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Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

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Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#391

Post by LegitShady »

tehbeard wrote: post #370
LegitShady wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- explorer randomly dies when switching virtual desktops and then comes back. I've had this one 3 machines now and I've no clue why. Were you using an Nvidia graphics card and did you right click on the left box of explorer where the quick access toolbar is? This is a common issue with Nvidias context menu in that situation.

Nvidia card....not sure about the rest, this has happened with the shortcuts at least.

it's a longstanding problem with the NVidia CPL Context Menu Extension.

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#392

Post by GekkePrutser »

This is becoming a joke... Along with the tricks hiding firefox from search results, the inclusion of buy-now-pay-later schemes, Microsoft is well on its way proving to us why we shouldn't trust them being a major player on the browser market. A fact they have proven to us once before of course.

I really thought they were on a good path when Ballmer stepped down but this is old Microsoft all over again.

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#393

Post by GekkePrutser »

fartcannon wrote: post #227
belorn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who on Earth would continue using a browser that has such hostile behavior and dark patterns all over the place Every kind of technology today has clear and visible dark patterns. In the past it was advertisement everywhere and now it is user-hostile design. See any discussion about smart tv, subscription services, webshops, smart devices, phones, apps or any other technology topics and the issue of dark patterns w…

There is no darkness in the world of FOSS, it's an actual, currently functioning, computing utopian dream. Let Caeser have his awful stuff. We can all push for fun, and free computing.

Agreed. I run KDE on FreeBSD and it's so amazing to have it do what I want, not what some company wants.

I feel the same about a lot of apps in F-Droid now. Sometimes their functionality is not as complete or they're not as polished as their Google Play counterparts. But the ad/crapware and mandatory logins that is included in those apps take away a lot of usability now.

At that point I gladly give up some polish for a 2MB app that is fast and does just what I need over a bloated 100MB app with stupid animations, ads and tracking. My battery loves it too.

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#394

Post by sofixa »

bacchusracine wrote: post #228
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean they were already thoroughly whipped and fined, forced to add a browser choice window, then made to pay a fine again after this browser choice window 'accidentally' didn't work anymore. Time for another fine? I mean I have no clue where that money ends up at, I like to think it goes into IT subsidies, but still.

>Time for another fine? Sure! I mean it's working so well at changing corporate behavior, why would we want to stop now? Things like this are why I advocate for Corporate Jail time and a Corporate Death Penalty.

If the fines are more regular and serious, they will mould corporate behaviour ( e.g. see GDPR). If MS get fined a couple of billion each for this Edge crap, and for bundling Edge and Teams into Windows 11, they might think again and take another decade before trying again.

But as i said, the best solution is to break them up. Split them into Azure; Windows+enterprise software à la AD; Exchange, etc., Office365; Surface.

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#395

Post by fragmede »

nitrogen wrote: post #280
r00fus wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> macOS only runs on very expensive hardware and doesn't run most programs people need (because the business world is still Windows oriented) This is an outdated take - it's functionally untrue in most business settings. Gaming on the other hand, is very much still mostly Windows only.

functionally untrue in most business settings Most business settings have some absolutely critical custom software written in Winforms or something that can't be ported, plus an entire machine of IT personnel and software tools that would be just as costly to convert.

So run it through Parallels. If IT doesn't want to do it that's a different problem, but the Windows on Intel Macs hasn't been a problem for business programs for a while.

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#396

Post by raxxorrax »

pierrebai wrote: post #316
mise_en_place wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal but I’ve never had any issue with Linux. Aside from installing Nvidia proprietary drivers when secureboot is enabled. In which case DKMS is broken so I had to enroll a new signing key in MOK and use that to sign the nvidia kernel driver. If I need to run Windows, I will either use WINE or single GPU pass through to a Windows VM on KVM. Never needed to dual boot. Edge on Linux is great actually, I just don’t…

That was a crash course on how to self-disprove one's argument, all in the first sentence. "It works well, except for this extremely common use case that requires arcane knowledge to fix."

It is secure boot specific which I believe is a in theory working but in reality a broken mechanism because of certificate logistics. We could also call it Microsoft Boot at this point. Sure, it will work better in Windows, but it comes at a hidden price.

Also, this won't give you too many benefits aside from convenience to skip one password entry, while any Saas will at some point leverage it against you if it every gets popular. That is basically the gist of secure boot or trusted platform in general right now.

Smartphones are trusted platforms and their software landscape is atrocious and predatory. Trusted platforming would move it in exactly the same direction.

Meanwhile boot viruses have become quite rare, because phishing and extortion is much more profitable.

