WordPad Is Gettings Ads in Windows 10
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The last time I clicked on a start menu my jaw nearly hit the floor due to all the extraneous and very much unwanted junk. Microsoft is clearly doing a lot right in terms of UX, but I lament that it feels like one step forward and two steps back.
I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users. There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled? Do most PC enthusiasts figure out how to disable that stuff or buy professional editions? My experience is limited to occasionally seeing family and friends do things in Windows, so maybe I’m just unaware of what the Windows-using technorati have known all along.
Embracing open source is just the first step of an old, old strategy of theirs. Maybe I'll be proven wrong on that, but you'd be a fool to forget their past. This the company that brought down IBM.
> I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users.
No real choice, unfortunately. Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise, but the reality is that Windows and Office run the business world. Microsoft put a lot of effort into delivering good products and keeping compatibility with old software, in addition to shady anti-competitive practices, to ensure that. Meanwhile, the Linux Desktop is still a fragmented mess that breaks every few years (at best). I really wish it weren't true, because Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.
> There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled?
That may be true of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, which can not be purchased individually and is expensive.
> Do most PC enthusiasts figure out how to disable that stuff or buy professional editions?
There are readily available tools to disable it, like O&O ShutUp 10.
Non-evangelist here. I've been running Ubuntu as my daily driver for years, and mostly it just works. Not saying it's going to take over the business world, just saying it's not worse than Windows for me in any way.
Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.
I don't have a problem with people who use the Linux Desktop. Hell, if I bother to count all the desktops in my house then I use it on 4/5 PCs myself. What I have a problem with are evangelists who believe that anyone not using a Linux Desktop is doing so for stupid reasons. I can't even count the number of times over the past 2 decades I've had to listen to some Linux Desktop evangelist proclaim that there was literally no reason to use anything else, and then proceed to argue the case with no knowledge whatsoever of the needs of the person they're arguing against. It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.
It is a mindset I really can't stand about tech people: assuming that because something works for them that it therefore is the right choice for everyone else. That they are so superior to the rest of humanity that they can instantly understand everyone's use cases, and anyone who claims otherwise is just being a stubborn fool.
The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.
I suspect no retail PCs coming with Linux preinstalled, and general lack of knowledge that it even exists or what it is is just as big (if not more) of a contributor to it's lack of users for non techies as UX is.
Let me see if I can leverage this to help you understand why other people don't use Linux: WINE and Proton do a pretty incredible job of allowing Windows games to run on Linux, why isn't that good enough?
Now take whatever your response was, and replace "gaming" with "engineering", "audio production", "accounting", "video production", or whatever. You're viewing these things from a perspective of casual understanding and saying that Linux seems "good enough", but when you've got a deeper level of knowledge in something (gaming) you readily see the problems.
Have you tried Steam within the past 6-9 months with Proton?
Steam is bundling a version of wine that Just Works(tm) in the Linux Steam client. Valve is claiming responsibility for all the goofy workaround configuration that accompanies setting up wine for any given game.
Native Linux games are listed alongside emulated Windows only games. This includes dx11 support. In the past 3 months they apparently added DX12 support, but I haven't tried it.
dx9 games have better framerates in Linux than windows on open source drivers. (not Nvidia) dx10/11 games have comparable framerates. Can't comment on 12. Obviously opengl or vulkan games have no issues.
It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.
Easy to say when the OS is more important to you than the games. But when games are more important than the OS it's a different matter. Most gamers just want to click on the game and have it run, they don't want to mess with WINE or proton or Lutris or playonlinux
I mean, maybe my experience would've been different with a different laptop, or maybe I could've put more effort in, but this is what stops Linux from being a daily driver for me. I don't want to spend all of that time just trying to find a distribution that works, followed by even more time trying to keep it working.
I disagree with Windows' direction more and more. I very much want to like Linux and use it as a daily driver -- I tried 6 popular distributions trying to get just one to work! -- but the reality of it stops me. If this is what someone who wants to use Linux experiences, how will it ever be able to catch on for regular desktop use?
(The best experience was with MX Linux. The hardware compatibility wasn't ideal; installing proprietary nvidia drivers broke the boot; power usage was kinda poor relative to Windows; but overall, I was able to at least use it.)
My mom got herself a new laptop while she was here to visit me, I installed Ubuntu on it, Wi-Fi kept crashing. It wasn't really stable.
Due to an unfortunate chain of events, her laptop spent another half a year with me, before she came back over to pick it up. I wiped it clean, reinstalled Ubuntu again, and now everything was working fine.
