I really think Microsoft needs to take a hard look at Windows and realize that it needs the ability to switch, install, or even decide at boot as a purpose built OS.

Take gaming for example, I pretty much only use my PC for gaming (I prefer my Mac for general purpose stuff) and there is a lot there that is really unnecessary. But where this really becomes an issue is on devices like the Steam Deck.

I installed Windows 10 on mine, used a debloat script to remove anything that was not strictly necessary for gaming, downloading games, and related tasks and I was able to get better performance and battery life for the same games than I did under SteamOS.

While I imagine that this would complicate testing of updates to support these separate purposes, it feels like Windows is trying to do to much all at once.

However I also recognize that much of what I removed is also things like telemetry that I doubt they would remove.

hnarn

What debloat script did you use, and how did you decide which one to use? My experience is that there is a lot of them out there, and it's impossible to tell which ones actually do something that results in an observable difference, and what the potential drawbacks are of the things being changed.

A lot of the time I feel like you end up with having to do a lot of research for a very minor practical effect.

nerdjon

I used this one https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater and yeah I had to heavily customize it and then I did need to re-enable something afterwords which I found on the github.

Basically what I did was I started with the default and then unchecked (or checked? I don't remember what the UI called for now) anything related to Xbox and the Store and I didnt have any issues.

I also did a comparison before and after and it was actually a pretty decent improvement. About a 10fps improvement over SteamOS and a Normal Windows 10.

For me the biggest incentive was being able to play xbox game pass games and not needing to worry about any compatibility issues with Proton which is why I went down that route.

But yeah your second part is very true. I feel, the impact is minimal if you are on a traditional PC. But on something with such limited resources like a Steam Deck, the difference can be going from 40 fps to mid 50's and a few more minutes of battery life.

But it isn't something I would recommend most people do. More just kinda pointing out that with the effort I think Microsoft could make a lean Windows really just by taking a look at what is actually necessary to be run for specific tasks.