Looking increasingly likely that my current Win10 machine will be my last hardware with MS software on it. Win11 is out of the question entirely.
And I thank them for finally pushing me to fully adopt Linux as my main OS, although they did that months ago when I ‘upgraded’ to Windows 10 and my frustrations with Windows began (8.1 wasn’t to bad really). This just seals the deal.
8.1 was peak windows.
7*
8 was all sorts of weird and clunky in the ui
Where I work we have brand new Media Servers for a 4 beamers video wall running on W7 - software vendor says it’s the last “unobtrusive” windows that just does what it is told to do. Remote control is via whatever, but the servers are 7 and will stay so. VNC’ing into those is quite the time travel.
its getting dangerous to have these connected to the internet though
And now I am reimaging my only Windows machine with Debian, so it can join all my other Linux systems. Thanks for being so toxic and enshittifying your OS, Microsoft!
Honestly, I wish Lemmy would be more about how you can block or circumvent stuff like this. Instead, it’s all Linux. Look, I’ve been on Linux since 2008 and I still use Windows. For work, I have to. Not everyone can switch.
Follow up to this comment. Just 6 days after this discussion, MS comes up with another way to annoy users. A Lemmy user posted this link to this thread. That article has written in it, how you can turn it off.
Thanks for sharing!
I get where you’re coming from as someone who has no option but to use Microsoft for everything at work, and no admin permissions to turn off spyware.
There are probably Windows Registry tricks, Group Policy edits, de-bloaters and ad blockers you can acquire to get around every awful change Microsoft makes, I know a few have been posted in the past (being able to uninstall Edge as an example)
However, the issue is that you remain at the mercy of Microsoft to allow a trick to keep working. They have every ability to change your setting back after an update or simply ignore your settings and put whatever on Windows it pleases.
(The until recently uninstallable) Edge, Teams, the new mail-stealing version of Windows Mail/Outlook, the Github Copilot shoehorned in, so on and so forth. Needing to come up with clever ways to block every shitty thing thrown into Windows is going to be a losing battle. The best strategy is not to play, so I’ve stopped spending energy on it. The only area worth actioning is to pester companies to stop using Microsoft rubbish and governments to stop contracting with them and stop their abuse of their position in the market.
Linux isn’t perfect, it’s not for everyone either and perhaps Windows is more suitable for some, but I’m long over trying to “fix” Windows and fully into helping people use Linux.
Didn’t they also announce recently that they’re gonna block 3rd party start menu replacements? Must just be a coincidence.
Not so much “announce” as just start doing it in beta builds.