This was maybe a year or two ago.
For non-devs, it depends on how much MS infrastructure and solutions they've already adopted and have resources invested in. For a lot of companies, all that really matters is that they have hundreds or thousands of excel documents being passed around, and they can get better support and licensing through Windows.
Online versions of a lot of these reduce this to some degree, but most people would probably prefer to run Word and Excel natively than through an online app, even if they sync to shared storage and occasionally use those to view/edit something.
Add to that the fact that MS offers an end-to-end environment where you can buy something for whatever you find your needs are and find directions on how to integrate it, and there's really not much to compare.
However if the game in question makes use of the Windows Video decoding APIs results are currently very disappointing; the last time I tested it (which was earlier this month) I still couldn't actually play Obduction (the Myst like game) due to none of the puzzle explanations / video data that make up the story of the game running.
And for linux, forget any game that uses BattleEye for anti-cheat detection.
Unfortunately, it's not a 100% complete solution. For example, no-one seems to have gotten Crysis (the original - and best ;) - version) to work, due to some kind of DRM thing in Crysis itself. :(
I tried Linux a few times at home for 6m to a year, in this regard I missed nothing of Windows. However twice my instance was killed by Nvidia driver updates. People claim AMD has better drivers on Linux so I recently bought a Ryzen 7 3700x and 5700XT.
But after being burned and /never/ having anything similar happen on Windows, I can't bring myself to put Linux on my computer in fear of the same shit happening again...
That's not true for AMD on Linux. The drivers are in the kernel itself so any changes made to the kernel interfaces will include changes to the drivers that use them.
It's not the case for either vendor on Windows because Windows has stable driver APIs.
Basically, if you're on Linux and your hardware has mainlined kernel support you are not likely to ever have that kind of problem.
On Windows, since the vendors control the drivers, they can ship out new hardware support immediately.
On Linux, if the driver is mainlined, it's tied to your kernel. So if you have a really new graphics card you might need a new kernel also. If your preferred distro isn't Arch or Fedora (which have very up-to-date kernels), that might also be an issue. Debian Stable for instance might not have support for a new graphics card.
Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement. Imagine if everyone whined about windows and also recommended windows. What would that achieve ? It's not like Nadella is lining up to listen to your whining either.
Also, Windows users tend to pay for software, Linux users less so. Guess which user base is going to be more valuable to 3rd party devs.
And that's an extremely arrogant mindset. They think because they know some tech shit that they understand all of that person's needs. I mean, they've converted an image from BMP to PNG in GIMP once, so clearly that's a suitable Photoshop replacement right?
The irony is delicious.
I'm a total libre evangelist but we don't have the power to overcome multi billion dollar engineering and sales departments...
But LOTD is not any easier for your average non techie.
And it was never about ease of use, its about adoption, presence and marketing.
For non-techies, it is actually a non-problem; they are already used to fact there are systems different than Windows (they know about Android, iOS or ChromeOS). This kind of users are so undemanding, that sitting them behind stock Ubuntu machine they will relatively quickly go their way and are able to do everything they need.
It's Windows power-users who have it most troublesome. They learned something about one platform, and to move to another platform they have to start from scratch.
> And it was never about ease of use, its about adoption, presence and marketing.
Very true. I would add bizdev there too.
Last I checked, windows explorer lacked split windows and a popdown console, both of which i use constantly. Windows also lacks focus on hover, proper session restore, a simple, readable, usable applications menu, the settings were scattered between at least two different places with no real rhyme or reason. It also has built in ads which honestly kills whatever positives the ui might have.
Ehm, no, you are just used to it. In my not-so-humble opinion, it is Finder > Nautilus > Explorer.
In Linux, the taskbar and start menus are not a part of the file manager, but part the desktop shell. The most used one is Gnome, which doesn't have taskbar and start menu.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Also mind that "professional" editions of windows contain less of the crapware than Home or similar editions...
For the OS Ads... I also see red. But I try not to forget that a corporation isn't a person, it's a large group of people. History doesn't mean that a corporation always acts the same with the same incentive structure. Look at Apple over the years. Now corporations do have a culture derived from history (and leadership obviously). And that culture is different in different places of a large company. I believe the ads in the OS is something that is culturally wrong with the group developing that OS. And likely, knowing nothing of Microsoft's structure, the culture of the people working on the projects I mentioned above is drastically different than that team.
Point is, because Microsoft is a large organization it can be "evil" and "good", it depends where you look. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
In Brazil we used to say that the year of linux (desktop) was current year + 1. Because people who used it would always tell others that "next year is going to be the year of linux on desktop", only for that not to happen and then they adjust their prediction for the next year again...
