I’m resurrecting a scrubbed Surface Book I inherited from the old gig that wants very badly to run Windows 11, and I can’t see a viable downgrade process because apparently modernity is just like that, so I thought I’d document the process of making Windows 11 tolerable.
The results so far have been pretty good, if I do say so myself.
I have modest requirements for “tolerable”, I’d like to think, but the process of getting Windows there from the defaults is really gritty. Microsoft’s front-end designers have done heroic work keeping their company’s quarterly bonus plan from bursting out of Windows’ chest like a Xenomorph with a Two-Week Executive MBA certificate, but you can see the Redmond incentive structure straining against their efforts at every turn, squirming in the ribcage of every undulating interaction. But the raw material we need is in there. We just need to scrape off a few layers of short term thinking.
The “tolerable” that I’m asking for isn’t really much muchness. I want to not see advertisements, popups or anything I don’t specifically ask for. I want to choose what’s in my taskbar and desktop and what’s not, and I’d like to have both of those things without signing up for accounts or services I don’t particularly want, need or trust.
You’d think that would be an easy bar to clear but the entire Win11 start-me-up experience has reminded me of a distinction I’ve seen drawn between “industry” and “business”; that is, “process improvement” v. “value extraction”. It’s a useful oversimplification but I think the stark difference between Win11 and, say, Win7 isn’t technical or cosmetic, but epistemic.
Windows 7, for any flaws it had, manifested a believe that process improvements were the way to give users something more valuable; Windows 11 treats whatever value you can extract from those users as the metric by which process improvement is judged. That’s the opposite of what you’d want as customer, but it’s so much easier to measure and that means it’s easier to manage and that has to be the same as better, right?
The Industry of Windows, the underpinning tech, is by and large Good Actually. Powershell is kinda clunky and verbose, I think because they envisioned a yet-unrealized future of higher-order tools that generate it, but in a better world the Linux community would recognize how much there is to gain from the idea that piping structured objects around might be better than streams of text. Defender is basically white-hat wizard magic. Granular, human-readable permissions are so much more sophisticated and usable than anything that exists in the unix world, and though it’s getting long in the tooth NTFS is solid.
And on top of all that, Microsoft does long term support and backcompat better than anyone else in the world, bar none. It would be nice if they had a better per-app update story that didn’t involve the Microsoft Store, it would be nice if you could have a stern conversation with the filesystem about who should have right of first reply to fopen(), but by and large the foundations are solid, the floorboards aren’t warping and you can have clean running hot and cold water when you turn the taps.
The Business Of Windows – the user-tracking, everything-is-rented-services-now, paste-ads-in-every-corner-of-everything, the relentless gotta-make-the-numbers-at-all-costs dark-patterning in anything that you might if you held it at an angle and crossed your eyes a bit maybe kind of describe as an “opportunity” – is atrocious. A disaster from stem to stern. Every other interaction with the installer and the OS it gives you is a desperate attempt to funnel your attention span into into somebody’s metrics. It is the worst, just relentlessly and unnecessarily unpleasant. It’s like trying to buy a car from someone who happens to be the guy who puts salt on the roads in the winter. “We can give you a great deal on this very nice vehicle, you’ll love the trunk-full-of-road-salt option.”
“The pardon, now?” “Yeah, you didn’t select the don’t-fill-my-trunk-with-road-salt add-on. It’s an extra, you don’t really need it. This way you get a free trunk full of road salt! Now, if you just sign here and also pour this road salt into your underpants, it’s a standard financing thing.”
The first step towards tolerability is to set yourself up with a local user account. That’s not particularly difficult, though it involves an excitingly-old-school magic incantation at just the right moment – alt-F10, running oobe\bypassnro and turning off your network connection, might take one or two tries, yes this is a real thing – but that gets you a local account rather than needing to sign up for anything.
Once Windows lets you in, don’t made the mistake I did of clicking the preinstalled weather widget they put in the corner of the taskbar where the start menu used to be. Who knows what it will show you, but Windows popped up a half-screen of “notification” full of random news and current event nightmares for me as though there’s a single human anywhere on earth who wants that when they ask for the weather. “Good morning, here’s three pictures of Trump, one of Putin, something about that house speaker clownshow, if you wanted to know if you needed and umbrella today, surprise, we don’t know or care.”
