I make golden images for Windows at work. Everything Microsoft annoys/pissed me off.
Me too. Such a pain in the ass.
What’s your capture/deployment tool?
I make golden showers out of windows at work. We are not the same!
Just say Fuck Microslop at this point, plenty of beginner distros for Linux nowadays. Sucks for company employees that force it though. Hey CEOs I have money saving advice, Linux is free! You can even not go bankrupt to claude! lmfao.
Not true. You still very much have contracts with those companies be it RHEL or Ubuntu. It’s less don’t get me wrong, but not free. Like your small local shop could get away with it, but once you have regulatory oversight, things change.
That sounds a lot like typical Windows features over the years. Using WIndows at work today I unpinned Co-pilot and that stupid new Notes app from my taskbar three times. They kept coming back, not right away, but ninja like.
Our O365 admin panel keeps telling me there is a problem because 0 of our employees can easily find copilot and I could fix it by forcing it to be pinned to the taskbar.
We’ve noticed you unpinned the apps. We’re sure you didn’t mean to, so we fixed it for you. You’re welcome.
Are you sure it wasn’t your workplace group policy bringing them back?
Unlikely. Microsoft took away GPO control of taskbar and start menu a while back, and I don’t think they restored it. And even if they did, a company would be more likely unpin and block them than to push them.
I’ll taken your word for it, but if taskbar and start menu were controllable, I’m pretty sure after the third “I’ve deleted the internet/copilot/notes” support call I would be enforcing that the default taskbar items stay there.
Some companies might be resisting copilot, but many are going all in on it.
I’d love to think that, but my company is currently holding weeklong seminars to make sure that every employee is using Copilot and ChatGPT as much as possible.
How to turn off OneDrive with Group Policy.
Press Windows + R, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter. Navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > OneDrive.
- Save documents to OneDrive by default: Disabled
- Prevent OneDrive from generating network traffic until the user signs in to OneDrive: Enabled
- Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage: Enabled
The last setting disables OneDrive on your system; make sure to change it to Disabled if you use OneDrive.
Restart your computer for the changes to take effect.
Every Windows debloater script comes with the caveat of “until the next update”. Instead of becoming a Windows Defucking Engineer I just left it entirely.
Except that these are group policy settings. The stuff they provide to allow businesses to manage their endpoints. Businesses that actually have enough size and money for Microsoft to care. Businesses that can have strict audit and data security requirements relating to things like not allowing data to even brush against something like OneDrive.
To be more direct, the only reason I can’t count the number of times they’ve broken a Group Policy is because I legitimately don’t recall it happening in the past decade.
Yes and no. They started to limit GPOs. Some are only valid on Enterprise Licenses or Windows Server and will be ignored by your usual Windows Pro License at home. With Windows Home, you’re SOL regarding GPOs.
Also they started to migrate some of these settings to their Intune Device Management and will ignore those if not set via Intune.
Read: Companies can still disenshittify Windows to some degree, but they make it harder and harder for normal people to do so.
Fair enough. I work in IT but endpoint config and group policy isn’t my area at work, so most of my experience is with my personal computers at home. I at least usually hear the latest bullshit Microsoft is pulling from our endpoint management/config guy.
I should also bear in mind that I stripped down and customized the hell out of the install media before I last installed Windows on any of my devices, and I’ve run a shit ton of other customization/privacy/debloat tools afterwards as well. Usually by examining the policy and registry edits or PowerShell code they run and just picking and choosing parts for myself. Lots of good tools out there, but none I trust to do exactly what I want with no oversight or investigation.
I’d still say that Group Policy is usually the best option for configuration shit sticking though, due to it being Microsoft’s “business side” solution for endpoint config for quite a while now.
Won’t work for Win11 Home. But it’s MASterly easy to conver your Home to Pro or even Enterprise. MASterly easy.
Nice pun but might as well link to it. It’s already MASsively popular.
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
For the people on mobile without needle-like fingers.
needle-like fingers
Right … you’re operating your touchscreen with your dick again, aren’t you?
Fun fact: Microsoft will try to guess your passwords to open and scan your encrypted archives when uploaded to OneDrive.
Microsoft also hands your BitLocker recovery keys to the government on request.
Microsoft also uses your local machine’s GDID to deanonymize and track you across the internet for the government.
