How to turn off some of windows 11's worst time-wasters

[robkelk]

If you're forced to use Windows 11, here's how to steal some of your time back

tl;dr: "Every Windows time suck has the same basic solution: turn it off. The only question is how to disable each annoyance so that it doesn't come back." The article gives instructions on how to turn off the widget board, Windows Spotlight, search highlights, Bing search results in the local search box (needs admin rights), the "Let's finish setting up your PC" screen, the hiding of file extensions, the Narrator keyboard shortcut, and non-necessary notifications.

[Labster]

I had a better idea and just installed Kubuntu on my laptop. The drivers are not amazing, but at least my computer is not going to send screenshots of my computer to the cloud every three seconds (yes this is a real thing Windows 11 is doing). Thankfully Steam games work pretty great via Proton.

[robkelk]

Well, some of us don't have that option...

Related: Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Local accounts don't insist on OneDrive, or send telemetry back to MS.

[robkelk]

Related: How to Disable AI Features in Firefox Browser

All of them at once, or just some of them - your choice. It's a simple fix, takes less than a minute, involves going into about:config

I had to go find this when Firefox popped up a positively huge AI-generated pop-up while I was trying to read a web page.

[Bob Schroeck]

I wonder if all that will migrate into Seamonkey (which I'm still using). Presumably the advice in that article will work there as well as in vanilla Firefox.

[classicdrogn]

... I haven't seen a popup except for the selection manager of DownThemAll in so many years I forgot they existed, TBH. As far as I can rmember, blocking them was one of the features built into the Ubunto and Majaro repo versions of Firefox, not even due to adding Ghostery, NoScript, and uBlock (in order) being the very first things I do with clean browser install. [laughs in penguin] again I guess?

NOOT NOOT!