For me, it was worse. It happened every time I booted Windows because I only used it occasionally to play games.
After I select Windows in the boot menu, I'd spend like ten minutes waiting for Windows Update to complete. Then I have to click through a series of full screen ads and prompts to disable my privacy settings, which is getting increasingly difficult with all the dark patterns thrown in after every new release. It really shows a lack of respect for the user, taking my computer hostage while I resist their attempts to enable numerous privacy-invading settings that I declined over and over and over.
Over the years, this made me distrust Windows so much that I removed anything critical off of it. I removed my password manager, deleted my browsing data, and made sure to remove anything tied to an online account except Steam.
Then I finally had enough and moved my games over to Linux. So far, the experience is good and I'm glad that WINE is going through active improvements.
I also use Windows occasionally to launch a single game. My experience is the same as yours. All sorts of nags that have nothing to do with launching a single game. Every update either breaks stuff, changes settings, or adds ads somewhere.
I return to my main Mac after 2 months on the road, and nothing has changed. It boots right up, and might occasionally ask me if I want to install updates in the evening.
I bought another Mac recently. I didn't have to turn a bunch of things off. I wasn't tricked into accepting anything. By comparison it took me a whole day to update my Surface tablet and turn off all manners of growth hacking before I returned it.
If someone behaved like Microsoft does, I'd keep an eye on my drink when they're around.
In my limited experience with VMs, I have found that it's easier to skip it if you disconnect your internet before booting windows. It doesn't remove it completely, but it can save a few clicks. The page where they try to force you to connect a Windows account can be very hard to bypass sometimes with internet access.
Many apps have become user hostile in the past years, including social media and even our software-driven vehicles...
It's a very stressful thing to deal with, and congress does nothing to stop it because they're too busy trading stock investment info for insider profit...
We are not totally powerless though, hacking and warez are on the rise again, lots of people are declining updates, and even returning to older software versions, and nothing has ever stopped us from creating a good old-fashioned picket line in front of Microsoft HQ, or any other predatory software making company for that matter.
I don't see why it's "not acceptable" at all. Why shouldn't they treat users this way? They can make more money with all these annoyances, and the people who hate it are just going to complain on internet forums and keep using Windows anyway. Seems like a good business strategy to me. Any time a business is in a position where they can abuse their customers endlessly and the customers will refuse to leave, it would be a breach of fiduciary duty not to abuse them for more profit.
An easily accessible option of “never” is probably more reckless. My MIL would always pick never and at the same time expect that her PC is fully protected.
That said there should be a setting for savvy users or enterprises to disable updates.
I wish Apple was actually good in that regard. I ended up uninstalling Apple Stocks app from my Mac and iPhone because of all the terrible ads. The ads I saw were even worse than this:
I saw this coming a few months ago and had the same reaction.
I was already in the market for a new PC. I'm just finalizing what version of Linux I want to run for my dev work and then I'm going to offload my Adobe work onto a Mac Mini and finally get rid of Windows once and for all.
This kinda of user-hostile malware is very frustrating, as many of platforms Microsoft creates I find quite pleasent technically. However some small hoard of product managers and growth engineers chasing their metrics are ruining Windows.
What grinds my gears is the scheduled waking from sleep to check for updates. And then it often doesn't go back to sleep afterwards for some reason.
Oh! And if you go into the task scheduler to hunt down the half dozen different places this function is called from, they just get turned back on with the next update.
Why stop there? Maybe the next version of Teams, will have commercial breaks during your daily stand-up? ... Microsoft is making 2023 the year of the Linux Desktop. :-)
In Settings>System>Notifications> go to the bottom and expand the last row. In it there's an option to Show you ways to improve something something. Uncheck that.
This only happens when Windows has a major updaye, usually overnight if you leave your PC on. On the next startup you're always greeted with a full screen overview of new features, setup, etc.
Perhaps require acknowledging an ad to open or save a document? With full OS integration and demonstrated willingness to expose any user to advertising, the possibilities are numerous.
Let me close the Apple Music window for this App I can't uninstall, and that popup that says I can't save my notes unless I have iCloud, and look past the automatically included Apple News and Apple Financed widgets in the notification panel I accidentally opened to go open a browser that defaults to showing me the shortcuts for several third party companies whose services I do not use to get on the internet to gloat about my superior choice.
/s
[For the record, all of this is bad, and I constantly wonder why my government thinks there isn't a monopoly problem here, I'm just kinda amused how much hate windows gets in particular, especially since I strongly suspect disabling this is a registry change away, which is not the case for many things I dislike about the computer I am using to type this.]
