Windows 11? Ads. New outlook program? Ads. Old outlook iOS app? Now injecting ads there too.
Ads are a cancer on the internet.
Nadella has ruined Microsoft.
Are you kidding? He’s made some…questionable decisions over the last couple of years, but look at where Microsoft is at today compared to when Ballmer left. It’s a much more successful, more exciting, and more open company than it was. Could you imagine Ballmer’s Microsoft releasing WSL? Or greenlighting a major faithful remaster and re-release of all 4 of the big Age of Empires games, as well as developing an entire new one? Or buying and actually being a surprisingly good steward of GitHub?
He’s far from perfect, and all the enshittification of the last 2 or 4 years should be roundly criticised. But overall, Nadella has been a net positive for the company both financially and in terms of the company’s societal impact.
The same can not be said for Google’s Pichai…
MS is still alive ONLY because of the licensing model they use which makes all corporations globally dependent. Period. The bundles, the product dependency, the price. If it’s not for this it would have banished years ago.
Yes, let’s look at it. Great for the shareholder, not for the customer.
- phone, dead
- AR/VR product dead
- non-Xbox peripherals, dead
- App Store, a joke
- other stores like books, music, and retail, closed or sold off
- Edge now a bloated privacy invading Chrome clone
- windows is now a crap ad-infested product that only runs on new hardware
Somehow other companies in these spaces have not had problems making this stuff work. It’s obvious all Nadella is interested in is cloud based products with subscriptions. And while that might be insanely profitable, it’s driving the consumer space to Google, Apple, and Linux. All the creativity and inventiveness has been removed from Microsoft. Xbox somehow survives in spite of his leadership.
I have an issue with calling Edge “a bloated privacy invading Chrome clone”. It’s a “a bloated privacy invading Chrome repackage”, thank you.
phone, dead
A product which, as interesting as it was, had sadly failed pretty resoundingly in the market under Ballmer’s leadership.
AR/VR product dead
As far as I’m aware, Hololens still exists? True it’s a product not getting as much attention as might have the potential to, but the same can be said for the entire VR market. Outside of a couple of very narrow fields, nobody has managed to get VR to really catch on the way the hype suggested it might back when Google Glass was a thing or when Hololens was first announced. (Who knows, maybe Apple will manage it with their product like how they made smartphones and tablets mainstream.)
non-Xbox peripherals
Honestly that seems like a real stretch. What exactly was their raison d’être? There are so many options for peripherals from companies that are better at it.
App Store, a joke
A joke when it was released under Ballmer. Still a joke today. That’s not a mark in Nadella’s favour, for sure, but nor can it really be counted against him.
Edge now a bloated privacy invading Chrome clone
Edge only existed under Nadella. Under Ballmer Microsoft still had Internet Explorer.
Great for the shareholder, not for the customer
Depends on what customer you’re talking about. As a software engineer, his tenure has been incredible. WSL is probably the single greatest thing to happen to Windows since '95. .NET Core and later simple .NET is such a huge improvement over the ancient .NET Framework for developing modern applications.
As an RTS gamer, I suspect he probably didn’t have a lot of involvement here, but it was still under his leadership of Microsoft that we’ve seen the greatest era in Microsoft’s first-party gaming since the 1997–2007 period when the original trilogy + AoM were being released by Ensemble Studios.
The creativity and inventiveness at Microsoft died under Ballmer. Nearly any Microsoft watcher will tell you he’s turned it around for the better not just in terms of business, but in terms of how it impacts the customer, as well.
Personally I’ve been relatively disappointed with Microsoft over the last 2-ish years, but compared to the last half-decade or so of Ballmer, the first 8 years of Nadella’s tenure were impeccable.
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Honestly so would I, but looking back on it now, I can’t say that Microsoft has been bad for it. If Microsoft hadn’t bought it, maybe someone else would have, who would have been far worse. Google might have bought it and shut it down 6 months later. Or Facebook data-mined it and sold all your private repos off to Russia. Or we could have been in a world where Microsoft did what many (myself included) expected would happen, with them ruining it themselves.
Yes, GitHub staying independent would have been the best-case scenario. But what we got was probably second-best.
Microsoft is still alive. That is bad. And nadella made it bigger. Even worse.
No company that size and power should exist at all.
Whether Nadella is running Microsoft well is a separate argument from whether trillion dollar corporations should be allowed to exist.
Thought the original comment was that nadella ruined microsoft by letting it live. And comment i replied to missed that point.
Maybe wrong then.
