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The Windows 11 Trash Party

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Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#121

Post by neogodless »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #66

These articles are probably important to really drive the point home, but I also have a bit of a sense that they are akin to saying "the face eating leopard is eating people's faces". Idk as I approach ten years without windows, the decline has been obvious for a long time. But I suppose when you try to stick with it and use the system there is a part of the brain that really tries to look past this stuff, and then o…

> But I suppose when you try to stick with it and use the system there is a part of the brain that really tries to look past this stuff, and then one day you look at what it is with clear eyes and find yourself so disgusted you have to write about it.

Maybe a combination, plus, like any OS user, you learn what you like and don't like, and you customize it to get rid of the stuff you don't like. I'm using Windows 10 and there are very, very few things to complain about 99% of the time. But sure when I do a fresh install, I'm reminded of things I don't like for roughly 5 minutes, and then I don't think about them again for like 2 years straight. So you can see why it wouldn't matter?

On the other hand, if you use Windows 11, and you don't disable the News and Weather widget, you will be reminded constantly how horrible it is. (I tried Windows 11 on a laptop for a few hours, and it a trash party.)

Now, I tried Linux Mint for just over 2 months, and lots of things were awesome, but there were things that sucked, and I could not for the life of me fix them, including losing brightness controls in situations, very frequent hangs on boot, and some games playing much, much worse than they do in Windows. (There were also a ton of games that played just as well as they do in Windows!)

It's the problems that are in your face, especially if you cannot configure around them that will eat at you over time.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#122

Post by JakeAl »

milsorgen wrote: post #103
WWLink wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like what does it want to be? Is it an OS or an advertisement platform. It's an OS created for enterprise corporations to support and manage the actions of their employees in a digital world. First and foremost. Most MS products are. The ad platform is MS trying to find ways to continue growing profits. :D

I'm getting heavy flashbacks to Active Desktop and iirc "Active Channels". Does anyone remember those? Web feeds on/in your desktop. I believe it coincided with the release of IE 4 and their big web integration push.

Active Desktop and MS DHTML was awesome. Insecure as hell for "consumers", but awesome. VBscript/Wscript on/in the desktop as an application was really useful.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#123

Post by userbinator »

charles_f wrote: post #100

There's been a long observed tradition that every other version of Windows is trash. 3.1, 98, XP, 7, 10 were good^, 95, ME, Vista, 8 and now 11 are trash. This one is a bit of a fun one because the bits described here are almost sabotage level bad. You can deactivate that pretty easily so it's not a big deal; there's some other clunky ui interface notably in settings where you can still find 4 or 5 different generati…

You consider 10 "good"? Maybe compared to 8, but not anything before. It's gotten consistently worse with each new version since ~XP. 8 was a massive nosedive, 8.1 a slight improvement over 8, and 10 roughly the same, and 11 another nosedive.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#124

Post by muyuu »

JakeAl wrote: post #122
milsorgen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting heavy flashbacks to Active Desktop and iirc "Active Channels". Does anyone remember those? Web feeds on/in your desktop. I believe it coincided with the release of IE 4 and their big web integration push.

Active Desktop and MS DHTML was awesome. Insecure as hell for "consumers", but awesome. VBscript/Wscript on/in the desktop as an application was really useful.

If containers had been a thing, many of the wild MS ideas of the early 2000s wouldn't have been actually crazy.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#125

Post by nobody9999 »

linguae wrote: post #81
iJohnDoe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point was that the big enterprises pay for licenses that don’t display this garbage. The rest, Microsoft is trying to monetize. I agree big time. We pay for licenses so none of this crap is shown. However, most businesses get the Windows license that is included with their hardware purchase and this crap is shown to them.

The sad thing is that you'd think the revenue coming from license sales to OEMs would be enough for Microsoft to not resort to these blatant attempts to make Windows an advertising platform, but I guess it's not.

>The sad thing is that you'd think the revenue coming from license sales to OEMs would be enough for Microsoft to not resort to these blatant attempts to make Windows an advertising platform, but I guess it's not.

