There’s a custom OS forum where I found it originally a year ago. Everything got scanned from virus total when uploaded and showed the report. And the guy had an excellent reputation there as well. I decided to go for it until 11 LTSC came out, and daily drove it for 2+ years issue free.
In the end, it’s up to you if you want to trust it.
That’d be advertising, and by a mile.
Doesn’t the N mean it’s only media player, and codec free? If so, IoT LTSC is a much better bet for minimalism and privacy and bullshit free.
It’s probably hard to keep up with lol. I’ll try my best. It has Edge and Defender ONLY. No cortana, copilot, recall, candy crush bloat or anything similar, .net, vcredist, edgeview/runtime, TPM requirement, online account, secure boot, store, xbox, one drive, winget, nor widgets.
You finish the install and it is BARE. All I do post install is, in regex and gpedit, turn off telemetry.
For my use, Steam installs all the .net and vcredist as needed.
Store and Xbox and the like are available to install via power shell or downloads, but fair warning. Once you do store or M$ account sign in, copilot and recall might find a way to sneak in via updates. None of them work, and error out when you open them, but the fact they install and exist makes me uneasy.
Edit: If you don’t even want Defender, nor Edge, look up Windows X-Lite. That man is a wizard at figuring out the bare minimum needed for an .iso.
Just a heads up, Windows 11 IoT LTSC is out, and it has none of M$'s bullshit you read about weekly. It can be tricky to find the .iso, so it would be a real shame if people wasted their time looking for it @ massgrave.dev
Bazzite out the box is just absolutely bonkers how good it is. Basically just stick to flatpaks from the DE’s app store, and layering anything else with rpm-ostree.
If the game isn’t on Steam, then Lutris which also comes with Bazzite, is your best bet. It’ll have installers for other DRM/launchers that work. I’ve gotten Ubisoft Connect and Battle.net to work and install games, but no luck getting Epic to work.
Also the app that can manager wine runners/steam’s proton are great. I’d have it download the latest proton-ge for steam, and set that to be the default version for every game’s Proton version. I don’t remember its name on gnome, but on KDE Plasma it’s ‘proton-qt’
Fun fact, proton-ge which stands for Glorious Egg Roll, is from the same guy who makes Nobara.
If Nobara was on your list, check out Bazzite. It’s Nobara but bullet proof.
“We have determined that we’ll be able to fill 80% of the user’s display with advertising before inducing seizures.”
From Ready Player One movie.
Fingers crossed for Tidal, since its made by a bunch of musicians, I think Jay Z is the big one. They actually pay the artists a decent amount, and lowered MOST everyone’s price and upgraded the their quality, so taking a big hit of hopium they’re good enough to not go to shit.
As an audiophile it’s like, way less exhausting to just go with Tidal, over pirating good quality music. Especially if you’re like me and listen to nearly anything and everything.
Tell that to Google before they replaced the long standing head of its search engine, with the head of advertising.
If you share your water or electricity with a neighbor, I think they can cut you off and/or fine you. Probably dependent on the state?
Then you should be fine to install W11. I’m on AM4 x570 and I can install W11. Secure Boot and fTPM are both on, and you can disable the requirement to need either.
Unless you built with like, really old parts, I’m not sure how this would be a problem?
That runs on chromium, which in Linux is HARD locked to 48000, so every single song will be resampled.
Tidal on Linux is a crap shoot, which sucks because pipewire is awesome for HiRes music since it can change sample rate on the fly to match a source. Best bet is Firefox and their web player, and using the middle tier “high” that’s blue colored, and letting pipewire play @ 44100
Even their middle tier quality CD level HiFi 16bits@44100Hz sounds sooo much better than max quality Spotify. Which is also included in their now 1 single price plan. Spotify maxes as 320 kbps, and an average lossless CD quality is around 1000 kbps.
I can definitely tell the difference.
That app is pretty pointless IMO. I’ve been a budget audiophile for a little while now, and one of the features a music player needs is to be able to output the music at the correct bit/format @ the correct sample rate. Ex: 24 bit @ 96000, which is the highest quality a song can be from Tidal.
Pipewire has the ability to adjust and match the sample rate on the fly, so that no resampling happens and you get “bit perfect” playback.
Since that tidal-hifi uses chromium for its DRM to allow the max quality, it is permanently set at 48000. Basically no music on Tidal is 48k, basically every song is at least HiFi quality at 16@44100, and then a lot of recent music is HiRez capable of “up to 24@96000.”
So you’re basically resampling every single song somewhere along the audio pipeline, before it reaches your external music hardware, like a DAC/AMP stack.
If you make the bootable USB drive with Rufus, a little window pops up asking if you wanna remove some of the bullshit, such as TPM and secure boot requirements.
One of the things for X-Lite I would do post install, is install Edge WebView2 along with the other runtimes available on X-Lites website. Not sure if I ever needed it or not, but never had issues with no Edge.