 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. But first, let's see how much our sponsor costs. GlassWire is the tool that shows you which apps are slowing down your connection in real time. It's used by security pros to monitor for malware, block bandwidth wasters, and detect suspicious activity. Get 25% off using offer code Linus at the link below. 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, 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 noticed 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 drop downs for File Explorer? This feels like it's gonna be very, very different. Also, we've got the classic Windows Vista and 7.0 style start menu. And of course, because there's no Edge, Anthony has helpfully thrown a Firefox 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, 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 LibreOffice. Huh, it's very Microsoft Office looking. Let's try and find some tech tips here. Line is tech tips. Wow, 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? That was so cool. Can I summon people just by saying their names? Oh, lttstore.com. Hey, this is a sweet shirt, by the way, guys. Okay, what else can we try out here? Okay, so where's my file dropdown? 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, gaming, like the Xbox stuff that was tied in 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 it? 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 screen saver 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 wanna 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 like a standard Windows 10 installed 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. Whoa, 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 a classic shell, or I guess it's called Open Shell now. So if you were to right click on the start menu and 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 no excuses for it then. So what else can we try here? I mean, a game will run fine, right? Let's play Doom. I mean, Doom should run. There's 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 alternatives you can get. Pathfinder is one. Oh, okay. 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. I'm 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. Okay. What's a... It might. I've got shadow of the tomb raider on there. Oh yeah. That'll do it. Oh, weird. 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. 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. Why would 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 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 engine. So that would lead me to believe that it's gonna 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 manager is 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 is 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 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's API for that. And the API itself has been removed. I open up Creative Cloud desktop. It goes, oh, you got no internet connection. You can't do stuff. By the way, we've got a new version available. Go ahead and update. Let's see if it gets it. Let's see if you guys get a water bottle on lttstore.com. Okay, this is not gonna 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. Wow, there's really not a lot in here then. Yeah, and in keeping with the spirit of the operating system, I used NVCleanStall 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, cause it's gotta like update some log in the background that's gotta go off to Microsoft and all that kind of crap. It makes you wonder how much stuff is actually just kinda caked on in there in the 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 the vault or any of our other servers usually takes like... Oh, 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 you were good all along. This is pretty cool. You get all the same benefits that you would from an officially available slims 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 wanna 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. 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That was a really cool project as well and well worth a look.