Let’s put it this way; when Microsoft announced its plans to start adding features to Windows 10 once again, despite the operating system’s inevitable demise in October 2025, everyone expected slightly different things to see ported over from Windows 11. Sadly, the latest addition to Windows 10 is one of the most annoying changes coming from Windows 11’s Start menu.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a so-called “Account Manager” for Windows 11 that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu (apparently, my 43-inch display does not have enough space to accommodate them). Now, the “Account Manager” is coming to Windows 10 users.
The change was spotted in the latest Windows 10 preview builds from the Beta and Release Preview Channels. It works in the same way as Windows 11, and it is disabled by default for now because the submenu with sign-out and lock buttons does not work.
Microsoft believes if they worsen the enshitification of Windows 10, more people will just upgrade to 11 quicker.
I decided to move to Linux and my other family went with Macbooks.
Sadly, I’m at a Microsoft office and do not have this option for my work machine.
It does look like I’ll be forced into Linux on my personal machine before too long, though.
Not much to be done with a work machine, but for personal use, I believe the more people moving away from Windows the better.
Lucky for me I only use my windows work laptop to remote into Linux.
Similarly, I use my windows work laptop for accessing remote (usually Linux) systems, and a few specific apps that are windows only.
My desktops are Linux (and of course my servers here as well), and I have a windows VM for those tools that are windows only that I need. Which I’ve modified that VM heavily to not have the normal junk from windows.
A recent decision for “security” will require using AAD joined machines only to access email/teams/etc. I was going to make an exception for my machines, then decided against it. My laptop now just sits off to the side, with only teams and outlook running, and its basically all I’ll use it for.
Well, I actually use Linux to remote into my work computer, to remote into Linux. I hate using a laptop at my desk, so I just stuck it on the shelf near the router.
It’s like riding a chariot made of dog shit into a wonderful land of freedom
That sucks. I use Ubuntu and SSH into redhat machines.
This. I mainly keep Windows around on my old laptop for Office development and I don’t need another subscription so won’t pay for 360. I’ll most likely just stop messing with Office and give Windows the boot altogether. Some of my computers already run Linux (mainly Debian). Office and SubtitleEdit have kept my laptop on Windows 10, but fuck getting ads from the OS.
I can’t stress strongly enough how badly I am opposed to ads.
Buy an expensive license
Install the software on hardware you own
Company puts ads on it that weren’t there when you bought the license
2024 is wild. Run Linux.
I jumped ship to PopOS a few months back.
There are some issues, like Bluetooth not starting without some terminal commands, I think I have to wipe or otherwise mess around with my 1TB NTFS storage drive to mount it and stuff like that.
But all the games I’ve tried to play work fine.
CPU: 3700x GPU: 4090
PopOS is pretty great. There is a polish to it that I haven’t seen in some other distros. Which is why it remains on my main gaming rig even though I have considered distro hopping for a while now.
Can’t you make an script and make it autoload on start?
Sam Reich? Did you get a haircut?
Seriously, I’m just munching popcorn with all these MS headlines lately, contentedly using my machine that does everything I want and 0 things more, all without actually having to fight with it for that outcome.
IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING ECONOMY BASED ON ADS??? WHO THE FUCK IS PAYING FOR ALL THESE SHITTY ADS??? WHO EVER YOU ARE, GET FUCKED WITH YOUR PRODUCT!
Who even buys shit because of ads?
Yes, literally anyone that wants to sell a product or provide a service relies, to a large degree, on advertising.
It’s been this way for over a century.
ShutUp10 for the win.
(Linux for the real win).
ShutUp10 is the equivalent of being in an abusive relationship and telling yourself “it’ll be okay if I just don’t upset them and stay out of their way”. You know it’ll happen again. You’re just in denial and kicking the ball down the road a bit until they do it again. Use it to buy yourself time to make a plan to get out of the relationship. The sooner you leave, the better off you’ll be.
Shutup10 for sure.
