geteilt von: https://lemmy.world/post/8371095
Long post and well worth the read, but the interesting part to me is this:
Windows operating system and apps
Customers using Windows have always used a combination of operating system functionality as well as apps, but now Windows will clearly identify operating system functionality in places like Settings, Start, and Search:
- Settings > System > System Components will show notable operating system components.
- Start menu’s All Apps list has been renamed to All and operating system components are labeled with “system”.
- Under Search, search results will show operating system components labeled with “system”.
All apps in Windows can be uninstalled. Of course, apps can always be installed again from the Microsoft Store and internet. Settings > Apps > Installed apps continue to show all the apps installed on the PC and we’ve added the ability to uninstall:
- Camera
- Cortana
- Web Search from Microsoft Bing, in the EEA
- Microsoft Edge, in the EEA
- Photos
So, they went to the trouble of keeping a different set of functionalities just for Europe instead of unshittifying Windows for everyone. Wow.
So it must be worth a lot of money to force al of that stuff on users right?
Nobody would be using their ad-bloated software otherwise
Is it that bad now? I don’t use windows products in my private life, only at work. And I don’t find things that bad over there, but maybe that’s because it’s windows for business
Your business sysadmins will have gone through the trouble of getting rid of any bullshit. My companies windows installs are more chill than default win11 versions.
Yeah, just like a home user can if they bothered looking into the settings.
~Sincerely a sysadmin
And tweaked some things here and there.
And dusted some stuff off.
And debloated a bit.
I’ll be sure to thank them!
It’s not. People just like to complain. Ad-bloat in the Camera, and Photos app? Edge doesn’t show more ads than other browsers without an ad-blocker. I don’t think Cortana is specifically pushing ads and Web Search from Bing… well Google is also pushing ads wherever they can.
This is not about ads, it’s about choice.
Edge used to be fine until the recent GPT craze. Now they added a giant obnoxious Bing AI circle ad in the top right. Bing is of course default everywhere. At this point I’m just waiting for the MSN bar to reappear
You’re partly right, it is not about ads. It is about the integrated control of your camera, your media & other peripherals/software/data by Cortana - which rings home all day long - all from behind closed source software which does who-knows-what with the information it gathers.
You can use Linux for free which has never been shittified.
Because it has never been good enough for the average terminal-averse user to begin with.
You don’t need that in todays world. Otherwise the Steam Deck would have been dead on arrival
Counter-point, on the Steam Deck/ SteamOS almost anything involving getting past the one app shell (Steam) or installing from a store (flathub) requires terminal and often does not survive system updates. It honestly sounds like Windows 8 typing it out.
There are plenty of distros which can be operated entirely through graphical user interfaces. Ubuntu, for example.
You have not seen a Linux in what, 20 years now?
I love Linux, but I’ll admit what you say has some credence.
Linux has a lot of polish now. Most big distros are going to have an easy to use GUI installer, and there are several mature very usable desktop environments.
But, for example, if a new user has an nvidia card it’s probably going to be a poor experience for them and they won’t understand why or how to fix it. So there’s shortcomings there. I blame nvidia for this specific issue, but your average user probably doesn’t care about that. They just want their video card to work well.
It is definitely getting better. I’ve been running the same Arch installation with KDE for the last 5 years at work. Surprisingly stable and had little to no issues.
Still, the issues I did have required a basic understanding of what a package manager is, what does sudo do, and other general linux knowledge.
The results difference between a newbie googling “wifi doesnt work” and an experienced user googling “networkmanager service logs showing error XY” is just too great.
How quickly they forget. Canonical added Amazon ads to Ubuntu 10 years ago. They walked it back after huge backlash, but don’t believe that any corporate-backed Linux is immune to “shittifying”.
There are plenty of community backed distros to install instead.
The good thing about that is that you have the choice to avoid Ubuntu and still retain 100% functionality (at least as a private user), but there’s only a small handful of Windows versions with extremely minor differences.
