AtlasOS says Defender will be back and it may even be more secure than original Windows 10

Yesterday, we covered the AtlasOS, a lightweight version of Windows 10, which is designed for gaming. However, there was a lot of criticism, and a lot of it fair, about how Atlas, the developers of AtlasOS, managed to achieve this. In order to lower the footprint of the modded OS, Atlas had stripped away important components of the OS like System Restore and Windows Defender.

Following the criticism though, Atlas has confirmed that it has changed its mind after stating a few days ago that Defender “was not going to be added any time soon“. In fact, not only has Atlas backtracked on this, but the dev believes the new OS could potentially allow it to be even more secure than stock Windows itself.

On its official Twitter handle, the AtlasOS team posted the following message:

To address the recent concerns about AtlasOS’ security, and what we’re doing to improve.

… due to our recent shift to being a more popular project, the security concerns have been brought up due to the expectation of everyone knowing the risks being unrealistic.

For this reason, in future versions of Atlas, it is now a priority to give the users warnings about disabling security features and having features like Windows Update and Defender optional.

Therefore, for the next release, you should be able to configure Atlas to be as secure as you’d like, potentially even more secure that stock Windows in some areas.

The change is expected in the next version of the software. Interestingly, the latest version removes some more features too, like OneDrive and Microsoft Edge.