Linux, nah. It still can’t do what we need it to do, so it’s not the proper tool for the job.
Chicken and egg. Linux is roughly 4% of the OS space. If more people would get on board, it would become a better tool. I use both. Windows because I have to. Linux because I want to.
Linux missed the mark years ago. It’s not a lack of people using it, it’s a lack of usability for people. You’re blaming users because Linux doesn’t work for them.
My standard response to “just go Linux” :
I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it’s still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.
As some background - I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).
I had my first UNIX class in about 1990.
I run a Mint laptop (for the hell of it, and I do mean hell) . Update: stopped running Mint on that laptop, it’ll never be viable for the intended use-case. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even boot.
Windows would never do this, no, Windows can never do this. It is incapable of running a battery to zero, it’ll shutoff before then to protect the battery. To really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows simply will not let a battery get to zero.
There’s no way even possible via the Mint GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions. None, nada, zip, not at all. Command line only, in the twenty-first century, something Windows has had since I don’t recall, 95 I think (I was carrying a laptop then, and I believe it had hibernate, sorry, it’s been what, almost thirty years now).
There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying “you should manage data in a proper database app”. While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, no, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.
Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? Again, in the 21st century?
Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. In the 21st century?
Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won’t even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a third-party download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of Windows since Win2k (at the least) and would probably work on Win95.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s on a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
Linux doesn’t even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it’s own way), and that’s a massive barrier for users.
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).
It sounds like many of your problems could be fixed by installing kde plasma6 instead.
I think this supports his argument. Having to research desktop environments to decide which is optimized for the potential problems a new user may face, then finding a distro that packages that DE is quite frankly too much for the average user.
I’d argue between 3% and 5% of PC users are willing to research and experiment to find the flavor of Linux that truly works for them.
Linux has come a long way, I still remember using Gentoo as a daily driver and seeing Linux cross 1% of desktop share, but the average desktop user doesn’t know the difference between a kernel and a colonel, and they don’t want to.
Nah, completely wrong take.
Linux can be adapted to fit any use case you have, and that’s an important part of its flexibility. What you really are getting at is that mass producing a machine with an OS built into it is convenient for consumers. See Android phones or Steam decks for evidence of this convenience being important to the sale of Linux based devices.
In the not too distant future, windows will go out of fashion for the home desktop PC. Someone will sell a cheap and cool arm based PC with a decent distribution. It will be a slow win, nothing like what we saw from macOS.
In the not too distant future, windows will go out of fashion for the home desktop PC.
Linux has 4% of the pc market. This is an all time high. The fact that you think linux is a threat in any meaningful way tells me that you’re either too stubborn or too stupid to see why linux as it stands today will never even reach 10% of the market ever, let alone become the dominant platform.
Windows could become a yearly subscription at $500 per year, and linux would struggle to reach 6%.
It’s a moot point, because the average user doesn’t install any OS on their system. They get people like us to install it for them.
They don’t generally solve their own Windows problems either. OEM is the real bulwark of of Windows dominance. Usability and familiarity is one aspect, but I’ve set a good few people up with Linux at this stage and very few of them know what a kernel is, or what Plasma/Gnome are, because they don’t need to (same way they didn’t know or care what NT was either).
Whoosh. This happens literally every time anyone comments about how difficult Linux is, someone just recommends some other distro or obscure fix (this time a new desktop). You’re literally missing the actual problem here because you’re always trying to solve strange problems on Linux. The fact that you know a solution to this and the solution isn’t continue using your current system but instead install a new graphical interface is the exact problem that the person you’re responding to is complaining about.
You’re just assuming that installing KDE was a solution to some obscure problem he had instead of it being his existing system.
That’s how it’s been for me at any rate. I read a lot of the original post while thinking ‘I’ve never had that problem.’ After the first day of setting up the installation, I don’t really do any meaningful tweaking of the OS. Personally, I switched over from Windows because I was tired of fighting it to make it behave how I wanted and solving obscure problems with meaningless error messages.
