so here's the situation you've been concerned about Windows 10's
privacy or lack thereof for a while now but
while you've tried Linux you just can't
make the jump maybe some software you need won't run properly or maybe you're
just a fan of Windows other than the privacy problems what can you do
why not ameliorate it yes my friends you can completely fix
the problems with Windows 10 and remove the unnecessary garbage that weighs it
down all by yourself so let's see how it's done
and what cost it comes at
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what does ameliorate mean anyway well according to the dictionary it's a verb
meaning to make something bad or unsatisfactory better and that certainly
seems to be the aim for Windows 10 ameliorated edition a small project
that's actually been around since all the way back in 2017. now not a whole
lot of information is available surrounding who is actually behind it
but some old links point to actrons a
90s kid who specifically calls out technology social science philosophy
psychology and neurology film and anime analysis and cringe
as their topics of interest ameliorated edition seems to be an
offshoot of their Windows 10 install script which originally merely disabled
things like Windows update and made adjustments to Windows explorer
as newer Windows builds came out though with more deeply integrated telemetry a
more direct approach was necessary to stop Windows from bloody phoning home
and giving them all my information ameliorated edition straight up removes
Windows update cortana activation
microsoft edge Windows media player and all apex uwp applications from the
install not disabled removed no longer present what that
means is there's a total size reduction of roughly two gigs
now of course removing such
deeply rooted components requires the
introduction of replacements in certain cases killing cortana for example
cripples the start menu and especially Windows search so classic shell is used
as a replacement and there's more that you'll have to give up too directx 12 may not be fully
supported due to Windows update not being a thing and of course you're stuck
without automatic updates in fact the update process itself is a bit of a bear
that requires you to disconnect from the internet
reactivate Windows update temporarily and so on and so forth suffice to say
while this version of Windows is focused on privacy
it's a little lighter on security though as the website claims
most of the commonly exploitable applications have been removed anyway so
that point may be less important than you might think but enough talk why
don't we take a look for ourselves and see what else we're giving up in the
name of improved privacy the first thing
i notice is that gone is Windows mail
who uses Windows mail like
how crazy do you have to be to not just use a web browser for your mail like
okay boomer enjoy your outlook so no Windows mail no
Windows store and no microsoft edge all we've got down
here is file explorer that's it actually i'm
noticing some more changes now too where's all the where's all the drop
downs for file explorer this feels like it's going to be very very different
also we've got the classic Windows vista and 7 style start menu and of course
because there's no edge Anthony has helpfully thrown a firefox uh shortcut
on the desktop actually the default is duckduckgo really yes is that the
firefox default or is that Windows 10 ameliorated edition no that's an
ameliorated edition thing actually firefox as well as thunderbird uh
only office and vlc media player were all pre-installed by the operating
system i've never heard of only office apparently it's a fork of liber office
huh it's very microsoft office looking let's try
and find some tech tips here Linus tech tips wow what's what's my
amazon page this is a secondhand titan x
okay we need to update this Colton i'm here what's up oh wow you're there
was so cool can i summon people just by like
saying their names oh ltdstore.com
hey this is a sweet shirt by the way guys okay what else can we try here okay
so where are where's my file drop down this is a modification to Windows
explorer called i think old explorer that kind of restores the
Windows 7 style of Windows explorer so it doesn't have the
traditional ribbon bar it doesn't have any of the other stuff it's just all
basically rewritten and there's actually a config
file you can change to customize it yourself i used it for a little while
just kind of out of curiosity it's just a preference thing i feel but they used
it here because some of the changes that they made to Windows
also affected explorer so they had to use old explorer to kind of patch it up
well i can tell you now there's only one thing that i would care about them
fixing and that's if i search for something
and i go to this folder when i click up folder
you bastards that's not what i want i
want it to go up a folder if i wanted to go back to the previous page i would
press back up folder means up one folder
in the directory structure so this looks like the horrible Windows
10 type settings menu except there's even less stuff in here like what's up
with that well a lot of it is stuff that was tied in with that telemetry stuff so Windows
update uh gaming like the xbox stuff
that was tied in with with the telemetry and the phoning home
so pretty much anything that
qualifies with that would also
be cut can i even set a screen saver
i think so it's under display isn't it
i don't know is that wait here it is here it is i got it i got it so you
can't search for it i guess that would probably be because
they gutted the regular search as well
yeah without cortana then Windows search kind of just
dies huh i actually didn't know that this bubble screensaver was still built into
Windows this is a Windows vista classic right here this was
so cool at the time ooh 3d acceleration on the desktop
now it looks kind of faked actually i just want to watch these bubbles for
days we've evolved past screen savers at this point as a species this is weird too
Windows tab doesn't cycle through things
for whatever reason alt tab does but why doesn't Windows tab
okay well that's cool i guess that's fine
i haven't really done any benchmarking but it does seem to be a lot snappier
than uh like it should like a standard Windows 10 install would be i mean the
start menu sure opens right away which is pretty nice but i mean how bad is
this search so let's search for like counter strike
hole that's rough not being able to find
something that is literally a shortcut on the desktop
is terrible no worse than the built-in one in Windows 10 mind you i think it is
possible to set the search folders for uh classic sheller i guess it's called
open shell now so if you right click on the start menu
go to settings you can kind of configure everything there but by default i think
it's not set up to do that it's just for the start menu itself got it okay search
the internet search programs and settings search files it is set to search
everything sir oh well i've got uh
i've got no excuses for it then so what uh what else can we try here i
mean like well a game will run fine right like let's
play doom i mean doom should run
a default password why would that be because the user account that you're
logged into right now is straight up a user it's not an
administrator why you know you're no longer getting the security patches right most security
vulnerabilities happen because users are administrators right and there's really
no compelling reason to be an administrator outside of just installing
programs and if you know the administrative password then you can just put it in anytime you need to do
that kind of like you would on a mac yeah i should just switch to mac between
spotlight and just finder wasn't so bad i'd consider it
there's uh alternatives you can get pathfinder is one oh okay it's uh it's
paid software though but it's actually pretty decent everything paid on mac
yeah because you can afford it you bought a mac
all right yeah we're running at like 90 FPS or whatever yeah it's totally fine
ultra nightmare
take that monsters why don't you try a directx 12 game
oh well i guess that's probably not gonna work then hey um okay what's uh
good night i've got shadow of the tomb raider on there oh yeah that'll do it oh
weird there's no there's no system tray pop up that might
just be an artifact of classic shell i'm not entirely sure it's been a hot minute
but it could also be that we don't have any
like hidden icons at all so i can't find any way to hide them i'm in the settings
now and it's just nope you just relocate them even the relocation animations are
slightly different so you might be right it might just be a classic shell thing
let's play some shadow of the tomb raider directx 12.
here we go boys Windows update affect that
apparently there's extensions to directx 12 that come down from Windows update
from time to time so the idea is if you've got a game that
uses an extension that you don't have then when the directx 12 just won't work
properly well shadow of the tomb raider is a bit of an older game and
it seems to be working properly at least in the menu which
is rendered in engines so that would lead me to believe that it's going to
run okay so officially
directx 12 is a no-go but unofficially if you try it on a
game-by-game basis it might actually work just fine then yeah you're not
supposed to stand in here but i like it new task managers here that's nice to
see got your GPU usage and all that good stuff although i don't see temps in here
yet so this is like at least one iteration back it's actually based on
Windows 10 1903. got it
it should be possible to do it with 1909 but the official images well official
images are 1903. okay you might notice down in the bottom right corner that
you've got an internet as disconnected icon oh i do
yes and that's because Windows can't know that i have an internet connection
right because it's not phoning home it can't
got it so it only knows that you have local connectivity
interesting so even though all the telemetry stuff
has supposedly been removed we still actually need to fool Windows
into thinking that it it has no reason to even use it
because i have no internet connection yeah oh creative cloud probably won't know i
have an internet connection either yeah
oh i bet there's gonna be lots of stuff
that kind of glitches out because it thinks you have no internet connection
because they can't ping their server they can't phone home so it turns off telemetry for other
applications as well i think adobe is one of those
applications that hooks into Windows API for that and the API itself has been
removed i open up creative cloud desktop it goes ooh you got no internet
connection can't do stuff by the way we've got a new version available go
ahead and update we'll see if it gets it let's see if you guys get a water bottle
on lttstore.com okay this is not going to finish it's
been sitting here forever now i take back everything i said about quality adobe software okay so with that closed
out we've got svc host
like task manager there's wow there's really not a lot in
here then yeah and in keeping with the spirit of the operating system i used
envy clean stall to install the NVIDIA driver as well so we only have the bare
minimum for that as well wow i guess that explains why it just
feels so snappy like you know how sometimes even on a fast machine you'll
go to open local disk c and it'll take like
10 or 15 seconds for no apparent reason
yeah because it's got to like update some log in the background that's got to
go off to microsoft and all that kind of crap it makes you wonder how much stuff
is actually just kind of caked on in there in the like vanilla version of
Windows you know no kidding like even when it does need a second to open up
and populate a directory list it's a second not 10 seconds yeah
accessing uh the vault or any of our
other servers usually takes like a
long time this is great though like i'm in bench
den right now and it's responsive enough considering that it's
running on spinning rust and running over a gigabit connection yeah
hey ms paint's still here ms paint is not spyware i knew i knew
you were good all along this is pretty cool you get all the same
benefits that you would from an officially available slimmed down
version of Windows like an embedded version which we've actually talked
about before when we did a video on Windows 9
plus more since all the telemetry is stripped out but
legally speaking this is all
something of a gray area so to speak
now according to the website the project is perfectly legal based on eu directive
2009 24 which they say gives them a pass
on interoperability grounds by downloading images with telemetry
including activation removed from the website itself though you are
essentially committing piracy
however it is possible to do this legally if you
modify a Windows image for yourself and they've got full documentation on the
process available along with a repository of open source scripts that
they use so supposedly you with your
Windows license and a download of Windows 10 1909 should be able to do it
for yourself although the pre-built images are all based on 1903. legality
aside the utility of a Windows image like this is
pretty great for someone who's looking to run it in a vm on a Linux machine for
example for everyday use
i don't know if you don't need some of the things
that we found didn't work quite right and if you don't mind jumping through
some hoops whenever you want to update or run something that needs
administrator permissions then sure otherwise honestly our
better recommendations are to just give in and run Windows
or just run Linux if you want privacy
without the hassle speaking of no hassle in your privacy
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