These are paid surveillance services Microsoft provides to the government, paid for by your tax dollars. No wonder they desperately want to force you to use OneDrive.
Pay for it twice actually, Microsoft charges you to install that spyware on your computer as well.
Hey now! I can honestly say Microsoft has never done that with any of my computers!
(Why yes, they do all run Linux. How did you know?)
If any of your Linux machines use SystemD, then Microsoft has done that with those machines. SystemD has a global system ID that can be used like the Windows GDID apparently.
Source?
See discussion below. I’m making it up obviously
Tell me more. I may have to move to a distro without systemdeez.
Okay but correlate that with the same methods and usage and by the same threat actor (MS) in this case.
Or any of the combination, as a treat
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s extremely implausible.
Absolutely zero reason a init system needs admin date of birth. Yes separate issue entirely, but it’s showing a trend and the direction things are headed.
To support and to need are two different verbs. Linux also needs your phone number in the user metadata by the same standard.
To be fair, yeah that shit is egregious.
But that’s not at all what I asked you or what you claimed. Those are technically two different things. And not technically like yes or no. Those are entirely different security fronts.
You’ve got to back that claim up or take it back, and I have a feeling you’ll be taking it back.
It’s okay to be cautious, and it’s especially okay to warn others of trajectories that could lean into privacy or security issues, but it’s not okay to make shit up.
Lastly it’s no longer an init system. It’s a system that happens to handle init.
Wow, that’s how it managed to find “malware” (not actual malware) in a password protected rar that I shared
To be fair, a lot of platforms just flag any encrypted archive file (not just rar) as malware. Their argument is that those files are commonly used to get past malware detection, which is kinda true. Still a pain for everyone who has a legitimate need for the feature.
Well if I’m already paying for Windows, I might as well use it, right? /s
What do you mean I’m out of space? I just bought an external hard drive on Thursday!
You say /s, but that’s the literal exact reason that Microsoft has all the market share.
Zipping files was never enough to secure them in the cloud. It‘s always recommended to properly encrypt sensitive data properly before you upload it. Whether you use OneDrive, Google Drive, Proton drive or whatever.
Still amazing how far Microslop goes to sniff through your stuff preemptively, though. Your cloud storage should be none of their business but sadly it‘s their entire business now. Privacy laws should definitely extend to digital space you rent no matter the circumstances.
If cloud providers argue that‘s too dangerous then they simply shouldn‘t be in business. If a government says it‘s too dangerous then they shouldn‘t be in power. Obviously they don‘t trust in the people who voted for them. Therefore they don‘t trust democracy and are therefore fundamentally undemocratic and a danger to the people.
ZIP encryption can be pretty strong, as long as you use aes-256 and not zipcrypt. AES256 had been supported for ZIP files since 2003, just not in the built-in Windows zip handling.
One drive was the final kick that made me jump to Linux. I had removed all my files from it and turned it off several times over the last few years then randomly, something like The Sims 2 will have a brand new game file and I know, One Drive stole my documents… Again.
Well the most recent time they took all my shit and put it back in One Drive was after that update where randomly One Drive was glitching out hardcore. It deleted all my files. All the files that should not have been in there to begin with. Microsoft help basically said, too bad so sad, if you were paying for it maybe we would help you.
I installed Mint that day. Haven’t been back.
I most certainly did uninstall one drive.
Yes, by using selecting format disk in the Linux installer.
Back in the day, I had my photos in multiple locations, some on local external drives, some in small cloud storage pockets….a bit of mess, really. Since I had a great deal on O365 family plan I thought - why not gather all of my various photo collections, and consolidate them on a single cloud storage - what could possibly go wrong? This is how I discovered that OneDrive doesn’t know how to read EXIF metadata properly. I ended up with basically a pile of over 30k pictures and videos, completely out of any order. Never again.
So does Copilot and Microsoft Copilot 365. I enforce GPOs to ban/remove them, and every couple Windows updates, it reinstalls, and each next day I see my alerts pop up they’re back.
Unlike traditional web apps, OneDrive Photos is actually quite well built. It has a Windows 11-like Acrylic design for the context menu and does not take up a huge amount of resources, as RAM usage stays under 1GB
Excuse me, a photo gallery that takes 1gb of RAM, especially in this economy, doesn’t seem “quite well built”.