Sure if you ignore the fact that their major projects were not extensions, and they're MIT licensed. Their past tactics was to extend open standards and become the corporate standard.
ubuntu just werks
Luckily, there are also all those shady eBay “key resellers”. (They are all cracked of course, but they also work, so it’s worth it.)
I often ranted about this: after running Linux as my daily driver 2004-2017 (and a few years before that in dual boot and since 1993 on servers) I switched to Windows + WSL in early 2018 and I am OK with it.
I use an eGPU. Now, of course, Linux does not even support changing the video card under X Windows. And I am not so sure about supporting hotplugging an nVidia card either.
And when I was running Linux I ran into problems with enterprise wifi and VPN all the time and my multifunction devices and bluetooth.
https://xkcd.com/619/ rings painfully true. Linux is a great server operating system with a desktop badly cobbled on top.
That xkcd is extra painful because there are still, 11 years later, zero Linux browsers that support hardware-accelerated (i.e. smooth) video playback.
But yeah on my laptop with Intel integrated graphics (I thought Intel was supposed to be better supported vs Nvidia under Linux?) I can barely play a 1080p video without frames being dropped. It even struggles displaying a 4K desktop so I have to run at 1440p, while Windows handles it fine.
1) Chrome does not use hardware video acceleration under Linux. Some distributions' Chromium build does (the code is there, and is enabled under ChromeOS). Why Google didn't enable it for desktop Linux is a question for Google.
2) Intel GPUs do not have problem with 4K desktop under Linux, they are capable enough to run two 4K display at once, at least since Broadwell. It's 8K capabilities that are currently under development.
Especially the most popular flavor, Ubuntu.
Between releases which require reinstallations to get new features, hardware support, and bugfixes (bugfixes are supposed to be backported, but fresher DE versions have worked much better than old ones for me, so I'm skeptical) and the awkwardness of PPAs, it's sad it's the go-to assumed distro which everyone writes articles for and tests hardware/software against when rolling release is such a better model (that Windows now ostensibly uses with 10).
Manjaro seems to be gaining popularity as a user-friendly, nerfed rolling distro which offers safety and fast features+hardware support+bugfixes and can use the AUR, where everything in the Universe is and can be browsed with a GUI package manager -- no PPA terminal imports needed. But so is MX Linux, a Debian-based, Xfce distro whose selling point seems to be "no systemd", which speaks to a misalignment of priorities between many Linux users and the average PC user... if "average PC user" means "vaguely technical person who games and wants fast drivers + new hardware support", which is already wrong.
But FWIW, >>Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.
Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though; I don't even know what an eGPU is. For me, there seems to be a magical effect of using Linux for a long time and then returning to Windows. Windows doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. There's permission problems with the new 10 Settings interface when trying to access the core system apps like Device Manager. It can't connect to the Internet when I turn off my VPN, when Linux works fine on the same VPN. So many little things.
Suddenly, Windows seems like the janky, ersatz OS I force myself to go to sometimes while Linux feels like the more intuitive "home" system. But I've been on it for like 2 years now, so I'm probably brainwashed. And in 10 years Linux will get worse so I'll boomerang back to Windows like you? Or maybe something better will take over, like Fuchsia.
I never had problems with updates, but had a lot of problems with non-standard locations. For example, getting Vim to work inside of Tmux with eslint and auto complete just wouldn't work perfectly no matter what I tried.
It's a different world with Gnome and PopOS, and I really miss the AUR and Pacman but other than that I feel like I'm spending more time on my system than before.
You got your facts wrong, Ubuntu supports updating in place no need to reinstall, maybe you confuse Ubuntu/Debian with other distros that require a reinstallation.
Ubuntu has a LTS version and it officially backports video and other drivers to allow support for recent hardware.
Windows desktop usage is somewhere north of 80%. Consider that Linux can't even do many common use cases right, it's just that it can do your use cases.
Not that I would recommend it but you can purchase LTSC on Ebay for about ~20 to 30$. That is where I got mine... Sketchy? Yes, but worth a chance in my book
Doesn't sound like you purchased it. It sounds like you gave some [random] place money for a pirated (and maybe backdoored) copy of Windows.
