One “simple trick” and your next Windows install will be blissfully free of bloatware.

Basically, install Windows as you normally would, but when asked for Time and Currency format, select English (World) instead of your country.

Then let the installer do its thing. Eventually, you will see a window with an ice cream cone on the floor with the words “Something went wrong” and the error message “OOBEREGION.” This cryptic message means that the “out of box experience” (OOBE) didn’t launch because it didn’t know which region to launch.

Click Skip, though, and Windows will install just fine. You won’t be prompted to buy Microsoft 365, you won’t be prompted to pay for a OneDrive subscription, and your Start menu won’t be cluttered with apps.

    • Captain AggravatedEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Can’t speak from experience as I’ve never touched Void Linux, but reading about it to make this comment, it sounds like Arch but worse. A rolling release GUI-optional distro with its own special boy package manager…yeah I’m starting to believe your dependency hell woes.

      Either way the command for installing Flatpak on Void is sudo xbps-install -S flatpak, which I would expect a user of Void Linux to know or be willing to learn.