I’m not assuming anything. He’s suggesting it as a solution. If your suggestion of a solution is to switch distros then Linux is not ready to be a desktop env. And I’ve seen multiple people recommend KDE as a “solution” to people’s problems so forgive me if I took them suggesting it as a solution as them suggesting it as a solution.
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. For what it’s worth, I haven’t run into laptop problems like those you described.
You’ve reminded me that people who declare “linux isn’t ready” often make the same mistakes:
- Expecting Linux to work 100%, with no effort, on random hardware that was built specifically for Windows.
- Expecting random google results to yield good guidance on a subject that’s well understood by a tiny fraction of those who know Windows. The web is an ocean of bad advice (but there are some worthwhile islands).
- Expecting to be able to manage any new operating system as well as the one you’ve been running your life with for decades.
Proficiency with any tool takes practice. More so when you don’t have an abundance of good mentors and pre-packaged solutions for what you want to do with it. That doesn’t make the tool bad. It doesn’t mean it lacks usability. It mostly just means that you haven’t learned how to use it yet.
Edit: Split the rest into a separate comment, since it wasn’t really addressing anyone specific.
Expecting Linux to work 100%, with no effort, on random hardware that was built specifically for Windows.
Thats ALL PCs.
Expecting random google results to yield good guidance on a subject that’s well understood by a tiny fraction of those who know Windows. The web is an ocean of bad advice (but there are some worthwhile islands).
Alright, fair enough. But then within the linux operating system, it should make those islands official sources for quality information. Make them easier to find.
Thats ALL PCs.
Nope. (example) (example) (example)
(And if you don’t like ready-made PCs, you can always build your own.)
Alright, fair enough. But then within the linux operating system, it should make those islands official sources for quality information. Make them easier to find.
Heh. It would be nice to have such things handed to us on a platter, wouldn’t it?
In reality, there is no central organization in a position to speak for the whole linux ecosystem, and a great deal of the work and knowledge comes from unpaid volunteers acting on their own. Standing out from the noise on the internet is harder than you might think.
However, there are companies selling direct support, and communities focused on specific topics, and wikis run by some of the most popular linux distributions, and classes, and books, and various other good information sources.
And, even if you have no money to spend, you will eventually come across some of the community-maintained gems just by regularly dedicating time to learning. Finding good info gets easier with practice.
I’ve run Linux on custom built gaming computers. You still get all the same problems that dude is talking about. And no, forums and wikis are not a replacement for the os just working. A good analogy for Linux that a friend came up with. “Linux is a tank, it can blast through anything, you can do tons with it. But it doesn’t come with a cup holder. You decide to install one. But when you do so the shift lever doesn’t work anymore. So you move the shift knob over, now the AC doesn’t work. You fix that and now the tank won’t turn right, unless the AC is off.” You get the point.
Thoroughly enjoyed this post thanks. I have long wished for a FOSS OS that can truly become popular by considering these users and carving a mainstream path for them. Even - for people who don’t even know what terminal/shell is and don’t care.
You post this same thing all the fucking time. “Someone said it better than me,” this guy decides to install random shit and run whatever command he can find and it, shockingly, doesn’t fix the problem?
You must be fun at parties
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I was going to write a reply to that guy about how linux doesn’t work for the common man, but then you come in and write shakespear level articulation that blows away my tiny brain cell reply.
It’s just such a complete analysis of the situation. The only thing missing is how linux requires you to use the terminal. Yes, REQUIRES. People can say it doesn’t all they want, but go on any self help guide, and any problem you have, is “step 1, open terminal”.
What would you say to someone who doesn’t know what terminal is?
“Ok, open terminal?”
“Whats that?”
“Its like a command line, but better”
“Whats a command line?”
And this is why 96% of people AREN’T using linux. Most windows users don’t understand how windows works. Most drivers don’t understand how cars work. And linux you HAVE TO be a mechanic to use linux. Because unlike windows and mac, linux isn’t designed to be used by idiots. And most of the world are idiots. Hell, I’m an idiot.
