When your OS is pure spyware, maybe it's time to look into switch to a less abusive option. The more people that switch, the stronger signal it sends.
This tool is equivalent to dating an alcoholic that beats you whenever they're drunk, so you keep trying to take away all the alcohol instead of dumping them and finding a new partner. The signs were always there and they just keep getting worse, it's time to move on.
Very few are these days with the enormous amount of resources Valve has been pouring into Proton. The only truly Windows-only games I have encountered were online multiplayer with anticheat and that was almost always because the developer chose not to support Linux (e.g. EAC, Rust) and not for lack of support for Linux.
Perhaps that wouldn't happen if more people switched...
This hasn't been the case for at least half a decade. Most games run perfectly fine if not better on Linux. The only exceptions are purposely broken remote rootkit "anticheat" gsmes which no sane person would want on their system anyway.
With the exception of multiplayer games with invasive anti-cheat measures, a very large number of games works very well on Linux now with Wine/Proton. When using Steam this mostly works just out of the box without fiddling.
I'm daily driving both Windows and Linux, and each has its own issues unfortunately, so using tools like OO is a necessity of making my(and others) life bit less miserable.
For Linux I have bunch of custom repair scripts because of certain bugs I encounter(which are tracked too but not solved).
Unfortunately this is the game no one will ever win, unless you will move, drop tech, and start breeding dogs, but then you need to sell them, and where would you advertise? :)
Well, when this alcoholic is the only one that works properly for the sort of audio and 3D/VFX work, and a bunch of tools are only able to run (well) on Windows (Yes, I've tried WINE and everything else under the sun, for a decade), so dual booting is really the only option here, unless I wanna throw out a bunch of licenses I've paid thousands for and stop accepting that sort of work.
Ableton is probably the biggest reason I still have a Windows installation, and the one I try to get working (properly and well) with Wine/Proton maybe once a month or so. Cascadeur, Unreal Engine Editor, rekordbox are some of the other software I can't get to run well enough on Linux (yet) to fully migrate.
But, on the other hand, lots of other software I use professionally works amazingly on Linux, better than Windows in fact, like Houdini, Unreal Engine (the runtime, not the Editor), DaVinci Resolve and Blender.
I'm not worried though, eventually it'll be runnable on Linux no doubt, but personally we're not quite there yet, sadly.
I know this doesn't address all your concerns, but I switched from Ableton Live to Bitwig Studio for unrelated reasons to my leaving Windows behind, and I was thoroughly pleased with how easy the transition was between the two DAWs (I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise given how many ex-Ableton devs work on Bitwig), and how well the Linux build of Bitwig worked. Bitwig on Linux, with Pipewire as the audio engine for low latency operation, is essentially an identical operating experience for me.
Getting your plugins working is a different story. A small but growing number of mainstream audio plugins have native Linux builds available, a wide swath of them work quite well with yabridge (https://yabridge.org/ - so shim to expose Windows audio plugins running in WINE prefixes to Linux audio plugin hosts), and a few required alternatives to be found.
I found the workflow decent enough to use, but as one might expect, some plugins not working well via yabridge/WINE made things a little janky, and once I picked up a Mac device again, that became my production machine. That said, WINE's come a long say since I last tried this out a few years ago, and I'd be interested to see if things work better.
My point, I suppose, is to share a reasonably good success story (though perhaps still not of a grade that you'd be comfortable switching to for paid work), and perhaps to encourage you to consider some alternatives to the tools you use. Tool changes are expensive, sure in cost, but moreso in time, so I don't suggest it lightly. That being said, I think that it might be worth it to grab a Bitwig trial and see how you like it. I'd grab it both on Windows and Linux, so you can try it "how it should work" when your plugins and the DAW are working in harmony while also getting the Linux toolchain working. And from the cost perspective, Bitwig does not have crossgrade licenses, so you can buy Studio once, and run it on any supported platform.
