Windows 11 is getting out of hand with its push for advertisments, frankly - remember the recent full-screen pop-up to persuade users to install Edge or other Microsoft services? Then another advertisment was placed in the Start menu, and now Microsoft has finally worn my temper thin - with a new Game Pass ad coming to the Settings app.
This will likely arrive in the July update for Windows 11, or at least it’s almost certain to do so. It was present in the latest preview update Microsoft just released for the OS (and quickly paused due to a bug, but that’s another story). It’s also worth noting that the ad has been present in earlier test versions of Windows 11.
You will take it and you will like it.
“Too far” is what they’re looking for. In other words, “How much bullshit can we cram down their throats before they’ll spend an absurd amount of money on a disposable Macbook or spend their days becoming a sysadmin so they can use Linux?” Doesn’t seem that they’ve found that line yet. They’re still looking.
Sysadmin? You haven’t needed to be a sysadmin to run Linux for years.
Agree to disagree, I suppose. If I have to go into the terminal to do anything, that’s unacceptable. And I have to do it for everything.
For what, may I ask? Can you give an example? I’m on Debian, arguably a less friendly distro than most, but I haven’t had to touch the terminal in two weeks. And it was just to ping a server somewhere, something you need to do on the command line in Windows as well.
How about setting the default audio device?
How about changing the default power profile?
Just for starters…
Why the hell would you need to open the terminal for any of that? It’s in your settings
It’s not
What’s your distro?
Yes it is. You seem reluctant to tell anybody which distro you’re using (even downvoting the person who asked), probably because you know they’d point out that it is in fact there.
Below I’m showing you how it is on my laptop running GNOME, the most used desktop environment. It’s similarly easy in KDE Plasma and Cinnamon. Even the more niche DEs like Pantheon, Budgie, XFCE, and LXQT have had that functionality for many years.
Change audio devices
Switch power profile
Bonus switch power profile
I really don’t know why you’re lying about this. The terminal is not something you’d ever need to open for this.
You really don’t. I don’t know what on earth you’re doing that requires it.
And I have to do bullshit like go onto powershell and the heap of shit that is the Windows registry from time to time, too. Shit, you need to enter commands to install windows with an offline account now, it’s insane.
I wish Microsoft could make Windows as user-friendly as most Linux distros are. It seems like you need to be a computer scientist to use Windows sometimes.
Don’t know what you mean. Have people on opens use here, and they do just fine without the command line.
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…except it’s not?
this is definitely the worst thing ever /s
More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.
If comsic desktop gets a perfect launch, it wouldn’t be an over exaggeration to say, some amount of people will switch
I like pop_os, I run it on my laptop and will definitely be using Cosmic, but I think people are putting too much hope in it.
The Next Great Thing™ will not make a number of users that is significant to any real world scenario move away from Windows. The only approach that might have a chance to do that is something that looks and feels as close as possible to Windows. Yes even the parts of Windows that are bad. All of it, except the most glaringly obviously horrible stuff (like ads in menus). And that also includes all the programs a significant number of users care about either running there out of the box without having to jump through any hoops or a replacement fulfilling the same “looks, feels and operates almost identical” criteria.
People care about something feeling familiar and not having to relearn stuff a lot more than about shiny new features.
Considering ms has changed the look and feel of windows itself over the years, sometimes pretty drastically, there’s some leeway there.
Guys, I’ll switch in a heartbeat to a Linux OS if any one you can recommend a stable OS that works on a Surface Go 2. It should support its touchscreen, of course, and a Surface Pen. Plus, a FOSS alternative to Journal would be stellar
I’m running Ubuntu on a Surface Laptop Studio. I really like it, though I have not yet gotten the touchscreen and pen working.
If I figure it out (and I remember) I’ll let you know.
Idk Journal but you can give Xournal a try, it works pretty well and you can arrange all the buttons to your liking
Have you looked into Mint?
The linux mint forums make it seem like it works out of the box. I know that it worked out of the box for my Thinkpad x380, even the touchscreen, pen, and screen rotation.
Same on my thinkpad y370
Same on my e6520 latitude
Mint is the only version you have a chance of liking if you are coming from windows. I know windows sucks and people low to pump Linux but most distros simply aren’t user friendly.