As a software developer: MS has been 100X better to work with under Nadella. He may not know what to do with the operating system side of things, but the .NET/Azure/android/linux etc side has never been healthier.
Are you implying it was good before that?
He did make it worse, but I don’t know about “ruined”
I would upgrade to windows 11 if it wasn’t full of ads, I had two computers accidentally upgrade after mis-clicking an upgrade prompt and the experience was bad enough I reloaded the whole computer.
Not only that, but it doesn’t make sense to have a task bar on the bottom of an ultrawide display. I’ve been putting my taskbar on the left side for over a decade, and now you just can’t do that for some reason…
I’m so confused by the ads thing. I don’t think I’ve noticed any since upgrading to Win 11. Are they only on certain editions or something?
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-remove-most-annoying-ads-from-windows
check out how many settings you have to search and disable to turn off MOST of the ads in windows. It’s completely ridiculous.
Microsoft’s Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems are PCMag Editors’ Choice picks
lol
What? I was expecting registry edits from your description. Actually hidden shit. Those examples are all right where you should expect those settings to be.
That really isn’t that many settings, and while it would be nice to have a collected “ads” settings page, those are all located sanely. You just need to pay a modicum of attention to where the ads are on your system, then go to the associated settings page.
Do people in general just not ever go through the settings when they first get something new? I feel like that’s the equivalent of buying some flat packed Ikea furniture and complaining about how shit it is after you throw away the instructions and can’t figure out how it needs to be put together.
This was my thought as well. Pretty sure I already have all of that turned off but I would have done that as part of the install and brief customizing of the UI. Can’t say I ever used a guide or anything, or even considered it unusual for modern software.
Do people in general just not ever go through the settings when they first get something new?
Basically, yeah. Lots of people just mindlessly click next to be finished as fast as possible instead of looking at the page and seeing what it turns on by default.
they keep moving that shit around, too. seems like i’m always finding some new crevice they’ve hidden some setting they don’t want you to know about.
That’s what confuses me. There are absolutely ads, it’s just fake installed apps. But amount of ads are exactly the same as windows 10. They’re in all the same places, same types (mostly the start menu). Shit you could say 10 has more since that awful edge desktop widget doesn’t exist by default on 11 as far as I’m aware.
Do people just have such deeply debloated windows 10 installs that they’ve forgotten what windows 10 is actually like? Maybe it’s because it’s been 1.5 years without a major update that reinstalls all the garbage automatically?
My start menu is a glorious thing with zero ads. No programs are listen in those shite block tile things. Removed them all and shrank the start menu to be the same size and feel as ptevious windows versions. In fact, I never even use the start menu for anything anymore but typing CMD.
They killed it for me the day it started searching the web instead of the system. I just navigate to the install folders like I always have years and run programs with the actual exe.
Web search can be disabled with a few registry keys.
Not using it is easier
Man I’m programmed to just ctrl+r and type cmd lol
Windows key is 1 less button I need to press
Got me there!
I think the key is I simply never interact with the OS outside of opening the search bar or PowerToys Run to type in the program I want to open, clicking on desktop shortcuts, or going into Control Panel. All the places they try to sneak ads in I literally just don’t use because there are other, faster ways to get there.
There aren’t more ads than 10 because MS has added those ads to 10 with each update over the years.
Weather bug in taskbar is an ad server. You click on it and it brings up bing stories to get you to click them and see ads. The search bar now has a little daily decoration. Click it for ads. The search menu has bing news- again to bait you into clicking one and seeing an ad.
All of that is disabled on my system.
And all of these are easily disabled with GPO, registry edits, and other basic system administration means.
One shouldn’t have to disable ads in any OS. They shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Ah, that likely explains it. I know when installing I hit “no” on anything that sounds remotely marketing related and I turned off search and weather because they just don’t add any value and I like a clean screen. So I think the only ads I get are the small, unobtrusive ones on the lock screen, which I can’t say I’m bothered by in the slightest. I barely even notice them since it isn’t like I stare at the lock screen.
The task bar is my main reason for staying on 10. Forced grouping with icons only and no option to change it is such a bizarre design decision.
Edit: Sounds like my last major gripe with W11 has been fixed! Dreading a forced switch to 11 much less now.
They (finally) changed this in a patch a few months ago. W11 still sucks, but at least it can now do this one thing that all the previous versions could do.
You can move the “start” button to the left but you can’t move the entire taskbar to the right or left to be a vertical stripe going down the side. I don’t do it but a right or left vertical bar makes much more sense than horizontal given today’s wide and ultra wide monitors.