The difference is that ads in Windows don’t go away even if you already subscribe to all possible Microsoft services. I own a license for Windows 11 Pro, pay for Microsoft 365, and use Edge as my default browser. But I’m still shown ads inside Windows. What more do I need to do to stop them??
In contrast, Apple’s ads are slight nudges at best. You can even uninstall the Apple Music app on your iOS device if you want. I’ve done this, and Siri correctly uses the Spotify app to play music every time I ask it to. Can you imagine Microsoft doing the same?
I was thinking the same thing. Apple berates the user quite a bit to onboard to iCloud and other services; the screenshot of the new promotion looks about in line with that. If I was a Microsoft PM I'd just pitch the menu as "Apple has the same thing and users are complacent", and get sign off in no time.
I think this is fine battle to pick, I have OneDrive uninstalled on my Windows machine, but I think it's a bit silly a lot of users on here are fine with functionally the same ad somewhere else, I don't want to be berated anywhere on any OS.
macOS keeps a permanent 'important' notification in Settings if you don't setup iCloud. I see it every week when I use the iMac in the theater I help out at.
Yup. I don't understand why people choose to rag on Microsoft when literally everyone else who has something to sell you besides the OS itself, does this. Maybe it's because Windows is from the era when MS was not a services company, and people, by force of inertia, expect windows to continue behaving as if MS is not a services company.
You’re right that it’s a double standard, but to an extent, when I buy an Apple device I know what I’m getting into. Lots of people buy Apple because of the integration. Not many people are forced into using macOS, but many many people are forced to use Windows thanks to Microsoft’s anti-competitive policies.
Windows is also adding this bullshit after decades of being bullshit-free, and even when you do sign up for all their services the overall experience of using them sucks ass compared to the Apple implementation.
It is death of an operating system. Before our eyes. Microsoft is trying desperately to squeeze a bit more cash out of it but the failing culture within Microsoft is unable to recognise they are driving users off their own product.
I already got fed up enough that I basically banned Windows at home and I am impatiently waiting to kill one last Windows box. It is our gaming machine that is generally available to entire household of 5 (3 adults and 2 kids). All other machines (we have 7 other machines, 6 laptops and a desktop) are either Windows laptops converted to Linux or new Macbooks and it seems we will only have more MacOS now that Apple got a bit more sane with their hardware choices.
I may leave one Windows instance running in Proxmox just in case if somebody needs it.
For what it's worth, a ton of people inside of MSFT are opposed to these changes. The few responsible for them are answering to overwhelming pressure from the Finance side.
Every time something like this ships out, guaranteed just about every CVP fields angry/annoyed/exasperated complaints about it.
Unfortunately, it's perfectly logical. On the one hand you have $x/year and the other you have $0/year. The argument that all this marketing stuff in the OS is having a negative financial effect is extremely hard to prove.
This is where having a strong minded CEO comes into play. You literally have to have someone who can say "although this makes us less money, this is correct approach". In an organization whose entire purpose is to make money, very few people have the authority to make that call.
Longtime Windows users here—migrating away because the OS has become a marketing tool instead of the productivity behemoth that it once was. Yes, there are still TONS OF THINGS THAT WINDOWS DOES BETTER THAN EVERY OTHER OS, but what Windows is becoming is causing me to overlook this.
The next step for me here will be migrating clients off of Windows on their machines too.
> but the failing culture within Microsoft is unable to recognise they are driving users off their own product.
Many recognise it, but don't care. Windows is not longer the cash-cow it once was even on the server. Azure is the new baby there – they don't care what server OS you run as long as you run it on their kit. In homes and offices Windows is just a vehicle for Office and Visual Studio, they are pushing people more towards the online office variants of Office (users therefore becoming dependent on a subscription for access to apps and storage/backups). Back to the server, and SQL Server runs on Linux these days or (even better for them) Azure-native.
If it wouldn't look terrible to just dump Windows, I'm fairly sure they would do so soon if they hadn't already. It would save them all the hassle of hardware compatibility, dealing with manufactures, being blamed for instability cause by bad drivers (on top of instability cause by bad Windows that is their fault!). They could let Linux & Apple deal with all that crap, and just sell cloud services, Office/SQL/Exchange licences, etc. to users of those OSs. They'd keep something of Windows on their console, but that is minute in comparison because it only needs to be the core & they control the hardware selection, and again that is just a vehicle with which to sell a subscription service to the end user and licensing/SDKs to developers.