Thanks a bunch for the ideas if nothing less :) I've played around with Bitwig a bunch in the past, love how well it runs on Linux, and it's mostly similar to Ableton so would probably be easy to move, if I decided to do so.
I'm mostly on Ableton because everyone else around me is on Ableton too, and we're sending projects between each other and sometimes sit together with each other and jam and such, and I basically chose Ableton over other DAWs to make it easier for us to collaborate, and now we're all basically stuck here :) Basically the same reason I use US input language on the keyboard when programming, although I'm Swedish living in Spain, with no Americans in sight around me.
Neat to know about the non-crossgrade license though, if I ever end up spending more time working by myself, it seems worth it to maybe do a deeper dive into it.
I completely agree with this comment! If your OS does not behave like an OS anymore, better to switch to a real OS at that point. That's it. I've always been disappointed by Windows "OS" in the past but now it's really too much..
I use cachyos as my daily driver for a long time now. I play quite a few games. Only league of legends forces me to dual boot into windows every once in a week or so - fuck the anticheat cartel
That's exactly the way I framed the relationship between Microsoft and its victim in a companion article[0] I wrote in 2025 looking back on my switch to Linux.
Since then I started realizing how parasitic the proprietary software industry really is.
If you need Autohotkey you can still run that under wine (if you are ahk on windows applications), you can run total commander under wine. You can log in as admin I think its time to make the switch
If they’re running auto hotkey they’re also likely gamers, likely needing to run games that either can’t emulate or lose performance when running via proton or wine. AKA, this advice, like most “switch to Linux” advice, is tone deaf.
Not sure why you think it's gaming related but fine, I just don't think AHK can do anything special. GP sounds rather like he's trying to find gotchas and justify staying on Windows (see his adjacent post), not genuinely find the replacement. All these features are either readily available or the apps themselves are Wine-ified with no performance loss, I have tried that and I don't think you have. All you need to switch to Linux or Mac is overcoming some friction which is of course inevitable, but utility software like this is definitely not a blocker.
> wonder if you ever used Autohotkey to unfuck annoyances in software.
Sure I did, but what particular annoyances in what software that you want to take with you into another ecosystem? I just don't get it, as you're being vague about it.
I have extensively used AHK for workarounds with annoying software. Generally, it's probably the worst class in terms of a workaround if you had something specific in mind with a bit of effort you could solve this now with AI tooling to write your something that does that specific behaivour anyways.
The only valid holdup for Linux at this point is kernel anticheats and some larger commercial software that is deeply engrained in the windows ecosystem eg most desktop offline CAD software. But once again AI is going to help you get that running under wine. I am already working on a series of wine patches and a custom runner to allow me to run ProE/Creo under wine without issues.
> It is not listed in the Linux Mint App Installer. The Portables downloaded from Sourcefoge do not work.
It's packaged in Debian and Ubuntu as "doublecmd-qt" and "doublecmd-gtk", so Linux Mint ought to have it as well.
> Can it filter-as-you-type the file list?
Yes.
> Does it have chainable script button bars?
I don't know what that is.
> Is there a poweful rename tool?
There's a Multi-Rename Tool, yes.
> Can it look pretty
You'll have to be the judge of that. It looks good to me. It uses the Lazarus component library, so it can be built with either Qt or GTK (or native win32 on Windows) and uses whatever themes and configuration applies to those.
AHK is a pretty Windows ecosystem-specific crutch and everything it does is done in different ways in other systems. TC can be run on Wine absolutely everywhere, I used to do this on Linux for a number of years and it's perfect including plugins, although there are plenty of good FMs out there (e.g. DoubleCommander is a near-direct replacement) so feel free to try them if you just need a way to manage your files and not your specific setup in particular. Log in as Administrator... uh what? Not sure what you mean. Not requiring admin password on system-wide actions? Sure, it's trivial everywhere.
> everything it does is done in different ways in other systems.
You are not the first Linux user claiming that to me, but it is not true. you never actually tried, admit it.
