"browser and steam" already is going to pull in a huge, huge subset of the functionality included in full Windows. Google has slowly piled huge amounts of stuff into Chrome like support for MIDI, and Steam embeds a bunch of stuff too and has weird features you might not know about (for example, a media player with custom playlist support)
Another thing is that many games rely on older APIs and libraries that are bundled into Windows for compatibility reasons, so if you strip those out to make a slim gaming windows, your games won't work.
Easier said than done, I tried paring down a bunch of seemingly unnecessary services on my Windows machine and it wound up breaking things in unexpected places.
Did you know that turning off handwriting recognition for tablets makes it so keyboard presses do not cause the lock screen to open to the password textbox, or that it breaks the ability to start typing in the start menu for search results? There's probably a good reason for this, but now I'm way more cautious about turning services off.
I understand the eternal desire for optimisation, but it’s a game of diminishing returns.
Most of the items people agonise over in taskman.exe aren’t using negligible memory and cycles. The software for your RGB keyboard is probably less efficient. Kill Teams, browsers and anything edge that actually handles content, and you’re probably at 95% capacity.
it's not so much the running processes, as it is the unpredictable nature of scheduled tasks which do things that just suck performance away from games. those things often run with very odd priorities and very odd schedules or triggers. Also, when games are run and windows doesn't really get to see the mouse move normally because the game has captured it and controls it, windows sees this as "idle" time in some ways, and will handle background activities via the task scheduler. in any use pattern that is not gaming, this is the correct behavior.
a windows OS mode that is single user, networked, and meant for limited use (so background housekeeping windows tasks run after you exit or reboot out of this mode) would be pretty ideal, not just for raw performance (which would be measurable, but not the main goal) but to avoid apparently random decreases in performance due to Windows deciding to do something, or suddenly needing to deal with an authentication request dealing with mapped drives, or something.
Fyi Windows does have a game mode that will do some of those things.
If you want to get super crazy, I'll boot a second copy of Windows off of a vhdx file that's stripped down if I want extra performance.
With a little bit of work you can even clone the sid of your main os, and symlink most of your existing files and info, so it's almost identical to your main OS.
Calyp.to's guide is one of the best I've seen for stripping windows down to reduce latency.
By nothing else you meant: Cortana; Edge and its pop-up when you open Firefox/Chrome; The internet-first search bar that might look into your actual files if you skim through enough Bing results; Windows defender; Windows media player, and image viewer, and an odd looking Paint revamp; All the Win8-style apps not meant for a PC, including an email client,a calendar yet another Photo viewer, something that wants hard to access your phone. All this without including Space Cadet.
And if you didn't do a clean install you can probably add a ton of extra stuff: Office trial; Another anti-virus, why not make your gaming environment even slower?; Games for a 5yo; Updaters and drivers that will haunt your system tray.
Others have already suggested this, but I'm going to re-mention that Proton on Linux has gotten very very good, so you might be able to get away with just installing a hyper-minimalist distro (e.g. Arch, Gentoo, Linux From Scratch, in order of necessary masochism), and just install Steam and Firefox. You could even use a hyper-minimal GUI, e.g. OpenBox or i3 or XMonad.
As someone that uses Windows exclusively for games and with no SSD, this was the only solution that made using Windows tolerable.
Nothing worse than your friends inviting you to play a quick match and be held by windows update screen for 15-30mins before you are even able to open Steam, and since I rarely boot the PC, all the time that I reserved for gaming was wasted by Windows.
There is significant drawbacks of LTSC, no Microsoft Store means no access to Game Pass, which has some good games, and some of the MP games only works among game pass users. Ended up buying an SSD and using the Enterprise version and stopping updates.
You can install the Microsoft Store on LTSC. I even had the Xbox Game Bar more-or-less working.
The bigger issue is that Win10 LTSC is increasingly far behind a "normal" Win10 (let alone Win11), which makes things increasingly screwy when it comes to both up-to-date drivers and anticheat. Fortnite, for example, would cause my machine to BSOD within 30 seconds of loading (if not sooner) due to (I suspect) its combination of EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye getting derailed; upgrading to Win11 (and putting up with its bullshit) seems to have fixed it.