Windows is only really moving forwards at all due to momentum, MS would rather be concentrating on other things that are more profitable for less hassle & questionable press.
I used azure at a previous job and it was awful, I even convinced the company to ditch it and buy a cheap local server. The end result is it was faster, they saved money and things worked better. If microsoft is really betting all its cards on azure then I would absolutely short it if I was into finance.
Once my Windows 10 no longer works I will NOT be upgrading to Windows 11, I will either go linux or mac because I can’t tolerate microsofts crap anymore. I will never pay for an azure office or visual studio subscription, I will avoid microsoft products like the plague after all the crap they pulled and I have been using windows since version 3.11
Just as Valve are making Linux way more viable for gaming, there are still pain points if you are into certain stuff with anti-cheat that doesn't like it, as I understand it, but for my use case, my Steam Deck plays everything I personally want right now extremely well. When my Windows 10 install on my dedicated gaming PC finally gets too old, I may just switch to SteamOS for gaming.
Same - I switched to Pop!_OS last year and after a decade or two of being disappointed with the claims that Linux gaming had come a long way, I'm very impressed with Valve's Proton compatibility.
I've been gaming on Void Linux of all things since November and it's run everything that isn't just flat out incompatible with Linux (anti-cheat doesn't allow, etc).
Sometimes I think it sucks that I can't play X because the anti-cheat won't allow it to start, then I remember it's a kernel level driver I cross my fingers and hope isn't doing anything nefarious and feel better.
The Windows 10 for business installs at $work seem to be clean. I don't know if that's IT's doing or that's the default. So this could be a classic "if you're not paying for it you're the product" issue
The problem is that Windows Enterprise isn't sold to individual users (and if it did, you'd still have to run a domain controller on Windows Server alongside it). Windows Professional still gets most of the same crappy behavior as Home.
The first definable moment where I think Windows started being at risk was release of iPhone and then smartphones that followed it (so say 2008). But even then it wasn't yet clear that smartphones will take over the world so thoroughly and drive people from using laptops.
Until that moment I would definitely project that the future will see more and more people having access to laptops. Only after it was clear people are more likely going to go with smartphones (around 2009-2010) it was reasonable to say that the market share of Windows has to start falling in favour of smartphones.
And it still wasn't clear that the same will be true even within laptop/desktop market.
Microsoft is primarily a cloud services company now. Legacy products need to fund themselves and it's difficult to get much for a Windows consumer license these days, so the Windows group has to find revenue where they can. At least the people in the Office group have a nice revenue stream from Office 365. Consumer Windows just isn't a viable standalone product anymore, at least not one that can cover its own costs easily. Windows Server still brings in revenue for licenses, so whatever development on Server that makes its way over to Consumer is probably a subsidy, though I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to have one department charge another for services.
If a third party other than Microsoft remotely administered something like this it would probably be labeled a "botnet". No doubt the amount of data that Microsoft exfiltrates about Windows users is at least as much as any "botnet" would, probably much more. Customers have about as much control over what Microsoft decides it wants to do as they do over so-called botnets. As an original Windows 3.11 user (LAN-only, no internet), it's amazing to see how far from sanity things have gone. Computer owners born into this new world of always-on, uncontrollable remote administration would have little reason to know any different. (HN readers or similar being an exception.)
NB. I use the term "remote administration" in a general sense, not only in the "remote desktop" sense. Wikipedia's definition is "any method of controlling a computer from a remote location". For example, automatically connecting to a remote computer, downloading, installing and running code that controls the computer, without any user intervention.
Network hardware, too. Just look at how many access points and routers insist on you managing your network through the clown. Yeah, hand the keys to your kingdom to a third party for the "convenience" of managing your network anywhere in the world from your phone.
No, I don't WANT to manage my network from a phone, save via a VPN into said network.
Don't they still charge a $100+ license for Windows? I have Windows 10 for games, but I haven't booted into it in months since Steam has been fantastic on Linux (relative to it's past, it has some ways to go).
I'll be the classic Linux desktop optimist: the improvements over the last four years along have been fantastic and I really hope for a future when it can meet everyone's needs.
My OS shouldn't advertise to me. It shouldn't sell my data, or shouldn't do anything like that. It especially shouldn't harass me to log into the owning company's account. I shouldn't need any internet account to just use the OS (missing features relates the said account is obviously reasonable).