This fucking web app wrappers, Picasa had 100x more features while using 50x less resources
It’s not a “web app”. It’s a native Windows app. A photo library app that indexes every single photo so you can search them with natural language like “green shirt”, group people by facial recognition, and edit photos, using under 1GB of RAM is impressive.
Shill harder, we need to deliver more shareholder value
Shill? Explaining why something isn’t a “web app” is shilling now? Geez you commies are getting really loose with your definitions now.
It it actually doing it in-device? Given that it’s attached to OneDrive, I was rather under the impression that it was just offloading the processing to their servers.
Doesn’t really matter where it’s doing what. It’s displaying it all on device. It’s caching stuff on device.
It does matter if you don’t want your shit in the cloud.
Why are you using onedrive if you don’t want your stuff in the cloud?
If the “native” Windows app it’s running on a dedicated browser and coded with web tech, it’s still a web app even if it’s an .exe
Did you know that Picasa could still group people by facial recognition in windows XP with 1 gb of ram in TOTAL? (Clarifying: 1gb to the whole system, not only a single app)
And are you sure that the indexing is running locally? Because it’s called “onedrive photos”, not “windows photos”, so they can totally do the indexing on the cloud.
It’s a native Windows app. What makes you think it’s “coded with web tech”? Do you know it’s just a web wrapper?
some of the reasons why it’s not a native app:
- it uses 1000 mb of ram instead of 50 mb
- if you install binisoft windows firewall control, it wants to get permission to “Microsoft Edge WebView2” when you open it
- all the other microshit apps like clipchamp, new outlook, teams, the start menu, the widgets, are all webapps. It’s like they fired anyone that knew how to write code and replaced them with copilot
- the library, https://github.com/microsoft/fluentui , is react = web
- Doesn’t even come close to proving anything.
- Proves nothing. Is edge a web app?
- The start menu is not a web app.
- React does not mean web lol. React is a UI library.
- If you do a native photo gallery and it uses 1000 mb of RAM just to showing 5 screenshots, that means you’re a grossly incompetent coder and that’s even worse
- I can’t believe you don’t know this, but Edge is a web browser, used to show web pages.
- The start menu is a web app and Microsoft itself even admitted it’s the reason it totally sucks and it will be rewritten native https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/03/21/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-start-menu-performance-boost-shift-to-winui-from-web-based-components/
- It’s a UI library for… Drumroll… WebApps!
It has almost never failed. We added 254092 ifelse statements, ensuring every possible state will be dealt with. It only fails if the user does something unexpected, like clicking too fast. Damn. That makes 254093.
actually quite well built
Windows 11-like Acrylic design
Lol, that’s the lede defense.
I corrupt the files. I take ownership, remove inheritance, and then deny Trusted Installer and System access. My windows systems generally have several components neutered like this. Major upgrades will sometimes overwrite my changes, but mostly they stick. Absolutely nonfunctional.
You can also just use a program to block data access. I have like 15 Microsoft processes barred from the internet because fuck off from my limited data.
I’d rather not use windows than have to do what you’re doing to keep it functional.
Ok. Then don’t use windows. Sounds good.
I already don’t. I’ve run Linux as my main OS on home computers for 3-4 years now, and I use MacOS for work.
Well there ya go. All of your problems are solved.
Seems a lot more annoying than just using linux instead.
Meh. I like things my way. There’s a certain satisfaction there.
Downvote and insult me as long and as much as you like, but I refuse to call anyone who works with Window$ an ‘IT admin’.
That’s a pretty limited POV
Well, considering it’s damn near 100% of the environment, I’d say anyone who doesn’t work with Windows isn’t really an IT admin.
I’ve been looking for jobs to get started in Linux administration, and I gotta tell you, the handful of times I see it mentioned is as a single line in the footer of the job posting.
My problem with this particular argument is that M$ attained this dominance not because of the quality of its products, or because its C-suites are geniuses, but by decades of lobbying and monopolistic market practice.
And if you’re not a Chystler mechanic you’re not an auto mechanic gosh darn it.
I want to switch but I just can’t give up winrar free trial
Oh, they learn all right: “hey, we can pull so much bullshit off and they still pay us. Let’s do more next time”
Their own f*cking fault. Anyone still using that garbage corp/software are just asking for it. Stop whining about your own decisions, start migrating to a non-psycho open OS. Please, spare other people from the guaranteed problems coming from your own stupid choices.
