8mo ago

Privacy tool

so I started to see stuff on OO ShutUp10++ that help disable most intrusive windows features, but it's closed sorce, wondering if they are any open source alternatives? Shutup10 ++

102 comments

Check out Chris Titus's one tool for Windows privacy debloat. It saved my sanity.
- Ctt windows util tool runs O&O shutup. It's a very good script cause it just runs everything and let you debloat to your hearts intent. I run it every time I need to make a windows machine.
  https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
  https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
  
  Your one of two person to said this, and it looks to be open source so might go with this
- I find Chris Titus generally annoying, but his script looks awesome. Definitely try it out.
- I too prefer this method

obligatory: linux
- How does this answer the question?
  I'm a little tired of this platform constantly shouting 24/7 about how we should all use Linux all the time, everything else is terrible, etc. Yes Linux is great, I use it a lot, I love it.
  I don't need it constantly shoved down my throat this way though. I especially don't need it's users to act all high and mighty and shame me for daring to still use Windows.
  I know the pros and cons of using both and I use both for various different tasks. When somebody asks a question about Windows, just telling them to switch their entire operating system to Linux without knowing anything about their situation or why they use the OS they use isn't answering the question, it's not even trying to answer the question.
  It's just saying "you're stupid for using Windows at all for any reason, and I refuse to engage with your actual question or try to help you at all, I'm just here to tell you you're wrong, your personal life choices are bad and you should do what I do instead".
  I appreciate how great Linux is, but let's not try to convert everybody to your way of life at every opportunity. Let people live their own lives and make their own choices, whether you agree with them or not, and if they ask a question, seek to answer it without shoehorning your own agenda in. That's all I ask <3
  
  Vegans, Atheists, Linux.. Fourth horseman is what?
  
  It's just saying "you're stupid for using Windows at all for any reason, and I refuse to engage with your actual question or try to help you at all, I'm just here to tell you you're wrong, your personal life choices are bad and you should do what I do instead".
  It's a two-word response. Where is all the rest of this coming from? Do you need a cookie, a hug, a pinata, and maybe a nap?
  
  without knowing anything about their situation
  Most people only need LibreOffice and Firefox.
  
  Why are you still on Windows when you love and use Linux?
- My standard response to "just go Linux" :
  I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it's still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.
  As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I'd stuck with Cobol).
  I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won't even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).
  There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
  There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
  Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying "you should manage data in a proper database app". No, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.
  Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
  Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't say "save creds"? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
  Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won't even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of windows since 2000, at the least, and would probably work on Win95.
  Someone else said it better than me:
  Every time I've installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it's gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn't look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works.... only it doesn't save my preferences.
  So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically.. but that doesn't work, so now I can't boot.. so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that... then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution... wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it's been four hours, it's 3:00am and I'm like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
  And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren't supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can't wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
  I just can't do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I've loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
  I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
  Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's of a Windows server.
  Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
  Linux doesn't even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it's own way), and that's a massive barrier for users.
  If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
  These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
  All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).
  
  All other things aside, which Logitech mouse are you talking about? Both my G Pro and my G 305 work out of the box. Logitech also advertises them as ChromeOS compatible and AFAIK the Logitech wireless dongles are USB HID compliant so seeing a Linux straight up refuse to interact with them sounds very weird.
  
  This is by far the worst take I've seen on the topic. Sorry for being rude, but it sounds like you haven't touched a computer since that last time in 1990.
  Power management is a joke
  Surprise, it's 2024 and windows will obliterate the battery even after you turn off the machine.
  There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
  There is, though it's via dconf, but it's justified as it's a thing few people would want to tweak.
  Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel
  Sounds like an excel problem to me
  Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort
  I don't use either, but I'm pretty sure filter views are available in libreoffice calc. Open source DB's and Access? What are you talking about, exactly?
  Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default
  The what now? Are you talking about CUPS daemon? systemctl stop cups && systemctl disable cups. Enjoy your 2.5megs of ram back at a cost of not being able to print anything. Now try and do that on windows without bricking your system.
  and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
  If you insist on needing a GUI, go ham. But don't you diss the command line. Being able to do things without GUI is anything but a con.
  Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”?
  That's notoriously a windows problem, not a linux one. You must be misremembering it
  Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won’t even recognize it
  Not recognize it like, not being picked up by xinput, or not even listed in lsusb? I haven't ever heard of non-class-compliant mouse. Is that something to do with the G-Hub thingamajig? If so, that's on logitech, not linux.
  My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of windows since 2000, at the least, and would probably work on Win95
  No, it won't. If linux didn't pick it up without a driver, then win95 won't either. And it's even worse in reverse. I have a bunch of old hardware that won't ever work on modern windows because the last drivers released are for WinXP, which are not compatible nor even portable to subsequent versions. All of them are plug-n-play on linux, though.
  Linux doesn’t even use a common shell
  Huh? You mean the desktop environments? The shell is a thing very few people ever care about.
  If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
  The overwhelming majority of systems are either in GNOME/GTK or KDE/Qt ecosystem, unless you really know what you're doing and want to go with something completely different. But even then, there's a lot of re-use or re-implementation of components from one or the other. It's great to have this choice. Sure, it can be a hassle if components from one don't play nice with another. But then, you're comparing it to windows, that uses components from 3 distinct eras, that don't really work together either.
  
