Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#441

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #344

15457345234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrast that to the Linux desktop where you can't turn off the "it just doesn't work" The modern Linux desktop is pretty damn usable, especially if you go with something like PopOS. It's got to be covering 99% of non-workstation-type of use cases out of the box.

Eh. It depends. If you have something exotic as analog mouse it just doesn't work on Linux. And Linux suffers from OS version of Lisp curse - i.e. whenever two nerds disagree you get a new distro with slightly incompatible behavior. Not to mention Linux breaks compatibility left and right, while Windows lives with its mistakes forever.

I was shocked when I was able to install Office 97 at work on a Windows 11 machine and… it “just worked”, paperclip and all the lame ways it tries to take over your desktop…

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#442

Post by nativeit » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 3:46 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #340

midasuni wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual solution from libertarian techies is to remove what little power democratic governments have and let big business be unchecked other than some “invisible hand” from a collection of individual actors who can’t scale due to psychological warfare that big companies can easily scale to. We are now at a point that billionaires openly make unilateral decisions about foreign and defence policy with little discussi…

I think this is curve-fitting. Billionaires in the USA are completely and totally beholden to the military-industrial complex, for the most part. Look how they all scrambled for JEDI, for example. The US military alone spends the entire net worth of the richest private person in 17 weeks, wealth it took him 30-ish years to accumulate; that's not counting the rest of government spending. There's an argument that any s…

The banana republics aren’t all that old. President Isenhour’s administration were toppling sovereign governments and democratically elected leaders directly at the behest of Dole Foods (United Fruit) well after World War II ended.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#443

Post by babypuncher » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

antiframe wrote: post #79

doyouevensunbro wrote: post #61

I’m using Windows 11 and nothing forces open Edge on my machine. Every link opens in Brave like I told it to.

What happens when you press Win, type a query, then press enter, quickly? In Win 10 that opens a Bing search in Edge for me, no matter what settings I try. Very annoying when I type "(Win)chr(enter)" to open Chrome and get a search instead. If I do it slow it will sometimes work. I haven't tried it on Win 11 because that was what caused me to drop Windows altogether. (Everyone has their straw).

I disabled the ability to search the web through the start menu long before they started with the edge shenanigans. As far as I'm concerned that isn't the operating system's job, and the only things I should see when I search there are things actually on my computer.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#444

Post by docmars » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

ciabattabread wrote: post #408

docmars wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it's a Catch 22, because the most influential billionaires have direct ties to Establishment politicians, supporting and manipulating them freely to their liking, including brazen election interference, in which the same Establishment players all admitted to existing not long ago, while judges and district attorneys in their respective states have also been bought out by these same billionaires in an ef…

> The bad news is, any criticism of these particular billionaires results in synthesized media campaigns crying wolf about anti-Semitism or anti-science Who’s the billionaire you have in mind? Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.

Due to the nature of the discussion, if I mentioned their names here, I would get flagged into oblivion for daring to mention them — I'm not being hyperbolic either (I wish I was!). I neither believe it's safe nor fruitful to discuss that freely here.

I will say, I encourage anyone interested in understanding this better to spend some time researching: to who known billionaire individuals (and families) are donating funds to, or investing heavily into, whether that be corporate/legacy media companies, video game publishers, farms, as a few examples — you name it. Follow the money, and you will find power and influence causing rapid changes to policy, hiring, and public relations that all closely align to known political agendas.

I'll leave it at that. :)

>Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.

Yes, precisely. It's human nature, but even easier as someone with nearly unlimited funds and quite likely, power.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

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Post by Scoring6931 » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 4:19 PM UTC

dc3k wrote: post #108

keyle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been out of the Windows world for years, but seeing a lot of games are now available on Linux, and drivers, why not build a Linux gaming PC? I mean what else would you need a PC with Windows for? This ReviOS stuff has all the smoke signals of too good to be true .