Thanks for the insight. I tried my hands at Kubuntu on an old laptop of mine and didn’t mind the few differences too much. From what I’ve heard on Lemmy, Mint seems to be a good all-around suggestion for new Linux users, though
Do you really need a custom kernel for the surface devices?
I don’t. But the person I replied to said they were having trouble with Linux on a surface.
So, that’s a project dedicated to Linux on surfaces. I would presume they had tried the usual distros and found them lacking
I’ve been running Bazzite on an old 1st gen Surface Book Pro that I had laying around. Touch screen and all the fancy keyboard stuff works great.
Idk man but try OpenSuse, It’s pretty cool. Here is the review that make me install it
Your hardware has to have support for Linux, not the other way around.
I switched to Linux Mint Debian edition when the Reddit thing happened. I’m glad I did before Windows got this bad.
I made the swap after they forced Windows 7 update behavior to change. You used to be able to download updates but you got to choose when to install them. Then they changed it to either they’re on and fully automatic, or fully off.
At the time, I was running a computer repair company, and my work computer running Win7 was running a data recovery on an accidentally formatted drive for almost two days. After I had left and the program finished, Windows was all “Oh, the computer is idle now. Let me give you a 15 minute warning that I’m going to install updates and reboot if you don’t cancel”.
After the second time, I formatted my work computer. Shortly after, I did the same to my gaming PC. Haven’t looked back once.
I love to hear it. Linux has done pretty much everything I’ve needed it to to and it’s great to see a lot of programs are available for Linux natively.
I think my favorite part of swapping has been forgetting how Windows does things. I’m so embedded in Linux and how it works every day that I don’t remember where to go for certain things in Windows without having to search.
I remember some power user shortcuts like run prompt shortcuts (
appwiz.cplorcontrol userpasswords2) but I used to be able to walk people through how to get certain pages in the Windows UI, and I couldn’t do it today.
I use edge and subscribe to gamepass, so the ads is gone, right?
If windows becomes an advertising platform, isn’t MS forced to open it to competitors lest they are misusing their power?
Our office uses windows, and egde feels like malware to me
I legitimately, non-ironically, prefer Edge over Chrome, and I cannot explain why; possibly brain damage, possibly too lazy to download Chrome or Firefox and setup my account for either.
Edge and Chrome are basically very similar at this point. Firefox is my browser of choice these days. It’s not perfect, but at least it isn’t anti-adblocking and doesn’t freak out when I block 8.8.8.8 like Chrome and the Google devices in my house. I’m moving away from Google as they move away from not being evil. Moving to self hosted stuff as much as I can for photos, email, file storage, and soon, home automation.
I don’t really like chrome either to be honest
Mozilla recently purchased and integrated a large internet ad company, so be ready for a storm coming.
For me it’s a pragmatic desire to share information with as few megacorporations as possible.
I deal with MSFT for so many other things, not all by choice - and Edge does everything I need it to do.
As with many such questions, it’s about the trade-off you are prepared to accept.
They haven’t gone overboard with THIS one, because they already went way the fuck overboard years ago and never got back on board
Man I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and make my next machine a linux one
Man I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and make my next machine a linux one
Make a compressed backup and try with this one. You’ll feel good.
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I took the plunge about a week ago with Pop!_OS. It took a good 3 or 4 days before I started to feel really comfortable with things. (Which is probably because I’m really picky)
If you have the time to try it out (and remember, always dual boot so you have a fall back and can switch back when you need to) I recommend it. The last remnant remaining for me is Photoshop, and there’s a GitHub page for downloading it with very few steps now.
Try out krita, rawtherapee, darktable, for photoshop stuffs, depending on what you need.
The Adobe stuff always held me back before but I finally just started messing with linux and trying stuff out. I don’t need photoshop for professional use so I was fine spending the time trying to find alternatives for what I needed
Unfortunately I use Photoshop pretty heavily. I’m trying to split my different use-cases of Photoshop into different applications.
I tried Krita, and was immediately put off by how you have to input text in a different window, and can’t see it live. GIMP’s UI feels so different.
I’ll add rawtherapee and darktable to my list to try, and I’m still giving Krita and gimp a chance. You can’t expect to just slide right into a new program in a day after spending a decade in something else.
Another easy solution for Photoshop is to run a virtual machine.
Yeah but the VM takes time to “boot” up and the folder structure isn’t as clean, right?
