How to create a clean, debloated install of Windows 11

Some time ago I made the terrible mistake of updating an existing Windows 10 installation to Windows 11. I did this because Windows 10 is end of life on October 2025. The many years of Windows 10 use however had left the update with a host of issues. The file explorer freezing at any opportunity it gets as well as the start menu not opening to be the most frustrating ones.

Because of this, it was time to bite the bullet and install Windows 11 as a fresh install on my machine. I ended up researching though if Windows was still the only option for me and unfortunately it is. There's a couple programs I use that are Windows only and gaming remains best on Windows. Linux has Wine and Proton, but when you read into it it mostly works, but not always 100% out of the box. There's a handy site here where you can look up games and view their compatibility with Linux. In the coming years I do think gaming on Linux will greatly improve. With SteamOS, more and more gamers will use Linux and once developers will take Linux seriously and the compatibility tooling improves, it should become more stable and performant. In terms of performance, Linux is about on par with Windows. Honorable mentions are CachyOS and Bazzite.

Windows 11

All that said, Windows 11 can be optimized and debloated. There are 3 ways to go about this:

1. Custom OS's

2. Playbooks

3. Chris Titus Winutil

Custom OS's

Custom OS's are someone else's best efforts to tweak Windows 11 as much as possible. And almost all claim a low process count, debloat and general performance increase. Though some perform better, some also perform similar to standard Windows 11 (benchmark here). The big concern here is that often times these Custom OS's disable Windows updates, remove Windows defender and are closed-source. If security is a concern (it should be) this is not the safest option. I would only choose this option if you have a machine with old hardware and you're not going to do anything sensitive on the machine.

Playbooks

Playbooks are tweaks you apply on top of an already existing Windows 11 installation. This means you install Windows 11 as is first. The most known projects are AtlasOS and Revision. I think this is a viable option, I just didn't go this route because some of the benchmarks provided appeared dated and I wasn't too confident on the (in)activity of the githubs.

Chris Titus Winutil

Chris Titus Winutil is a program by Chris Titus and contributors. It can apply tweaks to Windows 11, install apps, create your own Windows iso and more. After researching on YouTube (Chris Titus has a channel) I went the route of creating a Windows 11 iso using Microwin, which skips many steps and applies sensible defaults and leaves you with a very minimal Windows install. Security however is not removed and Windows defender remains present. From there on you can use the same utility to tweak further. In this video Chris Titus himself goes over the process.

In particular I found disabling Recall, tracking and feature updates (not security updates) very nice and easy to do.

Hope this simple blog posts helps you cut through the noise. Thanks for reading.