I want less hassle, not more. Linux still has a very long way to go in gaming - some things still require a bunch of tweaking, some games suffer from poor frame rates or just plain don’t work at all. Also I vastly prefer the windows desktop experience to any Linux distribution I’ve tried over the years.

Have you tried again in recent years?

Today it is much more of a binary experience. A game either runs smoothly out of the box or does not run at all. And the latter is the exception, not the rule.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

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Post by hospitalJail » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #304

Every day of bad new for Microsoft and Windows is another great day for Linux. You all have a choice. Make it.

Bonus: No more forced reboots!

Switching to Linux has saved me sooo much time. I go to my computer, log-on, and it just works. No reopening files, nothing lost, no having to save 'recovered' files, no browsers reopening all your tabs for a few minutes.

Every week with linux has saved me something like 5-10 minutes.

Invest those 5-10 minutes into fixing those random Linux bugs until those random Linux bugs are gone. Now its just pure time savings.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#447

Post by hospitalJail » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

HeavyStorm wrote: post #318

sandworm101 wrote: post #304

Every day of bad new for Microsoft and Windows is another great day for Linux. You all have a choice. Make it.

Sorry, I don't have a choice. And I find it naive to think that I do.

In the meantime, make sure you email your software vendors asking for Linux support. Its getting late, and Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to handle their responsibilities in the computing market.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#448

Post by cutler » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

cutler wrote: post #363

oefrha wrote: post #301

Last time I tested an extension of mine on Edge, I counted four or five distinct ways Windows and Edge tried to convince or coax me into setting Edge as default. (Coaxing includes but isn’t limited to full-screen one-click “finish setting up your computer” on boot which includes adopting “Microsoft-recommended” browser security settings which of course means resetting the default browser. It appeared on every reboot…

It always surprised me how even savvy devs bought WSL as proof of Microsoft's good intentions. If you lived through Microsoft's antics in the 90s and 00s you could never imagine them changing. Well, here's the proof - they haven't. WSL was introduced purely to grab a piece of the expanding Linux market and followed their attempts to extort money from Red Hat and Suse via their bogus Linux patents racket.

This in turn followed their failed attempt to derail UNIX by bankrolling SCO's failed anti-UNIX lawsuit.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#449

Post by yomlica8 » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 5:06 PM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #321

sam345 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it. I've used linux desktops for 20 years also and command line is definitely a must on a daily basis. Ive also used Windows and agree that it just fades into background. Windows 10/11 definitely less paiinful on the desktop. These days with better integration with and tools for Linux cli, Windows is definitely my preferred gui productivity environment. Many Linux fans don't know better or won't admit it be…

> Windows is definitely my preferred gui productivity environment lmao, not because I don't believe you really think what you write, but because how user hostile everything in Windows seems to me, if you only want to change a single setting. It will be hidden behind 3 level deep settings dialogs and a "material design" flat links connecting those setting dialogs, so almost no visual indication, to make things stand o…

The main problem with Windows' terrible settings is that they are constantly changing. So when you search for how to change something all the instructions are obsolete.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#450

Post by biogene » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

saghm wrote: post #52

biogene wrote: post #37

I don't care for edge for the most part, but there is actually one integration with edge that I have come to like. When I click on an email link inside outlook, edge opens the link, and also displays a sidebar which displays the email. Super handy IMO. Somehow we need to find a balance that allows vendors to tightly integrate their apps but prevent abusing this. MS is everyone's favorite whipping boy, but I fear what…

> Somehow we need to find a balance that allows vendors to tightly integrate their apps but prevent abusing this A vendor of a web browser and email client, sure. A vendor of an operating system and one (or both) of a web browser and an email client, hell no. If anything, an operating system should be forced _not_ to tightly integrate to vendor-specific apps and instead should provide integration loosely and in a way…

Well, everyone has their view, I don't think I'm any more right than you. You can give a technical definition of an OS from a CS textbook, but ultimately all of these are consumer/retail products created to benefit the end-user, not so much to create a technical design masterpiece. But that is just my view. I tend to side on the practical aspects more than design purity.