That's likely a very bad approach. ;)
Updates work just fine and are only performed at reasonable intervals
But, please don't encourage others to put themselves at risk. aka fall for a scam on Ebay
you could get scammed or have your key deactivated a hundred times and still be ahead
At least, not without (at a minimum) having the SHA256 (or better) checksum of the ISO match that of the MSDN equivalent download.
and there's plenty of dumps of them kicking around if you don't
edit: To clarify, users should be able to disable telemetry - it's the anti-telemetry rhetoric I find to be overblown - in general what I hear isn't nearly as nuanced as the replies here, it's simply blanket opposition to all telemetry.
Here's the first part under "How we use personal data" in their privacy statement:
Microsoft uses the data we collect to provide you with rich, interactive experiences. In particular, we use data to:
* Provide our products, which includes updating, securing, and troubleshooting, as well as providing support. It also includes sharing data, when it is required to provide the service or carry out the transactions you request. * Improve and develop our products. * Personalize our products and make recommendations. * Advertise and market to you, which includes sending promotional communications, targeting advertising, and presenting you with relevant offers.
So, points one and two are nice. Three might be nice, but really depends on the motivation for the personalization and recommendations. Four is full on, deep advertising.
BTW, you may want to make a distinction between your personal data and telemetry, but MS does not make any such distinction. Also, in the next section, MS notes they'll share your data with anyone they want.
Talk about head in the sand.
I can be anti-advertising and pro-privacy without being anti-telemetry.
I want my OS maker to ask for stack traces so they can fix crashes. I do not want this to be a default with no way to opt out. Even crash data is my data, not Microsoft's, and Microsoft should ask my permission each time it happens the way that MacOS does.
Then again, that might make people aware of how often programs go sideways on Windows, which is not in Microsoft's interest.
The user's opinions and desires are not on anybody's radar at MS, except to then extent that they coincide with the company's own desires.
Maybe there's an "always remember my selection" checkbox, but I don't remember ever seeing it, except once a year when I install the new version of macOS.
And switching between Basic and Full levels of telemetry in settings doesn't help too much. According to BSI (project SiSyPHuS), number of event providers for Basic telemetry level is 410, and for Full level there are 422 ETW providers.
Specifically, it has the option to enable a "Diagnostic Data Viewer" that shows the data it sends (as JSON). I've just enabled that, so there is not much to see, but so far it has only transmitted version information of OS software components.
(Mini-) crash dumps can contain all kinds of information but that is kind of unavoidable. As a developer, I'm gratefull whenever I get a core/crash dump, but yes, it shouldn't be automatic.
Here's a full list of data it seems to send https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-dia... (at full telemetry level)
Windows 10, when left alone for 1 year, sends about 4.5 Gb of outgoing data. There are no apps running all this time, so there are no crash reports to submit.
For decades I have used personal computers and it was my machine and nobody constantly observed what I was doing with it. With "telemetry" I'm not sure about the relation anymore - do I own the machine or does the machine own me? It's a loss of control, I'm not able to make the decisions anymore about what happens and what doesn't.
In Germany, such "spying" features are really detested; there exists a very privacy-conscious culture that perhaps has to do with the experience of two surveillance states on German ground of which one only ceased to exist about 30 years ago.
To give an example: When at the regular's table of some group (details shall not matter) someone suggested to form a WhatsApp group, some people gave very direct and harsh words.
I personally observe that when I think about buying something at Amazon, I ask myself and look whether there also exists another possible vendor.
So the mentality that I described is in real - it's just not possible to avoid said "Facebook/YouTube/Amazon/$FAANGCORP" completely for now; so you look for areas where you can avoid them - step by step.
.. but even anecdotal evidence. I says nothing about the general situation. Personally. I never felt the need for FB. For a few years now my - large - family is running Threema. All of them, even the old folk. This is good for us, but especially the youngsters have parallel installations of WA, Signal, Telegram etc..
This is also anecdotal and I'm afraid, not typical. Some months ago I became member of a Skat club (a popular german card game). All the people are very different in social beckground to me and even to each other - real estate shark, musician, blue collar worker and more - and know what?
> some people gave very direct and harsh words.
I got these words for NOT accepting WA. Eventually, we settled to Signal - but even that not unanimously and it remains a slightly frustrating communication model.
Why do you think this is even needed? Every software package used by more users than nobody (by Joel Spolsky definition) has their bug report system full of bugs, and solving them would take years of doing nothing but butfixing. Your telemetry won't help prioritizing them, or even lead to solving them, but it will be mined for info that can be used to monetize your behavior.
I find it troubling that anyone thinks that a user must have a "legitimate need" (whatever that is) to justify not wanting to be spied on. Simply not wanting your machine to send data to should be more than enough of a need.
> edit: To clarify, users should be able to disable telemetry
Oh, then we are completely on the same page. It appeared that you were arguing in favor of forced telemetry for "average PC users".