For that matter, they said the reason for the new centered taskbar was to be better for touch screens. Centered on the left or right, sure, but centered on the bottom? That’s probably the least convenient spot for a touch interface, especially on a laptop.
I don’t like start button being on the center when using mouse, but come on, when using touch screen on my laptop I don’t really care where it’s at exactly, as it takes roughly the same amount of time to move my finger to any place on the screen.
The keyboard gets in the way a bit for me when things are lower on the screen. Haven’t tried it with a tablet, but I would assume that keeping controls near the sides, where you’re already holding the device, would be beneficial there, too.
Good catch. I somehow missed the second part of the comment I was replying to - I was referring to the ability to finally ungroup taskbar items in W11.
you can now set taskbar to ungrouped (unless full) now in win11, as of one of the recent monthly updates. still can’t move the taskbar to the left side (my preference on wide screen displays), though.
And honestly the never combined feature is really really buggy, and just downright ugly with the way it resizes the bars based on the amount of text in the window’s name, even when there’s empty space left on the taskbar. If you have your file explorer open to c:/ the bar for the File Explorer is ridiculously tiny, for no good reason. If you want uniform, clean, consistently sized tasks that only shrink to make room when the taskbar is full, forget it.
It also just gets stuck. A lot. If you have a full bar and it needs to combine, then close a couple windows to free space, a lot of times it won’t do what it’s supposed to do and “ungroup” the remaining windows. It’s very inconsistent about when and how it chooses to combine, uncombine, and shrink things.
It just barely works well enough that I’ll grit my teeth with it on my work computer, because I don’t have a choice about that, but I’m not abandoning the Windows 10 taskbar for this at home.
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Thank you for clarifying. That sounds awful.
My work machine is W11 and has options to change it. Not one of those stupid ‘home’ vs ‘pro’ version things is it?
You can only align the icons to the left, but you can’t move the entire taskbar to the side.
Or to the top!
The update for grouping just came out a few weeks ago on 11. I know this because when I started a job 5 months ago as a regional analyst it was pure hell with windows 11 until grouping became available. I swear it knocked 10% productivity off the top.
It’s not, that was “fixed” a while ago.
I had to use it on a work laptop briefly. It is still insane, when you run out of space it the apps then get put in this crappy overflow area.
You know what I used to be able to do? Make the taskbar 2, or even 3 lines. No more.
I’m staying on windows 10 for work as long as I can help it.
The “show more” menu on right click is absolute insanity. I right click files constantly, all day.
They’ve taken features away for seemingly no reason.
I can change it on 2H22 with these instructions
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I have to use W11, but I use ExplorerPatcher to make it bearable.
I had to purchase new computers for my wife and son. So W11 home edition it is. $12 for for the family pack of startallback and the PC’s run as they should. It’s so stupid that I have to do it, but it clears out all the annoying shit so it’s worth the few bucks.
I have been using classic shell/open shell since Win8 anyways. My screens look the close to the same since Win7 and I am not changing anytime soon.
I’ve been using classic shell fro years. Is there a reason you’re paying for startallback?
They successfully reverted adding a custom toolbar to the taskbar. I create one for each of my cloud drives and one for the desktop. It turns a folder into a menu.
I organize my files in nested folders. It allows me to open files/programs much faster than searching using the mouse hover on the folders
For example:
Clouddrive^research/2023/ file.
Older files or less frequently used ones are buried deeper in a folder tree. Actives ones are very shallow so it’s fast to find them.
Windows 10 came with Candy Crush ads in the start menu (on my machine), it’s not any better than W11. Don’t get me wrong, I use W11 and think it sucks more overall, but W10 does the same crap.
The W10 bullshit eventually caused me to leave. Never even made it to 11 haha.
This popped up over the weekend on my work PC. It was an emergency and I absolutely needed to get to my desktop ASAP.
Nope. Full screen advertisement for Windows 11 demanding my immediate and undivided attention. Blocking all other functions, commands, and inputs. I must interact with this ad or else I cannot use my computer.
Fuck. That.
I am never installing Windows 11. I am never buying another Microsoft operating system. Specifically because of this sort of heavy-handed dark patterned bullshit. Not to mention the fact that Windows 10 is dog shit.
I feel this in my bones. Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been working on some late night or weekend work emergency when fucking Microsoft throws some random unnecessary bullshit in my path. Haven’t run into the Win 11 mandatory commercial yet. But MS is notorious for wasting our time with push notifications, Teams drama, mandatory updates, and slow ass software that glitches at the worst possible times.