> TC can be run on Wine absolutely everywhere
I just tried again on Linux Mint. The folder tabs overlay the path to the current dir and the window can just be full screen. Those are the bugs detected after a minute of usage.
> DoubleCommander is a near-direct replacement
See my answer to the other post. It does not even run on a current Linux Mint, not to speak of the things it does actually not have, compared to TC.
> Log in as Administrator (...) Sure, it's trivial
Well, since you never even said what AHK feature you need it's impossible to suggest anything. Yes I used to use AHK years ago, but GUI automation is fairly alien and roundabout way of doing things on Mac and Linux. That's why I can't think of anything special about it. Input automation and macros? There's maybe a dozen different utilities for this on every OS. If you have something specific in mind, you can say it.
Window manipulation is trivial, most window managers are even natively programmable or at least support complex rulesets that don't need scripting for such basic tasks, I'm automating KWin in a similar manner for example.
There's a myriad of tools for blind input macros.
DE manipulation is generally done with DBus and CLI tools.
UI element manipulation (menus, icons, widgets) is done through a11y, with things like accerciser, dogtail, etc. AT-SPI makes it unified. Providing an image... do you mean OCR? Use SikuliX, however that's just a Rube Goldberg machine like way to do things if you ask me.
And of course you can script all that in any industry standard scripting language instead of janky DSLs.
>Just when sending this text, noticing that this site does not properly handle markdown bullet list, I found another great use case for Autohotkey, when pressing the Enter key on Hacker News ...
I have a PC mainly for Hauptwerk, which uses ilok, which doesn't run under Linux and probably never will. I've got an MBP, but getting one with 128GB of RAM was terribly expensive, and is probably unaffordable now. Hauptwerk doesn't even run natively on the arm. The End.
They could still switch to using a Linux machine for most things (that don't belong to the employer), segregating the Windows machine off as much as possible and never letting Microsoft near any of their own data.
It’s about on par with these tools no? Running a closed source configurator that heavily alters the core OS isn’t really something I would expect a responsible IT team to do. Doubly so if you are in any sort of regulated industry.
Many IT teams are irresponsible though. I have a client now that has revenue of $1B and has no legal review process and doesn’t require IT vendors to submit SOC 2 certifications or any other security attestations.
Honestly, even as a Linux guy who doesn't use Windows (almost) at all anymore, I trust Microsoft to be generic and corporate in their spying.
They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.
A random closed-source black-box "privacy" tool though? You have zero guarantees.
> They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.
What’s the difference between backdooring for the US gov’t and directly robbing/bugging you (assuming for the sake of argument that they don’t already do at least the latter)?
Used to be that you’d only ask that question if you were brown and/or write your name from right to left. Doesn’t matter much whether you were from Svalbard or Sanaa these days…
I think they are making the assumption that if such a govt backdoor existed, it wouldn't be used for generic mass spying, but instead targeted at specific individuals they are trying to find/arrest.
That may or may not be true, but I feel like the former would be a whole lot harder to hide, and the risk of having to reveal it in court would likely mean they aren't going to blow their cover over someone who wasn't worth it.
Huge fan of this. I run it once on a fresh format, and then I never have to worry about Windows annoying me again.
(And no, I simply do not like Linux or even macOS enough to switch over, despite being perfectly competent. That, and I play video games that will never be compatible.)
> There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately.
FWIW, O&O ShutUp10 dates back to 2015, with the launch of Windows 10. This isn't v10, it's "Shut Up, [Windows] 10!".
O&O Defrag has been a trusted tool since 1998.
That said, I largely agree with "No source code? No thanks." as I don't want to worry about a private equity group buying O&O Software and doing with it what they will.
I understand. Different people have different thresholds for trust. Unfortunately, I have lived in DC for a long time. Long enough to know the basics of how espionage works. And, appealing to authority is very effective. Humans love authorities. Write a few papers. Give a few conference talks. Get a few magazines to report on your expertise. That's pretty much all it takes to get entry. Otto and Olaf are probably great guys. I'm just extra cautious.
