Tiny11 Builder 2025 Round 3: Customization Fails, New Laptop Install ⭐

Over the past several weeks, the Windows 11 version 25H2 install that I customized with Tiny11 Builder has survived two Patch Tuesday updates and one Preview update without regressing to its normal enshittified state. This is a solid indication that this tool is a great way to de-enshittify Windows 11, assuming you don’t mind starting over with a clean install.
So I figured it was time to take the next step, which I assumed would involve customizing the Tiny11 Builder-based installation script so that I could include several apps that it omits by default and then installing Windows 11 using the customized ISO on a different PC.
This did not go well.

Mistakes I have made
My attempts to customize the Tiny11 Builder script were straightforward. I simply opened tiny11maker.ps1 in Notepad and took a look.

You don’t have to be a PowerShell expert to know where to turn here: If you scroll through this script, you’ll come across a not quite alphabetized list of apps. These are the apps that Tiny11 Builder will exclude from the customized ISO it creates.

In my first attempt, I removed the following apps from this script:

Microsoft.GamingApp

Microsoft.MSPaint

Microsoft.Paint

Microsoft.WindowsCamera

Microsoft.WindowsTerminal

Microsoft.Xbox.TCUI

Microsoft.Xbox.App

Microsoft.XboxGameOverlay

Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay

Microsoft.XboxIdentityProvider

Microsoft.XboxSpeechToTextOverlay

Microsoft.YourPhone

Microsoft.WindowsTerminal

Then, I saved the script, and proceeded as before, and as described in the first article. The script took about 20 minutes to do its thing, and when it was done, I copied the custom ISO it created to a USB stick and then used that to install Windows 11 on a different laptop. Setup just presented the first few screens of its first-boot experience, in windowed form, including the step to format the disk. And then it rebooted and did the install offline.

Long story short, after I stepped through the Out of Box Experience (OOBE) and signed into Windows 11, I was confronted by a pretty normal configuration, one that included both Microsoft Edge and OneDrive. Oops.

So I started over, a few days later.

For the second pass, I was a little less aggressive with the apps list, figuring that one or more of those entries played some role in forcing Microsoft Edge, especially, back into the install. Basically, I left all the modern apps I had tried to include, leaving just the Paint and Terminal entries.

But no. After about an hour of work and waiting, I once again landed on the Windows 11 desktop. And saw that Edge and OneDrive were installed.

Doy.

While I tried yet another version of this install, this time with just Paint, I finally did the obvious and RTFM, meaning I went to the Tiny11 Builder repository on GitHub to see if NTDEV, the script’s creator, had written anything about customizing it. And while there...