The difference between home and pro is very small these days. Hyper-V, BitLocker, and Group Policy, are basically it. You can grab a cheap OEM licence to upgrade Home to Pro very easily for far less than $200.
Erm. No? I use it and I don't remember ads that I can't disable (honestly I don't remember ads in windows except in Edge but thats different story), or some tricky interruption on windows load.
In Hungary you can get them as cheap as $7-$10, because of the EU regulation that you can't exclusively bundle hardware and software. Meanwhile the retail version is $91, for the cheapest Home version. Ridiculous.
I feel like I'm on crazy pills when I complain about these things and all the other intrusions Windows pops up at me every time I use the operating system... Yet, the people who use it (mostly gamers), seem to think it's all fine and the operating system is great.
If you’re a gamer, how do you interact with the computer?
You launch Steam, see a bunch of ads, launch Epic Game Store or GOG Galaxy and see a bunch of ads, so why wouldn’t you see ads in the start menu?
Hell, you have to log in to an account for the “GeForce Experience”. Just to keep your graphics card drivers automatically updated.
As soon as you’re in a game, the game is full-screen. You’re not switching apps, you’re not creating anything, you’re just consuming content, and ads are a part of how we consume content these days.
You're right. Everyone keeps whining "privacy and usability" this and "I already paid for the OS" that. To them, I say: shut up! Don't these people know that computers are only about consuming content? We should be advocating for an even greater ad-filled future for everyone to enjoy
Why aren't we seeing ads in context menus? Why can't I yell "Burger King" into my mic every 10 minutes while streaming to get access to higher bitrates? Why hasn't Microsoft put ads on the BSOD? Why am I not paying a microtransaction every time I start up my computer to get it to skip an ad and boot faster? We are still missing out on some serious advertising potential! Every eyeball that isn't looking at a corporate logo is selfishly wasting time
> you have to log in to an account for the “GeForce Experience”. Just to keep your graphics card drivers automatically updated.
TechPowerUp's NVCleanstall makes it easy to automatically update Nvidia drivers without any login, and also to remove any Nvidia application bloat you don't want. (I exclude GFE and only install the control panel, for example.)
> ...you launch Steam, see a bunch of ads, launch Epic Game Store or GOG Galaxy and see a bunch of ads.
I think it's actually different. These are game stores. When I start Steam or EGS I expect to see game promotions (and *only* game promotions!) and targeting actually works there (e.g. I discovered a couple of games there I then bought and enjoyed).
And finally, at least in Steam I can start directly into my library view, skipping the home screen 'ads'. I would call all that completely acceptable, devoid of the usual dark patterns.
> Yet, the people who use it (mostly gamers), seem to think it's all fine and the operating system is great.
A lot of assumptions in such a short sentence. I suspect there's more than a complex set of opinions around Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, using Windows for gaming, thinking it's all fine, thinking lots of things suck, thinking it is a great operating system, thinking it's a shame it does things outside of the ideal scope of an operating system.
Anecdotally, most of the time I don't see the annoying things on my primary Windows 10 Professional machine. Upon a clean install, there were some nuisances that needed cleaned up. But the vast majority of the time, it is customizable as I desire, while being rock solid / stable, rarely needing reboots to apply updates, and when I go to play games, they just work, and they run super well.
I still hate those nuisances, and I hate that a reboot risks a dark pattern trying to push Windows 11. I hate Windows 11. It currently holds exactly zero advantages (for me) over Windows 10, and lots of disadvantages.
I really like Linux Mint, but I gave it a solid 2 months on my primary gaming machine (which happens to be a laptop) and it fell short in a few key areas. It has a lot of warts, and some games were unstable, performed poorly, or wouldn't connect to multiplayer. I also had no control over the brightness of my screen while using my discrete GPU. For the purposes of gaming, Windows 10 is vastly superior for the set of games I play. And it's a shame, because I do really like the Linux Mint experience for most things, including most games, but the issues are more problematic than the ongoing issues that I have with Windows 10.
> Yet, the people who use it (mostly gamers), seem to think it's all fine and the operating system is great.
I hate Windows these days, but the specific AMD video card in my gaming desktop has buggy drivers in Linux and reliably crashes the whole machine about once every four hours (or, much faster if I actually play a game on it—that's if I'm just web browsing and hanging out in terminals and such) versus my having had zero OS-level crashes on the same hardware over almost three years under Windows 10. So... Windows it is.