I had a win 10 VM set up and it “booted” faster than my regular win 10 drive. I then switched to a win 10 LTSC VM and it “booted” a solid 10 seconds quicker on top of that.
I switched to Linux mint. No ragrets. It takes a bit of fiddling and a teensie bit of a learning curve. But it’s way easier than Microsofts endless deluge of shit.
I’ve had a good track record with PopOS.
Steam works with about 90 ish percent of my games and all the software I use, there’s a Linux version or proton can run it. Plus the OS is rock solid.
+1 to PopOS. My only gripe is that they and Nvidia still haven’t figured out how to move to Wayland, but once that happens (and we can all switch to cosmic), I’ll be a happy camper.
I might be the minority, but as long as they are stable and I can work with my programs, thats all I care about.
I use my pi to experiment, but I use PopOS as my daily driver nowadays.
the issue I have had with PopOS is multi-monitor support, I cant rotate my rotated second monitor except through the nvidia settings, and my settings get wiped after a reboot, its a known issue for years, other than that I havent had any problems, I have been slowly finding replacement software for everything that I used on windows
Interesting, I have that setup, but then again I have an official system 76 machine that is still supported. I have three monitors with one rotated for dev work/teams (ugg).
If you wanna game and want everything to work, get bazzite, i wanted to install arch, had huge probs with my nvdia card (i know, but it was gifted with the cudas in mind) so i used bazzite since i loved the steam OS look. I am so pleased, it works amazingly, and there was 0 problems during installation.
The only thing stopping me is stupid vanguard for league. I’m close to just getting a clean league only mini pc and having my main one be Linux. I’ll have to check out bazzite. I play the usual minecraft, terraria, ff14, indie games mostly so hopefully they run fine. I don’t think I’ve played a AAA game in like 7 years.
playing ffxiv Dawntrail out of the box just fine right now in Pop OS linux
Perfectly understandable. Any anti cheat is a big nono on this system. But tbh, i am so much more relaxed after stopping league i consider it a bonus guardrail XD
Imma make the jump once they force me to 11. I’ve been saying this for years but they finally got something cooking i truly can’t abide. That screenshot of what you’re up to every ten seconds is fucking terrifying to me and that’s not even considering govt snooping. I ain’t about to leave a record of my porn consumption for my wife to see lol! Linux is finally juuuust about idiot proof and game friendly enough for me. Can’t wait to be one of those smug guys that says ‘just use linux lol’
I recommend Linux Mint. It’s very beginner friendly and you don’t need to use the console too much if that kind of thing bothers you. The GUI even looks very similar to a Windows 10 environment.
I second Linux Mint
I installed it on my Grandma’s PCs not too long ago and even she enjoys it. She’s almost 80.
We are having issues with her printer but it’s one that has known issues with Linux in general (it’s a fancy Epson laser printer, scanner, fax machine combo with bad Windows support) but I’m hoping to rectify that soon.
I would say the GUI reminds me more of Windows 7 than 10 which I really dig
Edit: spleling
I third Mint. Very easy setup (just check your system is compatible before you try).
Also it’s ‘laser’ (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).
I didn’t know laser was an acronym! Cool!
I know right. I wonder if there are any other words that are unexpectedly acronyms.
Funnily enough my phone corrected it to Lazer when I typed laser the first time
Just another fun quirk of the Google keyboard on Android lately, autocorrecting words to the incorrect spelling
No worries. Thought it was a typo. Bizarre correction for it to make.
Oh yeah it was a typo but it was autocorrected weird, the keyboard on my phone has definitely been making some odd choices for corrections lately.
At least it’s better than search results via Google, those have gone to shit lately
Microsoft has made the choice very easy for me. I still have an i7-7700k that works just fine. But that’s “too old”, so when Windows 10 hits end of life, I’ll be switching over to Linux.
Why wait?
Not important enough to me at this point to spend the time changing over. Windows 10 does what I need it to and still gets security updates. When one of those two factors changed, then it will be worth my time to change over.
I hear you. It’s been a burutal long slog of putting up with their crap for as-long-as-one-has-done-it no matter when anyone gets out. I made the switch to mac and linux many years ago and after a brief transition period, everything personal-computer-related became wonderful somehow. Well . . . “neat”, anyway. Leaving behind extensive and difficult experience with everything from 3.1 to 95, to 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, and 10. (skipped 8 for obvious reasons.) It had its good times but they’re long gone. Good riddance. Best of luck to anyone still out there.
