Windows 11 Enterprise Experiment – Windows Admin’s Opinion

As wright_is said “…I was just confirming your discoveries of what Windows 11 Enterprise can and can’t do. It isn’t a stand-alone solution that will solve the problems on its own, it only really provides the level of de-enshitification that you are looking for, when combined with the enterprise back end tools, which a normal user just won’t have access to.”

In particular, the following categories:

* Constant, unpredictable feature updates

* Forced Microsoft Edge usage* (Widgets, Search, Copilot, etc.).

* Bad Edge behaviors when you choose to use it, bad behaviors when you do not. 

* OneDrive harasses you to use folder backup and then silently enables it if you keep saying no. 

* Microsoft Office apps like Word display warning banners when you don’t save to OneDrive locations by default.

Pretty much all of the above can be fixed via Windows domain admin tools – eg. SCCM/Intune/Device Management or ‘old school’ Group Policy, Edge Admin Templates etc.

(* Widgets, Search, Co-Pilot can be disabled; however, AFAIK launching Edge can only be done via a third-party tool)

Sure an individual doesn’t have access to these BUT they can be reproduced. At a basic level, Group Policy settings are either registry entries or files, so it’s just necessary to find them (ie. every group policy setting either makes a registry or file change).

No doubt someone will have done this and are hopefully sharing. I suspect that’s where the settings of third-party ‘tweaking programs’ originate.

There are no end-user facing tools for these settings, that’s simply not how Professional/Enterprise Windows works.

In short, these editions of Windows (and, of course, LTSC/LTSB) can be made to work the way Paul and many of us would prefer!

That Microsoft hides this away, not offering it to the majority in a user-friendly manner, is obviously very disappointing.