* Show suggestions occasionally in Start
* Show suggestions in your timeline
* Suggest ways I can finish setting up my device to get the most out of Windows
* Get tips, tricks and suggestions as you use Windows
* Turn off suggested content in the Settings app
Changing these settings can greatly reduce Windows 10 spam.
The fact that it needs to exist in the first place is itself a bit of an indictment of Windows 10, but running this during the Windows installation process will give you a nice, clean, non-animated desktop and start menu, with all of the shovelware and ads neatly excised and the privacy settings set to sensible values (admittedly for certain values of sensible, given that you can't disable all of the telemetry in most versions):
https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/4378-windows-1...
And reading the article it explicitly says they will only show users this feature if edge is their default browser.
we don't have to imagine it, this isn't new, this is the Status quo.
And we're all to enrolled/busy/tired to give a shit about it. just make the customizing changes and move on.
With my PC, I could dual boot, as it's just reassuring that I can fire up my favorite games and they "just work" on whatever the latest Windows OS is I'm running, and the convenience factor is so much higher now that I'm running WSL2 and can do various Linux things, too. But cost-wise, well I've only ever paid for Windows when buying a pre-made system. When building, I've gotten various free versions of Windows over the years, like when I did a "Windows party" for the launch of 7, and they sent me a free copy of Ultimate (which was free to upgrade to 8->8.1->10. But obviously not available in general if you want a Windows license.)
And the cost of time... to fiddle with Linux and try to get all my Blizzard games working, maybe it's not as bad as it is in my head, but it seems like a hassle, and quite often, my spouse and my family members and my friends and I spontaneously want to jump into a game of StarCraft 2 or Valheim or Diablo 3, and I don't want anything causing me to stop what I'm doing and try to troubleshoot it for 2 hours while everyone else plays.
So, I run only Windows, and I put up with the once or twice a year that a new update comes out and potentially introduces some kind of notification or extra Start Menu tile, and I turn that thing off, and then I go on with my life without it. If I could have Linux with a "Windows gaming" channel like Netflix that always just worked for every game I play or will play in the future, I think I'd certainly consider switching to that. But for now, I'm not confident enough that everything I use my PC for would "just work" if I switched, with the same performance and lack of troubleshooting, so I do not do so.
If I search for "suggest", click a result, press mouse-back button: It loses my search results. I sent back to a blank index page.
So I have to search "suggest", find my place in the results, click result, back, search again, remember where I am, click, back, search, etc etc.
If you're going to make desktop software "browser-like" then actually commit. Don't add a back button but not have it act like a browser back button. Just obnoxious.
PS - On Windows 20H2/19042.867.
Yes, the command line itself has ads for the store sprinkled throughout it.
Later, when I needed to pull down the Rust compiler, I discovered that the C++ redistributable package, despite not including Visual Studio, helpfully adds an explorer shell link to "Open in Visual Studio" which I suspect is meant to open the Store again, though on my system it appears to do nothing. So that's another ad.
Clearly I'm not the target audience for this kind of stuff, being a Linux administrator and using that as my daily driver, but there's still something inherently creepy about all of this. I don't trust marketers, or the advertising industry at large, and while I understand Microsoft is a business and is necessarily going to engage in some marketing, there's a time and a place. Basic features of my operating system are not it.
Even Android doesn't get that intrusive, not that it's much better.
Funny thing is, this is actually wrong on Windows and always has been. Unless I'm missing something. I recently traced back the earliest python3 installer on the official ftp site of python.org and even that one didn't have a python3 command. No official installers seem to have had it. Nor does an Anaconda install. So I don't really know why the 'official' (that is, the one on the MS store) is pushing python3 as a command (apart from 'other OS do have this'). Anyone has any insight on this?
Yes, the command line itself has ads
Technically it's just an executable in the PATH so anything, including any terminal application, which uses that gets it.
helpfully adds an explorer shell link to "Open in Visual Studio
Care to post the link to that installer? Never saw that, curious to see which one that is.
No clue why the standard non-app store installer doesn't add python3 to the path to mimic this behavior.
- google can push chrome on people in their search results. and google pushed HARD. So hard they dominate the browser market and chrome is unfortunately not known for privacy.
- google pretty much makes it impossible to get away from chrome entirely in android. Example being that you MUST use chrome webview when using the google search app. Even though everything else uses firefox for me.
- ms doesn't have search results. sure they try with bing but its not nearly as good or widespread. MS does have windows itself though, so they push where they can.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to MS at the moment. And this is coming from the pitchforks and torches guy against IE6/7/8/9 back in the day.
No, that's not how this works. If it's wrong, stop Google from doing it, instead of letting others do it too.
MS can't wait that long for a maybe sort of kind of. Just being practical here.
I didn't pay Google $200 (Windows 10 Pro retaile I payed for recently) for the privilege to use their search, so they are free to push some advertising alongside it. When I will pay $200 to use their search then I don't want any advertising from Google either.
> - google pretty much makes it impossible to get away from chrome entirely in android. Example being that you MUST use chrome webview when using the google search app. Even though everything else uses firefox for me.
Funny, I have used InBrowser ever since I started using Android 10 years ago (which btw, makes it possible to read all those news articles without running into free article monthly limits because InBrowser doesn't store any state between sessions). Doesn't seem impossible to not use Chrome at all to me.
> - ms doesn't have search results. sure they try with bing but its not nearly as good or widespread. MS does have windows itself though, so they push where they can.
They are free to do whatever they want with their software but I don't find it acceptable to pay $200 for that and still get ads. If they were to give me Windows 10 Pro for free, then sure, go ahead and put a bunch of ads on my desktop.