As an aside: listen, PM-on-that-weather-and-news-notifications team, whoever you are – you somehow managed to convince the Windows leadership to put your little widget in the one corner of the screen every windows user in history has been trained to click to open the start menu, and honestly I’m impressed. You managed to wrest control of the single most valuable pixel in this industry from the clutches of the Start Menu team who’ve owned it for 25 years. It must have taken months of conniving and an acre of powerpoint to grab that pixel, but you did it. I respect the hustle, and I’m certain your team knocked their metrics out of the park, that you got that Porsche or cottage or whatever out of it. I want you to know that I see you, and the full scope of my appreciation is not just because Windows, as a product, is materially worse because of what you did. I bet you’re a hero now for everyone in Redmond who wants to follow in your footsteps, who’ve learned that locking in that bonus is as easy as hijacking decades of user muscle memory, and it will take years of work to undo the corrosion you’ve brought to the company’s culture if it can be undone at all. The world would be a better place if you and everyone who let you do this resigned in full realization of the cost of your actions, but I’m sure you got a promotion instead.
Mercifully, if you can find the taskbar toggles three or four menus deep in the bowels of settings, you can turn this trash fire off and put the start menu back where it belongs.
I learned later that if you pick “Global English” as a language option rather than “US english” you can avoid most of this terribleness, but at least you can find the toggle.
[Late edit: I’ve learned that “be in Europe when you install Windows” is also a sound strategy; if you have that option I recommend it. Making good use of things that would otherwise just stink seems to be a regional competency in that part of the world, they also have amazing cheese.]
That’s I think the third thing on my list, after local accounts and setting the touchpad options correctly; if you’re coming off a Mac, disabling “lower right corner is right click” will save you a lot of frustrating, otherwise-undiagnosable interaction weirdness. I’m really not sure why they picked that as a default, it’s jarring.
Moving on, there are… I think three places you need to uninstall Teams? Two apps in Settings -> Apps and one taskbar option. I should have made more careful notes about this step, but that little purple word-bubble option in the task bar took some doing to get rid of.
Like Internet Explorer before it Edge is a pretty good tool for its traditional purpose of being ignored after you’ve downloaded Firefox, but its role as purveyor-of-advertisements in Windows has made permanently deactivating it a higher priority. So once you’ve fired up Edge – answering it’s first-run questions with the usual no, no I don’t want that, no, no thank you, no, I said good day sir, no – you should consider permanently disabling it. It really makes the whole Windows experience cleaner and quieter in every way. This is the “gritty” part of the exercise I was talking about, though, and if you haven’t mucked around in the guts of Windows filesystem permissions before you want to walk through this cautiously.
The steps are:
- Open the Windows File Explorer,
- Go to c: -> program files (x86) and select the “Microsoft” folder. This is where Edge lives.
- Right click for “properties”, then “Security, then “Advanced”.
- Take ownership of the folder from “SYSTEM” by changing it to your local account.
- Click OK and OK again to close all the dialog boxes.
- Re-open these dialogues, again properties ->security -> advanced and click “disable inheritance”
- It will ask you to copy or remove all permissions, and you want “remove”.
- OK, OK, reboot.
After that Edge functionally doesn’t exist and you’re pretty much on rails. For myself, my own next move is getting SharpKeys installed to remap capslock to control and setting up Notepad++, an indispensable text-editor/brain-dumping tool. I’ll get to the WSL eventually, I’m sure. Our paths will diverge at this point, I expect, but from here out you can let your heart guide you.
I’m sure that’s a problem for somebody – I sincerely hope it is, really – but this is the best experience of Windows I’ve been able to create for myself. Defender works, updates works, nothing is trying to surprise or upsell me on anything… it’s kind of amazing to see how much better it can be, calm, clean, fast and elegant throughout, and to imagine how much work went in to making sure nobody can have that.