Respect begets respect. If Microsoft gave me the choice to disable telemetry, I would probably leave it on. The fact that they don't give me that choice motivates me to find a third-party tool to disable it, if only as a way to express my annoyance.
Yes, I know, I'm not representative of the vast majority of users.
Several governments and their regulators in the EU are currently at various stages of looking into this issue, because it may be literally impossible to be GDPR compliant if you're processing personal data on a system running a Windows 10 edition that requires this stuff. And that's just the literally-breaking-the-law part as it relates to personal data in general. You might also have contractual obligations like NDAs, or perhaps some more specific legal obligations to protect data if you work in healthcare, finance, national security, etc.
Do you really believe yourself to be the ultimate arbiter of that question, for all PC users? Or just for the average ones?
I didn't mean to imply that said user shouldn't have the option to disable telemetry, even for no reason at all.
You make that sound like a bad thing, when it's not.
MS deciding they control what my computer does, rather than me - the owner - is fundamentally just not on.
The concept is extremely basic. No idea why many other people seem to not grasp it, let alone MS. :(
It is a real problem, not a bogeyman, when it's actually turning itself back on when we turn it off.
Yeah, I can't wrap my head around why they would do that.
Is it really a big enough revenue stream to inconvenience the consumer to such a degree ?
______
Maybe it is because the type of user that uses wordpad is also not concerned with advertisements or user experiences.
I mean, for most people a computer is either a Netflix + Internet + Office machine (they live in these apps, so the rest of the OS doesn't really affect them) or a device which runs significantly worse OEM software,(in which case, good UX was a lost cause anyways.)
I really wish tech people would stop with this fantasizing that users don't have good reasons for the choices they make. This is why Linux Desktop has consistently failed for decades: the conception that it is "good enough" for "most non-technical people" because they've imagined some ultra-simplified usecase and then convinced themselves that they've made an appropriate replacement. Absolutely nothing good comes of this mentality.
Granted, there might be other sources (I found this with 1 minute of Google searching), but I doubt they'll paint a much different picture. Chromebooks are just big smartphones and are not a sufficient tool for the tasks which people actually use Desktop computers for.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Its a great device for browsing + youtube/netflix + FB + gdocs. Which is why its so popular in edu because they basically give it away. And its enough for most people.
I used to feel that way until I learned that recent Chromebooks can run Android apps and come with a Linux in a VM, and I am now a very happy Chromebook user. All the software I need is a browser, Emacs, git, SBCL, LaTeX and a few standard Unix tools: I use Chrome and run everything else in the Linux VM.
(And you're right that the file browser is very limited, fortunately I only need it ocasionally to move files between the Linux VM and the ChromeOS file system).
I'm sure they have internal builds which are pure Linux with a compatibility layer to run ChromeOS legacy. There is absolutely no reason a Chromebook can't run that - but then its just another laptop and loses the marketability.
Why can't ChromeOS be a standard Linux distro which runs apps in a flatpak (and validated by Google). That way you can't screw up your machine, you don't really lose any perf, and you have the best of both worlds.
Flatpak sounds worth exploring, although many of the cheaper Chromebook have pretty limited storage space.
Chromebooks are targeted at people who find even Windows too complex.
(make sure you make a backup/test it first before applying the scripts default preset, or make your own preset.)
What appears to be "turning over a new leaf" may actually be nothing more than adapting to changing conditions. Of course they were not the ones who set those changes in motion, other than perhaps through evolutionary pressure. What Microsoft has done in more recent times has been largely driven by what other companies were doing -- making money from selling advertising, collecting vast quantities of data about users, etc. Not to mention using open source software internally, publishing source code and giving away software, often as a means to collect more data. That is why, e.g., there are ads in WorpdPad and telemetry is on by default.
The more interesting point of criticism for me are the in-app ads. Not so sure on what is meaningfully different between ads in wordpad promoting word and ads in macOS and iOS music apps promoting apple music. Or, in the same vein, why it is fair to flame microsoft for integrating onedrive throughout the OS but nobody complains when apple does exactly the same with icloud (to the point where basically you have to really go out of your way not to get sucked into paying for icloud).
Why is it ok for apple, but not for microsoft, to do these things?
Except for your computer's colour: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level...
The closest you have is LTSC. No ads out of the box. Still has telemetry though, although you can turn it down to "security" level. It costs like $300 for a license[1], and they won't sell it to you unless you commit to buying a bunch (although that can be worked around by buying a bunch of cheap CALs).
