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Comment by moksha256 | Hacker News Reader

It's even worse than that. There's 2 types of crap now: vendor crap and Windows crap.

You can avoid vendor crap by reinstalling a fresh version of Windows from Microsoft, but you'll still get Microsoft crap (i.e., various apps from the Microsoft store pre-installed with links prominently displayed on the Start menu).

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These are what Microsoft calls "suggestions" (aka adverts). I think they only actually install when you first click on them.

Fortunately they're UWP apps so are easy to completely remove. Turning off the "Show suggestions" settings will stop them coming back.

A clean install of Windows 10 (not n versions) is shipped with stupid game installers for things like candy crush, Disney magic and march of empire which you can remove easily, but not just "hide" with disabling suggestions.[1]

[1] just did a clean install of win10 home

Yes, I meant disabling "suggestions" stops them coming back again in the future. Although Windows has had update "bugs" whereby this setting is ignored. This is solved by delaying feature updates until at least a week or so after release.

Maybe I'm the only one here, but it seem absurd to me to count on Google, an advertising company, not advertise on Chromebooks.

Not yet ... perhaps. Perhaps. Not ? No way.

ChromeOS is open-source. Last I looked, their build process was a horror beyond all reason. However, it would at least be possible to strip out any advertising built into the OS. Thing is though, Google controls the advertising on the top two pages on the Internet, and as long as that's true, they don't really need to do anything other than make sure you get there. Which is the strategy behind Google Fiber, Loon, and to some degree Android, more-or-less the reason for Chrome's existence, and why Chromebooks are designed around constant Internet access: all roads lead to Rome.

Yep while everyone was fighting yesterday's war with Microsoft another company took over the internet. Well done guys. Google has more power than MS did at any point in the 90s.

Since Chromebooks are very internet-forward, they get plenty of advertising opportunities without installing banner ads or something similar into the OS. Are you expecting them to start advertising on the Android home screen too?

They already do something better for their ad business moat. They just push their Google Apps bloatware collection on the Android ecosystem at every possible chance they get. I use none of it, yet it still comes with my Samsung phone whether I like it or not. I would expect them to continue that approach with any operating systems they control.

Seems counterintuitive that you take such a strong stance against bloatware and yet use a Samsung phone. The preinstalled (and non-removable) mountain of crap was the reason I gave up on them after my Galaxy S3.

Not that other vendors are much better, mind. But I'm quite happy with my OnePlus for now.

Then they all come back with the next update.

I'm in the insider program, they don't/haven't come back in ages.

I just had to delete "Candy Crush Soda Saga". Was it there before I did that ridiculous registry hack to prevent it? Or did they add a new one at some point... Who knows. Its clear they don't actually want people disabling the installation of them.

Does this only happen on Windows Home?

This is also true for my recent numerous installs of Pro, which is absurd

Another fun fact is if you remove the App Installer or whatever it is called, you can't remove the "adware" apps

You can easily remove them. It's still annoying having to deleted Candy Crush.

I would have a hard time justifying $400 for a Chromebook when a tablet+keyboard is cheaper and slightly better.

Plus with Surface Go....$400 seems like a rip off for a Chromebook.

Sometimes you can't even reinstall Windows easily, for example Dell has set SSD mode to Intel RAID by default (can be switched to AHCI) but Windows installation media doesn't come with Intel RAID driver by default. Installer doesn't see the disk at all (until switched to AHCI).

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