IDK, the driver may be fixed now, but the bug had been outstanding for 18+ months when I encountered it, so, I wouldn't bet on it. It seemed to have very little traction. And at this point it's really not worth my time to try, since the machine's working OK as-is, aside from Windows being crap.
Since all I do on Windows is game, having to avoid some ads isn't that big a deal. I spend nearly all my time on it in fullscreen programs anyway, hardly interacting with Windows at all.
So it's "great" in that it actually works correctly on my hardware, and ~all my games work just as they should. It's shit in every other way, but if it's effectively just a game launcher, oh well. I do anything important on other operating systems.
I use Windows and largely my computer usage these days is gaming and some related activities, and things are most definitely not fine and I don't know of anyone else who thinks they are.
What they are, is basically all we have. Thanks mostly to WINE and Valve, Linux gaming is now almost completely tolerable, but it certainly isn't perfect and there are huge gaps in capability (VR, for one). So as much as we hate what Windows has become we are unable to switch to it without making some pretty big sacrifices.
Instead we use LTSC editions, O&O ShutUp 10, and some other third party utilities to mitigate the bullshit.
Lack of VR on Linux is why my custom tower spends most of its powered-on time booted into Windows at this point. I play Beat Saber custom maps for exercise and that's not easy to replace.
I only use Windows for games, and I don't think its fine, which is why I only use it for games. And its like another commenter said - you also have to deal with Nvidia's trash application, all the game stores, Discord (which I swear has more bullshit popups pushing whatever monetization every time it updates). I just try to ignore all that crap as much as possible. Any time I'm forced to do something more than cut over to the PC on my KVM and launch the game I want to play, I cringe.
I have no real idea what the issue with Windows is. It certainly has drawbacks, but... so does every OS. I hit power, my computer boots up in 10 seconds or so, I launch a game, and I'm ready to go. I think Windows puts ads in the little notification center, but I turned that off ages ago. It seems fine to me.
I customize my Windows and almost completely avoid all this crap.
If you use another OS, you might have less of this crap to deal with but overall ever environment needs some customization and whether or not it's more or less is hard to determine.
The fact that Microsoft is the 2nd largest company in the world and enjoys a very close relationship with the Federal Government makes it even worse. Very cyberpunk, very dystopian.
Overall, this kind of thing makes the species worse off.
“we’ve all” kind of masks the way those who benefit the most from that decision are disproportionately influential it making it, both initially and on an ongoing basis,
Great, I just updated to Windows 11 in hope of getting WSL2 + Arch Linux + CUDA + Docker but it didn't pan out in the end, had to move back to proper Linux for that piece of work. But seems I'm stuck with Windows 11 now and additionally, the running applications that show up in the taskbar suddenly can only show icons, no text allowed.
I started to regret my decision to upgrade, and this just adds insult to injury.
My work pc was nagging me to upgrade so I did, after about 20 minutes I realized the productivity loss wasn’t worth whatever supposed benefits IT would see from having everyone on one OS so I rolled back. And thankfully bec it’s not domain joined, just MDMd I can pause updates and block windows11 from ever coming down.
Were you not able to use WSL2+CUDA+Docker on Win10?
I'm currently using that setup and it does use the 2080Ti in this machine and I'm able to run SBERT inferences in a docker container at blisteringly fast speeds now.
Nope, no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to work. That docker (or anything else for that matter) didn't output any errors when starting a container just made the whole thing difficult to troubleshoot as well. When specifying `--gpus=all` the container just refused to start and docker daemon would hang from there, until I forcefully killed it.
I also had the feeling that even if I fixed this issue, that wouldn't be the last of it, so I just went back to where I came from where I can easily troubleshoot issues and understand all the moving pieces. I guess WSL2 is a bit too much magic for my old brain.
For the record, I tried to use Arch Linux in WSL2 with a RTX 3090ti
Didn’t applications used to be able to show their titles in the taskbar under W11 if you change the taskbar settings? Did that go away, or am I imagining that ability?
It was never in Windows 11. Because the Start/taskbar are repurposed from twice failed Windows 10x. An os that initially was made for a portable small dual screen device with each screen dedicated to a single open application.
Readit News
This is not a small advert in a small corner of the start menu. These are full-screen adverts that interrupt your use of the computer until you click.
What on Earth could they possibly do now to top that ?
After I select Windows in the boot menu, I'd spend like ten minutes waiting for Windows Update to complete. Then I have to click through a series of full screen ads and prompts to disable my privacy settings, which is getting increasingly difficult with all the dark patterns thrown in after every new release. It really shows a lack of respect for the user, taking my computer hostage while I resist their attempts to enable numerous privacy-invading settings that I declined over and over and over.
