3w ago

Programs/Settings I should change to minimize data scraping on Windows 11?

Since Linux does not seem to work on my laptop (I have spent hours trying to find a fully functioning distro, it doesn't exist yet for Snapdragon), I am curious if there are different things I can do to keep Windows from tracking all of my shit.

I know that's impossible but minimizing it is desirable for me, at least. I don't want CoPilot, I don't want advertisement pop ups, anything like bloatware I fucking hate it, as we all do.

So pls let me know what you do to minimize this shit. Apps, things I should uninstall, settings I should change. If I have step by step instructions I'm not afraid to use command prompts since I got a little bit of experience with that while trying to install Linux.

Thank you all in advance for helping this luddite

13 comments

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Set it and forget it.
- I've always used the win11debloat script instead.
  https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
  As far as I can tell they do pretty much the same things.
  
  Winutil also provides a graphical interface to winget, I see winutil as more of a graphical utility program rather than a script.
  
  Any particular reason that you use one over the other, or did you just stumble across that script and just kept with it?
- Damn that's it?? Amazing.
  
  It also doubles as a software manager so there's no need to go onto the internet and download all the software you need individually.
  GNU/Linux already has this but now its ported over to windows
it doesn't exist yet for Snapdragon
What laptop is it? Linux works great on ARM chips, such as basically all android phones, tablets, etc. There's a number of distros like postmarket which are designed for arm phones and laptops.
It's very possible you're right and there's no port yet, but you might be surprised. Most of the popular distros are only really designed for x86.
- Linux support on snapdragon in particular is really bad. It's starting to get there but it's still not reccomended if you need your laptop to actually work 100% of the time.
- Microsoft surface 7. I spent a bunch of time checking out forums and such. It looks like Arch supports it, I think, and you can get it to work on Ubuntu but a bunch of stuff does not work for it. The keyboard (I think), Bluetooth, volume. I am not computer savvy anymore so I don't wanna fuck with Arch. I don't even use the touch screen so I could care less about that but keyboard usage would be nice lol.
  Someone in another post suggested trying puppy Linux but I havent seen any documentation anywhere saying that my laptop would support it
  
  Damn yea tricky, looks like mainline linux patches only landed a few months ago so it'll probably be a while until there's actually good distro support.

13 comments