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In an enterprise environment where I control the apps that I install for my users, what are the ramifications of removing the Windows store and all of its apps from my Windows 10 setups?
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Ask Soylent: Ramifications of Removing Windows Store from Enterprise Installs?
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(Score: 5, Informative) by Zyx Abacab on Friday March 31 2017, @04:45AM (4 children)
I can't speak for the plain Enterprise version. The below is applicable for the LTSB version of Enterprise, build 14393.
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Having worked with Windows 10, I can confidently say it very much accepts disabling the Store, as well as removing most apps. Don't go nuking everything, though. Some apps, like the Settings app, really have been integrated into the OS.
Disabling the Store doesn't stop Explorer from showing that annoying suggestion every single time you try to open an unknown file extension, but it does prevent said suggestion from actually opening the Store.
Unless you set some policies (or manually set registry values), Windows will still download and install apps in the background.
Above all, remember that any change you make is liable to be unmade by a future update! You'll have to bend over backwards to keep these tweaks from being overwritten—including your registry changes! Microsoft really hates administrators taking control of their own systems, it seems.
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Here's a list of the apps that can safely be removed.
You can use "Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers $PACKAGE_NAME | Remove-AppxPackage" to remove a package. Wrap it in a CMD file to save a few keystrokes!
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For those who might be interested in disabling the Store, but don't know how: here's a rough guide on how to do it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zyx Abacab on Friday March 31 2017, @04:51AM (1 child)
One more thing: you can get around updates destroying some your changes...but it's an awful hack.
Create a CMD script that performs the steps (using REG.EXE, SCHTASKS.EXE, SC.EXE and so on); then create a Scheduled Task which runs that script on startup and shutdown.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2017, @06:01AM
They can still change what the keys do/add new keys to replace them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nobu_the_bard on Friday March 31 2017, @02:05PM
Thanks for this post, I happened to be working on something to do precisely this as a coincidence. I ran these as PowerShell scripts.
I noticed that this snippet doesn't remove the AllUsers version of the package though, only the local user's; AllUsers here seems to not do anything? (It still seems to require admin rights)
Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers Microsoft.BingWeather | Remove-AppxPackage
You can tell by trying this after running it, the first query will give results but the second won't.
Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers Microsoft.BingWeather
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.BingWeather
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday March 31 2017, @03:59PM
Perhaps more helpfully for Enterprise admins, the store can be disabled (no thanks to Microsoft) via Group Policy:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/9514c7a6-991b-48b0-95ab-33edfc029c52/windows-10-enterprise-disable-store-feature?forum=win10itprogeneral [microsoft.com]
Note that you'll need to download and install templates from Windows 8.1 to make this happen, as MS "conveniently" left those out of the Windows 10 distribution -- even though the policy items are identical.
Oh, and fuck you Microsoft!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr