In my eyes Microsoft Edge is even more annoying. Even if you install the "business" version you still get that shitty startpage and if you log in to remote desktop that takes ages to render and then you have to a bit of time turn that "start page thing" off. And MS moves the options around all the time! Such a pain! You can't just set about:blank as an empty tab page any more.
Telemetry shows moving the option around results in higher use of the start page thing. Every time it moves less people can find it and the uptake of the new feature improves.
It's funny (in a bad way) that all this telemetry and optimization somehow optimizes for basically antisocial behavior. If I translate what you write into plain language: "every time we upset people by deliberately altering the interface, they are forced to rediscover things and they might start using some new bullshit we want to push".
Imagine if your local supermarket regularly reshuffled all the wares because this would force the customers to rediscover the location of everything again. This is the kind of thing that is being pushed? How do we stop this? To me this seems like a complete and utter resignation of human decision-making and empathy to machine driven metrics. "Computers says that my doohickey metric went up by 30% this month, I'll get a nice bonus".
I have lived in many US states, and I have never experienced this in 30+ years.
The end caps might change periodically, but the location of 99% of items is the same every time I have gone.
Costco would probably be guilty of moving things around the most, but I assume this is partly due to their logistics and partly due to them wanting people to browse.
My father, an inveterate Costco shopper, has a half-joke about this, because also the cashiers will routinely inquire if you "found everything OK?"
He says that this is actually a threshold poll, and if too many people respond "yes" that triggers the Grand Reshuffling of Merchandise overnight!
I actually think he's exactly right. Why does a cashier care whether you found everything? You're already checking out, it's too late to go hunting for more, and the cashier can't be the one who could help you look. So it's not an invitation to customer service, it's simply gauging your satisfaction.
I have encountered this in multiple countries in Europe and North America. Part of the reason is I obsessively form a routine and optimize the route around and consequently am incredibly sensitive to changes . . . Which I am not claiming is a healthy habit!
UK supermarkets go so far as to randomly drop free promo items “by accident” into baskets for online delivery in the knowledge that people will get hooked on the new thing, so you can’t escape it just by going online.
Supermarkets can probably only do this to a very limited extent. Moving entire aisles of product has a large human labor and training cost they would need to pay for, not to mention physical space and plate wiring limitations. They can't just chain a few code blocks every time some one gets a bright idea.
I will say costco will often move a product I regularly buy to an endcap to put it on sale. Then I can't find it anymore and am unable to buy it that week. I've tried asking the employees where it went but they never know either. Now I do a brief scan and then give up. For all I know they stopped carrying the product entirely.
> You can't just set about:blank as an empty tab page any more.
For Microsoft Edge, both on my personal computers and work computer about:blank is my home page and new tab page. (Home: Edge version 115.0.1901.203; Windows Pro 22H2)
Under the "When Edge starts" setting, I select "Open these pages:" and add "about:blank"
Can you combine that with "load the tabs from last session"?
I don't use windows very often, so I usually shut it down instead of hibernate so I can access its drive if needed from Linux. So it's a pain to reload all the pages from the last time, because I'll probably need them, that's why they were active.
In my case, I've found a "blank tab" or similar extensions which works well enough.
> Edge is even more annoying. Even if you install the "business" version you still get that crapty startpage and if you log in to remote desktop that takes ages to render
Oh Glob yes. De-venoming Edge is part of my RDP setup routine.
Has anyone become so disillusioned with windows that they just have a windows pc sitting around collecting dust?
Sometimes I still need to use some legacy program or whatever on there but I feel like the last time I booted into that thing was over a month ago now.
I started my machine for the first time in a couple of months yesterday; I mostly use it for gaming.
The taskbar “Search” box had a new “fun” little icon representing whatever search item they wanted to advertise to me today. Had to find windows “tips” site to work out how to turn it off…
Not as egregious as “full screen game adverts on login screen by default” though.
> The taskbar “Search” box had a new “fun” little icon representing whatever search item they wanted to advertise to me today. Had to find windows “tips” site to work out how to turn it off…
It boggles my mind how people don't find it absolutely infuriating. I watch quite a lot of streams and people always have 3 things enabled that I personally would disable instantly:
- huge searchbox taking a good 1/3 of the taskbar (I've yet to see anyone use this control for initiating a search)
- the playful icon in this huge searchbox (you mentioned it)
- Weather widget in the taskbar (just why?)
I assume that vast majority of Windows users just don't care.
> "I assume that vast majority of Windows users just don't care."
Most of them it's not so much that they don't care as it is that they've been literally brainwashed their entire lives to believe that Windows holds the top market position because it's somehow "superior" to other operating systems. They really truly believe the decades old Ballmer FUD about other operating systems. It's impossible in their minds that Microsoft gained such a stranglehold over the PC operating system market through completely unethical, borderline illegal means, and no amount of well-documented historical fact can change their minds about it. It's very nearly a literal cult.
It's really not that complex for me: I work in games, lots of game development tools only work in Windows and/or have horrible, undersupported Linux ports at best. I have no allegiance to Microsoft, I can still rotate around to Linux. but it's no surprise I end up mostly in Windows.
now with all that said, on topic: I haven't seen this search fun icon nor really any ads on W11. Don't know if that's because I opted out of any personalized targeting or whatnot, but I wasn't nagged much once I got everything installed and customized my toolar.
I've found wine good enough to run nearly any windows programme I want to use; the only exception is VR games, but I've found myself just not playing VR as a result
Windows is nowadays required for maybe 2 major things: games (I know, Wine is a thing, but let's be honest: it is very much still a hit or miss), and some video conference software (e.g. webex with camera).
I install Windows only for job interviews. Usually I install it 2 days ahead, and keep running windows update repeatedly, until it finally finishes with everything, and I can use the system for a 30 minutes call, before I would install a usable OS.
Maybe a bit tangential: until about 10 years ago I used only Windows. One day I tried make something bluetooth related work on it, I don't even remember what. I just remember that it kept failing in a very cryptic way. It got me so angry after many hours that I just deleted the whole OS, and swore that I will learn Linux starting immediately, and that will be my main system going forward. It became my career after a few months, lol. Don't know if I should be grateful for Windows or not.
And Android ROM stuff. All the vendor-specific ROM flashing apps are Windows only and I don't have the balls to run it via Wine. Sadly not even macOS (my main system) is an option.
> Windows is nowadays required for maybe 2 major things: games (I know, Wine is a thing, but let's be honest: it is very much still a hit or miss)
I'll be honest: I find it that it's very much a hit nowadays, rather than a miss.
With Valve doing so much work around Proton I can basically buy a random Windows-only game off Steam and... it just works. I don't even remember anymore a time when a game I wanted to play didn't just work.
(Of course this doesn't include multiplayer games with anti-cheat. If you like those then yes, you still need Windows.)
Possibly you are right. Must admit, I don't play a lot on my PC. I play sometimes the Portal series, which runs natively on Linux. My data set for my previous statement is admittedly not a big one: the one that I wanted to use Wine for was the Syberia series (I'm old), which has reports ranging from "doesn't work" to "works perfectly". It didn't work for me: it randomly either crashed, or just froze a few minutes into the game. Granted, haven't tried it since at least a year or so.
> games (I know, Wine is a thing, but let's be honest: it is very much still a hit or miss)
I used to dual-boot for a few games, but nowadays I just don't bother anymore. I check protondb beforehand and most of the games I played just ran without issues. I think the last time I booted Windows for games was for Space Engineers a couple of years ago (which seems to work now, but looks like a pain to set up).
I still use Windows for Photoshop and for games. Sure, more and more games seem to work with Steam's thing, but I sometimes get a noticeable performance boost when playing the same title under Windows compared to Linux. There was some Tomb Raider game which could barely do FHD on Linux but worked perfectly with max settings and 4k under Windows.
> and some video conference software (e.g. webex with camera
Meh, IME webex works fine enough in a browser (Firefox/X11). I haven't had any more issues under than Linux than my colleagues running Windows. Even Teams is just as crappy under Linux.
> [bluetooth]
I like when people complain about Linux and the proverbial crappy sound issues. The best Bluetooth headphone experience I've ever had was hands down Linux (though I've never had AirPods). It's the only one which connects reliably to my phones right away (macos was usually good enough at this) and it's also the only one that can use the better codec (ldac).
Your system will probably become unusable, because anytime Windows is shut down or disconnected too long, it will immediately crave gobs of updates upon boot, and you may be powerless to stop it.
For that reason, I made sure I rotated through all my VMs about once a month, just spin up and down for no other reason but updating.
Phew. After being a Windows user for literally almost two decades I've happily migrated to Linux and couldn't be happier. Yep, it took some time to prepare but let's be frank, developers already use quite a lot of Linux/Unix tools already so why not cut the middleman and just work directly with what we need most?
Exactly. I made the switch from MacOS and couldn't be happier. The fun thing is that with Linux these days you have the option of a powerful workstation that you can upgrade be it laptop or desktop, can do gaming, and is private. The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.
I should have phrased it better, indeed what I meant is self hosting by "declouding" from public clouds. My only concern is realiable self hosted backups. But I already have my own setup for newsfeeds, document storage, even for calling friends and relatives, and at the fraction of the cost (I factor in the value of my privacy as part of overall cost). I think there is good potential for self hosted products out there. A major pain point though is self hosting emails, since that requires a lot of work around spam protection and availability.
Yup, same here. And the sad things is that Windows was getting so close. Between WSL2, the new terminal and ssh, all the support for VSCode and better dev tools and open source language support, I was becoming a bit of Windows 'fan' and this close to seriously considering Windows 10 a fully usable developer desktop. Then they released Windows 11 and completely shit the bed.
Personally I think there are multiple forces acting on Windows at the same time. Some of them push it to a good direction (cases you mentioned) some of them less so.
We live in a times that are good for developers: we not only have free access to powerful tools that other professionals need to pay big bucks but it goes even further: with open source we can co-shape these tools and in the extreme cases fork and create our own derivatives.
Why not take advantage of this and just avoid proprietary solutions as much as possible?
I use an iPhone and other than that I hope to not use anything else that’s so cloud reliable. Maybe an AppleTV if I get one, but I only watch sports so a few cable channels are more than enough for me I think.
The nasty issue is that even tvs are turning into covert spies and are starting to show ads. So even if all you do is watch cable channels, the TV itself might still be spying on you. You perhaps need a "filter" such as a raspberry pi or a device that can transfer content via HDMI and have the tv completely cutoff from the internet. Really dubious times we are in.
Just don't use wifi or connect your TV to the internet. That works for me. My TV is online only during firmware updates which almost never happen cause its become old and those stopped long time ago.
> The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.
For me there are multiple parallel "side quests" and decloud is definitely one of them (I strive to minimize cloud and select solutions that can be self hosted and that are E2EE. Then I pay for hosting anyway but I always have an option of rolling my own. Example: etesync for calendars and contacts).
Other side quests: instead of Gnome use Sway, this requires manually picking wifi/Bluetooth connection managers (iwctl and bluetoothctl work well) and other tooling.
Yet another: convert my entire family to use Linux. Sadly this is harder since schools teach Windows but Gnome looks very similar to what they use.
These are just some examples. The good thing is that all of these are small steps that can be taken in any order to improve the situation in small increments.
how do you deal with absence of working task manager? any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up. Tried forcing myself to migrate to Linux, even after forcing no updates, a lot of things magically stop working or break, forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal. I just want to use my PC, not be a debugger non stop.
Both KDE and Gnome have task manager apps as far as I'm aware. And even then, in my experience it's very rare to observe any kind of hang-up that requires restarting the entire PC. Might be because I use a different set of applications. What applications do you observe these hang-ups with?
On the terminal, all the various "modern" replacements for `top` (btop, htop, bottom [mentioned in an earlier comment], etc.) are all really great. Many are almost on-par with their graphical counterparts these days.
I never have the problem of everything hanging except on an old laptop with only 4gb memory, in OOM conditions. If a program hangs I can just use the KDE task manager or kill -9 to make it compliant
You sound like my mom when she swears she did nothing and it just stopped working. We both know she did something but we also know I will just reinstall windows for her because she really doesn't want to learn something new.
It definitely sounds like you just need to learn a few more basic skills to use Linux.
Also good to note: there's tons of problems uniquely with windows that I'm sure are just "computer problems" and "computer slowness" to you, and you never blame windows.
Not the OP - but I think it's the use of the word "basic" that turns a lot of people off.
"Basic" in Windows is all stuff you can easily do with a mouse. Getting anywhere with Linux requires comfort with the command line, OK, but even after spending a decent amount of time, there are lots of system-specific and application-specific commands that you need to master to actually get the system humming. And a total rabbit hole when errors start to pop up. Getting a handle on all of this, being able to understand and fix errors, this is well beyond "basic" and the condescending attitude "just need to learn a few more basic skills" is a huge turn-off. Saying nothing is more helpful than telling someone they just need to learn "basic skills."
Yup, the nice thing about windows was everything was accessible by both mouse and keyboard so for people who needed the gui to figure things out it’s there for you and for people who are comfortable on the keyboard you used to be able to never think about the mouse. (This is no longer the case on windows 10 even, they’ve totally neutered keyboard navigation and you often need to reach for the mouse or use the arrow keys excessively for many things now).
Linux requires being super comfortable on the keyboard, using cli nearly exclusively and recalling with perfect accuracy arcane letter incantations which if you know the guy who wrote the program and the full name of his dog makes sense but to everyone else is just random letters strung together.
Every distribution has its variation of a task manager, and there’s always (h)top and kill as baseline standards.
Having everything lock up I don’t think I’ve ever seen, only way I could see that happen is a runaway process eats all the memory of the machine, and somehow dodges the OOM killer. Especially if the machine is configured with no swap (don’t do that).
And I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t really like linux.
> forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal
Have you considered that “copy pasting random nonsense into terminal” could be the source of your issues?
Ubuntu ships with woefully inadequate swap these days. We have to advise our employees to customize the installation process, or they get hangs while building C or Rust packages that sound like what GP is describing
> how do you deal with absence of working task manager?
I usually end up using something like htop for a quick overview, together with nvidia-smi when I do GPU-related stuff.
> any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up.
I've not had this happen for as long as I've used Linux, besides GPU driver bugs/crashes that brought down the computer, but I've had this happen more frequently on Windows than Linux. Processes using up all CPU should make the computer a lot slower to use, but shouldn't bring it down. Processes using up all RAM should be killed by the OOM manager that you distribution should include (but anyways you should have swap setup to avoid the situation in the first place). Processes using up all disk space is a bit harder, but again shouldn't bring the computer down.
> a lot of things magically stop working or break, forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal.
I'm guessing the problem of having things stop working/breaking "magically" is a effect of random copypasting stuff into the terminal, not the other way around.
Linux does want you to learn about the system in order for you to not mangle it, which has it's good and bad sides. Think of it like a chef having sharp knives in order to do their job better, it's true that you could do more damage if you fuck up, but their job requires them to have professional knowledge about the tools they use, and the knowledge about how to use those tools in a good way.
> how do you deal with absence of working task manager?
I see people offering nice advice here but I mostly do ps aux | grep thing and then kill (-9) it... or killall :)
> any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up.
I had the everything freeze up experience initially on a Dell laptop and frankly don't know what was the cause. Maybe missing microcode updates or old firmware? Nowadays it almost never happens (I don't remember it happening over the months). I have an app crash (like Firefox) ~once a month but it's so rare I barely notice.
Counter-intuitively my usual go-to is to SSH in from another device (phone, tablet, another computer). 95% of the time when the UI is locked up the ssh daemon is still responsive.
Note: I also do this on macOS but it’s much less useful since there are very few commands to actually restore a session that’s locked up.
If things are so frozen that you can't open System Monitor (task manager), try this: Hold down SysRq and Alt, let go of SysRq, keep holding down Alt, then press these buttons in order (don't need to hold them): REISUB - to remember it: "Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring", also known as "raising the elephant".
On some systems you need to enable this feature first, so try it out once to see if it works and look up how to enable it, if it doesn't.
On most distros, you can also get into a command line, with the combination CTRL + ALT + F1 - F8 (try out which function keys do it for you and how to get back to the GUI). There you can use `ps`, `kill <pid>`, `reboot now` or restart the GUI. I'd keep a note of the exact commands on my phone just in case.
As a sidenote, I've had an issue on a good windows desktop PC where it freezes when watching YouTube or ither streaming services. I can still move the mouse for a bit, but clicking does nothing and I'm unable to even save it from a hard reset with Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Sometimes it won't happen for weeks, but if I'm unlucky multiple times in an hour. Look up "PC freezes while watching YouTube" and you will see I'm far from alone with this issue, Asus motherboards with new AMD processors seem to be the common factor. Haven't had this happen on Linux yet (dual boot) and I've tried everything to avoid these unusual freezes in windows, but nothing seems to help.
Well this is the perfect example of the infuriatingly arcane crap that I have to deal with on Linux. Every time I need to do something on Linux, I have to look it up and then when I do - it is some crazy long explanation of hoops I need to jump through to make it happen. I try to keep track of these notes, but it all takes so much time.
I am hoping someone comes up with a fully dis-arcaned distro. Especially ditch (or remap) goofy command line relics into the obvious and easily remembered. Why do we still use CP instead of Copy? Legacy stuff that greybeards would freak if it were changed. Let them use a greybeard distro and make one that is for joe user.
Yes, I use Mint and it is still full of arcane crap.
Are you on Windows 11? There is an ongoing fTPM issue with AMD firmware that can cause behavior like that. I had this issue and ultimately just disabled TPM in the BIOS. Its supposed to be required for Win 11, but I haven't seen any issues since disabling.
That's the Windows way. It's a bad fit for Linux, because there is no one true obsessively-backwards-compatible Linux.
The good news is we don't need it: Linux isn't a black box, so we don't need to guess or study its behavior. We can look it up instead. The goal here is to construct understanding from documentation, as opposed to deconstructing behavior from testing.
Some great starting points to get your bearings are:
The modern iteration of the Start menu is a particular travesty and has been rendered all but unusable in order to push you to Bing by accident.
Microsoft simply must believe that Windows can survive the users hating this crap, and I fear they are right. For myself 11 was bad enough to finally try out Steam on Debian and was pleasantly surprised. KDE is closer to being the Windows desktop I want than Windows 11 is, which is just insane.
Minor point for the article, OOBE is a very widespread term in the consumer technology industry, not MS specific.
The modern start menu (at least what I see) reminds me of the gnome and KDE equivalents. It's a simple little list of apps, a space to pin those I use a lot, and a snappy search box. Bing is there, but it's gotten less intrusive in 11. The search box is better about surfacing what I'm actually looking for and not showing web searches 99% of the time.
So I can't imagine I'm seeing the same thing as what's got so many people up in arms about the start menu. Did I get a weird OEM configuration? It's a newish Lenovo Legion laptop. I haven't changed any start menu settings.
> So I can't imagine I'm seeing the same thing as what's got so many people up in arms about the start menu. Did I get a weird OEM configuration?
To answer that question, check out the screenshot in the article. If you have a similar spittoon-load of crapware installed, you have the same experience as ~everyone else and for some reason you aren't registering it.
I guess it comes down to what you perceive as crapware. I accepted a long time ago that I'm not the target audience for anything aimed at the mainstream. There were some icons I unpinned for apps and tool installers I didn't need. None of them were actually installed. They just went to the MS store. No biggie. I'd expect a lot of people to appreciate links to install/access very mainstream things like Office or Instagram.
They're trivial to remove and don't affect performance. When I think crapware, I think bloaty nonsense that no one needs or wants like Bonzi Buddy or 900 different browser toolbars. I don't see unpinning a few things on a fresh install as some great burden.
It's a bit frightening that they've beaten you down to the point where you don't even recognize the ads and crapware on "your" computer for what they are.
Spyware is still every bit as invasive and harmful as it was in the Bonzi Buddy days, but it looks a bit different and now ships as part of OS itself. You should try to unblind yourself to it because no matter how much you think you aren't affected by it you are absolutely being taken advantage of.
That's absurd. They're shortcuts like any other. Nothing is even pre-installed like when OEMs would ship computers with AOL or Compuserve when those were popular.
They are ads if they link to an app store, and bloatware if they've actually installed that crap on your machine. The shortcuts on my machine are for things I personally chose and installed and none of them open an app store. I've had cell phones that came with apps pre-installed like facebook that couldn't even be uninstalled normally. Does that count as "just a shortcut" too?
Those shortcuts weren't put there for you as a courtesy. Those are paid advertisements
> ... apps pre-installed [...] that couldn't even be uninstalled normally. Does that count as "just a shortcut" too?
I mean, logistically I'd expect parent to agree with that. They don't take up any additional space that you, the end-user, could take advantage of (because they were on the system partition).
Personally, I agree that stating which programs are to be installed on your hardware is a good way to determine who actually owns the hardware, but if parent is logically consistent, then sure: it'd be "just a shortcut" that the average end-user will take advantage of.
It still works! I installed it on a Windows 11 machine, and it puts the little start button down there and it works. So while it may be discontinued, it's still very much works.
Best of both worlds in a good window laptop with Windows 10 with no bloatware :). I purposely reinstalled windows 10 after upgrading to windows 11 due to all this intrusive bloatware
My company keeps trying to force me onto W11. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve marked my connection as “limited” so it won’t download any updates and outlook asks me if I still want to connect even though I’m on a slow connection. Only way to prevent that virus from infecting my work machine. I tried it twice and rolled back twice after less than an hour.
"A clean installation is one that is done in the absence of any interfering elements such as old versions of the computer program being installed or leftovers from a previous installation. In particular, the clean installation of an operating system is an installation in which the target disk partition is erased before installation. Since the interfering elements are absent, a clean installation may succeed where an unclean installation may fail or may take significantly longer."
I keep seeing headlines about Microsoft adding adverts to Windows and whatnot but none of it ever appears infront of me. Is that because I'm on Windows Pro?
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I'm not aware that anyone's properly reverse-engineered it, but based on what I've heard anecdotally I suspect some of it is eliminated by not using a Microsoft account, and some of it is eliminated by operating in certain regions or languages (perhaps due to not having a localized version of the campaign, or due to compliance concerns around advertising regulations and consumer protection laws in jurisdictions where that sort of thing is actually taken seriously).
It's because everyone got super happy to give their money to apple who has a similar experience in ipad etc. Want to setup apple wallet? Oh you're not backed up here's an iCloud offer in your settings menu. Etc etc.
It's gross but it's sort of the norm now. Why shouldn't Microsoft do it if that's ok when apple does it?
'Apple doesn't mandate Apple ID sign-in. Apple does put "helpful" "reminders" about setting up Apple Pay, iCloud backups, and a few other things into its setup screens, but it doesn't take your full screen over again to try to get you to opt in to things you've already said no to. There is a notification in the Settings app asking you to sign in and set a few things up if you haven't, but they're dismissable, and they stay dismissed. Safari doesn't pester you to switch back to it once you've switched away, like a 4-year-old who asks you what time it is every time the clock changes (I don't know if this is a widely relatable example, but it's my lived reality at present). There are no third-party applications installed beyond the under-the-hood open source bits and pieces that are baked into macOS's foundations.'
And:
'My frustration is not so much with what Microsoft is doing but how it is doing it. So many of Microsoft's reminders and notifications feel like they happen at the expense of respecting the user's choices.'
Personally I find putting things in the setting screen with a red indicator to be much scarier to the average person. It doesn't say join iCloud in the heading it says "your iPad is not backed up" and uses that to scare people.
Personally I find the dislike of both to be reasonable and I don't think Microsoft's is much worse than apple.
Microsoft literally flags not setting up OneDrive as a security issue in Windows Defender or whatever the current iteration is called. The warning pops up in routine scans.
There is one difference. In macOS if you pay for Apple One all the annoyances go away. In windows, even if you pay for MS365, stuff is still really annoying.
I'm a lifetime computer user and software engineer with a half bricked laptop caused by Windows 11. Windows wanted me to create a Microsoft account and somehow me not doing that resulted in a boot loop. I installed Linux on it and work around the Windows partition. I did lose a lot of data that's technically accessible, but too lazy.
Right, but I bought it for gaming on Windows. Since then the games I want have been released on MacOS, so the use case no longer exists. Now I have an expensive gaming laptop in a box somewhere.
I use Ubuntu at work and at home. It's a great experience and I am so happy to not have my OS controlled by Microsoft. (Or Apple, but those are for different reasons.)
I love a lot of things in their Edge browser, but man if the first ten minutes with it aren't spent disabling and removing stuff. Seems crazy to have browsers throw MSN news feeds at you in 2023 but here we are.
This is not informing about other services, this is pushing them on them with sleezy tactics. The article calls out that MS refers to this as "second-chance out of the box experience", or in plain English, "you did not want this the first time, but we need this for our bottom line, so get ready to have this shoved down your throat".
I would also not be surprised if they are banking on people accidentally clicking Yes to make the annoyance go away.
In Futurama, there is a gag where Fry finds out about ads being injected in his dreams through brain waves or something. When he is upset by this, his peers do not understand him. So he explains: "Of course we had ads in the 20th century... but only on billboards, and buses, and milk cartons, and [list goes on for a while]. But not in dreams! Nuh-uh!"
I think what's happening here is two things: First, a personal computing device is fundamentally an extension of your own self into the digital world, functioning similar to how you use your limbs to interact with the physical world. Having a personal computing device overtly act in someone else's interest and not yours is not that dissimilar to having someone else manipulate your arms and legs to force you to go to certain places or interact with things that you don't want to.
Second, most ads have the redeeming quality of being ignorable. If there's an ad on a billboard, I can look somewhere else instead or just close my eyes. If there's an ad on a news website, I can (hopefully!) scroll past it. If there's an ad in my dreams (or indeed, on my home screen), it's forcing itself on me and violating that premise of ignorability.
>a personal computing device is fundamentally an extension of your own self into the digital world, functioning similar to how you use your limbs to interact with the physical world
well maybe that's the issue. I see it more like operating a car than me acting as some avatar renovating my house. Ideally there'd be a smooth flat empty road, but there will be bumps, annoying people, billboards, and sketch sand roads. It's all a part of the journey, and in many cases I'm riding through a pre-defined world.
At least I can remove more of these in the ditital world.
Anyone who thinks otherwise, do go through a full install and then observe how many apps are installed that you cannot uninstall.
And it's true that you can't really uninstall things from Windows either... Xbox 360 Bar... it will be there forever. If you ever touch Windows Hello PIN logon, that will never be disabled again.
The only way to have an OS install be minimal is to choose a Linux, a distro will likely give you lots of things you may not want still (i.e. games, the office suite) but at least you can uninstall those all quickly.
Apple has always been kind of an awful desktop experience IMO. Never understood why so many technical users like it. Windows 11 is becoming so much worse though.
Thank goodness for Linux being the solution for 99% of time.
I'm a Linux user, but you can't always easily remove the random crap that gets installed. An Ubuntu server install will come with "modem manager" (wtf does that even do?!) and a bunch of other crap which isn't exactly useful in a VM environment. Yet if you try to remove them, you'll find that it tries to remove the whole system since it depends on "ubuntu-server" or some such. Sure, you could remove that meta package and reinstall the things you actually need manually, but that's still a terrible pita.
At least all this junk doesn't start up random daemons, like windows does.
This sounds like an Ubuntu problem. My web server is running Debian 12 and ModemManager isn't even installed. For shiggles I installed it just so I could remove it. The extra packages it installed are libjim0.81 libmbim-glib4 libmbim-proxy libmbim-utils libqmi-glib5 libqmi-proxy libqmi-utils libqrtr-glib0 usb-modeswitch usb-modeswitch-data and these are exactly the packages it told me I could autoremove after removing ModemManager.
The year of the Linux Desktop is finally here. Not because Linux solved any of it's problems or added long-awaited features, no. Just because Windows gets shittier every day by adding more crapware, dark patterns, telemetry, and nudging dialogs.
The standard Year of the Linux Desktop acceptance speech hasn't changed often in 20 years. The, "We fixed X now, so people will actually use it!" one only gets used on special occasions. 'X' being literal in most of them.
Apple’s “post-PC” marketing line became reality for many individuals. Not because they bought Macs and iPhones but because many Windows problems were avoided on mobile operating systems. Mobile browsers and apps have the majority of mindshare.
Mobile devices wake instantly. Official app stores are much safer from malware than the Windows software acquisition ecosystem of running an Internet search, the first search result being malware, he website having fake download buttons, and downloading often unsigned .exe files. There’s no anti-virus software bogging down I/O. There’s less maintenance like disk defragmentation, Windows Updates that take an hour and require a forced restart. Users can’t get lost opening a file they downloaded because files are hidden away through the abstraction of apps. If you’re just consuming content you might not even own a PC.
Windows is full of garbage. MacOS jumped the shark on UI and is irritating in so many ways as it tries to be some Frankenstein’s monster of a desktop and mobile-inspired UI. And Linux is incapable of watching videos in a browser without destroying my CPU (Nvidia lacks hardware video decoding on Linux) and continues with all the classic “engineers don’t do UX” problems.
Not one option feels “good” to me. There’s just levels of tolerable.
What do you mean about the MacOS UI? It sounds like you're talking about Stage Manager (which I love but understand not liking) but it should be disabled by default.
Big Sur's redesign is an unusable mess. Window borders are pure white. Contrast is non-existent, especially on buttons (both light and dark modes). Too much transparency, it's not just distracting - the menu bar is often unusable (depending on your wallpaper). Many builtin apps exercise too much freedom in customising the look&feel, everything is inconsistent. I understand this was done to bring the design language closer to iOS, or to make iOS apps feel more at home on the Mac. They are not - every time you run an iOS app, it really feels out of place.
Some of this can be remedied with accessibility settings. Most things will likely stay broken until someone at Apple calls for yet another pointless redesign that will break something else in return.
Mobile inspired UI includes Catalyst apps, System Settings, Control Center, narrow dialogs with centered text and buttons, all icons the same shape, title bars gone.
So 1. I'm using the wrong hardware. It's my fault. 2. I'm using the wrong browser. 3. I should be working out the dependency story and compiling some driver from Github myself.
It's 2023. For me that means my OS cannot hardware decode video. It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.
I don't think it's your fault and I don't think you're using the wrong browser.
> I should be working out the dependency story and compiling some driver from Github myself.
no, nvidia _should_ make it easier for people using the 3rd most popular desktop OS to use their hardware. It would make them more competitive against AMD and Intel, which both support hardware video decoding.
That's probably not going to happen, so the next best option is to install a package from the package manager [0]. There might be some kind of compilation needed, but in my experience that's rarely an issue (aside from time), especially if it's coming out of the package manager for a popular distribution.
> It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.
well, 99% of PC users with Nvidia hardware. It's an important distinction since this problem is specific to Nvidia. If the solution is to installing a package from the package manager, it's only as difficult as installing the browser in the first place.
I do agree there's some extra questions that may make things difficult, or unfamiliar for the vast majority of people, though. Like how is someone supposed to know they need the nvidia-vaapi-driver package anyway?
I share your frustration about the Nvidia situation. However, if you want to run a certain operating system and have a good experience, you need to buy hardware that's well-supported on that operating system. It's as simple as that. This is a little like buying an M1 Mac and complaining that Linux doesn't run well on it.
I've tried this specific driver every which way and it just will not work for me. At hour two I had a moment of, "am I actually hand holding an OS through learning how to watch a video that my phone can do effortlessly 10 years ago?"
Oh I remember now, it was missing a whole bunch of dependencies on Jammy, so it was taking me down a dark path of figuring out the compilation story for a bunch of stuff.
I'm not interested in babysitting my OS. I have real work I want to do with my limited time. It's a very frustrating UX... insofar as there basically is no UX.
I feel exactly like that on bad days. On good days though, I'm happy using a heterogenous environment. I can use a Mac to play games or watch movies; Linux to productively write backend code rather than waste time fighting Docker-in-VM; or OpenBSD to feel a brief, soothing wave of sanity.
I think there is still hope for Windows as well. It's basically like the Star Trek movies: every bad release seems to be followed by a slightly better one.
The only thing I can't quite make peace with is using #ffffff for window decorations. Whatever you're smoking Apple, it's time to quit it.
>Not one option feels “good” to me. There’s just levels of tolerable.
isn't that just life in general? You compromise with family, with where you work, with how much you pay for stuff at the store, even with your own mind. Nothing is ever ideal.
The anti-Win 11 complaints here are entirely valid, however a $5 shareware StartAllBack restores many of the things people liked about prior Windows versions, like the Start Menu, clock, Explorer menus, etc. Winaero Tweaker (free) is another similar program for restoring some older features.
This doesn't excuse Microsoft for screwing up so many aspects of Windows but a $5 option to fix most of the things that bother me is a no-brainer.
Pro Tip: If you create a Win 11 USB install drive with the Rufus utility, you can pre-define a local user and get around the cloud account sign-in roadblock when installing Windows.
Some modern gaming gear kind of requires windows to setup basic functionality like turning off lights and stuff. Now, windows has been crap for a while, but it really amazed me that multimedia keys that work on Linux and Mac, somehow require the stupid software to enable functionality that is already configured in firmware.
> First, Microsoft account sign-in was made mandatory instead of optional (though third-party tools like Rufus can work around this, and Windows 11 Pro still lets you use a local account if you know all the right buttons to click). It's the Microsoft account sign-in that prompts most of the annoying behavior during the OOBE process.
I think this is becoming yet another "boiling the frog" strategy: You don't even have to make this stuff completely impossible - you only have to add enough friction and general unpleasantness that the (mental) costs of using a local account exceed the benefits.
Then companies have their cake and eat it too: To everyone saying they are now forced to use an account they can reply "oh no, it's technically still possible to use the software without an account, so no coercion happens" while everyone who actually tries to do so will either give up or look like a lunatic.
I got to tell ya, one of the blissful things about using a Chromebook is that they don't pull this shit at all.
Sure, Google's an ad company, and the telemetry is taken for granted, but they don't put animated, undeletable shit in the app menu, there's never a popup to remind me I haven't purchased something, or even that some obscure, irrelevant system process died or needs attention. There's no shovelware; how could there be?
Surely they have many years to enshittify this as well, but in 2023, the ChromeOS experience is clean and mature, it's less expensive, and it's easy on your resources.
Not by choice, I was given a new laptop from HP that required signing into a Microsoft account before the computer would continue its initial setup. I to create a throwaway account just to access the computer my office paid for. That and the cloud-basing of all software (can you even get office for desktop anymore?) and increasingly, it seems like the management of software is taken out of the hands of the user.
it's really terrible. I recently had an awful experience with apple and dumped all my apple products and moved to windows. I really feel microsoft's multi-monitor support, wsl, compatibility is a lot better, but the built in spyware from microsoft is outrageous.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadImagine if your local supermarket regularly reshuffled all the wares because this would force the customers to rediscover the location of everything again. This is the kind of thing that is being pushed? How do we stop this? To me this seems like a complete and utter resignation of human decision-making and empathy to machine driven metrics. "Computers says that my doohickey metric went up by 30% this month, I'll get a nice bonus".
The end caps might change periodically, but the location of 99% of items is the same every time I have gone.
Costco would probably be guilty of moving things around the most, but I assume this is partly due to their logistics and partly due to them wanting people to browse.
He says that this is actually a threshold poll, and if too many people respond "yes" that triggers the Grand Reshuffling of Merchandise overnight!
I actually think he's exactly right. Why does a cashier care whether you found everything? You're already checking out, it's too late to go hunting for more, and the cashier can't be the one who could help you look. So it's not an invitation to customer service, it's simply gauging your satisfaction.
UK supermarkets go so far as to randomly drop free promo items “by accident” into baskets for online delivery in the knowledge that people will get hooked on the new thing, so you can’t escape it just by going online.
I will say costco will often move a product I regularly buy to an endcap to put it on sale. Then I can't find it anymore and am unable to buy it that week. I've tried asking the employees where it went but they never know either. Now I do a brief scan and then give up. For all I know they stopped carrying the product entirely.
https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-email/167957-truly-blank-...
Edit: I have a regedit file with the value "about:blank" and it just takes a double click.
That's awesome. Just emailed the link to myself to add it to my decrapify scripts.
For Microsoft Edge, both on my personal computers and work computer about:blank is my home page and new tab page. (Home: Edge version 115.0.1901.203; Windows Pro 22H2)
Under the "When Edge starts" setting, I select "Open these pages:" and add "about:blank"
I don't use windows very often, so I usually shut it down instead of hibernate so I can access its drive if needed from Linux. So it's a pain to reload all the pages from the last time, because I'll probably need them, that's why they were active.
In my case, I've found a "blank tab" or similar extensions which works well enough.
Oh Glob yes. De-venoming Edge is part of my RDP setup routine.
Sometimes I still need to use some legacy program or whatever on there but I feel like the last time I booted into that thing was over a month ago now.
The taskbar “Search” box had a new “fun” little icon representing whatever search item they wanted to advertise to me today. Had to find windows “tips” site to work out how to turn it off…
Not as egregious as “full screen game adverts on login screen by default” though.
It boggles my mind how people don't find it absolutely infuriating. I watch quite a lot of streams and people always have 3 things enabled that I personally would disable instantly:
- huge searchbox taking a good 1/3 of the taskbar (I've yet to see anyone use this control for initiating a search)
- the playful icon in this huge searchbox (you mentioned it)
- Weather widget in the taskbar (just why?)
I assume that vast majority of Windows users just don't care.
Most of them it's not so much that they don't care as it is that they've been literally brainwashed their entire lives to believe that Windows holds the top market position because it's somehow "superior" to other operating systems. They really truly believe the decades old Ballmer FUD about other operating systems. It's impossible in their minds that Microsoft gained such a stranglehold over the PC operating system market through completely unethical, borderline illegal means, and no amount of well-documented historical fact can change their minds about it. It's very nearly a literal cult.
now with all that said, on topic: I haven't seen this search fun icon nor really any ads on W11. Don't know if that's because I opted out of any personalized targeting or whatnot, but I wasn't nagged much once I got everything installed and customized my toolar.
I install Windows only for job interviews. Usually I install it 2 days ahead, and keep running windows update repeatedly, until it finally finishes with everything, and I can use the system for a 30 minutes call, before I would install a usable OS.
Maybe a bit tangential: until about 10 years ago I used only Windows. One day I tried make something bluetooth related work on it, I don't even remember what. I just remember that it kept failing in a very cryptic way. It got me so angry after many hours that I just deleted the whole OS, and swore that I will learn Linux starting immediately, and that will be my main system going forward. It became my career after a few months, lol. Don't know if I should be grateful for Windows or not.
Lmao nah that shit doesn't work
If that fails there are chip specific tools you can use to read/write to the right partitions, such as the fantastic EDL tool for Qualcomm devices:
https://github.com/bkerler/edl
I'll be honest: I find it that it's very much a hit nowadays, rather than a miss.
With Valve doing so much work around Proton I can basically buy a random Windows-only game off Steam and... it just works. I don't even remember anymore a time when a game I wanted to play didn't just work.
(Of course this doesn't include multiplayer games with anti-cheat. If you like those then yes, you still need Windows.)
I used to dual-boot for a few games, but nowadays I just don't bother anymore. I check protondb beforehand and most of the games I played just ran without issues. I think the last time I booted Windows for games was for Space Engineers a couple of years ago (which seems to work now, but looks like a pain to set up).
> and some video conference software (e.g. webex with camera
Meh, IME webex works fine enough in a browser (Firefox/X11). I haven't had any more issues under than Linux than my colleagues running Windows. Even Teams is just as crappy under Linux.
> [bluetooth]
I like when people complain about Linux and the proverbial crappy sound issues. The best Bluetooth headphone experience I've ever had was hands down Linux (though I've never had AirPods). It's the only one which connects reliably to my phones right away (macos was usually good enough at this) and it's also the only one that can use the better codec (ldac).
For that reason, I made sure I rotated through all my VMs about once a month, just spin up and down for no other reason but updating.
These are often useful, so the better option is to host your own privacy-respecting versions of these tools.
We live in a times that are good for developers: we not only have free access to powerful tools that other professionals need to pay big bucks but it goes even further: with open source we can co-shape these tools and in the extreme cases fork and create our own derivatives.
Why not take advantage of this and just avoid proprietary solutions as much as possible?
> The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.
For me there are multiple parallel "side quests" and decloud is definitely one of them (I strive to minimize cloud and select solutions that can be self hosted and that are E2EE. Then I pay for hosting anyway but I always have an option of rolling my own. Example: etesync for calendars and contacts).
Other side quests: instead of Gnome use Sway, this requires manually picking wifi/Bluetooth connection managers (iwctl and bluetoothctl work well) and other tooling.
Yet another: convert my entire family to use Linux. Sadly this is harder since schools teach Windows but Gnome looks very similar to what they use.
These are just some examples. The good thing is that all of these are small steps that can be taken in any order to improve the situation in small increments.
Unless you are dealing with a kernel panic, this will work.
It works on Windows also and in my opinion is better than the default on there too.
Also good to note: there's tons of problems uniquely with windows that I'm sure are just "computer problems" and "computer slowness" to you, and you never blame windows.
"Basic" in Windows is all stuff you can easily do with a mouse. Getting anywhere with Linux requires comfort with the command line, OK, but even after spending a decent amount of time, there are lots of system-specific and application-specific commands that you need to master to actually get the system humming. And a total rabbit hole when errors start to pop up. Getting a handle on all of this, being able to understand and fix errors, this is well beyond "basic" and the condescending attitude "just need to learn a few more basic skills" is a huge turn-off. Saying nothing is more helpful than telling someone they just need to learn "basic skills."
Linux requires being super comfortable on the keyboard, using cli nearly exclusively and recalling with perfect accuracy arcane letter incantations which if you know the guy who wrote the program and the full name of his dog makes sense but to everyone else is just random letters strung together.
If something hangs I just kill or pkill it via the terminal.
Having everything lock up I don’t think I’ve ever seen, only way I could see that happen is a runaway process eats all the memory of the machine, and somehow dodges the OOM killer. Especially if the machine is configured with no swap (don’t do that).
And I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t really like linux.
> forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal
Have you considered that “copy pasting random nonsense into terminal” could be the source of your issues?
I usually end up using something like htop for a quick overview, together with nvidia-smi when I do GPU-related stuff.
> any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up.
I've not had this happen for as long as I've used Linux, besides GPU driver bugs/crashes that brought down the computer, but I've had this happen more frequently on Windows than Linux. Processes using up all CPU should make the computer a lot slower to use, but shouldn't bring it down. Processes using up all RAM should be killed by the OOM manager that you distribution should include (but anyways you should have swap setup to avoid the situation in the first place). Processes using up all disk space is a bit harder, but again shouldn't bring the computer down.
> a lot of things magically stop working or break, forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal.
I'm guessing the problem of having things stop working/breaking "magically" is a effect of random copypasting stuff into the terminal, not the other way around.
Linux does want you to learn about the system in order for you to not mangle it, which has it's good and bad sides. Think of it like a chef having sharp knives in order to do their job better, it's true that you could do more damage if you fuck up, but their job requires them to have professional knowledge about the tools they use, and the knowledge about how to use those tools in a good way.
I see people offering nice advice here but I mostly do ps aux | grep thing and then kill (-9) it... or killall :)
> any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up.
I had the everything freeze up experience initially on a Dell laptop and frankly don't know what was the cause. Maybe missing microcode updates or old firmware? Nowadays it almost never happens (I don't remember it happening over the months). I have an app crash (like Firefox) ~once a month but it's so rare I barely notice.
Note: I also do this on macOS but it’s much less useful since there are very few commands to actually restore a session that’s locked up.
On some systems you need to enable this feature first, so try it out once to see if it works and look up how to enable it, if it doesn't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
On most distros, you can also get into a command line, with the combination CTRL + ALT + F1 - F8 (try out which function keys do it for you and how to get back to the GUI). There you can use `ps`, `kill <pid>`, `reboot now` or restart the GUI. I'd keep a note of the exact commands on my phone just in case.
As a sidenote, I've had an issue on a good windows desktop PC where it freezes when watching YouTube or ither streaming services. I can still move the mouse for a bit, but clicking does nothing and I'm unable to even save it from a hard reset with Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Sometimes it won't happen for weeks, but if I'm unlucky multiple times in an hour. Look up "PC freezes while watching YouTube" and you will see I'm far from alone with this issue, Asus motherboards with new AMD processors seem to be the common factor. Haven't had this happen on Linux yet (dual boot) and I've tried everything to avoid these unusual freezes in windows, but nothing seems to help.
I am hoping someone comes up with a fully dis-arcaned distro. Especially ditch (or remap) goofy command line relics into the obvious and easily remembered. Why do we still use CP instead of Copy? Legacy stuff that greybeards would freak if it were changed. Let them use a greybeard distro and make one that is for joe user.
Yes, I use Mint and it is still full of arcane crap.
That's the Windows way. It's a bad fit for Linux, because there is no one true obsessively-backwards-compatible Linux.
The good news is we don't need it: Linux isn't a black box, so we don't need to guess or study its behavior. We can look it up instead. The goal here is to construct understanding from documentation, as opposed to deconstructing behavior from testing.
Some great starting points to get your bearings are:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/
- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page
- man pages
Microsoft simply must believe that Windows can survive the users hating this crap, and I fear they are right. For myself 11 was bad enough to finally try out Steam on Debian and was pleasantly surprised. KDE is closer to being the Windows desktop I want than Windows 11 is, which is just insane.
Minor point for the article, OOBE is a very widespread term in the consumer technology industry, not MS specific.
So I can't imagine I'm seeing the same thing as what's got so many people up in arms about the start menu. Did I get a weird OEM configuration? It's a newish Lenovo Legion laptop. I haven't changed any start menu settings.
To answer that question, check out the screenshot in the article. If you have a similar spittoon-load of crapware installed, you have the same experience as ~everyone else and for some reason you aren't registering it.
If you don't, something ethical happened.
They're trivial to remove and don't affect performance. When I think crapware, I think bloaty nonsense that no one needs or wants like Bonzi Buddy or 900 different browser toolbars. I don't see unpinning a few things on a fresh install as some great burden.
Spyware is still every bit as invasive and harmful as it was in the Bonzi Buddy days, but it looks a bit different and now ships as part of OS itself. You should try to unblind yourself to it because no matter how much you think you aren't affected by it you are absolutely being taken advantage of.
Those shortcuts weren't put there for you as a courtesy. Those are paid advertisements
I mean, logistically I'd expect parent to agree with that. They don't take up any additional space that you, the end-user, could take advantage of (because they were on the system partition).
Personally, I agree that stating which programs are to be installed on your hardware is a good way to determine who actually owns the hardware, but if parent is logically consistent, then sure: it'd be "just a shortcut" that the average end-user will take advantage of.
Start menu is slow as shit
I have w11 at work and w10 at home and i see the diff
http://www.classicshell.net/
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Control = control
Alt = meta
Windows flag key = super
I dont really ever go into Quick Actions or use notifications in windows
Genuinely had not noticed there are ads in there. But there are, you are right. Well, I see a single 'suggested app' advert for a game.
Also I disabled web results in Windows Search a while back, maybe that helped
It's gross but it's sort of the norm now. Why shouldn't Microsoft do it if that's ok when apple does it?
'Apple doesn't mandate Apple ID sign-in. Apple does put "helpful" "reminders" about setting up Apple Pay, iCloud backups, and a few other things into its setup screens, but it doesn't take your full screen over again to try to get you to opt in to things you've already said no to. There is a notification in the Settings app asking you to sign in and set a few things up if you haven't, but they're dismissable, and they stay dismissed. Safari doesn't pester you to switch back to it once you've switched away, like a 4-year-old who asks you what time it is every time the clock changes (I don't know if this is a widely relatable example, but it's my lived reality at present). There are no third-party applications installed beyond the under-the-hood open source bits and pieces that are baked into macOS's foundations.'
And:
'My frustration is not so much with what Microsoft is doing but how it is doing it. So many of Microsoft's reminders and notifications feel like they happen at the expense of respecting the user's choices.'
Personally I find the dislike of both to be reasonable and I don't think Microsoft's is much worse than apple.
>A Microsoft 365 trial offer.
>A 100GB OneDrive offer.
>A $1 introductory PC Game Pass offer.
Whats so bad about those?
I disagree. Ecosystems enable better ux, look at Apple.
Also nobody prevents you from moving your files from OneDrive to e.g Google
Or using Google docs instead of MS Word
I would also not be surprised if they are banking on people accidentally clicking Yes to make the annoyance go away.
Is there law for that?
There was such a thing for browsers, but I dont know about services
I think what's happening here is two things: First, a personal computing device is fundamentally an extension of your own self into the digital world, functioning similar to how you use your limbs to interact with the physical world. Having a personal computing device overtly act in someone else's interest and not yours is not that dissimilar to having someone else manipulate your arms and legs to force you to go to certain places or interact with things that you don't want to.
Second, most ads have the redeeming quality of being ignorable. If there's an ad on a billboard, I can look somewhere else instead or just close my eyes. If there's an ad on a news website, I can (hopefully!) scroll past it. If there's an ad in my dreams (or indeed, on my home screen), it's forcing itself on me and violating that premise of ignorability.
Id never call dumb ass computer as a "my extension" despite the fact that it pays me well and I use it a lot.
Maybe if youre social media addict then yea.
well maybe that's the issue. I see it more like operating a car than me acting as some avatar renovating my house. Ideally there'd be a smooth flat empty road, but there will be bumps, annoying people, billboards, and sketch sand roads. It's all a part of the journey, and in many cases I'm riding through a pre-defined world.
At least I can remove more of these in the ditital world.
Anyone who thinks otherwise, do go through a full install and then observe how many apps are installed that you cannot uninstall.
And it's true that you can't really uninstall things from Windows either... Xbox 360 Bar... it will be there forever. If you ever touch Windows Hello PIN logon, that will never be disabled again.
The only way to have an OS install be minimal is to choose a Linux, a distro will likely give you lots of things you may not want still (i.e. games, the office suite) but at least you can uninstall those all quickly.
Thank goodness for Linux being the solution for 99% of time.
At least all this junk doesn't start up random daemons, like windows does.
On top of that you also have to run tools like O&O ShutUp10++ to shut off all telemetry settings.
It's like Windows is working against me... I just wanted an OS for my parents laptop and instead I have all this bloatware.
Windows 10 LTSC is the same. (Windows 11 LTSC will come later next year)
I use these for years and don't have any problems.
How much does that cost compared to Pro or Home? I cannot even find the pricing for it.
MS doesn't care either, they rather have you pirating it than switch to Mac
Mobile devices wake instantly. Official app stores are much safer from malware than the Windows software acquisition ecosystem of running an Internet search, the first search result being malware, he website having fake download buttons, and downloading often unsigned .exe files. There’s no anti-virus software bogging down I/O. There’s less maintenance like disk defragmentation, Windows Updates that take an hour and require a forced restart. Users can’t get lost opening a file they downloaded because files are hidden away through the abstraction of apps. If you’re just consuming content you might not even own a PC.
Windows is full of garbage. MacOS jumped the shark on UI and is irritating in so many ways as it tries to be some Frankenstein’s monster of a desktop and mobile-inspired UI. And Linux is incapable of watching videos in a browser without destroying my CPU (Nvidia lacks hardware video decoding on Linux) and continues with all the classic “engineers don’t do UX” problems.
Not one option feels “good” to me. There’s just levels of tolerable.
Some of this can be remedied with accessibility settings. Most things will likely stay broken until someone at Apple calls for yet another pointless redesign that will break something else in return.
That’s a hot take. Big Sur’s redesign is perfectly fine.
The only redesign I hate is Settings (especially since it disallows full screen, WHY?), but the rest is fine, and arguably less « in your face »
That's… not true. Fact, they don't support VA-API, but there is support for some other methods like NVDEC.
Programs like mpv can use it directly while for something like Firefox you can use a wrapper like nvidia-vaapi-driver[1].
It's not ideal, but that's what you get from buying their stuff.
[1] https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver
It's 2023. For me that means my OS cannot hardware decode video. It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.
> I should be working out the dependency story and compiling some driver from Github myself.
no, nvidia _should_ make it easier for people using the 3rd most popular desktop OS to use their hardware. It would make them more competitive against AMD and Intel, which both support hardware video decoding.
That's probably not going to happen, so the next best option is to install a package from the package manager [0]. There might be some kind of compilation needed, but in my experience that's rarely an issue (aside from time), especially if it's coming out of the package manager for a popular distribution.
> It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.
well, 99% of PC users with Nvidia hardware. It's an important distinction since this problem is specific to Nvidia. If the solution is to installing a package from the package manager, it's only as difficult as installing the browser in the first place.
I do agree there's some extra questions that may make things difficult, or unfamiliar for the vast majority of people, though. Like how is someone supposed to know they need the nvidia-vaapi-driver package anyway?
[0] - https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver#package-manag...
Oh I remember now, it was missing a whole bunch of dependencies on Jammy, so it was taking me down a dark path of figuring out the compilation story for a bunch of stuff.
I'm not interested in babysitting my OS. I have real work I want to do with my limited time. It's a very frustrating UX... insofar as there basically is no UX.
I think there is still hope for Windows as well. It's basically like the Star Trek movies: every bad release seems to be followed by a slightly better one.
The only thing I can't quite make peace with is using #ffffff for window decorations. Whatever you're smoking Apple, it's time to quit it.
isn't that just life in general? You compromise with family, with where you work, with how much you pay for stuff at the store, even with your own mind. Nothing is ever ideal.
This doesn't excuse Microsoft for screwing up so many aspects of Windows but a $5 option to fix most of the things that bother me is a no-brainer.
I think this is becoming yet another "boiling the frog" strategy: You don't even have to make this stuff completely impossible - you only have to add enough friction and general unpleasantness that the (mental) costs of using a local account exceed the benefits.
Then companies have their cake and eat it too: To everyone saying they are now forced to use an account they can reply "oh no, it's technically still possible to use the software without an account, so no coercion happens" while everyone who actually tries to do so will either give up or look like a lunatic.
Sure, Google's an ad company, and the telemetry is taken for granted, but they don't put animated, undeletable shit in the app menu, there's never a popup to remind me I haven't purchased something, or even that some obscure, irrelevant system process died or needs attention. There's no shovelware; how could there be?
Surely they have many years to enshittify this as well, but in 2023, the ChromeOS experience is clean and mature, it's less expensive, and it's easy on your resources.
Yet.
A wizard for modification.