Linux distributions and/or components have been, and will be, shittified repeatedly. Not as badly as commercial operating systems, but pretty bad anyway.
Hmm… but the registry hooks for those uninstalls must be in there even if the option isn’t surfaced in the UI right?
Maintaining different UI options is one thing, maintaining completely different OS versions is another… and it seems like it would be prohibitively complex and expensive to do that.
Probably all you’d need is for someone with the EU version to export a backup of the relevant parts of their registry, and distribute that so anyone who wants to can have the same uninstall options. The trick would be keeping it that way through Windows updates.
Well, they are no longer allowed to milk victims in the EU thanks to good laws. That does not mean they cannot exploit those who are not protected.
Don’t worry, they’ll invent a new way of milking in no time.
$$$ > $$
That sweet sweet data collection $$
“system components” is a weird way of spelling forced bloatware.
Well… dependencies can still exist, which would justify the “system” marking. For example, different programs’ WebViews depend on Edge nowadays, though maybe it is possible to isolate having that rendering engine without having the full browser program.
Microsoft already has a webview software that deals with that, which afaik already also comes with Windows, and is independent of Edge.
Edge, the browser proper, is in no way a dependency of anything else.
This came about from the Netscape v MSFT browser wars; where MSFT tried to argue that because IE was bolted directly into the OS, it therefore had to come preinstalled without asking & could not be uninstalled. The court ordered them to unbolt it & bundle it as a separate install - just like other browsers.
For example, different programs’ WebViews depend on Edge nowadays
I.e. the programmer could not care less about adherence to standards. Or, in other words: The software is buggy.
I think you might’ve misunderstood what a WebView is.
A WebView is just another UI component/control/widget that windows apps can use, just like how things like buttons, check boxes, text fields, etc are also UI components. The idea is for developers to be able to just use those common components instead of re-programming them every time.
The WebView is used to display html content (not necessarily web pages) inside an app without the developer needing to basically program or embed an entire browser engine in their app just to show something.
I think you might’ve misunderstood what a WebView is.
I don’t think so. It’s a box displaying HTML. If it depends solely on Edge being present and installed - this is a bug (of the WebView implementation). If it could be based on any browser, but the user puts Edge-specific non-standard HTML in it, it’s a bug, too (this time by the HTML provider).
Why yes, Microsoft, I do live in Europe, why do you ask?
I’d like to see this on android too. That shit is the worst. I know we can root and remove it or disable it. It should not be there in the first place and it should definitely be removable.
fyi a lot of preinstalled crapware can be uninstalled just by using adb, no need to root
It shouldn’t need to be removable through adb either.
How many regular users do you think would be capable?
I hope more than those who know how to interact in an internet conversation
deleted by creator
feel free to feel lucky searching for ‘remove android crapware adb’
The big issue here is that it’s both the carriers and the manufacturers who make money off the crapware that’s preinstalled. Many Android phones are generally cheaper by hardware spec compared to iPhones specifically because someone is making money of the preinstalled crapware.
Don’t kid yourself, phone cost exactly as much as the company selling them can charge. They don’t lower the price because they are making money off the crapware. It only increases their profits.
Android phones are cheaper than iPhones because people are willing to pay more for iPhones.
Your carriers install crapware?
Never seen it happen, but I also don’t buy into the scam that is carrier phones subscriptions.
so you are superior, but you also are superior? I mean, you’rereally superior…
Kinda why I went with a Pixel phone. Just pure stock Android and nothing else.
Idk, most people don’t need half of Googles’ apps either. Can you remove them on a Pixel?
Nope, you can’t
With grapheneOS you can
Yeah, that wasn’t the question.
I am running DivestOS, a degoogled hardened version of Android.