And still push hard. I use whichever browser is most "native" to the platform I'm using at the moment (Safari on macOS, Edge on Windows, Firefox on Linux) so I see prompts to install Chrome constantly. Very irritating.
Still pushing hard: if I open the gmail app on my iPad and click a link it pretends I need to choose a browser every single time it seems and one if the choices is always Chrome (that I haven't installed and won't install).
I've already been writing relevant authorities here (Norway) twice last year and I'll keep pushing.
The moment they kill competition, that moment ad blocking disappears.
On my Pixel, when I start a search from the home screen, and then click on a result, it opens that page in Firefox.
Edit: I figured it out. I'm not allowed to uninstall Chrome, but disabling it made it finally use Brave as a fallback. So they actually implement using whatever browser you want, but they just ignore it unless it's actually impossible to use Chrome.
However, if you want a non-Mac PC, your choices are slim to none to avoid Windows.
Microsoft a convicted monopolist, DoJ has acted twice already against them. Google isn's there yet.
Advertisements or recommendations in Windows 10 are definitely helping Edge
For example Wikimedia shows Firefox at 12%~ of desktop browser usage whereas W3Counter has it at only 6.1% and StatCounter 7.95%. With the latter two being JavaScript based.
They are promoting the ability to pin websites on the taskbar.
use LTSC. it only has security updates so you're not forced to constantly decrapify your OS.
I have many apps that do that when a new version is pushed out and they have new features.
That statement implies to me that they are also advertising to people who aren't using Edge.
Microsoft charges $100 for Windows 10, virtually every corner of the experience is riddled with advertisements and marketing crap.
Microsoft trying that would absolutely kill the company- either by lawsuit or people getting up in arms over anti-competitive behavior. They make a small amount every few years when you buy a new computer, and hope you'll also pay for their other software (or give them data, which is tantamount to the same thing).
Microsoft, literally, sells Windows 10... for money.
edit:
To make it clear to people not reading the comment carefully, I'm not saying MacOS is "free". I'm merely saying that once you pay for the computer, the OS is included in the price.
And there is no additional monetization under the form of ads or tracking. Unlike in the Windows world, where you pay for the license, yet you are still being tracked and served ads.
Imagine how nice Windows 10 would be if Microsoft didn't own Bing, Xbox, and Office.
I'm pretty sure I see adverts for all these things on my "advert-free" Macbook.
Maybe I'm cynical, but if MS is adding ads to the OS that you paid for, then how much worse would it be if they didn't have these other platforms raising money to offset as well. I'm imagining your OS with a desktop that looks like a NASCAR car and driver's suit.
For well over a decade that didn't make OS X free. I 'member when upgrading OS X meant forking $129.
Also the OS isn't free. When you buy an Apple computer, you're also purchasing a license to use macOS on that machine.
Now to say "virtually every corner of the experience" seems like a massive overreach. When you first install Windows, or buy hardware with Windows, you are likely to find some advertisements, i.e. programs pre-installed, and start menu tiles that offer other things they want you to install. And there is this obnoxious taskbar notification, which I abhor! It happens once after a major software update.
That doesn't cover nearly all corners of the Windows experience, though. It's just two items, and you can uninstall or dismiss the notification and it mostly never shows up again (except next time they release a major update.) About 363 days of the year, I will see zero advertisements in my Windows 10 experience from Microsoft.
Now, I'm not saying we give them a pass. We should absolutely be critical of these user hostile moves, but we should describe the experience using accurate terms and phrases.
For all intents and purposes their OS is free - the consumer does not ever need to worry about upgrade costs.
And "search with google" keeps pushing you to safari https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17935301/how-to-force-ma...
I don't have win app store / one drive too, removed that on the first day.
Once every x months, I have to install a larger Windows update - which has me click through a bunch of screens AGAIN, having to avoid accepting some kind of ad-pushing nonsense and tracking.
Every corner of my Windows 10 experience is not riddled with advertisements. All I have to do is to remove few built-in partner apps after Windows install which I'm doing every few years.
You're really exaggerating it. I don't like that Microsoft tries to monetize already sold Windows. But it's not that bad. Open web browser with a typical website and you'll have every corner of the experience riddled with advertisements. That's truly embarrassing.
My point here is that it pretends to be neutral and allows Reddit, Fb, and Youtube...But google is nowhere to be found.
I really want to give Linux a shot for daily driver use on a laptop and desktop, and have avoided it thus far because it seems intimidating and potentially tricky to get right (for example I worry about getting security right). Are there any trustworthy guides that introduce newer users to using Linux as a daily driver?
How many people doesn't get updates today because they got sick with the way they were doing windows updates back in the "forced restarted" early days
This bloat culture at microsoft has to stop, please!
All my auto-updates are off. I only update "manually" and one thing for the duration, so that I can isolate any eventual issues.
And Microsoft Updates specifically are banned for at least 6 months. I wasn't affected when it occurred, but I sure as hell won't let them exercise their incompetence of the "update deletes your data, users are our testers in production" kind upon me. (INB4: Yes, I do backup.)
why is it that some people see all this crap, and I'm just sitting here thinking win10 is working perfect and is the best os to date
This entire thread is very humorous.
Personally I have Hackernews/reddit/Youtube/Stackoverflow as taskbar pins.
I still have a Windows 7 machine, but it hasn't been powered up in the last month. Wine 6 on Linux is doing most of what I need in running old Windows software.
Don't even get me started on that ill-starred generation of Windows Server that used the touch-screen influenced Start Screen instead of a Start Menu...
