KDE: Welcome to Linux. Do you like the UI of Windows? Well we have an excellent offering for you if that’s your choice. There’s also other DEs that you may select from if that’s your choice.
Windows: Here’s an ad bitch, fuck your choice.
yeah yeah windows bad. (i completely agree)
Windows serves ads? Where?
Edit: Why are people mad that I don’t see adverts on Windows?
Right just in the browser, start menu, notification panel, and whatever it’s called that pops up when you accidentally hover your cursor over the weather thing in the bottom right by the clock/calendar for .2ms too long.
Supposedly it’s being trial run in file explorer on 10/11 and will be present at launch on 12
Soon enough, the lock screen will play ads like a gas pump. Also, you have to watch the whole ad before you can unlock it.
In the settings menu they advertised Microsoft 365 too.
The built-in antivirus complains if your OneDrive is full, showing the same “Action needed” icon as if you actually had a virus.
The only ads I see are the clickbait garbage MSN shit that the browser defaults to but I’ve disabled it. I don’t really see ads other than that. Then again I live in Europe and I upgraded from a purchased copy of Windows 10 so maybe there are lesser or greater degrees of advertising Microsoft puts on users depending on their location, version of Windows 11 etc.
i only use win 10 at work there i don’t see ads but things like it asking if i want edge as default and the search bar popping back into the task bar still happens
Win 11 has sponsored apps in the start menu. Also I think if web search is on it shows you little popups about bing, even in win 10.
You get ads in windows? I thought linux users were supposed to be savy. That’s just sad, man.
question if a mechank can repair gas cars but can’t repair electric cars is he a bad mechanic?
I see zero adverts. What you describe is news to me. I wonder if it’s regional?
I use machines daily that are Win11 home and Win11 pro.
The only change I’ve made to Win11 is turn off web search in the start menu.
These are annoying as heck but I don’t consider them ads at all. Sure they probably launch some ad riddled page, but no direct ads in windows.
They can all be turned off and I am a bit annoyed that our desktop team hasn’t turned them off in our org’s standard images. I cringe anytime I have to remote in to troubleshoot with a user. Thankfully it isn’t very often.
DEFINITION FOR ADVERTISEMENT
noun
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a paid announcement, as of goods for sale, in newspapers or magazines, on radio or television, or on the internet.
-
a public notice, especially in print.
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the action of making generally known; a calling to the attention of the public
Just because it may not be trying to get you to buy Coca-Cola doesn’t mean it isn’t an ad.
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Shouldn’t you lose your linux membership card for something like this?
Linux police officers come into your house, and they take your membership!
And shave your neck
damn y’all don’t fuck around
And your pet penguin gets forcibly removed.
I need my neck shaved…
“This incident has been reported.”
Best
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Chicken isn’t vegan?
Yeah, Windows does really like to copy Plasma, don’t they?
Oh wow, I’m glad to see there’s other people who are reminded of Plasma by Win 11. As someone who never installed or used it the first time I saw someone using it I made a comment about them using Linux. Until I realized…
Microsoft even copied KDE’s motto “Simple by default, powerful when needed” in their Windows 11 announcement.
Copying stuff that enhances the UI/UX is something that I’m personally not opposed to but stealing another foundation’s motto is just lame and shameless.
This is hilarious. It really cut me deep. I don’t think I’ve seen Harold used in the Drake format like this either. The look of dejected shame is priceless.
Linux users realizing Windows is fine.
Windows is not “fine” aside from all the non-UI stuff, they’re UI is annoying and slow to me, they moved things behind extra clicks/commands to make it “clean”- stuff I actually use.
And then there’s the whole tracking usage to drop adds in your notification thing… which is a privacy nightmare.
I mean I’m cheering for Linux adoption too, but I’ve never received an ad beyond the initial install crapware app stubs. I do a sweep on the system settings, clean the junk, and I’m off to the races.
For the unsuspecting users, the privacy concerns are quite bad though.
On win 10 that crapware would reinstall on every feature update.
I havent had that happen, either - between 6 machines I manage and about the same number of reinstalls over the years, from 10 rtm to present 22H2 (or whatever its up to now); I’ve heard the claim by many, but my evidence is nil.
I keep seeing ads in my notifications on my windows installation for windows store items or bing.
Out of curiosity, do you have a screenshot? Unless I have always been the B/control group in A/B testing or something, it sounds super weird.
No, I only boot into windows when I game, so its been a couple days since I’ve gotten one of the notifications.
isn’t the windows search bar a giant always on ad for edge and Bing?
also windows advertises a lot of their cloud/subscription services in notifications and settings to me
You can turn that off
yeah, through registry keys
no normal user is going to do that
Registry is just the settings panel in windows now
But the normal user can download random programs off the internet to do it for them
bloat at best, virus at worst
regedit isn’t hard enough to justify a registry editor app
I suppose - I always disable it as part of my initial setup steps, I have actually never used it.