I didn’t wait. I did it earlier this year and haven’t booted from my Windows 10 drive since then. My entry drug was Linux Mint. But I quickly switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed after because I wanted something that ran the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment (I prefer how it looks and handles multiple displays). It isn’t that hard to learn the basics you need to use Linux, as long as you use a decently stable distro that you won’t need to troubleshoot at every update. In my limited experience, you only need more in depth knowledge when you try messing around with more “cutting edge” and less “stable” distros and are installing experimental features.
I can’t believe that Microsoft is expecting everyone to get rid of their computer to switch to 11 once the support for 10 expires next year. I even revived an 15 year old laptop that only had 4Gb or RAM by installing Mint on it (and switching its HDD with an SSD I had kicking around). It’s fast and perfectly usable for everything but modern games now
Not knocking your choice, OpenSUSE is a grand daddy OS, but if others are looking for a good KDE experience I find Fedora KDE Spin, which is not anweird fork yoi can get it from Red Hat themselves, is very good and come out of the box with all the latest and greatest like Wayland and Pipewire by default.
I tried Fedora KDE spin first but it didn’t work out for me. IDK if it was my hardware configuration it didn’t like but the first time I booted it, it spammed me with crash reports. I poked around it for a few minutes, not being able to go far without things crashing again and again. I installed the updates and rebooted it hoping it would fix it but it got much worse after that. I couldn’t do anything else as it immediately crashed at startup. I couldn’t be bothered to look any further into it and switched to OpenSUSE which has been rock solid for months and still going. I’m running Plasma 6.1 with Wayland on it with no issues as well and I know Plasma 6.2 is coming soon. It uses pipewire as default as well. To be honest, IDK what Fedora would do better for my uses, except maybe for a faster package manager.
I’m certain that my Fedora experience isn’t typical but for me at least it was a disaster.
Yeah that doesn’t sound typical, but you’re right if you’ve got those going on OpenSUSE then I don’t think you’re missing anything major. If Fedora ever gives me trouble I might give that a try. I just wasn’t interested in PopOS or Mint as a lot of other people were because I want those latest core components and don’t really like GNOME.
I’ve managed to de-google completely and mostly de-microsoft, but I use cloud streaming (shadow) for gaming and anything else that’s more than my shitty laptop can’t handle and there’s no way to use Linux on the cloud part. Only thing I can’t do anything about yet, and doubt that’ll change anytime soon or at all.
Yeah, the only solution there is to buy better hardware.
If you order the shit soup, don’t act surprised if it tastes bad.
These people are CHOOSING to use Windows. They need to just STFU and use Linux or enjoy the shit soup they keep ordering.
People are abusing Google’s ad distro platform to get malware onto people’s machines. I see Microsoft signed up for the same firestorm of possibilities.
I hope someone sues Microsoft.
Are you going to have to deal with a full-screen ad when you’re trying to open File Explorer eventually?
I was literally reading this sentence when the whole page grayed out and a window asking me to subscribe popped up.
I wholeheartedly believe that all forma of unsolicited or public advertising should be completely banned. Nothing good comes from it, it is only a nuisance to everyone.
But how will the wealth addled convince us pleblians to spend money on worthless garbage? Or convince us that we’re ugly and not good enough so we buy their products? Oh the humanity!
In all seriousness, advertising has had way too much of an influence on our culture and it needs to be properly regulated. I’m sick of being negged by beauty product ads.
SoMeBoDy HaS tO tHiNk Of ThE sHaReHoLdErS!!!
Especially in a paid service, like why do I pay for these services if you’re still going to advertise, track, or datamine? I know the answer is greed, why profit off of one option when you can profit off of all of them, but I, the consumer, am fed up with the customer abuse.
Shit, I’m a web developer and I’m fed up with all the ads, tracking and stalking that goes on. It’s so ingrained like “why not use Google for analytics?” or “just host it on Amazon.” 90% of the services we use at work I refuse to use at home (and go as far as outright blocking them).
Exactly.
Fortunately, my company doesn’t put ads in our product because it’s essentially a B2B product and customers pay a lot to use it, and our product being unusable could cost individual customers potentially millions if it blocks their day-to-day activities (we deal with regulations). We do use spyware though (e.g. fullstory), which makes sense given that lens, since being able to solve problems before they report them has a lot of value for our customers. If we did anything unethical, I would push back and potentially quit, since I’m not interested at all in manipulating customers (ads, dark patterns, etc).