You can remove as many apps as you like, BUT then, you have no access to your banks, to services etc. We are literally talking about modern slavery on Android if you are Google free… Without Google’s Safety net, most banks and subscribtion based applications are not working. You are enforced to have Google on your phone. Or have 2 devices. One for big brother, one for your personal use.
Uninstalling Windows entirely has improved my sanity immensely.
I would too if anti cheat worked on Linux
I’m glad to see it improving lately, together with proton, but it’s not ideal yet, for sure.
For people who want to follow the progress of anticheat on Linux: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I’m not an expert on it, but I imagine it’s probably not the most complex task in the world to program those anti-cheats with Proton in mind. With increased Linux gaming (thanks Steam Deck!) It’s probably worth it, financially.
Same
You just switched it out with a different devil.
How are those drivers?
Is your audio working?
Drivers? Do you mean the kernel modules that get automatically loaded without a problem on each boot?
My audio works really well. Why wouldn’t it? The ALSA days are long gone and pulseaudio has matured enough to work great, even with Bluetooth.
I even got Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator working, I’m never going back to an OS that breaks its own photo viewer app with an update. Twice.
Both are great, everything just works* on my Linux install, thanks.
- I don’t use Nvidia. Because their drivers suck. So validity on your drivers comment.
We’ll be updating Windows 10, version 22H2 and Windows 11, version 23H2 PCs in the EEA to be compliant by March 6th, 2024.
Not just Win11, but Win10 as well. Nice.
Well, they kind of have to I would guess.
It just so happens I will be reinstalling my windows partition and “moving to Europe” in March of next year too!
If the EU could force them to allow us to fully disable tracking as well, that would be great.
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help” is a very good thing when the government gives a shit about the people it governs.
Slow down
It’s the same Union that wants to ban cryptography in instant messaging apps. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes…well
“Let” more like forced by the eu
Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during device setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA. Once chosen in device setup, the region used for DMA compliance can only be changed by resetting the PC.
Uuh. I hope I have that set to my actual location despite using en-US as display language.
Thinking about it, I’m pretty sure it should be correct.
I hate when apps use your format settings instead of display language to decide the language they display. Having to reset the Windows installation would be a much bigger hassle though.
I’ve often fixed these settings post installation. I guess doing it right the first time is important now.
Wish they would also do that with Win10.
That step they don’t have to go makes me think with Windows 12, the whole process will likely start from 0. They will try to implement everything again, waiting for courts or politics to take some decisions after years.
That’s the circle of shit, but they were forced well before Windows 10 is EoL’d, that’s good
Another post linked an article by windowscentral which states that these changes will also be rolled out to Win10
Can I please pay full price on just Windows without any “telemetry”?
I get your point but in software development some telemetry data ist very helpful and also nessesary to improve or fix your software. Microsoft though and almost all tech companies are collecting much much more than needed.
Telemetry isnt a substitute for actual bug reports, and if a company wants to know how their software is being used… then they can always just ask? or just do some actual user testing?
You could by the Pro license then modify Group Policy to restrict telemetry down to the bare minimum.
Bing is a sytem component now?
Cortana and Microsoft Bing are going right out the window, Microsoft Edge will have to stay as a necessary evil to deal with moronically designed websites. Hear, hear!
I wish this would make sense, but if I want to watch Netflix in better quality than 720p then I have to use Edge and Geforce Now won’t work decent with Firefox either. They do already have systems in place that will make it hard to decide to not have Edge on your PC if you live in the EU. I still only use it for these special cases and Firefox for everything else, but damn do I hate it.
That’s a Netflix issue, not a Windows one.
Netflix requires not only extremely specific DRM, they also have a whitelist of what containers are allowed to see the higher resolution. It’s a whole problem on Android too.
It’s not Microsoft somehow forcing you to use Edge, it’s Netflix.
In other news, my Jellyfin server’s web UI works even if you’re using outdated Firefox versions on Hannah Montana Linux.
outdated Firefox versions on Hannah Montana Linux
It really exists, I’m, laughing way too hard …