And until linux can fix itself FOR the user, no user will even take a look. Even if there were a single distro that did all that, you’d have to convince people “this linux isn’t like the other linux”. It’s the main reason that even though Android is linux, it stays far far away from that branding. It doesn’t want the linux stink.
And from what I’ve seen, every developer WANTS linux to be hard to use. Like a right of passage. “I had to endure these learning curves, and so shall you!”
I really don’t understand the objection to using a terminal to get things done. It’s just a window that you can type text commands into. You don’t even have to come up with the commands on your own, you find the ones that solve the problem on the internet, copy and paste, and boom problem fixed. How is this different from looking up a solution to a Windows problem that walks you with a series of pictures through using Regedit or Group Policy Editor, only instead of pasting text into a terminal, you have to click through dozens of menus, trees, and tabs to find the setting you need to change? You’re still looking up solutions online in either case, but the Windows solutions require navigating windows with dozens of mouse clicks versus copying and pasting some text in Linux.
sudo pacman -Syu
vs
Windows is installing updates and may need to restart. This might take a while. :)
Me: My fan doesn’t work.
Internet: To install fan copy this command into terminal.
Me: does that.
Computer: error.
Internet: ???
Me: ???
And 5 years later I still can’t turn on the fan.
Is that supposed to be a real example? It’s just that fans are controlled by the BIOS, not the OS, so fixing a fan problem would usually involve either updating your firmware, which I have never seen done via a terminal command, or changing a BIOS setting, which could involve rebooting and holding a key like F2 to enter the BIOS settings menu (not Linux, usually a quasi-graphical mouse-driven UI) to change something there.
The fact that people pay hundreds of dollars for this OS to get advertised to is insulting. Same energy as these smart TVs that feel like they have the right to show you ads.
If I’m dictator, I’m making this shit illegal, full stop.
Yeah yeah, Linux is our saviour.
I call bullshit. Charge Microsoft criminally. Sue them into the ground! We will never get enough people to truly harm them just by leaving, so we need to FUCKING DESTROY ANY COMPANY THAT PULLS THIS BULLSHIT!
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Because I hate them. It should be a criminal offense to be on my bad side
Sue first, ask questions later!
- the legal department at Nintendo
If they can’t bring the people to Win 11, they bring Win 11 to the people instead?
Just install Linux, it’s not that hard. Or at least get a Mac or a Chromebook…
I have been installing Linux on a number of my work PCs that I manage. Most of them are pretty straightforward, office products, printing, web, basic video player. But my personal PCs have so many different programs installed for different niche uses that it’s been a massive roadblock to me switching over. I know it’s coming because I’m not moving to Windows 11 even though my PC is compatible in theory. But man is it going to take me a lot of time to figure out all of the different screen capture, video editing, audio extraction and editing, disc imaging, photo editing etc. I know I can figure it out, but it’s about the time. I have a huge steam library too,but most of that should work.
Any of you playing Fallout London on Linux?
screen capture
OBS (same as is popular on Windows).
video editing, audio extraction and editing
I basically never do that sort of thing, but if I needed to I’d start out with Kdenlive and Audacity, respectively.
See also:
https://itsfoss.com/best-video-editing-software-linux/
https://itsfoss.com/best-audio-editors-linux/
disc imaging
For a task that basic, most of the time I just use
dd.photo editing
GIMP and/or Krita.
I wouldn’t suggest GIMP to anybody: Photopea. It is very similar to Photoshop and is a webapp.
Was in the same place, got FOSS soft for almost everything so now I run Mint on my main PC and on my laptop too, with a little 100€ used think centre running photoshop (I’m starting to figure out krita/gimp but pixel editing is a bummer there IMO) and 3dsmax for when I need them.
Edit: no internet connection for that box ofc.
Just install Linux, it’s not that hard.
This is just but the small first step. I was basically checking what it will take to daily drive linux on my desktop, and there’s many little roadblocks that I’m just instead considering getting a Win 11 pro license next year and just turning off all the shit in gpedit.