I’ve only seen shilling for 360 in the account panel, though. Never in the notification tray.
+1
i have to use microshite crap every day.
It outdoes oracle at generating curse words.
and it gets worse. i’d take windows 2000 or nt4 over whatever shit they force on me at work.windows peaked at windows 7/xp then went down the drain
I liked some earlier win10 versions too but that was also before I tried Linux.
XP was a disaster, security-wise. Vista was better conceptually but the tech was undercooked and win7 was basically a re-skin of vista plus some extra maturity due to time.
Then, there’s the entirety of the situation around those releases. Microsoft was so mismanaged under Ballmer that even though Windows 7 was maybe their best OS, it completely missed the smartphone revolution and set them back about a decade until they could be re-spun as a cloud technologies company.
Imagine how huge they’d be if they had successfully leveraged their desktop and business dominance to force their way on top of the mobile world.
Tl:dr Win7 was both Microsoft’s best and worst product of all time.
I got a goddamn pop-up ad for an XBox controller. That really says all you need to know. When there are advertisements in the operating system, the operating system is fired.
I loved it when windows recently started giving me Xbox achievements (aka ads for Xbox) notifications just for playing any PC game on my computer. Like I’m trucking along, playing a steam game, and Xbox game bar shit, just has to wake up from its slumber to say: we randomly noticed you played something on this computer! Have you considered Xbox today?
It did something like that to me when I played Minecraft just not an Xbox ad. I think it was something about the game bar. (which I would absolutely love to disable if possible for just one user)
Eh, you only notice it when it’s bad, most of the time for most users it’s okay, though I generally argue they just make an unconscious decision to ignore most issues, even before trying out Linux I was flabbergasted at how people literally lose time and get flustered at a problem but then refuse to accept it as such.
Some say the stress helps you grow a long white wizard beard.
Ya’ll are nuts. I logged in to a windows 10 pc after ~1 year so that I could flash a SD card. Windows immediately updates and literally bricked an ssd. How is that “general computing”
Because that is not a common experience in the least bit. Windows 10/11, as far as general usage (Internet, media, games) works 99.95% well for those use cases. I haven’t got a blue screen or had to reinstall an OS for like…idk 6 or 7 years now. You might not like the level of customization or data collection, but most folks don’t care about that.
Meanwhile on Linux desktop (servers and infrastructure excluded) nerds (I use deprecatingly) get excited about idempotent updates so snap can’t break their shit because fuck usability, or gpl god must be appeased.
As someone who uses Linux servers and software all day Windows gives them normal user a far far more stable experience on the desktop.
Yeah for real, trying to get people to switch by saying that windows crashes all the time/ has driver issues/ bricks hardware or software is just not the selling point people think it is because windows doesn’t do that 99% of the time.
And does Linux ever do that? “wellllll yeah sometimes it can but only if you’re using it wrong.”
And does Linux ever do that? “wellllll yeah sometimes it can but only if you’re using it wrong.”
Linux community is like the dark souls of computers
It’s managed to completely mess up my efi partition to the point where I had to boot from a live usb to be able to do anything… (after going less than a month without booting into windows)
A lot of older people I know only use their PC every few months and get frustrated by the involuntary updated.
Tbh, I thought Windows was fine too, until I had to use it last summer.
I installed it recently in a VM for something and my first thought was “what the fuck?”. My last proper Windows installation was 7 and W11 is barely recognizable. The amount of preinstalled garbage alone really shocked me. The system menus have become even more convoluted too and I actually seriously struggled to find various settings. I remember the first attempt at re-categorizing the system settings in I think it was Vista but this is even worse.
Really made me appreciate Plasma even more.
The number of times W11 menu has tried to convince me to install TikTok immediately destroys the OS’ legitimacy in my eyes.
And then there’s the lack of customization; the shovelware and bloat; the random crashes and hangs with only a blue screen with an emoticon frowny face; the constant advertising; and the tracking of everything you do with the OS to feed advertising; the forced integration of cloud services like OneDrive…
Fuck windows. I’m not a programmer but I’ve been running Manjaro (I know, I know) as a daily driver on three different devices for 7 years now. The only true problem I’ve ever had was theming grub2 and fucking up the config, which was entirely my own fault.
The privacy concerns were one of the main factors why I moved away from Windows. And when the “free” W10 upgrade killed itself, along with my system partition, I decided that it’s the point where I have to make the jump.