I don’t think the tools we use to catch issues in the field make ethical sense in other contexts though. So yeah, I block a lot of the stuff we use in our product, and we don’t do anything to actively counter blocking in our app either (if you block it, you don’t get the pre-emptive bug-fixing).
You probably agreed to all of this in the billion page TOS so it’s no unsolicited.
A regulatory change would obviously need to prevent them from hiding that kind in intentionally too long legalese TOS. It has to be a clear single acknowledge, not obfuscated or bundled with functionality.
We should be able to charge them for ad time. You want to paint an advertisement on my car you have to pay me. Why should it be any different when you want to put ads on my work computer screen when I’m working with clients?
I get what you’re saying but that still gives them unsolicited permission to post ads in the first place.
I want an operating system, not an ad system that also happens to be an operating system
They should, but that’s never going to happen unless political lobbying is made very illegal (like life ruining and business bankrupting illegal, not slap on the wrist, cost of business illegal)
Life sentence. Solved.
But have you thought about a legal person’s right to fuck your eyes and brains?!
Also, what about their freedom of speech… Shit lord
Ads are probably closer to brainwashing than they are to legitimate free speech. Things that are legal can also be problems.
Because they are not “ads”
They use the same propaganda tactics that governments in 20th century perfected
Gets people going
Imagine If I worked for Kellogs and I hired a guy to follow you and yell about how good corn flakes are every time you look at your phone, every time your TV shows go on a break, and every time you pass a billboard in your car, or a marquee on a building. Even if we assume that person does nothing else illegal somehow, that could easily still be harassment, which is definitely not free speech.
Tell that to the courts that’s who decided this degeneracy is acceptable.
Don’t get me started on them spying
I’ve long know I wouldn’t make a good lawyer because you can’t say things like “Listen here you little shit” even when you’re right.
I’ve been called a sovereign citizen as an insult, though I’m just a voluntarist (not sure if ancap or generic anarchist), and that sometimes was past the point of me saying
things like “Listen here you little shit”
but I’ll admit “the society” wasn’t persuaded. Though sometimes it felt that possibly more than half of the people present agreed, but were confident that the majority doesn’t.
It’s actually a very good propaganda strategy - even if most people disagree with you (as the bad guy), what’s important is that they believe that others agree and thus keep their heads down.
Sure way to get some time in the hole haha
When corruption is the process, no amount of good argument will win tho.
Shit lord
And it’s not like w11 is free, the price of a PC with Windows installed comes with its’ license’s costs. It’s not told to the consumer so they won’t even know they are using a product they paid for, for them it’s what a clean basic PC looks like. And that’s what prevents many to care about it the same way they can be frustrated by a paid streaming plan with ads. To take is as a given, and shifting the Overtone’s window of fucked up services even further.
I don’t like solving things with regulation, because that’s always a victory in one battle making the enemy stronger for all the following ones.
But doing this EU-style, like browser choice, only with operating systems, can be a solution.
People love cheap and easy things. That’s how social media won over normal web. Seeing the choice between “install Fedora for freeeeeee” and “install Windows for 20$” significant amount will choose the former.
At the very least, the price of OEM OS should be disclosed before one buys it.
Doesn’t quite cut it.
Now if there’s no other option or if the variant with Linux is labeled as “other” or “no OS”, and listed separately, normies still choose Windows 99% of cases. Sometimes they pirate it.
They should have a clear choice in the store from a few OSes with details. Summaries with screenshots will do.
if i cant grafitti the walls why can corporations?
Because they own that wall. The owner of a wall (or poster space for that matter) can do whatever.
sounds like time for even more grafitti to cover their ads
And what do we get to own? Nothing… My OS… My… bandwidth… My RAM? Nope.
Oh I own my computer, and I don’t get ads as a result. It’s not impossible. A Linux DE does not have ads and your browser can block them with various methods.
Yup. If you use Windows, you need to accept what Microsoft does, because they control the OS. If you use Linux, you only need to accept what the software you install does, and there are a lot of options to select from.
Feel free to complain when Microsoft does something stupid, but don’t expect Microsoft to do anything about it. If you want control, use something that preserves that control.