MS lost the way years ago. They forgot that software is supposed to work for us. They demand we work for their shitty software.
“Just use Linux” indeed. Will be doing that in my retirement.
It seems like every other time I interact with teams I get a “ARE YOU AWARE OF THIS FEATURE” popup that I have to close before I can do whatever it was I was trying to do. It’s annoying as fuck. Then there’s outlook fucking up my view every time I open the calendar across all my work PCs.
Pain. Very familiar. They went full Clippy on us.
Whenever that switch to linux comes, I recommend linux mint.
Works out of the box, the community using it seems friendly and happy to help, and can be pretty easily configured to fit with windows habits.
Thank you for the recommendation. I have dabbled but have a lot to learn. Looking forward to it.
I paid full price for Windows 10 twice, from Microsoft’s website. I believe in paying for good software but Windows 10 was anything but. After the whole forced Microsoft account thing I had very little patience and then Windows 11 dropped. I switched to Linux and never looked back.
I understand if anyone can’t switch or disagree with my point of view, you don’t have to leave a comment.
What do you mean by forced Microsoft account? You can make local accounts out of the box in 10 and 11. It’s just annoying to get around.
The point being that he paid for the software and he shouldn’t have to get around if
I agree, but I’m just pointing out that it’s possible to get around it. Microsoft fucking sucks, but I want people to know ways around stuff so they aren’t wasting time and money if they don’t have to.
Microsoft fucking sucks, but I want people to know ways around stuff so they aren’t wasting time and money if they don’t have to.
What is the way around Microsoft accounts during 10/11 setup?
10: put no@thankyou.com as the email and whatever the fuck you want as a password. It’ll give you an error then let you proceed with local setup. That’s if it forces you to connect to the Internet. I prefer saying I don’t have Internet and choose the limited setup option.
Yup. Personally only use it for work. Linux all the way on all my machines
I’ve never worked with Linux and I get so drained from work, that I don’t even want to look at a computer when I get home. Idk if I have the energy to learn Linux lol.
Install mint (cinnamon). Very easy to use for starting. Will make computers fun again. As for games. Most work fine but ymmv
I switched to Linux in 2014 mostly because Win 8.1 happened to me.
Learning Linux MInt felt about like learning a new Windows version. Think about what it was like to cope with 7 if you’re used to XP, or 10 if you’re used to 7. It’s about like that. But on Linux, it doesn’t go through those dramatic pointless UI changes. Features get added, they sometimes change the default theme, but they don’t drastically change the workflow from one version to the next. If anything, the UI felt more familiar to me than Win 8.1 did. Coping with things like the new way file systems are handled can be a thing, but as I was already playing with Raspberry Pis and had learned how to type cd and ls in a terminal I was kind of okay with that.
It’s just annoying to get around.
This right here is exactly why I jumped ship. Linux questions tend to be “How do I do this?” and ya learn something.
Microsoft questions tend to be: “Windows is trying to force some new commercially motivated shenanigans on me when I’m just trying to use the OS I already paid them for, how many clever steps must I take to work around their unending, ever-evolving nonsense… Until they pull something else with the next update?”
The complete obfuscation of making local accounts and pushing M$ accounts was infuriating.
There isn’t much stopping them from patching the workaround and forcing a setup screen right after the update. I’m glad it works for you, I’m just not interested in making excuses for a three trillion dollar company .
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I work at an MSP and it has made me hate Windows with a passion. I don’t even want to look at my own computer when I get home. I do almost everything I need to at home on my phone (a pixel 7) and I game on my PS5, switch, and I will be getting a Steamdeck at some point soon.
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I’m saving up for a fence for my yard and a new patio roof, because those take precedence over fun shit. After that I’m gonna get a steam deck. I wanted to get one with my Xmas bonus, but I had vet bills for my puppy and I was out of work for two months due to an injury.
You can support a Windows domain and tons of endpoints from Linux. I know. My work PC runs Arch, btw.
xfreerdp is much better than mstsc.exe
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I doubt my helpdesk staff will support my PC. I manage the company including helpdesk PCs from my PC.
It will probably be last PC working when the dummies in that department manage to get spearfished and all windows boxes are encrypted.
There’s not a lot you can do against idiots with Domain Admin credentials other than off-site backups (on a non AD joined Linux PC of course).
what was that nice app that would block Windows 10 upgrades?