Manjaro isn’t as bad as its rep. I had way more issues with EndeavourOS, which also eventually nuked itself, which Manjaro never did in the (much longer) time I was using it.
I’ve started using endeavouros but haven’t had any problems, besides getting used to pacman and similar (also Nvidia drivers messing things up but that happened on my Ubuntu which recently killed itself too). Care to elaborate on which issues you had?
At first mostly smaller issues, but they started to pile up, with me not being able to find any solutions for them.
But then one of the updates in July killed grub, despite me always using the recommended commands after each update, causing me to lose access to the system. I was not skilled enough to recover it as all the guides didn’t really give me enough information for me to handle my encrypted setup, so I tried getting help from their forums, where I then got insulted, gaslighted and trolled by a few users, trying to put the blame on me for using grub instead of the default bootloader, completely ignoring the fact that grub very much was the default boot loader, to the point where a moderator ended up locking & hiding the thread, so that it wouldn’t leave a bad look on them, telling me I should probably create a new thread if I still need help. I decided this would be my last time with EOS.I think the default bootloader might depend on some config, because for me grub also wasn’t the default, I had to reinstall it once though too, but that was because I accidentally booted into windows and it instantly gave me an update which messed up the whole efi partition. No idea if I have an encrypted setup though. I’ve barely used the forum so I don’t know about that. Thanks for the info though.
Depends. what version of Windows? 10? I can agree for the most part that yeah, it’s fine. Most users loved 7, I…never paid it much mind (mostly because it was good, i guess? Got nothing bad to say about it, at least) and 8 was…Windows 8.
Windows 11 tho? Eh…the UI’s ok. I like it better than 10’s, at least. Ish. But whose bright idea was it to limit the number of items in the context menu? Or to hide the ribbon that, again, shows you more options? Or basically force ya to make a Microsoft account to even use the thing? (there’s apparantly a way to revert some of these things via messing with the Registry) Like, Windows 10 was fine like you said, dunno why 11 needed such drastic changes. And that’s without mentioning ads or the habit Windows has of reverting some of the setting you set after an update (tho that was a thing since 10, tbf. Still annoying)
I think Windows 10 was peak Windows. Controversial for many, I used a start screen too. The only thing I like more about the aesthetics of 11 than 10 is the window outlining with the color of your choice.
I’m not logged into my Microsoft account on Windows, nor do I see adverts. When you boot Windows 11 for the first time there is a trick into getting it to offer the option of a local account. I’m not sure why I don’t see adverts. The only mod I’ve done is to turn off web searching in the start menu. Where do you see adverts?
I’m inclined to agree with ya there since I have no strong feelings towards Windows 7 in particular and I’ve never tried earlier versions. Yeah, I can live with Windows 10 if i had no other choice or say in the matter, and it wasn’t my old install (see the other parenthesis if you care to know)
The ads are on the Start menu search. They’re not that bad as far as I remember, but i can see for others why’d they’d be annoying–in particular, those who paid for the software liscene already. it’s the small little annoyances when it came to Microsoft’s decisions (and the fact i wanna believe my Windows was just messed up from the word go…seriously, that thing was laggy as it was slow and just…strange is the best word I can describe using it, compared to other machines running Windows 10. So yeah, I already had one foot out the door as it was) and the fact I realized I had a choice that was NOT apple that moved me to Linux and it’s been pretty good, considering 95% of my needs are met on Linux
Eh, it’s okay for most people, I guess. I am just not comfortable being the product. I want to be in control of the things I own.
There is no shortage of different programs that can neuter Windows telemetry and ads but they’re always finding new ways to fuck your shit up and I’m done playing the game.
Is most of the UI fine? Yes, absolutely. It’s just the rest of the OS that sucks.
It was fine on Windows 7. Now you can’t open the start menu without 5 ads jumping into your face or open any app without a popup promoting a Microsoft alternative (note for the whoosh people, this is hyperbole). It’s even worse than the pop-up/pop-under phase of web ads.
If Linux was fine, then I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of looking for an alternative and taken the time to teach myself Linux. I don’t know anybody else who uses it so it’s not like somebody twisted my arm
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It’s very constricting and now with ads and forces updates upon the user that cause more problems than they solve (at least in my experience) but other than that I think it’s ok, just not for me.
Pirate images all the way man
They don’t get updates? Or how would that help, genuinely curious for the three times a year I use windows.
The pro versions of windows don’t get as disrupted as windows home (the version everyone complains about because they don’t know there’s a difference). And the pirate ones I’m mentioning usually are iso images that have been preemptively unshitified as to not have most of the unnecessary bullshit out of the box but still get the security updates.
