Yes! Incredibly annoying. Just checked my iPad and I had 2 notification markers or whatever they are called (the number on the Settings app icon) telling me about "special offers" since I recently purchased an iPhone and one to set up Apple Pay. On my Mac when I wasn't signed into iCloud I would get occasional popups telling me to sign in. Thanks Tim Apple
I'm not signed into iCloud on the main account on my mac. It brings some annoyances but in general it works remarkably fine.
One day I desperately needed something from the App store, so I made another account to sign in there. Ever since then I've been getting a "sign into you account" badge on my Settings app prompting me to remove it from the dock.
I was just thinking that as one popped up just now. "Some account services will not be available until you sign in again" all day every day. Whenever I try to close it, it (of course) brings me to settings.
Guess what? If I haven't used those services over the past 6 years, I don't think I need them.
Pretty sure this day is today. It probably doesn't matter much on a personal device, but my company-issued test and dev iPhone has several "unread" suggestions that I can't seem to remove.
You get a badge for the "System Settings" app for both on macOS & iOS. It's very distracting because there is no way to dismiss it, I had to unpin them from the dock.
You can dismiss it by going to settings, tapping the prompt to set up Siri, then saying you'll "do it later" (again). Annoying AF.
What's been bugging me is that a recent update (16.2?) means there's no way to dismiss the "Set Up Cellular" prompt in Settings anymore on an iPhone with no SIM.
All of this is, frankly, paternalistic bullshit that treats the user like some kind of idiot or sometimes "mark".
It probably depends a lot on the individual user. I know many people don't have a problem with pending notification badges, some colleagues literally always have a bunch. But personally it's a big distraction, because for me a notification badge means I have something left to do. At worst it is dismissing the pending notification, but I always stay at 0 notifications in any apps or services that are running.
It's been distracting enough that I didn't use my previous company iPhone, and it's distracting enough that I'll fully switch off Windows.
To commemorate Elon's attempt to dismiss the SEC lawsuit last week (or at least try to out-SEO the news about it). Dogecoin has also gone up a lot since the change.
I hate it. I always set up my Windows PCs with an offline admin account and normal user accounts for day-to-day work. Some of those I log in with my Microsoft account(s). Some I don’t. It depends on what my needs are.
Encouraging everyone to use one administrator, do everything account just because it makes it easier for Microsoft to push their services seems pretty pathetic to me. Toss in the per-profile licensing and activation for Office, etc. and it’s obvious Microsoft doesn’t care about security if it gets in the way of sales.
I was also trying to install windows 11 on a VM to do some one off work. It was next to impossible to create a local account with internet connection on. I had to restart my installation process with Internet disconnected. And even after I installed, I realized how many times it asks me to login. Even desktop features like widgets need login.
It's even worse after you manage to install it: in Windows 11 the remove the option to ungroup application windows on the taskbar. So if you want find that specific windows, you need to first hover with your mouse over the single app tab, wait until it shows the windows, and pick up the right one. People are getting mad about this.
>So if you want find that specific windows, you need to first hover with your mouse over the single app tab, wait until it shows the windows, and pick up the right one. People are getting mad about this.
Worth remembering that everyone has complained about grouped windows in the taskbar since way back in Windows XP when Microsoft first released the feature.
If you're using Windows Pro there should be an option for "Domain Join." If you select that it'll have you create a local account that's admin (so maybe don't make it your day to day account) because domain join is not actually done during the OOBE.
You can also try entering no@thankyou.com for the account name and a random password [1]. It should give you an error message stating the account is locked and then let you proceed to create a local account. Might not always work though according to some recent comments on [1].
Oh yeah, go try to install Chrome through edge on that new setup. Windows alerts like 3-4 times during the process that Edge IS Chromium and stuff trying to keep you using their browser. I am not about to start using a browser that has special backdoors to annoy me when I try to do things that it doesn't approve of...
"To be fair" these facts are 100% irrelevant to whether my computer should do wtf I tell it to do.
You tell your car to drive to a cafe and it tells you that caffiene is bad for you and you should go to McDonald's instead. I give zero shits about whether it's true or not, it's nobody's goddamn business where I want to drive.
I used Edge (logged in) + Bing for 3+ years and recently switched back to Firefox. When it was new, Edge was great. It was a Google free Chromium browser that integrated with my MS account and got out of my way.
Now Edge is a bloated piece of trash because Microsoft can't stop jamming crap into it.
I don't ever see any nagging by Firefox, except for the first time I installed it and a few tabs popped up to tell me about certain features or when a big new feature is released and they pop a tab up for that feature. I think those are pretty reasonable.
I jumped from Chrome to Edge ~3 years ago, and ever since it has been a steady downward trend with each release. I switched back to FF a couple weeks ago when the giant Bing Button appeared and can't be easily removed.
> Anyone who works at Microsoft brave enough to comment...?
Approximately 200,000 people work at Microsoft, and I can assure you that the vast majority do not hold the authority to make decisions like this. In reality, I suspect that many of them view this kind of user interface/user experience as unfriendly and express their concerns to higher-ups, but without any influence, they may never see any improvements.
Given this fact, I would recommend rephrasing your request to call for a Microsoft executive to clarify this decision. However, you probably already know the answer to that question: engagement, which leads to promotions, which leads to more money.
Yes. It would be nice to see one being honest behind the protection of a pseudonym.... even nicer if they slip some hints for how to toggle these nastygrams off.
The problem is most of us have enough clues on our primary accounts that it wouldn't look great badmouthing our employer to the degree I'm about to.
I regularly feel disgust at some of the decisions I see the OS and other consumer product teams roll out. It makes the company look bad, and I believe hurts our long term best interest by cheapening our product and brand, let alone the ethical perspective of dark pattern or depriving users control over their own devices.
I know of no way to turn these off short of using an older version of Windows. I think some of the enterprise releases may have ways to create local accounts, but they may still hit this, I'm not familiar with that side of the world. If there is third party software to mitigate this I encourage it. If this drives you to linux I encourage and am encouraged by it. If you pirate out of protest I encourage it. Consolidation and other related factors in the OS marketplace have rendered consumers with very little real leverage, and this is not a state of affairs I am happy with.
To guess's point, I can also say that I know of no coworkers happy with this or who have any power to impact this state of affairs. I am not in the OS org, but I would be surprised if it were any different there. To put it crudely, incentives are a bitch.
Thank you for going to the trouble of making a throwaway for possibly just this comment. I'm aware that employees currently don't have a lot of power, and of course consumers being wrangled with dark patterns means they don't have a lot of power either. Getting confirmation that the unpopular decisions can be laid squarely at the feet of executives does allow one to hold out hope for a more equitable future for consumer electronics.
> Anyone who works at Microsoft brave enough to comment...?
What would they even say? "Yeah, we think our users are stupid and we don't respect them, so we use dark patterns to dupe the suckers into giving us PII and $$."? It's intentional deceit by Microsoft IMO.
It's the same thing with OneDrive. If you don't set up OneDrive you get nagged by the "security" center that your files are at risk because they're not "backed up". However, OneDrive isn't a backup. It's sync and, if you factor in files-on-demand, can end up being the only copy of users' files. I wouldn't consider the only copy of my files a "backup", but most users don't understand, so Microsoft is happy to stretch the truth (aka lie) to get people using OneDrive so they can convert them into subscribers.
Cloud storage is a de-facto backup for 95% of computer users. Most of them have a versioning system or time-travel system to see old versions for a few weeks or a year. I used OneDrive for a while and they also have a nice system for detecting encryption malware, and will notify you if it detects that a ton of regular files were deleted and then a bunch of new encrypted files were added. It's not the worst service in the world, and it does act as an effective backup for most cases for most users, especially considering that it takes no time at all to setup. A super reliable backup system is a hard thing to keep up with for most people, and you can't usually just set it and forget it like you can with cloud storage.
It’s ok if it’s secondary storage / sync, but with files on demand you lose everything if Microsoft bans you and most users don’t understand the risk. Microsoft is encouraging them to do something risky and using the security center to do so.
Anyone at Microsoft with integrity left a long time ago. All that are left are those willing to implement stuff like this because it pays the bills and don't really care enough about users to even bother with malicious compliance.
What would you expect from them? From a product perspective, there's incentive to push for this, from a developer perspective, they get paid to work on the software. That's all there is to it.
You know, I with most of you on being against this. I will always use offline accounts myself but for regular folks there is a security advantage to having an MS monitored and access controlled account, especially for people that reuse passwords. But then again an online account is easy to phish and then pathways open up to control the windows device.
I feel a bit similar about connecting the phone to the cloud. Do I want the data in the cloud? No, especially at the first. But the second the phone drops into water or something, it will be a godsend. Just buy a new one, log in and presto, you're at home, no data is missing. As a service provider, I think I too would push it on common folk. And of course personally, I set up my own cloud. But that's definitely not a path everyone can walk.
The more and more I see, the decision to finally install Windows 10 LTSC is more and more justified for my gaming PC.
I have to wonder though how much of this stuff are they going to try to shove into Windows 11 LTSC when that comes out or are they going to continue the pattern of a lot of the shady stuff magically being missing from LTSC?
There is a GitHub project that you may find valuable.
But yeah, and it make sense. I mean Microsoft doesn't want to make it easy to strip out all of the crap they add in (or really never have it in the first place).
Not that I am defending Microsoft since this is their own doing, but I can understand why LTSC is not... easy isn't the right word. Can't think of the word I am looking for.
Edit: The best part is I have not noticed any downsides. I did have to install the Windows Store for the Xbox app but that still leaves a TON of stuff that isn't there.
If you're affiliated with a university or high school (or know a student who will help you out), you can get free Windows Server licenses through their Azure student/educator deal. Also includes all the fancy versions of Visual Studio, SQL Server, and education versions of Windows 10 and 11 (which include Group Policy).
I can understand the outrage over dark patterns, but I think you could also view this change from a different perspective: Microsoft makes it clear that long/medium term they want to make Microsoft accounts mandatory to use Windows and view local accounts as a legacy exception which should be progressively eliminated. If you follow that assumption, it's perfectly logical to see a local account as an "error".
So if the roadmap is that clear, I think the better question is why people go still along with it and keep using Windows.
Or alternatively: Why are software companies allowed to just make those decisions, even it could potentially disrupt the work of millions of users.
Windows will be the reason for Linux overtaking the gaming and home desktop market.
They'll pull a 180 right around Windows 13 when linux OS is released that works by default with 95% of games and 95% of hardware takes 20% of the desktop market.
> I think the better question is why people go still along with it and keep using Windows.
The reason investors and CEOs love monopolies and oligopolies so much is that they don't have to care about users, they can abuse them as much as they want.
Windows machines are the only affordable option for millions of people so they have to keep using it, no matter how much they hate Microsoft. Governments should be less tolerant of important companies that abuse their power.
And before anyone chimes in saying "Linux is Free Open Source Software!", remember the old saying: Time is money.
Almost noone wants to spend time messing with their computer. A computer might be the end to a means for Linux neckbeards, but for the rest of humanity a computer is simply a means to an end.
Windows, unlike Linux, satisfies that role of being a means to an end, of just being a tool for bigger things. Buying a Windows license is, in fact, more affordable than messing in Linux.
>"I think the better question is why people go still along with it and keep using Windows."
I've been using Windows for almost 30 years now, and while I've given different distros of Linux and MacOS an honest try, I am never as comfortable or as fluent with them as I am with Windows. I know there is an extensive amount of customization that can be done with Linux to get it really close but it just isn't the same.
I'm also at the level where I am comfortable enough with gpedit and regedit that as long as there is a way to turn most of the annoying and onerous "features" off, I can keep on truckin'. For instance, disabling Cortana in the start menu.
> I think the better question is why people go still along with it and keep using Windows
A lot of non-open source desktop software available only for Windows and MacOS. While I dislike MacOS less than Windows 10 or especially 11, MacBook is more expensive than Windows notebook or mini-PC.
Because it's a well-studied science just how much most people will put up with. Most people are 100% path of least resistance, and that is simple to manipulate.
People also willingly addict themselves to the dumbest things. They can't use linux because some stupid nike sneaker app doesn't work on it, they can't use libreoffice because the menus are different. Even most of the real differences are unneccessary gimmicks that only exist to create exactly that trap. Developers too slurping up the whole vs stack, feeds back to all the shitty apps that people can't live without only existing on windows.
I support a Windows site and am wishing I could retire before the Windows 10 end of support in Q4 2025. My only hope is that Windows 11 becomes 12 by then and resembles something like Windows 9 might have been.
I understand goat farming done right can provide a living, but I also understand there's not a restart button on goats.
My wife couldn't get along with Linux, but I'm trying to get her to at least get an Apple computer next time. At least Apple is a half-decade behind the other companies that are shoving ad-filled crapware into their OSes (MS, Google) and hopefully by the time iOS/OSX are merged and start getting ads and stuff in them and disallowing you from installing unapproved binaries, I can have trained her to use a Linux-like software and then move her onto Linux and never have to deal with that shit again. My son will use nothing but Linux on his computers once he's older.
For a while now they've made the default user account name by truncating the first 5 letters of your email (so if your email starts with 'robert' your username will be 'rober'), and to stop this you need to do a weird workaround where you dodge some UI tricks that get you to login with your Microsoft account so you can create a local user account with a name of your choice.
I believe when I setup my recent machine I had to be disconnected from the internet to be able to complete setup without a Microsoft account.
Ah, another thing to learn to ignore because everyone seems to think my attention is owned by them. These companies don't seem to realize that continuing to add these petty things will just make us learn to ignore them more and more. It's like notifications. My discord is always on no notifications and the @heres and stuff make my icon badge always say 9+ or whatever. So now I never see things people want to share because they've overused the alerts.
Facebook was the same. I turned off notifications completely because I couldn't disable specific ones I didn't need so they started emailing me so I blocked them as spam. Sorry FB, your loss. My life is better without your garbage product anyway.
If you are on an android phone what supports shelter[1], I can recommend installing "social" apps inside the shelter, and just sleep the apps when you don't use them.
In regards to windows, it feels to me as morphing into a solution for large corporations if disregarding the tabloid news while leaving private users just waiting for a friendly OS to be presented for them.
Not quite as good, but you can turn off background app refresh on iOS to cripple their ability to do anything, though I believe push notifications come via Apple’s server anyway.
This 100%. I turn off notifications every time an app abuses them. Spotify wants to tell me about a random album I should listen to? Notifications blocked. Twitter recommends an account to follow? Notifs off. The pattern has continued to the point where I now do not get any social media notifications and I only see the app's content when I actively open it up and check.
They waste our time so we disable their functionality.
Right? Or the pattern of opening Spotify to find/listen to something, something pops up, I close it immediately without reading it because it's In My Way and never find out about what they were trying to tell me.
Apple Podcasts sending you notifications for new podcasts that are subscription only. You tap on it. You wait for it to load. And then you get a popup 'subscription only'.
The worst thing is, these notifications/error badges consume your attention even if you choose NOT to engage with them. If you have OCD (or are OCD-adjacent, or just enjoy seeing a screen that is not full of unremovable “call to action” badges), it’s a nightmare.
This shit should be illegal. Make it truly optional so I can turn off or dismiss the badge/“error” permanently, or just don’t do it this way.
Facts facts facts. For anyone with any kind of obsessive tendencies towards cleaning your inbox or anything, it's literal torture. It's crazy that it's even legal.
It really is a testament to the power of the Windows monopoly that MS can continously make the product worse without losing a meaningful amount of customers.
Windows is more than ripe for disruption, but unfortunate the monopoly is enforced by drivers, productivity software, habit, gaming etc.
It's depressing to think about how much better our computers could have worked if there had been real competition in the market of PC OSs for the last 25 years.
It's all the little things. I just set up my first Linux / Windows dual boot laptop to ease my way out of Windows, but my day 1 experience with Linux involved disabling IPv6 so that I could get onto WiFi + internet, disabling the HiDPI daemon so that my screen resolution changes would persist across restarts, and wearing headphones most of the day because the laptop's external speakers don't work out of the box. The Apple-like "everything-included" model might work well for desktop Linux, but the Windows-like "BYO everything" model is still quite rough... and I don't see that changing because it's mostly hardware / driver-related, and there's a constant churn of new devices, chips and accessories.
Windows has already been disrupted: first by the web, and second by mobile.
The reason Windows continues to dominate desktop is because Apple isn't a competitor, more like an off-ramp for those that can afford better. And Linux on Intel/AMD is finicky on most OEM machines except for a couple of machines that are 10 years old.
This is why I use Windows only for games, nothing else. They have little to no respect to their users because they no we have almost no other options (except macOS).
When the day I am able to play the majority of my steam games on a Linux device, that's the day I say goodbye to Windows.
Windows is incredibly broken and yet miraculously its power is that it works.
My exotic mix of apps work. Games work, new ones and 20 year old ones. All peripherals and hardware combinations work, or have a way to make them work. There always seems to be a path towards success.
Years or decades of muscle memory fueling resistance to change, corporate lock-in, game compatibility...that's how Microsoft can get away with almost anything.
Should Apple want to, they could get the ultimate revenge by reversing the lost PC wars. And actually dominate the laptop/desktop market. They have the hardware, software and resources to do so.
But it won't happen, it would require too many non-Apple moves, like wide compatibility, very long term legacy support, low margin products.
Ironically, macOS already shows an error message when an account is not using iCloud.
Using both macOS and Windows 11 on an almost daily basis, they are really not that different when it comes to nagging users. Both show full-screen displays on startup from time to time where they want to change some settings (activating Siri, using Edge as default browser, ...), try to sell additional services, make you use an online account, and come with a lot of bloatware.
I for one am very glad that they are doing this: the more they insist on forcing people to create accounts the more they get people interested into switching to alternatives.
The sad (and quite ironic) thing with Microsoft is that while it is a company that is pretty much liked across the world, its managers keep doing their best to generate distrust and disdain amongst whoever actually owns a legitimate license of Windows.
114 comments
[ 0.60 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadOne day I desperately needed something from the App store, so I made another account to sign in there. Ever since then I've been getting a "sign into you account" badge on my Settings app prompting me to remove it from the dock.
Guess what? If I haven't used those services over the past 6 years, I don't think I need them.
The day they don't is the day I throw my iPhone in the river.
It's annoying that these companies are all starting to use "error" messages like this.
What's been bugging me is that a recent update (16.2?) means there's no way to dismiss the "Set Up Cellular" prompt in Settings anymore on an iPhone with no SIM.
All of this is, frankly, paternalistic bullshit that treats the user like some kind of idiot or sometimes "mark".
It's been distracting enough that I didn't use my previous company iPhone, and it's distracting enough that I'll fully switch off Windows.
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-is-covered-in-doge-for-no-d...
wild.
Though audacious, it completely lacks style and wit and thus is just rude and abrasive.
Of course, my opinion of the media is that they're shit and deserve all the bad treatment they get.
I would accept it if providers other than Microsoft could offer the service.
Encouraging everyone to use one administrator, do everything account just because it makes it easier for Microsoft to push their services seems pretty pathetic to me. Toss in the per-profile licensing and activation for Office, etc. and it’s obvious Microsoft doesn’t care about security if it gets in the way of sales.
Unfortunately Microsoft/windows does not care what your needs are, it only cares about data collection and ads.
I recently had to install windows in a vm because I could not get adobe reader working through wine. The install process was awful:
* Dark pattern to try and force me to login with a MS account during setup
* Majority of setup steps pertain to data collection and/or ads
After setting it up, I had to open up edge to download and install adobe reader, once again
* Nags me to login to an account
* Most if not all setup steps are about ads and data collection
All for the sake of filling out some pdfs. I am truly grateful that Valve is pushing proton as it makes me (almost never) have to leave linux.
No way! Thankfully I went for windows 10 which did not need me to unplug the internet (just a hidden option down to the side), but that's just awful.
Worth remembering that everyone has complained about grouped windows in the taskbar since way back in Windows XP when Microsoft first released the feature.
And without Internet connection you cannot even reach the step to create an account.
[1]: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/269419/tip-set-u...
The only difference between Edge and Chrome is choosing who you want your data to go to and your ads to come from: Microsoft or Google.
You tell your car to drive to a cafe and it tells you that caffiene is bad for you and you should go to McDonald's instead. I give zero shits about whether it's true or not, it's nobody's goddamn business where I want to drive.
Meanwhile, both Edge and Chrome are Chromium.
I used Edge (logged in) + Bing for 3+ years and recently switched back to Firefox. When it was new, Edge was great. It was a Google free Chromium browser that integrated with my MS account and got out of my way.
Now Edge is a bloated piece of trash because Microsoft can't stop jamming crap into it.
Anyone who works at Microsoft brave enough to comment...?
Approximately 200,000 people work at Microsoft, and I can assure you that the vast majority do not hold the authority to make decisions like this. In reality, I suspect that many of them view this kind of user interface/user experience as unfriendly and express their concerns to higher-ups, but without any influence, they may never see any improvements.
Given this fact, I would recommend rephrasing your request to call for a Microsoft executive to clarify this decision. However, you probably already know the answer to that question: engagement, which leads to promotions, which leads to more money.
I regularly feel disgust at some of the decisions I see the OS and other consumer product teams roll out. It makes the company look bad, and I believe hurts our long term best interest by cheapening our product and brand, let alone the ethical perspective of dark pattern or depriving users control over their own devices.
I know of no way to turn these off short of using an older version of Windows. I think some of the enterprise releases may have ways to create local accounts, but they may still hit this, I'm not familiar with that side of the world. If there is third party software to mitigate this I encourage it. If this drives you to linux I encourage and am encouraged by it. If you pirate out of protest I encourage it. Consolidation and other related factors in the OS marketplace have rendered consumers with very little real leverage, and this is not a state of affairs I am happy with.
To guess's point, I can also say that I know of no coworkers happy with this or who have any power to impact this state of affairs. I am not in the OS org, but I would be surprised if it were any different there. To put it crudely, incentives are a bitch.
What would they even say? "Yeah, we think our users are stupid and we don't respect them, so we use dark patterns to dupe the suckers into giving us PII and $$."? It's intentional deceit by Microsoft IMO.
It's the same thing with OneDrive. If you don't set up OneDrive you get nagged by the "security" center that your files are at risk because they're not "backed up". However, OneDrive isn't a backup. It's sync and, if you factor in files-on-demand, can end up being the only copy of users' files. I wouldn't consider the only copy of my files a "backup", but most users don't understand, so Microsoft is happy to stretch the truth (aka lie) to get people using OneDrive so they can convert them into subscribers.
It's why Windows 10 will be my last Windows.
I have to wonder though how much of this stuff are they going to try to shove into Windows 11 LTSC when that comes out or are they going to continue the pattern of a lot of the shady stuff magically being missing from LTSC?
But yeah, and it make sense. I mean Microsoft doesn't want to make it easy to strip out all of the crap they add in (or really never have it in the first place).
Not that I am defending Microsoft since this is their own doing, but I can understand why LTSC is not... easy isn't the right word. Can't think of the word I am looking for.
Edit: The best part is I have not noticed any downsides. I did have to install the Windows Store for the Xbox app but that still leaves a TON of stuff that isn't there.
So if the roadmap is that clear, I think the better question is why people go still along with it and keep using Windows.
Or alternatively: Why are software companies allowed to just make those decisions, even it could potentially disrupt the work of millions of users.
Because it's often the only option in the corporate world.
They'll pull a 180 right around Windows 13 when linux OS is released that works by default with 95% of games and 95% of hardware takes 20% of the desktop market.
It's only the home-users that get hit by this....
In fact, one of the Group Policies is for specifically blocking Microsoft account logins.
(Yes, I have that policy turned on.)
Windows is a joy to use when you turn off all the half-baked consumerized nonsense.
Because Windows runs Win32.
The reason investors and CEOs love monopolies and oligopolies so much is that they don't have to care about users, they can abuse them as much as they want.
Windows machines are the only affordable option for millions of people so they have to keep using it, no matter how much they hate Microsoft. Governments should be less tolerant of important companies that abuse their power.
And before anyone chimes in saying "Linux is Free Open Source Software!", remember the old saying: Time is money.
Almost noone wants to spend time messing with their computer. A computer might be the end to a means for Linux neckbeards, but for the rest of humanity a computer is simply a means to an end.
Windows, unlike Linux, satisfies that role of being a means to an end, of just being a tool for bigger things. Buying a Windows license is, in fact, more affordable than messing in Linux.
I've been using Windows for almost 30 years now, and while I've given different distros of Linux and MacOS an honest try, I am never as comfortable or as fluent with them as I am with Windows. I know there is an extensive amount of customization that can be done with Linux to get it really close but it just isn't the same.
I'm also at the level where I am comfortable enough with gpedit and regedit that as long as there is a way to turn most of the annoying and onerous "features" off, I can keep on truckin'. For instance, disabling Cortana in the start menu.
A lot of non-open source desktop software available only for Windows and MacOS. While I dislike MacOS less than Windows 10 or especially 11, MacBook is more expensive than Windows notebook or mini-PC.
People also willingly addict themselves to the dumbest things. They can't use linux because some stupid nike sneaker app doesn't work on it, they can't use libreoffice because the menus are different. Even most of the real differences are unneccessary gimmicks that only exist to create exactly that trap. Developers too slurping up the whole vs stack, feeds back to all the shitty apps that people can't live without only existing on windows.
I understand goat farming done right can provide a living, but I also understand there's not a restart button on goats.
I believe when I setup my recent machine I had to be disconnected from the internet to be able to complete setup without a Microsoft account.
Facebook was the same. I turned off notifications completely because I couldn't disable specific ones I didn't need so they started emailing me so I blocked them as spam. Sorry FB, your loss. My life is better without your garbage product anyway.
In regards to windows, it feels to me as morphing into a solution for large corporations if disregarding the tabloid news while leaving private users just waiting for a friendly OS to be presented for them.
[1] https://github.com/PeterCxy/Shelter
This shit should be illegal. Make it truly optional so I can turn off or dismiss the badge/“error” permanently, or just don’t do it this way.
Windows is more than ripe for disruption, but unfortunate the monopoly is enforced by drivers, productivity software, habit, gaming etc.
It's depressing to think about how much better our computers could have worked if there had been real competition in the market of PC OSs for the last 25 years.
All of these moves I call “KPI features”, as in: “I have to make this worse to meet my personal bonus criteria, sorry.”
There are so many dark patterns in Windows now because of this.
Nobody at Microsoft cares about the products at all any more.
The reason Windows continues to dominate desktop is because Apple isn't a competitor, more like an off-ramp for those that can afford better. And Linux on Intel/AMD is finicky on most OEM machines except for a couple of machines that are 10 years old.
If it's only for games, MS is going to be very disappointed when all of gaming moves to Linux/Wine/Proton.
Unless I don't understand what's going on, I feel MS is on thin ice here (everything looks fine until it's simply not anymore).
When the day I am able to play the majority of my steam games on a Linux device, that's the day I say goodbye to Windows.
My exotic mix of apps work. Games work, new ones and 20 year old ones. All peripherals and hardware combinations work, or have a way to make them work. There always seems to be a path towards success.
Years or decades of muscle memory fueling resistance to change, corporate lock-in, game compatibility...that's how Microsoft can get away with almost anything.
Should Apple want to, they could get the ultimate revenge by reversing the lost PC wars. And actually dominate the laptop/desktop market. They have the hardware, software and resources to do so.
But it won't happen, it would require too many non-Apple moves, like wide compatibility, very long term legacy support, low margin products.
Using both macOS and Windows 11 on an almost daily basis, they are really not that different when it comes to nagging users. Both show full-screen displays on startup from time to time where they want to change some settings (activating Siri, using Edge as default browser, ...), try to sell additional services, make you use an online account, and come with a lot of bloatware.
A later session did the same thing.
I don’t like how companies are interrupting flow and trying to force logins.
The sad (and quite ironic) thing with Microsoft is that while it is a company that is pretty much liked across the world, its managers keep doing their best to generate distrust and disdain amongst whoever actually owns a legitimate license of Windows.