I'm not defending Microsoft here, but just about everyone else is doing that same thing (and not just tech companies, auto, appliance, consumer electronics manufacturers and many others are doing this), so why wouldn't Microsoft do so as well?

Microsoft isn't the problem per se. Rather it's the lack of effective privacy regulations. GDPR (sadly, I'm not in the EU) is a start, but is still far too weak to reverse the perverse incentives that lead to your coffee maker[0][1] spying on you.

Yes, that example is (I think) an outlier, but I used it to point up just how widespread this sort of thing is.

But we shouldn't let Microsoft off the hook for that reason. We should bash them (and everyone else who does this kind of thing) and do our best to vote with our wallets/feet.

Failing that (for whatever reasons), as others have pointed out, Pro/Enterprise versions of Windows allow you to turn this garbage off.

[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/14/chinese-sma...

[1] I'd note that the article linked in [0] has some pretty blatant China bashing^W^W jingoistic undertones. That said, concern over this sort of thing out of China is definitely a concern, but less so (at least to me) than the US/Western corporations that are doing at least as much of this disgusting stuff.

Edit: Clarified prose.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#126

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

tcmart14 wrote: post #85
sho_hn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows is definitely adware now. It's sad, isn't it? In many a Hacker News thread about the Year of the Linux Desktop, someone will inevitably deadpan how there's just no money to be made; there's no business model. It seems to me that the same is true for Apple and Microsoft. There's "no" money in the desktop itself, only as a value-add, via platform effects or via dark pattern monetization like this.

To be honest, Windows really should just rebase on to Linux. They can make their programs work on linux. But the OS isn't the future for Microsoft when it comes to profits. Their future is software and tooling. I don't follow MS's financials, but I bet their growth with Azure and Linux is far outpacing Windows license keys. I believe they have already indicated that Ubuntu is far more popular than their own server OS…

> Windows really should just rebase on to Linux

No, it should not. The NT kernel architecture is drastically superior to the Linux monorepo.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#127

Post by charles_f »

userbinator wrote: post #123
charles_f wrote: post #100

There's been a long observed tradition that every other version of Windows is trash. 3.1, 98, XP, 7, 10 were good^, 95, ME, Vista, 8 and now 11 are trash. This one is a bit of a fun one because the bits described here are almost sabotage level bad. You can deactivate that pretty easily so it's not a big deal; there's some other clunky ui interface notably in settings where you can still find 4 or 5 different generati…

You consider 10 "good"? Maybe compared to 8, but not anything before. It's gotten consistently worse with each new version since ~XP. 8 was a massive nosedive, 8.1 a slight improvement over 8, and 10 roughly the same, and 11 another nosedive.

Yeah I didn't mind 10, it was reasonably consistent and, at least in my experience, fine in terms of perfs

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#128

Post by sn_master »

userbinator wrote: post #5

Windows is definitely adware now. Microsoft saw how much the average user would install, and thought "we can do that too"; of course, by being "official", their own adware is much harder to remove. Windows can show the weather in the bottom left of the task bar, which is nice I've never wanted that feature nor found it appealing. I can just look outside if I want to know the weather where I am, or visit a site otherw…

> I've never wanted that feature

Same for the obligatory stocks feature every OS is obsessed to put when (certainly outside the US) only a tiny minority of people trade stocks.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#130

Post by neogodless »

berkle4455 wrote: post #76

This doesn’t excuse any of that behavior but none of this stuff is enabled/exists on Win11 Pro.

**ing Microsoft. I was trying to compare editions of Windows, and ended up on this page (don't click it) which commandeers your back button for exactly zero (valid) reason: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare

Anyway, at least officially[0] omitting the News and Weather widget is not a feature of the Pro version to my knowledge, but perhaps you found better options for disabling it? Can you enable the weather widget without the news feed? I would love to learn how to do it if I ever end up on Windows 11 again for some reason!

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compare-windows-11-h...

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