[1] https://www.cdw.com/product/windows-10-enterprise-ltsc-2019-...
Why would you think that? My enterprise loves MS. Literally everything is being moved to MS. Chat, documents, internal websites (sharepoint), all hosted by MS under their office 365 umbrella. It’s maddening.
I cannot imagine the security folks being bothered by some ads in windows or some extra telemetry. If MS can read that data they know everything already.
Many other corps collect much more invasive telemetry and users have no clue - e.g Netflix is basically a data collection service with a side effect of video streaming. Same for FB, Google ads cookies etc, every retailer etc etc.
But singling out MS has always been popular.
Microsoft, on the other hand, added telemetry to already widely-used product, not giving the existing users any choice. Is it any wonder that Microsoft is being singled out? They deserve to be singled out.
I could also never understand why explorer.exe (or wordpad.exe, or WinZip or solitaire, or majority of apps on a PC.. need to tell anyone on the internet what I am doing with my PC.
In the same spirit, I always suggest it to friends who ask me to help them setup a new W10 machine. I block almost everything that moves and this solves any ad problem and telemetry that W10 is running.
The user experience with web-based versions of these things is substantially worse, though. I don't know, but perhaps that's why there isn't greater adoption.
They don't. It's not a ultra-premium edition that disables it. The extra apps installation is easy to turn off via registry and can be applied to new users. In better controlled corps, your apps whitelist will not allow you to run extras anyway. The ads are either not a present: if it's a corp, everyone has office, not wordpad. In a completely controlled environment, the network won't allow you to connect back either.
I've set up a win10 pro laptop very recently and getting rid of the extra apps, disabling promotions, and most of ads takes maybe 30min. I'm not saying I'm ok with them, or that everyone can easily fix it - but if you have any kind of experience with windows, you can do it.
Also those registry fixes frequently get reverted by updates. It’s happened to me multiple times. Even if you succeed your greeted with a start menu that looks half broken.
More-or-less. The large organisation editions of Windows 10 (Enterprise and Education) are basically a different product to the others, with most of the unpalatable junk able to be disabled. But you can only legally get them through the organisation-level licensing schemes, with all the extra cost and hassle that brings.
The really surprising thing to me is that the Pro edition -- the one that historically was aimed at power users and smaller businesses -- is basically dumped in with Home now, with little of that same flexibility even though these users probably have much the same concerns about controlling updates, telemetry, ads, etc.
So for some of us working in small businesses, Windows 10 remains a no-go area regardless of any attempts by Microsoft to promote it and demote anything else. It appears to be impossible to retain proper control of your system and the data on it, which leads to all kinds of concerns about reliability, security, statutory and contractual data protection obligations, etc. Presumably this is why various government regulators within the EU are already going after Microsoft on the basis that it's essentially impossible to be GDPR compliant if your organisation is using such an OS.
I think you can always count on smart companies to optimize for return on assets, including their brand.
Microsoft had some weakness on that front, but they've put significant, sincere, and welcome effort into building brand value with the engineering crowd over the last decade. Nonetheless, it's entirely reasonable to expect them to make use of opportunities to leverage their assets to build their business as well.
If you have the means, compile from source. And if not, then perhaps enlist the services of someone who does (directly or indirectly).
Every time the 'do better' people are busy looking at something else, stuff like this will slip through.
I disagree, they should have stuck with XP and just made incremental improvements like Apple have done with OS X. But no, every few years they have to change everything.
On a few people want that, most people what the OS to get out of the way.
Who knows how much bandwidth and time has been wasted at my job alone with folks' computers force-updating with included installations of Candy Crush, Spotify and Disney Kingdoms.
Such as? Win 7 is generally retarded as peak Windows UX, and its main feature was undoing junk from Vista/XP before it got rejunked in 8. Windows 8.1/10 main improvement was in undoing part of 8.
I presume that was a typo, but it's beautiful!
It seems like it would be a huge pain to go through and disable or blocking everything, and even then how confident could I be that I didn't miss something?
a somewhat less cynical answer: some division head decided it would look good on their performance review
This functionality is locked behind a feature control mechanism, in a pre-release version of Windows 10. The feature is named BlankDocOfficeUpsell. The feature control mechanism is used by Microsoft to gate potential features in public builds for various reasons (e.g. experimentation). Using tools I wrote (https://github.com/riverar/mach2), and public debugging symbols, they can be manipulated on/off and is usually a good indicator at what's coming in a future Windows release.