I remember that time very well, and not in a good way. We were all running janky obfuscated software without giving it a second thought. These days trust is not enough, you need at least some way to verify (but also a lot more). Plenty of trusted software has been sold, hijacked, or otherwise has turned on its users over the decades.
Few were as potentially deadly, at least at the time (in earlier times there might have been less we could do to treat them), and in the 80s the main source of fear of HIV was that it was not understood (people feared catching it in ways that are not possible, and so forth) were those that had been around much longer had well known risk factors.
I removed my dual boot in 2009, so the last windows I used on a personal computer was Vista. I switched my close family (parents and even my grand mother) to Linux years ago, nevertheless I still am the tech-savyy go-to person for other people and I am completely disconnected from what's going on the Windows world. Is an antivirus still needed there? Are there some good tools that should always be installed on a computer?
The only thing I usually do is to put as many free software as I can (Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, VLC, Gimp...) But then what ?
This is more a decrapifier than an "anti-spy tool". Yes, it also lets you easily block things like microphone access and disable AI features, but it's not a firewall.
I started using it with Windows 10 because I could disable most of the crap Microsoft was using with a few clicks. When I reinstalled Windows 11, this was one of the first things I ran because of how much shit there's now (weather, news, recommended apps, ai, etc). I have almost everything disabled.
We can do the same by following some guides, setting up system policies and go to 20 different menus, but this does the same in 1 or 2 minutes.
Unfortunately, over the years, ShutUp10 has also suffered from some enshittification itself. Now there's a message tell you to buy the premium version, more branding, etc. I understand why, and considering it still does the job and still runs without having to install it, perhaps I shouldn't complain too much, but it used to be more "bare-bones"... something that I prefer on these tools.
- imagine a version of windows made from the ground up with 0 spyware, 0 adware, 0 bloatware
- 100% minimal designed for absolute performance coded ground up in rust
- backward compatibility by required drivers on the fly instead of bloating the OS with 30 yrs of support for all the. 456257963423512 hardware device types
- Its called "Windows Maximal" priced 4x the cost of Windows Home
Windows LTSC / IoT comes pretty damned close. It's the only version I install. I'm always shocked by the <20 processes running in Task Manager on a clean install.
It may be 20 less but still hundreds. I'll never understand the LTSC advocacy, it is still the same thing except they mopped up the most disgusting looking liquid seeping out to the floor but didn't touch the huge turd sitting in the middle.
Unattended is no "magic". Go ahead and inspect the xml file created by that utility, all the customization and debloating is practically same as running a script post install.
If you really want to debloat before it's installed you want this: https://ntlite.com/
Unless I am doing something wrong, you should also use WPD and Winaero Tweaker, and preferably Windows 8.1 or lower, although that can be debated down to 98.
94 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 35.3 ms ] threadThis tool is equivalent to dating an alcoholic that beats you whenever they're drunk, so you keep trying to take away all the alcohol instead of dumping them and finding a new partner. The signs were always there and they just keep getting worse, it's time to move on.
Perhaps that wouldn't happen if more people switched...
and people won't switch if there is no way to switch, it's like asking people to go on a hunger strike
Each system has pros and cons.
I'm daily driving both Windows and Linux, and each has its own issues unfortunately, so using tools like OO is a necessity of making my(and others) life bit less miserable.
For Linux I have bunch of custom repair scripts because of certain bugs I encounter(which are tracked too but not solved).
Unfortunately this is the game no one will ever win, unless you will move, drop tech, and start breeding dogs, but then you need to sell them, and where would you advertise? :)
I like the issues faced on Linux more, since I can solve them. I too have a handful of repair scripts.
I feel like an adult to be given access all the internals. I don’t feel that way on Windows (and any other locked down OS).
