De-Enshittifing Windows 11 Version 25H2: Tiny11 Builder ⭐

It’s been a while since I last looked at Tiny11 Builder, the PowerShell-based successor to Tiny11 that helps you install a cleaner version of Windows 11 than the stock version provided by Microsoft.

That sounds good. But Tiny11 Builder, like all Windows 11 “debloater” solutions, can be problematic as well.

In some ways, Tiny11 Builder couldn’t be easier, as it’s just a script that you run to build a custom version of the stock Windows 11 ISO, which is used to make Windows 11 installation media. But in other ways, it’s not particularly flexible in that you can’t easily customize what is installed and what isn’t. Unless, of course, you really know what you’re doing.

In the good news department, you can later (re)install anything that Tiny11 Builder lopped out of the install image, so if there are a few apps it removed, like Clipchamp or OneDrive, that you actually do want in Windows 11, you can get them back. But that’s not true of the more aggressive Tiny11coremaker script variant, which not also carves Windows Defender and Windows Update out of the install image while making it impossible to later reinstall apps and features and keep the system updated. For this reason, I will ignore Tiny11coremaker here and recommend you do so as well.

I last looked at Tiny11 Builder about a year and a half ago, soon after its initial release. Since then, Tiny11 Builder’s author, NTDEV, updated the utility to disable telemetry and with improved Microsoft Edge removal. And Microsoft, of course, shipped Windows 11 version 24H2 and, just recently version 25H2.

I am interested in Tiny11 Builder, as I am tools like Tiny11 Builder, because of their potential ability to lessen the enshittification of Windows 11. I will consider documenting this utility in the 25H2 edition of the Windows 11 Field Guide if I can determine that it’s effective at this task.

Of course, Tiny11 Builder isn’t really designed for that purpose—it’s more about shrinking the install size and resource usage of Windows so that it can run on older, less capable PCs—but if some de-enshittification happens as a byproduct of its central purpose, that’s just fine with me. The questions are how Tiny11 Builder can help and whether this is more or less effective than a utility you run against an existing (normal) Windows 11 installation. You have to clean install Windows 11 using a Tiny11 Builder-created ISO (and, thus, installation media), and that alone may be problematic for many users.

So I gave it another shot, this time with Windows 11 version 25H2.

Use Tiny11 Builder to create a custom Windows 11 ISO

To use Tiny11 Builder, you need the latest Windows 11 ISO, which you can and should download from the Microsoft website, and the Tiny11 Builder ZIP download, which you can find on GitHub (click the green “Code” button and then select “Download ZIP”). If you will be creating installation media with the modified ISO you make with Tiny11 Builder, you will also need an 8 GB or larger USB flash drive and Rufus.

Once everything is downloaded, you just extract the tiny11builder-main folder from the Tiny11 Builder ZIP file and place it somewhere you can get to easily; I put it on the Desktop. I also copied the Windows 11 ISO file into that folder to make the script I would need to run simpler.

From there, you run Terminal with admin privileges and navigate into the folder with Tiny11 Builder (and, in my case, the source ISO).

Initially, there are just four files in this folder, and only one of them is notable, as it’s the script you will soon run: tiny11maker.ps1.

There are a few ways to proceed from here. But you must first mount the ISO you downloaded in the file system (by double-clicking it in File Explorer and waiting and bit) and set the PowerShell execution policy to Unrestricted or Tiny11 Builder will fail. You do the latter using this command line (followed by tapping Enter):

Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted

Then, I just ran the script with the following command line (again, followed by tapping Enter):

./tiny11maker.ps1

As with my previous Tiny11 Builder experience, you’re prompted to enter the drive letter for the ISO you just mounted (D:, in my case) and then it dumps a list of the Windows 11 product editions supported by that ISO so you can choose the one you need for the modified ISO it will create. It assigns a number to each edition, so I entered 6 for Windows 11 Pro.

From there, it’s a waiting game: Tiny11 Builder then runs a series of Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) commands and builds the custom ISO over a long period of time. I did this on my Snapdragon X-based OmniBook 5 (even though I was building an x64-based ISO), assuming it would be a best-case scenario from a performance perspective, but it still took about an hour. The script unmounts the ISO-based virtual drive when it concludes.

Set up Windows 11 using the Tiny11 Builder ISO

I skipped the Rufus/USB setup media bit because it’s unnecessary. Instead, I copied the 5.4 GB ISO that Tiny11 Builder had created (an improvement over the 7.5 GB original) over to the laptop I was going to blow away, double-clicked it on that PC to mount the ISO as a virtual disk, and then ran Setup.exe from there.

Windows 11 Setup works normally during what I call the first-run experience, that old-school wizard-like experience that appears full-screen with the purple background when you boot from USB. But here it was just presented as a series of dialogs over the existing Windows install.