Used to be you had to pick and choose updates or get your system gimped for not being a legal copy but Microsoft kinda gave up on that when they went freemium
Ooh sounds nice.
No, it isn’t. File explore is dog slow (though wiggling the scrollbar helps WTF), they don’t support no-brainer UI niceties such as being able to change volume with the scrollwheel when hovering over the task bar icon, middle click on scrollbars to jump to a location still doesn’t work, no focus follows mouse, double clicks everywhere, settings are… where? There’s like 20 different different UI interfaces to different settings in Windows, half of them dating back to Windows 3.0.
Oh and can you fucking let me set start menu favourites without trying to second-guess what I want there. “Recently used?” I never fucking used that shit you put there and stuff I used isn’t in there.
As to Windows 11: I heard that you can’t have the task bar at the top. Why. Seems like nowadays MS is breaking more stuff than they fix. I was kinda miffed at KDE disabling alt+left/right click move/resize… but then I googled and they moved it to meta. Which is actually sensible. I ceased to be miffed. I probably should read release notes on updates it’s all there.
you get ads in kde plasma?
The UI of Windows 11 is fine, at least visually. Windows 8-10 were mostly just ugly. When it comes to configuration options, they lose even against Plasma from a couple years ago.
I have a Mac like UI btw., there is no chance of confusing my Plasma with any Windows :P
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It just so happens that I also use Arch x)
UI is fine… UX is a few good steps backward
I feel like the windows 11 ui looks really nice and it seems like they could do a lot with it, but at least last time I actually tried it it just felt kind of unfinished and there were a lot of weird bits where the theming looked wrong
Did KDE get a recent makeover? Last I saw, the window decoration still defaults to half rounded and half square. Devs can’t decide which one they like.
Don’t worry, Plasma 6 will default to half square and hat rounded instead.
I assume the window decorations are like that because rounding the title bar is safe whereas rounding the bottom of the window has the potential to partly obscure content
How do you even not notice?
He though that new widget with all the advertisements was really nice, and was on the way to thank whoever cleaned his system removing 3/4 of the items on the start menu.
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Hum, no, there are no ads on the start menu. They are all on the search widget and at the one near to the notifications.
But yeah, you can remove them if you find the option. They are hidden enough to guarantee most people won’t.
They’re dropping them as notifications in the system tray, though.
Yeah, there’s ways of stopping it, it’s patently ridiculous.
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I have. it popped up in a notification. it was for MS office even though I have never (and will never) use 365 willingly. If you’re using a organization-controlled version from your employeer, it’s possible they have it turned off and MS actually respected their group policy.
They didn’t for me. Specifically they turned “suggested” back on after I had turned it off. (and they seem to like doing that with settings all the freaking time)
It is patently ridiculous one time.
You remove them and they will never return.
But the Linux community really likes to rave on about it as if it is the worst infraction since the holocaust. Just look at this comment section.
The fact remains that OP used Windows for 45 minutes without even noticing. So it is really not that bad as many of you claim it is.
You remove them and they will never return.
until they revert your settings in the next update. Which happens. And then there’s the privacy invasion and intrusion they represent. You get to use what you want. But this is linuxmemes… you’re going to find more people hostile to MS here than you will in other vague computing forums. MS definitely deserves the hate, though. “Embrace. Extend. Extinguish” is still their motto.
No that does not happen with the ads. Those only appear during a fresh install and can be clicked away in a matter of seconds.
The only thing that happens with is sometimes Edge and recently the search bar once.
MS deserves hate sure, but not the unwarranted hate some of you have here in the comments.
Uh huh.
Sure it doesn’t. Microsoft never turns off settings with major updates….
…. Never….
In fact it- that is the advertisement in notifications- happened again with the most recent major update.
But go ahead, ignore my anecdote. I’m sure that makes it more comforting for you. That’s it. I’m just totally incompetent and don’t know how to turn off “suggested” notifications.
I’ll shut up since I clearly don’t know how to use a computer.
I think it’s pretty warranted. Why would you put ads in my OS in the first place? It’s not a free OS either so no excuse to put ads on it.
Yeah but irrational anger because Micro$oft bad is easier and gets more upvotes
They say they use linux and yet they went 45 minutes without opening a terminal? /doubt
There’s themes to make your OS seem nearly identical to Windows. Maybe they have that.
Or maybe it’s a meme
Exactly, IRL you see the windows boot screen and think I fucked up my grub again
Sounds like the good old fucked bootloader after system update
I actually had that happen during my last update from 23.04 to 23.10 a few days ago.
Put https://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/files iso on Ventoy usb and fixed it with a few clicks.
Brilliant! rofl
*45 months later
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