Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

thenextweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 351 posts

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#91

Post by archon »

cyberpunk wrote: post #61
booleandilemma wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. I tried Ubuntu a few years ago because I heard that distro was comparably easier to use and my experience was frustrating. It took me 3 hours just to get the speakers to work, and the wifi connection would regularly drop off. Windows just works, and I'll happily pay money for a good product.

I have a reasonably noob-unfriendly linux distro (arch) on my bleeding edge kaby lane xps 13 laptop (month or two old) and even the touchscreen worked without any messing around with config files and so on. It came with ubuntu pre-loaded and I assumed they tweaked the arse out of the configs for it, and so expected pain when I replaced the OS. Turns out I was wrong. Vanilla with a minimal distro and even the touchscr…

> At the same time I'm don't understand how anyone with who works in tech and is thus capable of really understanding these things would voluntarily pick this stack as their daily driver.

Because it's way less work. Simple as that.

Windows, in my experience, just works. The things about it that don't work are the exceptions. Windows gets out of my way and lets me work with minimal setup and maintenance.

Linux, on the other hand, has been a pain in the butt every time I've tried to make it my primary desktop OS, and I have tried multiple times (granted, the last time was 6 years ago). Editing endless config files; building some obscure driver from source to make a device function correctly; and heaven help you if you want to do an OS version upgrade.

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#92

Post by jaxn »

aphextron wrote: post #17

I'm so divided on Microsoft these days. On the one hand they are doing all the right things in terms of supporting FOSS and making Windows into a truly great OS. But then they pull stuff like this and you remember it's Microsoft. I think this is just the price we are going to pay for "evergreen" operating systems. As a consumer, you now only buy Windows once. Microsoft has to make up for these lost sales so it makes…

It is like a bipolar company.

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#93

Post by bubblethink »

jaxn wrote: post #80

This is very disheartening. As a direct result, I am spending some time tonight researching running Linux on my Suface Book. I have been impressed with what seems like a new Microsoft. I even made the switch from OSX to a Surface Book as my primary laptop. I used OSX for a decade and ran Linux as my primary OS before that.

>As a direct result, I am spending some time tonight researching running Linux on my Suface Book.

Probably not the best hardware to run Linux on. There's an entire subreddit comprised of woes of people trying this https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/ . Try something very new like Fedora 25/upcoming 26 or the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04.

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#94

Post by Silhouette »

coldtea wrote: post #37
grawlinson wrote: post #2

Here's a better idea - show Microsoft that you don't accept this type of behaviour by switching products/services. I'm aware that Windows 10 is a "free" OS, but trying to ram this type of behaviour down my throat is despicable unethical behaviour and I don't condone it. It is why I've switched to Linux for my daily computing needs.

> I'm aware that Windows 10 is a "free" OS, but trying to ram this type of behaviour down my throat is despicable unethical behaviour and I don't condone it. It is why I've switched to Linux for my daily computing needs. That would make sense if the benefits were more than the costs. Which, for the average people, aren't. Just the hassle of using a new interface, much less one that needs more admin work like Linux, i…

That would make sense if the benefits were more than the costs. Which, for the average people, aren't.

I'm not so sure any more. The average home user probably does most of their stuff online these days, and you can see your friends' photos on Facebook or write a message in Google Mail or access your online banking or watch a show on Netflix just as well on pretty much any platform today.

What desktop applications do most home users really run now? Gaming, sure, for part of the market. Maybe some basic spreadsheets or word processing documents or accounting for organising household stuff or writing the odd letter that still needs sending on paper.

Other than that, you're probably into niche territory. There are a lot of niches, and no doubt some of them still rely on Windows desktop software or Windows drivers for related hardware, but they're niches because most people aren't that interested in them. And even then, for significant fields such as programming or graphics/creative work, many of the interesting developments in recent years have been on non-Windows platforms and it's the Windows software that tends to lag behind.

Remember, one popular switch already is from Windows to Linux, when home users dump the traditional PC entirely and just do things on their Android phones/tablets instead.