This particular feature upsells Office online via a yellow bar, not unlike the Message Bar in full Office applications. The Message Bar is typically used for important security warnings and alerts [1], presumably one reason this particular design was chosen. At this time, the upsell notification can be closed but that action is not persisted -- the ad will re-appear at next WordPad launch. This could change but that's not a guaranteed pattern (see: permanent PowerShell Core ad in PowerShell).
[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Enable-or-disable-s...
...and which will continue to make this bar useless leading to people continue to ignore security warnings and drive on the train of vulnerabilities within word documents which has been so successful for decades now. Good job Microsoft.
Thank you for finding this.
Nowadays Microsoft business shifted from selling licenses to making money selling the user data, that is something far worse and concerning. Take a look at this, they suggest the user to use Word online, buy for what reason? Simple, to collect their user data. Or have you tried to install Windows 10 recently? They do everything to force you to sign up with a Microsoft account, think about a non expert user that buys a computer and thinks that is necessary to register one, also they propose to accept default settings that enable all the possible data collection.
Also they are doing harm in other ways, especially against the FOSS community, despite the stupid slogans 'Microsoft loves Linux', no they don't, they are just trying to get the Linux developers to switch to Windows, they made installing Linux on a computer more complex thanks to UEFI and secure boot, and they offered the solution, why do you have to install Linux first place, we have the WSL, you can run your Linux software inside Windows so you have no reason to install it bare metal.
Me too. I prefer excel from 1991-1993 era. It fit on three 2.5" floppys, and did the basics perfectly.
Around Office 2004 I started to encounter weird formatting bugs (e.g., rotated axes would sometimes be clipped off the screen if I resized the chart), and this has persisted to today where Office Excel (v15) on macOS still fucks up the fonts, e.g. this morning I couldn't change the the x-axis font label: it was frozen as Calibri. Maddening.
I try to use Google Sheets for simple sharing spreadsheets, or gnuplot+awk for technical precision, but the industry is so MS heavy it is challenging. I've seen an uptick in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides usage over the past 5 years that is encouraging.
MS is clearly a monopoly on office productivity software, but slowly becoming a duopoly as Google Apps pick up momentum. Star Office still hurts too much when switching between Linux <> PC. (And Apple's Pages/Numbers? LOLOLOLOL)
They continue to offer options to use a local account for those that want it and I really see no problem with pushing an account as the default option for the majority of users. No one complains that Apple pushes iCloud accounts on people.
This doesn't jive with the progression of their efforts to hide the option away. At first it was a small text link on that portion of the install screen, then it was that link plus another, now it looks like this [0].
[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/442609/confirmed-windows-10-setup-...
But they're doing an excellent job of hiding that option. Over the last month, three people I know were unable to find it without help.
What can be done to change this perception? If "software is eating the world" then it's hard to see where this ends. Soon you'll have ads in your car, or on home appliances.
No, I won't, because the instant that I see any of that happening is the instant that I'll be getting rid of that car/appliance/whatever.
Only if you're inured to this kind of corporate intrusion on your machine that you paid for with your money.
My toaster barking, "Hey, wouldn't you like a nice Thomases' English Muffin instead? Nooks and crannies!" is also fairly low-key, but not something I want.
On the bright side, my kids would get to (briefly) see a reproduction of After Dark's "Flying Toasters" screensaver.
Wait.
Feature creep. Scope creep. Ad creep.
Windows 10 is a great OS in many respects, and I like the hardware story more than in Apple world, but I just can't get over Microsoft's need to invade my workspace with tacky, distracting, irrelevant ads.
The first time I saw a "Candy Crush" ad in the Start menu (of Windows 10 Professional, not Home), I hoped Microsoft would get enough negative feedback to see the error of their ways.
But it seems like they're going the wrong direction.
And yes, I'm aware of the LTSC version of Windows 10. I have no way to install it legally.
I'm curious if HIPPA-related lawsuits against healthcare providers using Windows 10 could start mobilizing small businesses against what Microsoft is doing.
[1] https://winaero.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Wordpad-...
Unfortunately, that took several years before the conclusion of the court cases (with MS losing).
Thus pretty much locking in IE as the monopoly default for a long time afterwards.
I remember that, too. It was when I stopped recommending Ubuntu to people.
That's good to know. I don't use Ubuntu myself (because I tend to have an inordinate number of technical problems with it), but tended to recommend it to newcomers based on reputation. Perhaps I should start again.
* All your Windows applications start getting ads, unless you pay for a subscription.
* Your home appliances start getting ads, unless you pay for a subscription.
* Your car starts getting ads, unless you pay for a subscription.