Over the years, this made me distrust Windows so much that I removed anything critical off of it. I removed my password manager, deleted my browsing data, and made sure to remove anything tied to an online account except Steam.
Then I finally had enough and moved my games over to Linux. So far, the experience is good and I'm glad that WINE is going through active improvements.
I return to my main Mac after 2 months on the road, and nothing has changed. It boots right up, and might occasionally ask me if I want to install updates in the evening.
I bought another Mac recently. I didn't have to turn a bunch of things off. I wasn't tricked into accepting anything. By comparison it took me a whole day to update my Surface tablet and turn off all manners of growth hacking before I returned it.
If someone behaved like Microsoft does, I'd keep an eye on my drink when they're around.
What has gotten into the minds of these people? Why do they think this is at all acceptable?
You're still a Windows user, aren't you? (No judgement, just answering the question!)
It's a very stressful thing to deal with, and congress does nothing to stop it because they're too busy trading stock investment info for insider profit...
We are not totally powerless though, hacking and warez are on the rise again, lots of people are declining updates, and even returning to older software versions, and nothing has ever stopped us from creating a good old-fashioned picket line in front of Microsoft HQ, or any other predatory software making company for that matter.
That prompt never comes back for me in 3 days though. Just at the next major OS update about every ~3 months.
That said there should be a setting for savvy users or enterprises to disable updates.
https://images.app.goo.gl/dVbDoBuScVzp3uAg9
I was already in the market for a new PC. I'm just finalizing what version of Linux I want to run for my dev work and then I'm going to offload my Adobe work onto a Mac Mini and finally get rid of Windows once and for all.
In an ideal world, it would push people toward real life.
"Another ad on my computer? I don't need to Candy Crush that bad. I'll go outside."
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-10/why-am-i-g...
This kinda of user-hostile malware is very frustrating, as many of platforms Microsoft creates I find quite pleasent technically. However some small hoard of product managers and growth engineers chasing their metrics are ruining Windows.
Autoplaying videos with sound
Oh! And if you go into the task scheduler to hunt down the half dozen different places this function is called from, they just get turned back on with the next update.
Now i don't have to be afraid to go to sleep at night...
Deleted Comment
Let me close the Apple Music window for this App I can't uninstall, and that popup that says I can't save my notes unless I have iCloud, and look past the automatically included Apple News and Apple Financed widgets in the notification panel I accidentally opened to go open a browser that defaults to showing me the shortcuts for several third party companies whose services I do not use to get on the internet to gloat about my superior choice.
/s
[For the record, all of this is bad, and I constantly wonder why my government thinks there isn't a monopoly problem here, I'm just kinda amused how much hate windows gets in particular, especially since I strongly suspect disabling this is a registry change away, which is not the case for many things I dislike about the computer I am using to type this.]
In contrast, Apple’s ads are slight nudges at best. You can even uninstall the Apple Music app on your iOS device if you want. I’ve done this, and Siri correctly uses the Spotify app to play music every time I ask it to. Can you imagine Microsoft doing the same?
I think this is fine battle to pick, I have OneDrive uninstalled on my Windows machine, but I think it's a bit silly a lot of users on here are fine with functionally the same ad somewhere else, I don't want to be berated anywhere on any OS.
Windows is also adding this bullshit after decades of being bullshit-free, and even when you do sign up for all their services the overall experience of using them sucks ass compared to the Apple implementation.
Not a Redhat user BTW.
+ Windows is very popular (so awareness is higher)
+ This behavior is bad and annoying
= many people complain
Dead Comment
I already got fed up enough that I basically banned Windows at home and I am impatiently waiting to kill one last Windows box. It is our gaming machine that is generally available to entire household of 5 (3 adults and 2 kids). All other machines (we have 7 other machines, 6 laptops and a desktop) are either Windows laptops converted to Linux or new Macbooks and it seems we will only have more MacOS now that Apple got a bit more sane with their hardware choices.
I may leave one Windows instance running in Proxmox just in case if somebody needs it.
Every time something like this ships out, guaranteed just about every CVP fields angry/annoyed/exasperated complaints about it.
This is where having a strong minded CEO comes into play. You literally have to have someone who can say "although this makes us less money, this is correct approach". In an organization whose entire purpose is to make money, very few people have the authority to make that call.
The next step for me here will be migrating clients off of Windows on their machines too.
Many recognise it, but don't care. Windows is not longer the cash-cow it once was even on the server. Azure is the new baby there – they don't care what server OS you run as long as you run it on their kit. In homes and offices Windows is just a vehicle for Office and Visual Studio, they are pushing people more towards the online office variants of Office (users therefore becoming dependent on a subscription for access to apps and storage/backups). Back to the server, and SQL Server runs on Linux these days or (even better for them) Azure-native.
If it wouldn't look terrible to just dump Windows, I'm fairly sure they would do so soon if they hadn't already. It would save them all the hassle of hardware compatibility, dealing with manufactures, being blamed for instability cause by bad drivers (on top of instability cause by bad Windows that is their fault!). They could let Linux & Apple deal with all that crap, and just sell cloud services, Office/SQL/Exchange licences, etc. to users of those OSs. They'd keep something of Windows on their console, but that is minute in comparison because it only needs to be the core & they control the hardware selection, and again that is just a vehicle with which to sell a subscription service to the end user and licensing/SDKs to developers.
Windows is only really moving forwards at all due to momentum, MS would rather be concentrating on other things that are more profitable for less hassle & questionable press.
Once my Windows 10 no longer works I will NOT be upgrading to Windows 11, I will either go linux or mac because I can’t tolerate microsofts crap anymore. I will never pay for an azure office or visual studio subscription, I will avoid microsoft products like the plague after all the crap they pulled and I have been using windows since version 3.11
Sometimes I think it sucks that I can't play X because the anti-cheat won't allow it to start, then I remember it's a kernel level driver I cross my fingers and hope isn't doing anything nefarious and feel better.
The first definable moment where I think Windows started being at risk was release of iPhone and then smartphones that followed it (so say 2008). But even then it wasn't yet clear that smartphones will take over the world so thoroughly and drive people from using laptops.
Until that moment I would definitely project that the future will see more and more people having access to laptops. Only after it was clear people are more likely going to go with smartphones (around 2009-2010) it was reasonable to say that the market share of Windows has to start falling in favour of smartphones.
And it still wasn't clear that the same will be true even within laptop/desktop market.
> Windows Server still brings in revenue for licenses, so whatever development on Server that makes its way over to Consumer is probably a subsidy
Windows for desktop brought in almost $25 billion in revenues in 2022, which was more than SQL Server, Windows Server and Visual Studio put together.
https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/
NB. I use the term "remote administration" in a general sense, not only in the "remote desktop" sense. Wikipedia's definition is "any method of controlling a computer from a remote location". For example, automatically connecting to a remote computer, downloading, installing and running code that controls the computer, without any user intervention.
No, I don't WANT to manage my network from a phone, save via a VPN into said network.
I'll be the classic Linux desktop optimist: the improvements over the last four years along have been fantastic and I really hope for a future when it can meet everyone's needs.
My OS shouldn't advertise to me. It shouldn't sell my data, or shouldn't do anything like that. It especially shouldn't harass me to log into the owning company's account. I shouldn't need any internet account to just use the OS (missing features relates the said account is obviously reasonable).
Consumers didn't react harshly enough after the prism leaks. Microsoft has gotten the inch and is taking a mile.
Upd: Im about win10.
Retail price is ~$140 for Home.
You launch Steam, see a bunch of ads, launch Epic Game Store or GOG Galaxy and see a bunch of ads, so why wouldn’t you see ads in the start menu?
Hell, you have to log in to an account for the “GeForce Experience”. Just to keep your graphics card drivers automatically updated.
As soon as you’re in a game, the game is full-screen. You’re not switching apps, you’re not creating anything, you’re just consuming content, and ads are a part of how we consume content these days.
Why aren't we seeing ads in context menus? Why can't I yell "Burger King" into my mic every 10 minutes while streaming to get access to higher bitrates? Why hasn't Microsoft put ads on the BSOD? Why am I not paying a microtransaction every time I start up my computer to get it to skip an ad and boot faster? We are still missing out on some serious advertising potential! Every eyeball that isn't looking at a corporate logo is selfishly wasting time
Auto-updaters are a bane unto themselves of annoying crap running in the background.
As are "quicklaunch" agents, or anything which claims to be some sort of "agent" to improve the user experience of their software.
Most of it delivers very little value, and who knows what the hell data it is hoovering up.
I would expect ads on Windows when I open the built-in app store, but not on the Start Menu.