We should put in the volunteer hours to upstream these fixes to make it nicer for normies :^)
Ableton is probably the biggest reason I still have a Windows installation, and the one I try to get working (properly and well) with Wine/Proton maybe once a month or so. Cascadeur, Unreal Engine Editor, rekordbox are some of the other software I can't get to run well enough on Linux (yet) to fully migrate.
But, on the other hand, lots of other software I use professionally works amazingly on Linux, better than Windows in fact, like Houdini, Unreal Engine (the runtime, not the Editor), DaVinci Resolve and Blender.
I'm not worried though, eventually it'll be runnable on Linux no doubt, but personally we're not quite there yet, sadly.
I mean, that seems universally truer than not.
Getting your plugins working is a different story. A small but growing number of mainstream audio plugins have native Linux builds available, a wide swath of them work quite well with yabridge (https://yabridge.org/ - so shim to expose Windows audio plugins running in WINE prefixes to Linux audio plugin hosts), and a few required alternatives to be found.
I found the workflow decent enough to use, but as one might expect, some plugins not working well via yabridge/WINE made things a little janky, and once I picked up a Mac device again, that became my production machine. That said, WINE's come a long say since I last tried this out a few years ago, and I'd be interested to see if things work better.
My point, I suppose, is to share a reasonably good success story (though perhaps still not of a grade that you'd be comfortable switching to for paid work), and perhaps to encourage you to consider some alternatives to the tools you use. Tool changes are expensive, sure in cost, but moreso in time, so I don't suggest it lightly. That being said, I think that it might be worth it to grab a Bitwig trial and see how you like it. I'd grab it both on Windows and Linux, so you can try it "how it should work" when your plugins and the DAW are working in harmony while also getting the Linux toolchain working. And from the cost perspective, Bitwig does not have crossgrade licenses, so you can buy Studio once, and run it on any supported platform.
I'm mostly on Ableton because everyone else around me is on Ableton too, and we're sending projects between each other and sometimes sit together with each other and jam and such, and I basically chose Ableton over other DAWs to make it easier for us to collaborate, and now we're all basically stuck here :) Basically the same reason I use US input language on the keyboard when programming, although I'm Swedish living in Spain, with no Americans in sight around me.
Neat to know about the non-crossgrade license though, if I ever end up spending more time working by myself, it seems worth it to maybe do a deeper dive into it.
Since then I started realizing how parasitic the proprietary software industry really is.
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-w...
Sure I did, but what particular annoyances in what software that you want to take with you into another ecosystem? I just don't get it, as you're being vague about it.
The only valid holdup for Linux at this point is kernel anticheats and some larger commercial software that is deeply engrained in the windows ecosystem eg most desktop offline CAD software. But once again AI is going to help you get that running under wine. I am already working on a series of wine patches and a custom runner to allow me to run ProE/Creo under wine without issues.
The only Linux Software I miss on Windows is Timeshift. Thats not enough.
Also, which Linux Distro allows me to log in as Admin as comfortable as Windows 11 does?
It's cross-platform, so could switch file manager on Windows first to make it easier to switch to Linux later.
It's packaged in Debian and Ubuntu as "doublecmd-qt" and "doublecmd-gtk", so Linux Mint ought to have it as well.
> Can it filter-as-you-type the file list?
Yes.
> Does it have chainable script button bars?
I don't know what that is.
> Is there a poweful rename tool?
There's a Multi-Rename Tool, yes.
> Can it look pretty
You'll have to be the judge of that. It looks good to me. It uses the Lazarus component library, so it can be built with either Qt or GTK (or native win32 on Windows) and uses whatever themes and configuration applies to those.
You are not the first Linux user claiming that to me, but it is not true. you never actually tried, admit it.
> TC can be run on Wine absolutely everywhere
I just tried again on Linux Mint. The folder tabs overlay the path to the current dir and the window can just be full screen. Those are the bugs detected after a minute of usage.
> DoubleCommander is a near-direct replacement
See my answer to the other post. It does not even run on a current Linux Mint, not to speak of the things it does actually not have, compared to TC.
