One “simple trick” and your next Windows install will be blissfully free of bloatware.

Basically, install Windows as you normally would, but when asked for Time and Currency format, select English (World) instead of your country.

Then let the installer do its thing. Eventually, you will see a window with an ice cream cone on the floor with the words “Something went wrong” and the error message “OOBEREGION.” This cryptic message means that the “out of box experience” (OOBE) didn’t launch because it didn’t know which region to launch.

Click Skip, though, and Windows will install just fine. You won’t be prompted to buy Microsoft 365, you won’t be prompted to pay for a OneDrive subscription, and your Start menu won’t be cluttered with apps.

  • Captain AggravatedEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Installing Steam on Windows: Microsoft has a store but it sucks, I don’t think Steam is even in there, so you have to open up your browser and remember that the URL is steampowered.com or maybe valvesoftware.com, or google it, somehow make visually sure you’ve found the right webpage and that you’re not being scammed, find the download page, click Download, now it downloads a small installer .exe to your Downloads folder, open up your file manager, go to you Downloads folder, find the .exe that just came down, click that, there’s a several step process that asks you several questions that amount to “do you want to install this in a non-standard place that will break shit later?” then it downloads and installs the actual app.

    Installing Steam on Linux (I’m using Mint Cinnamon here, but the process is pretty similar for most popular distros): Open the software manager, type “steam” in the search box, click on the first result to come up, click install, key in your password, it downloads and installs the app.

    TL;DR: Everyone. Android, iOS, MacOS, every single Linux distro. Everyone. Has a functioning app store system that users actually use. Except Windows.

      • Captain AggravatedEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        I pretty much outright don’t believe you. Flatpak ships by default on a lot of distros; it works on Linux Mint and is integrated with Mint’s software center. In my procedure I said “click the first option that pops up” well the Flatpak version is the second option. I do know that Manjaro requires you to go into the software manager’s settings and toggle it on, and Ubuntu deliberately doesn’t include Flatpak by default because of their competing Snap store.

        The assertion that Flatpak “does not come by default on most systems” is factually incorrect. Per this page: https://flathub.org/setup the majority of distros listed say that “Flatpak is included with newer versions by default and is ready out of the box.” With a notable exception of regular old Ubuntu, for which the command is “sudo apt install flatpak.” Or Arch or Gentoo, whose entire deal is “By default we install AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. Do it yourself.”

          • Captain AggravatedEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            Can’t speak from experience as I’ve never touched Void Linux, but reading about it to make this comment, it sounds like Arch but worse. A rolling release GUI-optional distro with its own special boy package manager…yeah I’m starting to believe your dependency hell woes.

            Either way the command for installing Flatpak on Void is sudo xbps-install -S flatpak, which I would expect a user of Void Linux to know or be willing to learn.