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#397

Post by AshamedCaptain »

jeroenhd wrote: post #372
overshadow wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux has been making progress but still isn't a good alternative for the common user For non tech savvy people, Linux can cause problems, but only if they do something weird to their system. Linux, specifically Ubuntu or Mint, untouched, and unaltered is a great out-of-the-box experience. The key (if turning someone on to Linux for the first time) is to stress that the command line is for power users who want full…

I agree, but when you Google "Ubuntu 21 sound not working" you end up here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProced... and the first thing you see is tons of shell commands and very outdated GUI controls. This is the vendor documentation, not even a StackExchange forum. When you Google for "Windows 11 sound not working" the first result I get is https://www.makeuseof.com/fix-no-audio-windows-11/ w…

This is actually a good observation. Yes, the Windows results are full of what I would call useless crap (e.g. "make sure you did not mute the speaker!"), but for real newbies that is likely to be useful advice, and much more likely to solve their problem than say digging into alsa.cfg internals (which is highly unlikely to be the source of the problem).

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#398

Post by badsectoracula »

jeroenhd wrote: post #369
badsectoracula wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux has been making progress but still isn't a good alternative for the common user unless they have an expert to rely upon when something breaks down IME "common users" already rely on an expert when their Windows OS breaks down. Not long ago I had to walk my aunt through opening the command prompt in Windows 10 and entering the command to do a full reboot (as opposed to that hybrid shutdown+hibernation) because…

My problem with Linux for end users is that Windows and Linux break down differently. When a Linux update fails (which can happen automatically; for example, Ubuntu 16 reserved a very small boot partition and upgrading it to the latest version leaves it with too little space to keep the normal amount of kernels available), you end up digging through files and configuration and terminal commands. This is different fro…

The last time i had Linux break after an update was around 2015 with Arch, but that is a rolling distro and during a time when rolling distros weren't as stable as nowadays. Before that it was with Ubuntu in the late 2000s but that was with a full system upgrade that you have to explicitly do manually.

I wouldn't expect a "fixed" version distro to break nowadays because of updates.

Also FWIW openSUSE does provide recovery support[0] as it uses Btrfs snapshots before and after package installations and upgrades (as well as during some other events, including taking a snapshot periodically - these are deleted after a while or if they start taking too much space) and you can roll them back either manually or even boot from a snapshot in case something goes wrong.

I haven't really had a need for it so i can't exactly tell you how useful that would be (or to compare it with Windows since i never used Windows' system restore either), but it does sound like it'd provide the same or at least very similar functionality.

[0] https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/b...

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#399

Post by badsectoracula »

armchairhacker wrote: post #340
badsectoracula wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux has been making progress but still isn't a good alternative for the common user unless they have an expert to rely upon when something breaks down IME "common users" already rely on an expert when their Windows OS breaks down. Not long ago I had to walk my aunt through opening the command prompt in Windows 10 and entering the command to do a full reboot (as opposed to that hybrid shutdown+hibernation) because…

In my experience the real issue with Linux is that it’s hard to set up. Especially when you have/get an OS preinstalled with Windows, to just using Windows. And that most applications / drivers don’t support it nearly as well. There are many many distributions. When I started Linux, I first tried Ubuntu because that was recommended to me. Ubuntu is installed with Xfce which looks and basically is clunky and outdated.…

Well yeah, but i wouldn't expect a "normal user" to (re)install Windows either, so if they end up with Linux it would be because they either bought a computer with it preinstalled or someone else installed it for them.

Re: Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

#400

Post by badsectoracula »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #301
badsectoracula wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux has been making progress but still isn't a good alternative for the common user unless they have an expert to rely upon when something breaks down IME "common users" already rely on an expert when their Windows OS breaks down. Not long ago I had to walk my aunt through opening the command prompt in Windows 10 and entering the command to do a full reboot (as opposed to that hybrid shutdown+hibernation) because…

If Windows says "restart" that should always mean a full reboot as far as I know. I usually disable fast startup, and it sounds like she should disable it too. Whoever set it up so that you have to reboot to shut down should have realized that the way they were implementing this was a bad idea.

> If Windows says "restart" that should always mean a full reboot as far as I know.

That is what i expected but it doesn't seem to work that way and i had issues myself with it with other things, like e.g. some older games use the system timer (which is reset at full shutdown) for their animations but if the timer is a large number the animations and movement might break. This wasn't much of an issue back when most PCs were shut down every day as it would reset the timer, but nowadays the timer state persists after reboots - it was what actually prompted me to figure out how to reboot the PC from the command line as that does a full reboot.

It might be a bug that persisted for a long time or some intentional feature, but either way it is something i've experienced on my PCs and for that reason i have a small shortcut that calls 'shutdown' with the parameters for a full reboot.

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