* Your wrist-watch starts getting ads, unless you pay for a subscription.
...and eventually:
* Your ad-free subscription services start getting ads (like Hulu).
* You can't avoid ads, and all information about you will be sold, regardless.
...But I hope it doesn't play out like that.
>* You can't avoid ads, and all information about you will be sold, regardless. Sounds like you've been watching Black Mirror again
Pretty similar to what Apple does with their "Sign up for Apple Arcade" push notifications, iCloud Login badges etc.
It's still pretty bad but the headline is blowing it a bit out of proportion.
Having made the switch to Linux myself I feel like I can look at these things a bit more objectively. I can say "recommending Word isn't that bad" not out of Stockholm syndrome, but instead as a tertiary observer, watching the house burn down from the outside.
The old Windows Photo Viewer still exists and is the default out of the box to open .TIF files. With a couple of short registry hacks you can make it the default for other photo types again. Other than multi-page TIF files, I usually do prefer the newer app as it once again offers a ton more features.
It's somehow different from a native Windows app, it's somehow integrated into the Windows Store thing.
Right-click a shortcut to it - you can't set any custom hotkey for it anymore.
I can't use CTRL+ALT+C to open Calculator anymore. Thanks Windows 10, another step back. (Also, wow! I didn't think it would be possible to make the UI so ugly and the app so slow to start. What does it need to do? Oh, yes, telemetry, right?)
Funnily enough, there's still a "native" (?) .exe or two buried somewhere in the Windows installation directory, but executing them... bring backs the Windows Store Calculator.
I don't care anymore. Windows is dead to me. Except that I need to develop for other people who use Windows, but I can use Windows 7 for that, for me, personally, I'm quite hell-bent to change to Linux and forever excape the corporate software tyranny.
I usually don't learn that anything has changed until I actually want to use it then I'm like WFT where did X app go?
Or are you arguing that default apps in Windows should just never change to newer, more featured versions?
I am forced to accept that either Microsoft's Windows division is so incompetent that they did this on purpose, or so incompetent that they did this by accident.
I’d say that’s an exaggeration - trying to take an objective perspective. Some users may not know a better option exists. The beige notification bar isn’t intrusive and can be closed. A significant question is whether the notifications will be able to be disabled (readily, from within the Wordpad app).
Thankfully I don't see that day coming. There's enough people like me.
There is also a build system and one can download packages that enhance coding in many different languages. I have no economic interest in this, I'm just a satisfied user.
1 - https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-poi...
How much more can Microsoft do to the user before they actually rebel against it?
Welcome to dystopia.
eg using their monopoly in the desktop OS market to get people using their Office application
They've had problems with this before, eg Windows + IE.
Hopefully the EU takes action here as well.
Download last update: https://pastebin.com/TpaTxVxq
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3037396/windows-10-lock-scre...
LibreOffice Writer!
WordPad is a rich text editor; Notepad++ is a text file editor.
WordPad lets you do stuff like boldface/italicize/change the font size of the text you're looking at, and it does the WYSIWYG thing of actually showing you the nicely formatted document.
https://external-preview.redd.it/mZxH3Zh3-fme9ENc2j1CAENz3nQ...
It's bad enough I have to spend two hours digging through a new Android phone to turn off all the Google tracking (if there's no Lineage rom for it), but I also have do to it on my Win10 gaming rig. No one else seems to care about privacy.
Ads in a word processor are like ads in your house's wall.
Ads in a website are like ads in a football stadium.
1. You don't have MS Word proper, and you don't need perfect Word interop.
2. You want basic WYSIWYG, so neovim or emacs or equivalent, and even things like Notepad++, are out.
3. You don't have or can't use LibreOffice... because reasons?
I suspect either people won't care about WordPad ads or they'll discover LibreOffice and won't look back.
And yes, it's handy for opening .doc and .docx files if no office suite is installed. ("Because reasons" often being that it's not a machine under your control.)
It's WYSIWYG; it's fast; it doesn't get in the way. It isn't a bloated behemoth like LibreOffice or MS Office or any other Office. It just pops up a window on the screen for you to type in. Any styling beyond bold and italic would be done by the designer in InDesign anyway.
Only half the ads use this wording. And no doubt this was not 100% intentional. Still, could this be a viable tactic to de-value poorly constructed brand names?
Is this an ad? When you read the title you think Windows will start to read your text and advertise diapers and dating sites to you. Perpetually.
There must a be a different word, no pun intended, to differentiate a single time hint within a product family from vanilla banner ads.
Wordpad is a free application included in Windows. