I see Chris is getting too comfortable with the whole "being a YouTuber" thing with clickbait titles like that. For shame, and I thought he knows better than that.
The main thing that has to be clarified is that MicroWin is meant to be Chris' ISO cleanup that is
very lightweight on what it eats out so that you can install it for a normie and they'll be happy. Chris is extremely careful to not break shit for people that have zero troubleshooting skills with this tool, so for example he's not automatically removing Edge and running
winget install firefox afterwards which would be the sensible thing for the tech savvy crowd, because removing Edge will break features like Widgets that a normie would probably freak out whenever it wouldn't work. Basically any breakage that's tolerable to a power user is considered critical here. The Windows Explorer reverting back to the Win10 one over removing Recall, because yes, Win11 has barely changed from Win10 in the codebase, is already a major bug that needs to be corrected. Hence the sensational title of Recall being MANDATORY.
Here's the thing about Windows: you can monitor exactly what every process does, including system ones, it's not a locked down black box and it can never be unless you were to write a completely new OS. Microsoft has a set of tools called SysInternals, and one of those tools is called Process Monitor. It tracks every single thing every process does, it's used by security experts to monitor malicious process behavior, crackers to see what a game does when they try to break it's DRM, and generally people that want to know what registry keys or files a program accesses. That whole suite is great alongside NirSoft tools, but anyways.
Microsoft has officially made it so that in 24H2 Recall is a removable system component. WinUtil utilizes DISM for system component removal, which is a CLI utility in Windows for maintaining your installation, and it can also manage those system components you'd normally manage with the GUI tool you want to now open by clicking Win+R, typing "optionalfeatures" and hitting Enter because it's buried under five layers of retard in Win10/11. You can then verify if there isn't anything running in the background with Process Explorer to make sure that you've actually uninstalled Recall instead of defaulting to a schizo theory that it's totally mandatory and still spying on you when you could prove with certainty whether or not that's the case.
The best part is the WinUtil script itself. It's a PowerShell script so you can just download it and look at what it's doing.
Here's that function that Chris was talking about on how he had to exclude Recall from component removal. This function gets called during the MicroWin ISO creation. It's pretty clear what it does, it sets up a list of exclusions with components like Windows Defender, printer service, Windows Indexing and other crucial things you don't want to remove, and then removes everything else. Now it also excludes Recall because it breaks Win11's Explorer. But this is called early on during the creation of the ISO, so before you even install the OS.
However, there are two more instances of the word "Recall" in the current version of the script. So let's look at these last two results.
Interesting. In the try/catch error check, you have an if statement that checks if Recall is installed. If it returns a value greater than zero, so one, meaning that Recall is installed, it'll then uninstall Recall.
What is this function exactly?
It writes an entire PowerShell script to the Temp folder, where the last thing it does is removing Recall, this time via PowerShell. Where is this function called?
A MicroWin function. Let's look up this script's name.
Yep, it adds it as the last thing to run on your first startup after you've successfully installed the OS from the MicroWin ISO. So in the end it does get uninstalled, and as far as I know the PS command is the same as DISM and the OptionalFeatures, it's just three different ways (CLI, GUI, PS) of accomplishing the same task, it gets removed, it's gone.
I haven't tested it but I think I see what's happening. When MicroWin tries to remove Recall at those earlier stages of ISO debloating, for some unknown reason it causes the File Explorer to revert to the Win10 version because Microsoft didn't predict someone doing it that way, but removing it after the install like Microsoft intended doesn't cause any unexpected behaviors, and that's how it's now done in MicroWin. This might as well be Microsoft being stupid rather than Microsoft being evil.
The thing with this entire Recall debacle is that by the end of the day it's Windows, you can look into what every process does and you can verify exactly what's going on. Yet no one who has this knowledge seems to bother to look into whether or not Recall is actually gone, but instead keep rambling on and on about how it's totally there but you can't see it and how it's mandatory and yadda yadda. I'd love to see Enderman do a deep dive on how the Recall situation really looks like since he has the knowledge and skills to dissect Windows this way.
Of course, one thing remains the same. Windows' future is unstable, and God knows what Microsoft will try to pull next with another update. I am not dismissing this fact by any means, they might as well flip-flop on the Recall issue again and actually make it a mandatory component you can't remove without dodgy manual file and registry gutting that may or may not break the OS and I am fully aware of it. But as it stands now I don't see that that's the case.