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#95

Post by Klathmon »

cyberpunk wrote: post #86
Klathmon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I just don't think of it as an ad. Just like how Apple pushes their cloud storage, Google pushes drive, even Foss software pushes or bumps other complementary packages. They are being "targeted" because you are already running the software, so if it's saving your shit to a paid account, just hide it, if it's not then show it. No tracking or nefarious stuff needed. If they were really truly​ putting ads in exp…

Yeah, I'll admit I didn't read the article before commenting.. It's a popup slinging integrated cloud storage? Mef. I'm with ya. Who cares.

And I don't blame you for reacting how you did from the headlines.

They are all worded like MS is putting banner ads for "hot singles in your area" in your OS... And this story has been covered by every single major tech news site the same way... It's odd.

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#96

Post by skeletonjelly »

dboreham wrote: post #78
Keverw wrote: post #58

Are the ads only for storage service? At first I was thinking we'd start seeing banner ads like we do on blogs. If it's only Microsoft pushing their own integrated services I don't really have much of a problem, but for software I paid for showing third party ads when I never ever had an expectation of such a thing then I do agree it is very horrible. The "Not now" button does seem like a anti-pattern instead of a si…

The only one I've seen was for their storage services. I admit it surprised me initially, but I suppose it could be worse. Hopefully it does not go the way of Skype which (for me) is almost entirely unusable on Windows these days due (I assume) to the ads locking up/hanging the process.

https://gist.github.com/joielechong/d0042338fd3132013aec4ee5...

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#97

Post by AnthonyMouse »

xkxx wrote: post #15

It was my first thought and after I checked the comments it seems like a general consensus of HN that the best way to turn them off is to switch to some other OS.

The problem is that Microsoft doesn't really want you to turn them off, and is now on rolling releases, so there is no longer a one-time fix. You can turn it off now but next week they'll be back because they changed something and the old setting is no longer effective. The only permanent fix is to switch to a different OS.

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#98

Post by tyingq »

Klathmon wrote: post #56
besselheim wrote: post #43

Doesn't seem that big a deal, it's an upsell for Microsoft's own file synchronization services, not some third party ad. And you can easily disable it.

It's amazing how much this story has blown up, along with the "Google home has ads" story. In both cases they seem almost insane how many people are up in arms about this. It's them pushing a service of theirs in their os. Apple does it, Google does it, Ubuntu does it, everyone does it. And it's such a non issue. They are promoting a service that is very tied in to the OS that a lot of people want and don't know exis…

Perhaps it is the history. Google search, for example, started with no ads. Then some ads, but on the side, leaving the organic results mostly as is. Then it all devolved over time to what we have today.

They know how to boil us slow so that it doesn't seem terrible at first.

Re: Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off

#99

Post by cyberpunk »

cm2187 wrote: post #89
cyberpunk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep so I'm definately being biased by personal experience here -- not claiming otherwise. I've been using and working with unixy types for >15 years or so and probably type 'grep' a hundred times a day (I'm a lead dev). I'm genuinely just curious how your world looks as it's so different to mine -- I must live a sheltered life but even junior devs I have with routinely push makefiles and bash scripts etc.. Are you a…

That's the thing. I'm not a dev, I am a banker. And there are only so many hours I am willing or able to spend on a week end relearning the basics. GUI are infinitely valuable in that case. Windows allows to do quite sophisticated stuff all the way with a UI. You can always observe the state of the system, know what can be done from there, etc. I know a few command lines for some basic things I do all the time, but f…

Hmm. I've never worked with the 'frontend' of finance -- I know how your infra, payement processing, massive enterprisey stacks etc work but the day to day stuff the folks on the desks are doing I've not really observed.

It's a wide field I guess, but at the end of the day would I be safe to assume that you're mostly playing with data in interesting ways then telling various services/apps (aforementioned chunky java apps, for e.g) to do things based on what you work out from those manipulations?

If that's the case, then I really think there is an advantage for you in mastering the 'unix ide', but only if you're doing really custom stuff all the time...

If you're working with a bunch of tools that do everything you already need them to do, then of course there's no point in working out how to do the same with different tools. If you're constantly hitting the limits of how you can play with your data, then perhaps it's worth looking into a language which is good at manipulating data and you'd be suprised how powerful this mysterious CLI can be..

Post reply on HN