- No RGB software for my gigabyte mobo (openrgb doesn’t have it).
- No AMD adrenalin unless I go with Ubuntu, which is just on the same path of enshittification as windows
- No steelseries engine
- No Sapphire trixx
- No microsoft office desktop/onedrive (means I gotta find an office replacement that also works on my apple devices and syncs)
Linux has come a long way, and it’s probably enough for some but it would be a massive headache for me still…
You can mount and sync your OneDrive files with rclone, which I think is much nicer than OneDrive, but maybe not easy to set up if you’re not comfortable with command line interfaces.
You know that you dont have to pay for a Windows license right? You can permanently activate it (and any version of office) with a script. I found some article a while ago talking about it, some official Microsoft tech support used it because they were frustrated with Windows, so it’s legit
I do computer repair/tech support for just a small business. I haven’t used Windows on a a personal machine in a looong time, but that script helps me when I get stuck at work
Yea, it’s definitely not for everyone yet. But the average user (who needs a browser, a file manager and maybe an office suite) has no reason to stay on windows besides the convenience of being installed already.
Windows 10 will be my last Windows operating system. It’s been fine and it works well enough. I’ve already started setting up a drive with Linux Mint 22 for use moving forward.
In the same boat. Mint has some growing pains but for mainly web browsing I’ve been enjoying an OS that doesn’t feel like a ad billboard or a data snitch.
Yess yesssss let the linux flow throughhhh youuuuuuu. Manjaro XFCE here. Play with the distros in Oracle Virtual Machines and find the right one for you. Linux desktop is seriously worth the effort. Check out Yakuake as a Quake style drop down terminal to get to hacky stuff. Learn everything about Linux. It’s fun!
if you don’t feel like setting up a vm, use distrosea :] free website that sets it up for you in-browser
I just recently installed the windows 11 LTSC IOT enterprise edition, it contains no ads and is meant for corporate use. I got it off of the massgravel Dev site. The only thing pre-installed is the edge browser. Boots way faster and my games are right there. I have it dual-boot alongside Ubuntu. I recommend it if you have to use windows for some programs.
This is what I’m planning to go to once my IT department figures out how to implement windows 11 across our systems. We tried a controlled roll. Out and has to roll back to windows 10 because some of the software we use (mandatory) doesn’t work quite right on 11 (menu problems and weird crashes from what I saw -but it’s legacy software from the windows XP times so that’s to be expected, even in compatibility mode). They’re still going to try because the alternative is to pay for the extended support and the company doesn’t want to. I guess we’ll see what happens.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a so-called “Account Manager” for Windows 11 that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu.
How the fuck are people OK with this?!
What are you gonna do about it? Install Linux?
Followed by smug mentions of cheap OEM keys and massgrave repo. Yeah, that ain’t gonna fly for work laptops, guys.
Obligatory PS mentioning that I do use linux everyday on my personal machine
How to avoid: right click the start icon (or press win + x) and go to “Shut down or sign out” that way.
I try not using the Windows start menu anymore because I hate seeing the little “notification” bubble on my profile, when dismissing it it returns within a few days!
Yes Microsoft, I am aware I cancelled 365. Thanks for reminding me why I did so.I shit you not, whenever the issues of Microsoft are brought up in my friend group, there is one guy who pops up and defends Microsoft with “Well it’s not a problem for me. I do t see the big deal at all! It’s only a few ads.”
I don’t think you get a choice.
They’re doing a good job getting people to move to Linux or MacOS
Dang I thought Windows 10 would be safe from this for some reason. Silly me.
no security updates, only ads
Windows 10 already had ads, I don’t see why MS would be adverse to adding more.
Well, I was gonna run win10 until its service life ends next year. I guess MS want to speed up the timeline a little.
Arch here I come.
Join the free side. We have penguins.
Already run it on my laptop, and used to dual boot. I’m just trying let proton mature as much as possible before migrating my desktop for good.
