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.
I updated my work laptop, and they put their shitty copilot button on the bottom right and TURNED OFF MY SHOW DESKTOP BUTTON.
nothing more to add, just wanted to vent with people who may understand my rage with windows lol
As tech support this has made my job a bit more annoying.
It’s time to ditch Windows and all move to macOS or (even better) Linux
MacOS has different flaws but has major flaws nonetheless. Linux is the one that truly lets you own your computer, you decide everything.
Yea it annoys me too, you can switch it back, but I can’t do that every time I’m working on someone’s computer.
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.
So, does PiHole work against this threat? I don’t believe I’ve seen an ad on Windows 11 yet on my desktop, but it’s firmly behind a PiHole and never leaves the house (because desktop)… so either I’m lucky, missing something, or it’s working.
I mean, I basically just boot it up to game and backup CDs to FLAC and such, so maybe I’m just missing things.
And Yes, as someone who has used linux since 1995, I know I can probably do those things in Linux at this point, but I couldn’t when I set it up and since it’s working I’ve got other things higher on my list to do.
No, Pihole doesn’t help.
I think the reason you say you haven’t seen an ad on Windows is because the ads aren’t the traditional ads like you see on a webpage.
When someone talks about an ad on Windows, they are referring to the Spotify app presinstalled in the Start Menu, the OneDrive prompt for backing up during setup, and the weather bug on the taskbar that brings up news if you click it.
You might think that a weather widget isn’t an ad, but the idea is you click it, see a relevant news article, click the news article and you are taken to a traditional webpage with ads.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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
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 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).
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.
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.
Hopefully they’ll end up with an incredible amount of user telemetry telling them that they’ve created the least adopted version of Windows in the history of the company.
That’s what Windows 11 deserves, they need a punch in the face from users.
they’ve created the least adopted version of Windows in the history
could be tough to beat “Windows ME”… ;-)
I wish, but what are the end users going to do? Switch?
Apple is expensive, and all Linux users will eventually have to use a command line. Sure, if you’re on lemmy you’re probably fine with the occasional terminal window, but most older folks aren’t, and many in the younger generation aren’t familiar with any os that doesn’t come on a mobile device.
Power users have an alternative in Linux, but most will just shrug and accept it. Who has time to learn how to use and install a new OS? Ads are everywhere, it’s become ewww the norm.
ewww…
Fwiw, it may be arguably easier for you to switch than to have to run a debloater script after every Windows update, at this point.
The thing that irks me the most is that those things work. They’ll see a little complain from the most vocal ones, and that’s it. The revenue will increase, their shareholders will be pleased, the OS will be worse, and we’ll have no viable alternative.
Unless governments start to regulate the hell out of tech companies, it’s only downhill from there.
Edit: about Linux, it’s not viable if you’re outside IT or rely on commercial software. That’s a debate for another post.
Regarding Linux, what commercial software are you dependent on? More and more, it’s all online, even Office.
Adobe Creative Cloud, which despite the name is pretty much local. And although Microsoft Office works online, it has a series of issues that the desktop version doesn’t have, like broken formatting on Word.
Why wont we have viable alternative ? We already have
Agree with everything expect for the viable alternative. Linux is viable for many people
I know ExplorePatcher and Startallback can stop ads on Start menu. is there any viable solution for this Settings app ad?
Microsoft has gone too far:
Just now, with this?
Must’ve been asleep for the recall shenanigans
I got the “It’s time to upgrade to Windows 11” message on my Windows 10 laptop. It’s getting aggravating.
I hope they don’t show an ad on my doctor’s operating table computer while he’s performing surgery on my heart and watching through a camera image. 😱
You will take it and you will like it.
Solution is easy - just don’t use windows
Win11 becomes a less and less appealing switch day by day… When I can no longer hold into Win10, I think I’ll just have to jump ship to Linux.
Win10 is already quite privacy poor, but Win11 is straight up intolerable.
My machine cannot run 11 because of the arbitrary hardware requirements so I was looking down the barrel of Win10 being no longer supported next year.
I proactively installed Linux Mint on a second SSD I had kicking around just to see if I could live with it without making any commitments. I never looked back since then. I switched to OpenSUSE soon after though but that was because I wanted something that ran the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment because I didn’t like how Cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. But I haven’t booted up my Windows 10 drive since then, other than to migrate some files I needed.
You guys complain but you never actually switch to Linux. :)
If you truly cared about being a technological slave, you would learn Linux tomorrow. But just like someone stuck in a abusive relationship, you hang around despite the horrible treatment because you are afraid to leave what’s comfortable.