There’s a registry setting for telling Windows that the target feature release is a specific version (it should be 22H2) which also will stop it from trying to push win11 upgrades
If anybody is curious, here are the details on how to do that: https://www.pdq.com/blog/how-to-block-the-windows-11-upgrade/
If you want to take it a step further, write a Powershell script that checks that the registry entry is what you want it to be, and then changes it if it is not. Then create a scheduled task to run at login that runs the script. That way if/when Microsoft pushes an update that switches the registry entry back, the scheduled task will flip it back after installing updates/rebooting/logging in.
I am currently fighting this battle with New Outlook in Win 11 23H2. It’s really annoying. I can get rid of it with registry entries, but when windows does updates it reverts the registry changes back. So scheduled task it is. It would be great if there was an Intune configuration profile to deal with this, but that would go against Microsoft’s current methods of shoving new products down your throat.
But 11 wants sometjing from my computer that it doesnt have, so it cant “upgrade”…
Linux. (ducks)
Damn a new distro? I can’t keep up…
Linux Ducks sounds delightful. I’d give it a shot.
It will curse and swear to helll with unintelligible error messages.
You say that like that’s not a feature.
Never said it wasnt ;)
(ducks)
Penguins. :D
It’s called Russian botnet initiator 5.0
You might be talking about Never10, made by Steve Gibson over at GRC.com. It has since been updated and renamed InControl. It now also works to prevent unwanted Win11 upgrades, as well as other things. https://www.grc.com/incontrol.htm
grc yes! thank you
Give me back my vertical side-docked taskbar or STFU.
No, I don’t want to deal with Explorer Patcher.
I wish they’d stop defaulting to the goddamn boot drive for updates… I don’t have the space
Windows is like the corner prostitute: pay some money, usually get what you want although not the best, occasionally get some horrible disease
Linux is like the sweet SO: has its quirks but you love them for it. let’s you grow in your skills but that can be challenging at times. Surprises you in good and bad ways.
Edit: for grammar
I finally swapped to Linux and it’s been easier than I expected. Don’t know if I’ll ever go back to only windows.
Same I was really surprised how easy it was. Thank you Lutris
What distro did you go with? Been thinking of switching myself
Not OP, but there’s many beginner friendly distros. I’d look into Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin, or Elementary
So this was the exact thing that pushed me over to the FOSS side the last time they did it. Nice to see the tradition of annoying users to the point of them abandoning Microsoft is alive and well.
Drop requirements for TPM and secure boot then.
That shit is just Xbone Kinect all over again.
Desolder your tpm chip to prevent forced downgrade to win11
Disabling it in Bios is enough
Eventually, windows will just override it.
Oh, you can do this? Neat.
That seems much easier than installing Linux.
Or don’t buy a machine with that bullshit.
Edit: I’m not sure why I’m being downvoted. My comment is still valid. If the argument is “you can’t, all the machines now include it,” then it’s fucked up. Like today’s TVs which all of them are smart, and that’s fucked up.
If you’ve got a CPU from the last 6 years or so, you’ve probably already got one.
x86 cpu.
There’s no bullshit on Arm and RISC.
You can turn off those requirements a few ways. IIRC using Rufus to make the bootable USB can, or something like Windows X-Lite which absolutely strips away all the M$ bullshit, like edge, defender, telemetry, bloat, and ads.
I want to get the microsoft monkey off my back, can anyone point me to a guide or give me steps to making the switch?
Yep. Just turned on my win10 machine and had a full screen spread trying to get me to upgrade which I had to decline 3 different times to get to my desktop. Keep this up M$oft and I’m gonna switch entirely to Linux and run windows in a VM.
My $2000 PC built a year before its release with no TPM will beg to differ.
if you built a $2000 desktop and didn’t specifically go out and source old parts… it’s got one, most likely, you’ve just chosen to not enable it. intel and amd cpu have them built-in and motherboards and their bios support those. they don’t need headers for a module or a discrete tpm chip on the board.
Trust bust tech
lol my reasonably good gaming pc doesn’t even meet the minimum system requirements. I don’t have anything with a cpu that’s in the “list of approved CPUs” 😎. Guess I can’t use Windows even if I wanted to. 🤷
So absurd. My i5-6600K apparently didn’t make the cut either. Sure it’s almost 10 years old now but it runs W10 just fine. Thank god for Linux Mint.
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Plus if I remember correctly rufus disabled at least SOME of the spyware
I think you are misremembering, since the iso already contains all the microsoft shitware, rufus can’t strip those out.You might have used a custom build.
