In our corporate environment I was asked to remove most of the built-in Windows 10 applications from the command line .
It works fine , but the Start Menu layout is then filled with missing applcations as shown in the following screenshot :
And it will be looking like this for each new user logging-in the computer. So I’ve customized the Windows 10 layout to look clean as below :
But to define this new layout as default for everyone in the computer, you have to use some powershell commands to export – import the layout :
Export-StartLayout -Path C:\users\_you_username_\start_menu.xml
Import-StartLayout -LayoutPath C:\users\_your_username\start_menu.xml -MountPath C:\
You might consider using GPOs instead of a command in the distribution image … But the GPO that defines a “layout” located in “Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar > Start Layout” will apply your exported layout, but also lock the Start Menu customization for the users ! Which we didn’t want to happen…
Finally the Export/Import in PowerShell was a good solution for our needs. 🙂