231–240 of 645 posts
I'd be happy to give Edge a chance but honestly Windows has so many anti-user patterns that it's intentionally forcing me to not use Edge because of how mad it's making me.
Windows is just full of hostile, anti-user patterns these days. I've considered building a windows box just to have a gaming rig multiple times over the last few years, but every time an article like this or their crusade against Chrome reminds me that Bill Gates is still the same anti-trust monster he was in the 90s.
Google has an equally annoying crusade against anything that isn't Chrome. Visit google.com with Edge (on desktop) and you immediately get a popup on the top right "Google recommends using Chrome. Built for Windows. Easily search on Google with the fast, secure browser". As if there was any material difference between the browsers. We need a comeback of antitrust enforcement with teeth to get both Microsoft and Googl…
The both the browser and OS actively advise against it.
Windows is just full of hostile, anti-user patterns these days. I've considered building a windows box just to have a gaming rig multiple times over the last few years, but every time an article like this or their crusade against Chrome reminds me that Bill Gates is still the same anti-trust monster he was in the 90s.
About the Windows gaming machine, you can surely build one just for gaming; just never put any personal data on it, never use it for surfing or doing anything that is not gaming, never give it any unfiltered access to your LAN, assume it contains malicious software then put it on dedicated Ethernet port on the firewall, setting up rules that allow only very restricted storage sharing so that it can't read or write anywhere but directories set up to contain exclusively what one would want to be readable/writeable by that machine.
Yes, it's a nightmare, but I don't see alternatives, save for giving Windows the middle finger for good also wrt gaming, which might end up easier than expected given the recent development with Proton and DXVK.
I don't understand how Microsoft benefits from getting everyone to use their web browser? Is it all to spy on people's browsing habits?
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You don't need Windows for gaming any more. Ubuntu 22.04 comes with graphics drivers. Steam has Steam Play and Lutris has a huge library of install scripts, so everything is handled for you. The one thing you will need to do occasionally is experiment with different Wine distributions. This means you will need to right click on your game and select the distribution from a drop-down box. Exhausting, I know.
That's not entirely true. Most games are still built for Windows, and all of the tools for playing games on Linux have come a long way, but there are still a lot of combinations of games and drivers that don't work.
Lol. Euphemism for "we want to take away all choice from the user".
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I'd say it's far better because messing at the OS level is straight out evil. On Firefox I can stand the suggestion to use Chrome when I use google, I can even block it with uBlock, but haven't really bothered to. Now, when they keep tweaking my OS settings, and use every upgrade as the excuse to reset my browser settings over and over, then I get mad. When I get ads on my start menu too. That's why I don't use windo…
I agree in general but Google has done things like let YouTube be slow in non-Chrome browsers or “accidentally” break GCP logins or Meet for months at a time.
Its getting worse everywhere: some things I've noticed: Mobil Safari seems to be using the search bar to hijack my google search (Particularly for locations which open in apple maps) Although I'm mostly linux these days I went to install an alternative browser on a windows machine (using edge to download). I mentioned this in another post, but edge seems to watch for "chrome" or "firefox" downloads and politely remin…
WSL2 in Windows means you can just run a Debian underneath and launch a non-snap Firefox from there and have it appears in Windows. Now you get the benefit of Windows power management (and that beautiful laptop battery life) but a web browser Microsoft isn't going to mess with. This sounds hilarious were it not the way I actually work. PS: I'll also mention that VSCode from Windows to WSL2 + Debian is a mind-blowingl…
Google does something like this with the GMail app on iPhone— you click links and instead of just opening Safari, it pops up a "which browser to use" selector modal, which is really just an advertisement for you to install Chrome.
This is what I want personally. I use different browsers for different things: let me fucking chose which browser to use. I am currently wondering how easy it would be to build a "shim browser" that you can set as default but does not actually open the page, it only list the urls apps tried to open and lets you copy them to whichever browser you prefer.
Properly implemented such prompts would be great though. Someone else in the thread mentioned how location search results on mobile Safari always launch Apple Maps - it would be great to have the option to choose from whatever I have installed.