  My Dell XPS 13 (Windows) will kill it's battery if you look at it funny... Or don't look at it at all.
  One time, I fully shut down the laptop and put it in my carry-on.
  When I took it out after my flight, my bag was suspiciously warm and the battery was fully dead. Power management on Linux might be a joke but Dell is certainly the Carlos Mencía of the comedy club. At least I know my enemy now though. I unplug the battery to turn it 'off'.
  
  Of course this is all subjective. Millions of people use it as their main OS just fine, because it’s fine.
  I’d never use Windows and can come up with an equally long list of complaints.
  At least a few of your comments are also just false.
  
  Try Fedora or another distro with nearly-up-to-date kernel + KDE Plasma, the latter has a GUI for configuring power management separate for AC, battery and low battery. It even includes features like a charge percentage limit.
  KDE's file manager Dolphin doesn't remember SMB passwords unless you tell it to.
  For MS Office compatibility try OnlyOffice.
  My brand new Razer Viper V3 Pro that releases in April 2024 works great under Linux. Not sure why your Logitech stuff doesn't.
  Your quote is interesting, because it's the number one point for me when choosing an operating system: get out of my way, I want to get stuff done on the operating system, not tinker with it. So Windows it was for me, and I really held on to it for a long time, even using the LTSC version because it was less bloated and annoying. Some day, an update even started these nags in my LTSC installation and eventually it was at a point where Windows was more in my way and I had to do more tinkering to move it out of my way than just using a solid Linux distro, where yes, I had to tinker quite a bit to get everything working perfectly, but at least once its set up, it won't suddenly come around on the next restart and says "HEY I MADE EDGE YOUR DEFAULT BROWSER NICE RIGHT? WANT TO USE ONEDRIVE AND MICROSOFT REWARDS? OH AND LOOK CANDY CRUSH IS BACK. AND THESE NICE MICROSOFT NEWS IN THE TASKBAR." - this to me is just straight up disrespectful to the user.
  No OS is perfect and I won't pretend Linux is, but it got to a point where it is less annoying and cumbersome.
  
  I have been ping ponging for almost two decades on the desktop. Currently on Pop!_OS (Ubuntu derivative) with a “safety blanket” dual boot with Windows. I went through a lot of these stages many times. So far, ~3 months on this has been the least frustrating Linux desktop experience. I’m still missing some of the power management controls and cloud file integration is kind of a joke, but an interesting time. For the many things that work well, the performance is so much better than Windows and all the other Linux distros I’ve tried on this same hardware.
  
  Of course bashrc isn't going to run in the context of a desktop environment. They have zero clue how the system works at all.
  Either Windows does a lot of it for them and they should have chosen a distro that does the same, or they're much more familiar with Windows and expecting that to translate to Linux without any time investment.
  "Monitor doesn't look right so I installed 20 things and ran random commands," gee I wonder why their Linux installations keep breaking? If they behaved like that on Windows they'd also have a number of problems.
  
  Skill issue
  
  Sorry, but if you want linux to be "just like Windows" it will never be good enough. It is different, and of course it takes time and effort to learn.
  
  What a spectacular response. If you don't mind, I'm going to bookmark and copy that text because it magnificently describes the whole situation.
  
  A great response it is
  
  Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
  Lemme get your russian immigrant wife to setup that VR headset for you, so that you can disable any process you like like it's Jarvis
  Edit: Care to point to my wrongs?
- I wish, Main game i play is windows exclusive, and as soon as they add Linux support or November 2025 hits I'm jumping ship
  
  Which game? Linux can run a lot of Windows games these days.
  Edit: I struggle to imagine why some people have downvoted this. Since doing so doesn't help anyone at all, I encourage them to use their words instead.
  
  If it's on steam it will run.
  What happens November 2025?

You can generate your own "debloat" scripts with https://privacy.sexy
I think the project has a better chance than most at being relevant long-term for a number of reasons, but also the maintainer is a pretty cool person!
- Ye, after reading through the basic script it seams quite good.

Don't know if this is the right place to post this (apologies if it is not)
- Here's fine, it is tech after all.
  !privacy@lemmy.ml
  That's the largest privacy focused community though.
  
  Too bad it's on .ml, the mods often can't be trusted.
- It's not news or article, so no.

iwr -useb https://christitus.com/win | iex
https://christitus.com/debloat-windows-10-2020/
- Guys: don't actually do this. Running stuff blindly on the command line from a URL without checking it beforehand is super risky and dumb.
  
  So long as it's open source and I can read the code myself and enough people vouch for it I think it's more likely then not safe
  
  Very dumb, check the second url I posted first and get the command line from there. Don't trust some random ass dude on Lemmy but I hope you'll see that I posted the same command as on the website
- Your one of two person to said this, and it looks to be open source so might go with this
  
  Give it a go, it's really handy for setting up new machines! I'm on Linux mint permanently now but I still use that for servers
- Anything for win 11 ?
  
  Same tool actually, its so good

I literally just found out about O&O ShutUp10++ and in the same post other commenters recommended Optimizer and privacy.sexy.

Based on the screenshot, I don't see the point. All of these are accessible in Windows settings, just with slightly different names.
Edit: OK I didn't see the scrollbar on the right.
- Windows settings has scrollbars too.

you can just use group policy for most windows deshittification needs

Maybe try this PrivateZilla but it's always a great step to reduce even by a little your data leaks, but as some already said here you should consider switching to linux, even with all your efforts you cannot repair a broken thing at the base....