TechPowerUp's NVCleanstall makes it easy to automatically update Nvidia drivers without any login, and also to remove any Nvidia application bloat you don't want. (I exclude GFE and only install the control panel, for example.)
They aren't a part of how I do it.
I think it's actually different. These are game stores. When I start Steam or EGS I expect to see game promotions (and *only* game promotions!) and targeting actually works there (e.g. I discovered a couple of games there I then bought and enjoyed).
And finally, at least in Steam I can start directly into my library view, skipping the home screen 'ads'. I would call all that completely acceptable, devoid of the usual dark patterns.
A lot of assumptions in such a short sentence. I suspect there's more than a complex set of opinions around Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, using Windows for gaming, thinking it's all fine, thinking lots of things suck, thinking it is a great operating system, thinking it's a shame it does things outside of the ideal scope of an operating system.
Anecdotally, most of the time I don't see the annoying things on my primary Windows 10 Professional machine. Upon a clean install, there were some nuisances that needed cleaned up. But the vast majority of the time, it is customizable as I desire, while being rock solid / stable, rarely needing reboots to apply updates, and when I go to play games, they just work, and they run super well.
I still hate those nuisances, and I hate that a reboot risks a dark pattern trying to push Windows 11. I hate Windows 11. It currently holds exactly zero advantages (for me) over Windows 10, and lots of disadvantages.
I really like Linux Mint, but I gave it a solid 2 months on my primary gaming machine (which happens to be a laptop) and it fell short in a few key areas. It has a lot of warts, and some games were unstable, performed poorly, or wouldn't connect to multiplayer. I also had no control over the brightness of my screen while using my discrete GPU. For the purposes of gaming, Windows 10 is vastly superior for the set of games I play. And it's a shame, because I do really like the Linux Mint experience for most things, including most games, but the issues are more problematic than the ongoing issues that I have with Windows 10.
- WiFi 6(e) 6Ghz band support is only in Win 11
- Direct GPU access from WSL2 for things like CUDA/ML programming is Win 11 only
I hate Windows these days, but the specific AMD video card in my gaming desktop has buggy drivers in Linux and reliably crashes the whole machine about once every four hours (or, much faster if I actually play a game on it—that's if I'm just web browsing and hanging out in terminals and such) versus my having had zero OS-level crashes on the same hardware over almost three years under Windows 10. So... Windows it is.
IDK, the driver may be fixed now, but the bug had been outstanding for 18+ months when I encountered it, so, I wouldn't bet on it. It seemed to have very little traction. And at this point it's really not worth my time to try, since the machine's working OK as-is, aside from Windows being crap.
Since all I do on Windows is game, having to avoid some ads isn't that big a deal. I spend nearly all my time on it in fullscreen programs anyway, hardly interacting with Windows at all.
So it's "great" in that it actually works correctly on my hardware, and ~all my games work just as they should. It's shit in every other way, but if it's effectively just a game launcher, oh well. I do anything important on other operating systems.
What they are, is basically all we have. Thanks mostly to WINE and Valve, Linux gaming is now almost completely tolerable, but it certainly isn't perfect and there are huge gaps in capability (VR, for one). So as much as we hate what Windows has become we are unable to switch to it without making some pretty big sacrifices.
Instead we use LTSC editions, O&O ShutUp 10, and some other third party utilities to mitigate the bullshit.
If you use another OS, you might have less of this crap to deal with but overall ever environment needs some customization and whether or not it's more or less is hard to determine.
Overall, this kind of thing makes the species worse off.
“we’ve all” kind of masks the way those who benefit the most from that decision are disproportionately influential it making it, both initially and on an ongoing basis,
I started to regret my decision to upgrade, and this just adds insult to injury.
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
My work pc was nagging me to upgrade so I did, after about 20 minutes I realized the productivity loss wasn’t worth whatever supposed benefits IT would see from having everyone on one OS so I rolled back. And thankfully bec it’s not domain joined, just MDMd I can pause updates and block windows11 from ever coming down.
I'm currently using that setup and it does use the 2080Ti in this machine and I'm able to run SBERT inferences in a docker container at blisteringly fast speeds now.
I also had the feeling that even if I fixed this issue, that wouldn't be the last of it, so I just went back to where I came from where I can easily troubleshoot issues and understand all the moving pieces. I guess WSL2 is a bit too much magic for my old brain.
For the record, I tried to use Arch Linux in WSL2 with a RTX 3090ti
It's very important to me. :/