It mostly works the same way, but and once the system reboots into the Out of Box Experience (OOBE), there are some notable differences. Not so much in the steps I had to take to complete this process, but rather because there was no mouse or Wi-Fi support.

No problem. I see this sort of thing all the time, have an Ethernet cable I can use, and have no problem navigating a simple GUI like Windows Setup using a mouse. So I stepped through the OOBE by signing in with a Microsoft account (MSA) and then handling each stage of this overly-familiar process in turn.

When I arrived at the Desktop, I was greeted by an overly minimalist Start menu with just two Pinned icons (for Settings and File Explorer), as expected. The mouse cursor, missing in action during Setup, appeared pretty quickly, so maybe Microsoft is actually prioritizing that driver download, which would be a bit more forethought than I would expect.

And then I went into Windows Update and installed all available updates while simultaneously doing the same for apps in the Microsoft Store. That process also took a while, about an hour all told, including one reboot in the middle for the Windows Updates.

So far, this is almost exactly what I experienced the last time I used Tiny11 Builder. But there are a few small but important differences. For example, though Microsoft Edge was not installed, Widgets appeared correctly the first time I clicked its Taskbar icon; last time, I had to manually install the Edge WebView2 runtime first. (If you click on a story in the Widgets feed, however, you get a dialog named “Get an app to open this ‘microsoft-edge’ link”.)

Is Tiny11 Builder worth the time and effort?

I have questions, though most are unknowable without the passage of time. Most obviously, will things like Microsoft Edge and Copilot just magically auto-install at some point? How about the nag banners in Settings that want me to keep “backing up” using Windows Backup? And less noticeably, will the telemetry tracking this tool allegedly disabled also just auto-start on its own? If not, then yes, Tiny11 Builder might be considered an effective de-enshittification solution.

On a more personal level, there are apps I use that Tiny11 Builder never installs, and while those are easy enough to get in the Store, that’s more time and effort one has to spend after setting up this system. And this whole thing already took a couple of hours away from my life. And there are several apps I probably never use, not really, but I don’t mind them being there on disk. They’re not hurting me per se.

But taking this thing at face value, and with the understanding that Microsoft could undermine some of these configurations in the future via whatever monthly cumulative updates, it’s worth assessing what Tiny11 Builder delivers for those who seek de-enshittification. Using my Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist as a guide, it goes like this:

✅ Forced telemetry. Tiny11 Builder is supposed to disable this, but I did have to uncheck a box on the OOBE’s privacy settings page, so who knows?

✅ Preinstalled crapware. If anything, Tiny 11 Builder overachieves here. I’d prefer to see a list of apps to install/uninstall so I could choose. But at least I can get back the apps I do want.

⛔ Constant, unpredictable feature updates. Tiny11 Builder can’t do a thing about this because these updates are delivered from the cloud.

⛔ Forced Microsoft account sign-ins. Tiny11 Builder doesn’t address this non-concern, but it doesn’t have to. There are plenty of workarounds, including Rufus and the workarounds I document in the *Windows 11 Field Guide*.

⛔ Forced Microsoft Edge usage (Widgets, Search, Copilot, etc.). Tiny11Builder removes Microsoft Edge from the Windows 11 install, but it doesn’t prevent any of the forced usage, it just breaks it. (For example, as with the Widgets example noted above.) Here, another utility will need to be employed, such as MSEdgeDirect: Just installing another browser won’t make those Edge-based features work.

✅ Bad Edge behaviors when you choose to use it, bad behaviors when you do not. So far, this is “working” in the sense that it’s not prompting me to use Microsoft Edge … yet. But this is obviously a “nuke it from orbit”-type solution.

⛔ Arbitrary hardware requirements. Tiny11 Builder doesn’t address this non-concern and it doesn’t have to, as this is easy to work around.

✅ OneDrive harasses you to use folder backup and then silently enables it if you keep saying no. There’s no OneDrive, and so there’s no OneDrive harassment. As with the bad Edge behaviors item above, this is a pretty radical solution. Though I suppose simply uninstalling OneDrive is no more or less radical.

So that doesn’t seem like a great score, with Tiny11 Builder “solving” just 4 of the 8 enshittifications I previously identified in Windows 11. But it’s really a bit better than that since 2 of the 4 “unsolved” issues are non-events and/or easily solved otherwise. And of the remaining 2, one of them, the never-ending updates, is unavoidable while the other is easily solved with a free third-party utility.

And that suggests that maybe this tool does serve a role for the Windows 11 de-enshittifier. Assuming, that is, that its best changes aren’t reversed as we use these systems going forward. And the only way to find that out is to keep using it. So I will do that now.