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De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

arstechnica.com

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Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#291

Post by genocidicbunny »

dartharva wrote: post #189
aorth wrote: post #106

Fantastic! How do we get access to this "European" version of Windows 11? Asking for Europeans who don't live in Europe, and for non-Europeans everywhere who want less Bing, Edge, and upselling in their OS.

You can still have a debloated Windows 11 setup without the bloat by just selecting "English (World)" in the localisation option during installation. Add to that the "no@thankyou.com" trick while signing in to Microsoft account and you'll have an option of a fresh, clean locally-administered install.

Didn't they fix the English (World) trick at some point?

Regardless of that, supposedly for this you just need to set your region to somewhere in the EU during initial installation; Though that can't be changed post-install.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#292

Post by janfoeh »

sureglymop wrote: post #164
handsclean wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s trivial to implement this in a legal and user friendly way, just make the save button make clear that it’ll persist, or even add a persistence checkbox. Demanding consent as an aggressive popup when it isn’t necessary for anything but ad tracking is not a good faith compliance effort, it’s an attempt to avoid real compliance by just having the user just sign off on whatever they were already doing.

Add the cookie popup/banner into the browser so that the user can make a choice for _all_ the websites used. But honestly, something like that is much harder to achieve with such regulations because it's kind of not the browser vendors problem. The ad network companies are parasitic in a way.

We've had that twenty years ago, in Internet Explorer no less [1]. It just never gained traction, likely because it was quite convoluted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#293

Post by appplication »

pavlov wrote: post #224
hurril wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don't do the exact same thing at all. One comes preloaded with apps you didn't choose and news or ads right on the task bar. Apple does none of that.

Apple preloads the phone with commercial apps that I didn't ask for like Apple Music, and those apps will get automatically triggered for some content. They show news and other unsolicited content practically in the home screen (the widget screen is just a swipe away, every user will stumble there). What's the difference? I think people are a bit blind to Apple's defaults. They compare a fresh Windows 11 install to t…

> I think people are a bit blind to Apple's defaults.

I think there is some truth to this. But the reason people are blind to it is that, even if Apple and Microsoft are doing the same thing philosophically to a degree, Apple’s implementation of it feels less aggressive, less cheap, and more easily turned off than MS’s approach (two taps to permanently remove the news widget).

For what it’s worth, Apple News, even the free version, is actually a half decent news app if you’re in a supported area for local news.

> comes with an ever-growing pile of Apple default apps loaded in the Dock and set as defaults

Realistically, this is the direction consumer workstations are heading, and it’s the right direction. The average user is nontechnical, and less interested in customization than functionality. They want apps preloaded and preset as defaults. For those who don’t, there’s always Linux. But I think it would be a misrepresentation to suggest this is somehow a bad thing or that the masses don’t want or wouldn’t benefit from this.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#294

Post by hnhg »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #280
BlarfMcFlarf wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because while corruption* is still rampant in the EU, it’s not at least directly protected by the constitution like in the USA, so occasionally some legislation that benefits normal folks over megacorporations manages to sneak through. *also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.

... sigh. Lobbying isn't equivalent to corruption. While the two can get very similar in the US because US elections have no campaign spending cap, therefore politicians (and even some civil servants) have a constant need for massive political donations, in general lobbying is a lot more complex than "spend money, get law you like". It usually involves a high amount of, you guessed it, waiting around in lobbies. In t…

Your post didn’t require the impolite sigh and reads much better without it.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#295

Post by zerr »

severino wrote: post #278
zerr wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btw, Microsoft seems to be circumventing US/EU sanctions. While traveling to eastern Europe, the fresh installation of Edge has yandex (pootin-linked company) as the default search engine, and also proposes other similarly shady websites like mailru.

I don't think there is any EU sanction related to Yandex. I could always access it (with my default ISP settings, no VPN nor anything like that) and I don't know of anybody who couldn't, at least from inside the EU.

I mean the deal Microsoft has with yandex to have it as the default search engine.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#296

Post by hnhg »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #222
BlarfMcFlarf wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because while corruption* is still rampant in the EU, it’s not at least directly protected by the constitution like in the USA, so occasionally some legislation that benefits normal folks over megacorporations manages to sneak through. *also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.

In the EU, really? I can see it in the US, but the amount of lobbying spend in EU must be 1-2 orders of magnitude less. Also, all highly advanced democracies have some lobbying. It is not viewed widely by political scientists as corruption.

If you spend time in brussels it becomes quite difficult to avoid lobbyists. They are perfectly nice people but apparently everywhere, for every sector and very much full time there.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#297

Post by felixding »

octacat wrote: post #275

oh yea, can we also patch Apple? This "Your icloud storage is low" and "Buy space" warnings are annoying. And you cannot do anything about them. Oh, Apple products have such an amazing usability (they are not, apparently, in 2023, if they think advertising their cloud bundle is ok).

Exactly. I disabled notifications completely because of this which makes the feature useless to me. I kinda miss the good old Growl days.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#298

Post by throw101010 »

BlarfMcFlarf wrote: post #171
magnio wrote: post #53

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but how on earth did the EU pass a regulation[0] with such far-reaching implications? First Apple opening up to third-party app stores and RCS, now Microsoft giving users a bit more leeway. How come none of the big tech lobby against it in the EU? If it survives the waves of appeals, the DMA will probably change the entire technology landscape in the near future. Not that I'm complaining…

Because while corruption* is still rampant in the EU, it’s not at least directly protected by the constitution like in the USA, so occasionally some legislation that benefits normal folks over megacorporations manages to sneak through. *also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.

> Because while corruption* is still rampant in the EU

> *also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.

Firstly, corruption is not "rampant" in the European Union, it is on average the least corrupt political organization on this planet: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022

Secondly, lobbying is not corruption, it is legalized, registered and regulated in most EU members and at the Union's level even more so.

If interest groups cannot communicate their interests to politicians, how do you expect politicians to inform their votes, make laws, and take decisions? Should they just guess or know everything about every topic they are solicited about? Should they "Google" the answers (the irony here should strike you in regards to the original post)?

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#299

Post by Shadowed_ »

alkonaut wrote: post #254
alok-g wrote: post #228

>> Camera, Cortana, and Photos can now be uninstalled When a user would uninstall an app, would it actually be removed from the system, or just the icons and entries would be. Motivation for asking: Several built-in apps are listed in the Apps section of the settings as having just a few kB in size, which does not match how bloated in size apps typically are in the current times. I've seen mouse drivers occupy hundre…

I think for app uninstallation to be relevant it's not whether the app resides on disk that's important, it's whether it's interfering with how you use the system. E.g. for a browser it's just important that the browser isn't registered as the default browser everywhere, but you can install your own browser. Being able to "uninstall" an app in a relevant way means being able to make it appear as if you don't have it.…

What you are talking about is not uninstalling. It's disabling. Uninstalling should remove application.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#300

Post by majewsky »

chakintosh wrote: post #262
magnio wrote: post #53

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but how on earth did the EU pass a regulation[0] with such far-reaching implications? First Apple opening up to third-party app stores and RCS, now Microsoft giving users a bit more leeway. How come none of the big tech lobby against it in the EU? If it survives the waves of appeals, the DMA will probably change the entire technology landscape in the near future. Not that I'm complaining…

> lobby There is no such thing in the EU. You can't just waltz into the European parliament and lobby (read: bribe) your way into regulations that favor you like it's the case in the USA. Once the parliament votes on something, it's done.

> Once the parliament votes on something, it's done.

The Council and the Commission would like to have a word with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_trilogue_meeting

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