUI and toggles if that's more your thing too.

I think only the file explorer tweaks aren't in it.

Is it worth upgrading from 10 to 11 yet? I downgraded back to 10 after I had to change default programs by individual file associations rather than having a 1-click option for default audio player etc.

She's fairly thorough. I see some good additions to my set.

I'd guess she has a different list of powershell commands to uninstall apps.

(My lists are on a home IIS/text files/NAS. Edit over VPN. I use them every week to clean client machines.)

How many of these tweeks can be done without editing the Registry? And if they are all registry modifications can’t you just backup the registry before applying the changes?

Bookmarking for when I get forced into windows 11

Or.. just switch to a more user friendly operating system like Debian or Pop_OS.

I know I'm not installing Windows again on my machines anytime soon.

Windows takes wayy more work than Fedora to make it usable. The tables have turned.

This broke Wifi on my PC because it disables WinHttpAutoProxy service.

I'm now forever calling Control Panel "Systemsteuerung".

It's like trying to make a cupcake out of a turd.