Tag: windows

Disabling Windows 10 setup nag screens

Are you tired of these things popping up when you update, or even randomly on login? Believe it or not, Microsoft provided a way to turn them off.

Open the Settings app, then go to System. Here, choose Notifications & actions in the sidebar. You’ll see checkboxes for various options. The main ones you’ll want to be sure are disabled are the “Show me the Windows welcome experience…” and “Suggest ways I can finish setting up…” options.

If either of these is already off and you’re still seeing the nag screens, try turning them on and then off again.

Note that disabling notifications all together will NOT disable the welcome/setup nags.

Thanks to this article for the solution.

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GRUB and Windows

I keep my Windows installation around for a few reasons, and today I finally bothered to add it to my GRUB menu for convenience. I ran into a couple of gotchas, so here is the process on an Arch-based system.

The first thing to do is run os-prober. This should return the Windows installation like so:

sudo os-prober
/dev/nvme0n1p1@/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi:Windows Boot Manager:Windows:efi

Next, a step that’s missing from many guides: /etc/default/grub needs the following line:

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER="false"

You may already have this line set to “true,” so just set it to “false” in that case.

Finally, run grub-mkconfig and the item should be added to the grub menu. Out on the internet, you’ll see references to grub-update. This is just a wrapper for grub-mkconfig and does not exist on Arch.

Additionally, I loaded up grub-customizer to remove extraneous entries. This is optional, but it’s an easy way to edit grub and keep the menu clean. You can do other stuff with this tool such as changing the background image, so have fun with that.

pacman -S grub-customizer

EDIT: This thread is where I found the “missing” step.

EDIT 9/24/2022: As a result of some issues following the great Arch/grub debacle of 2022, I have stopped using grub-customizer at all and no longer recommend it.

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Windows CLI installer

Windows 10/11 has a command line software installer! It’s limited to what’s in the Microsoft Store, but still very useful.

Go to the MS Store and install App Installer. If it’s already installed, make sure it gets updated. Then you can use winget on the command line:

winget install firefox

…for example. More info, including usage, can be found here. The search and show options are of particular interest.

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