this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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It's probably hard to keep up with lol. I'll try my best. It has Edge and Defender ONLY. No cortana, copilot, recall, candy crush bloat or anything similar, .net, vcredist, edgeview/runtime, TPM requirement, online account, secure boot, store, xbox, one drive, winget, nor widgets.
You finish the install and it is BARE. All I do post install is, in regex and gpedit, turn off telemetry.
For my use, Steam installs all the .net and vcredist as needed.
Store and Xbox and the like are available to install via power shell or downloads, but fair warning. Once you do store or M$ account sign in, copilot and recall might find a way to sneak in via updates. None of them work, and error out when you open them, but the fact they install and exist makes me uneasy.
Edit: If you don't even want Defender, nor Edge, look up Windows X-Lite. That man is a wizard at figuring out the bare minimum needed for an .iso.
Didn't know these customized windows os's were still a thing. I thought they did out in the windows 7 age
But like back then, how do we know these are safe and don't have some kind of password stealing malware? Excluding Defender specifically makes it a bit sus
There's a custom OS forum where I found it originally a year ago. Everything got scanned from virus total when uploaded and showed the report. And the guy had an excellent reputation there as well. I decided to go for it until 11 LTSC came out, and daily drove it for 2+ years issue free.
In the end, it's up to you if you want to trust it.
I think reputation is better than the virus total scan, since it wouldn't catch malware broken up in different parts that are integrated into the OS.
I will definitely keep this in mind. Have you had any issues with the OS not having Edge? I thought it wasn't easily possible without causing some issues.
One of the things for X-Lite I would do post install, is install Edge WebView2 along with the other runtimes available on X-Lites website. Not sure if I ever needed it or not, but never had issues with no Edge.