> Log in as Administrator (...) Sure, it's trivial
Yes it is, I just did that. I give you that.
There's a myriad of tools for blind input macros.
DE manipulation is generally done with DBus and CLI tools.
UI element manipulation (menus, icons, widgets) is done through a11y, with things like accerciser, dogtail, etc. AT-SPI makes it unified. Providing an image... do you mean OCR? Use SikuliX, however that's just a Rube Goldberg machine like way to do things if you ask me.
And of course you can script all that in any industry standard scripting language instead of janky DSLs.
>Just when sending this text, noticing that this site does not properly handle markdown bullet list, I found another great use case for Autohotkey, when pressing the Enter key on Hacker News ...
I think that's easier done with a userscript.
They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.
A random closed-source black-box "privacy" tool though? You have zero guarantees.
What’s the difference between backdooring for the US gov’t and directly robbing/bugging you (assuming for the sake of argument that they don’t already do at least the latter)?
Used to be that you’d only ask that question if you were brown and/or write your name from right to left. Doesn’t matter much whether you were from Svalbard or Sanaa these days…
That may or may not be true, but I feel like the former would be a whole lot harder to hide, and the risk of having to reveal it in court would likely mean they aren't going to blow their cover over someone who wasn't worth it.
Like PRISM, Boundless Informant, Stellar Wind, etc?
(And no, I simply do not like Linux or even macOS enough to switch over, despite being perfectly competent. That, and I play video games that will never be compatible.)
There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately. It’s a good time to be wary of any if you don’t trust the author 100%.
It’s like when HIV emerged in the 80s - the disco days of free love are over. Be wary of who you’re sleeping with, and always wear a condom.
FWIW, O&O ShutUp10 dates back to 2015, with the launch of Windows 10. This isn't v10, it's "Shut Up, [Windows] 10!".
O&O Defrag has been a trusted tool since 1998.
That said, I largely agree with "No source code? No thanks." as I don't want to worry about a private equity group buying O&O Software and doing with it what they will.
https://github.com/builtbybel/FlyOOBE/
Support the original, not the copy: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
But thanks for the link, wasn't aware about that open source project.
I started using it with Windows 10 because I could disable most of the crap Microsoft was using with a few clicks. When I reinstalled Windows 11, this was one of the first things I ran because of how much shit there's now (weather, news, recommended apps, ai, etc). I have almost everything disabled.
We can do the same by following some guides, setting up system policies and go to 20 different menus, but this does the same in 1 or 2 minutes.
Unfortunately, over the years, ShutUp10 has also suffered from some enshittification itself. Now there's a message tell you to buy the premium version, more branding, etc. I understand why, and considering it still does the job and still runs without having to install it, perhaps I shouldn't complain too much, but it used to be more "bare-bones"... something that I prefer on these tools.
- WinScript: https://winscript.cc/
- Winhance: https://winhance.net/
I find O&O ShutUp10 easier to use and understand.
- 100% minimal designed for absolute performance coded ground up in rust
- backward compatibility by required drivers on the fly instead of bloating the OS with 30 yrs of support for all the. 456257963423512 hardware device types
- Its called "Windows Maximal" priced 4x the cost of Windows Home
- when are we getting this version of windows?
Rust didn't exist in 90s yet Windows' performance was pretty good speed, consumption or bloat-wise.
https://wpd.app works well too for extra telemetry and https://github.com/builtbybel/privatezilla still works with Windows 11 but again autounattend.xml works magic.
Unattended is no "magic". Go ahead and inspect the xml file created by that utility, all the customization and debloating is practically same as running a script post install.
If you really want to debloat before it's installed you want this: https://ntlite.com/
There was another one too at some point called MSMG Toolkit (IIRC) that worked wonders but who knows what happened to that.
WTF happened? I have some old versions.
1.9 from 2024 1.8MB
1.3 from 2016 480KB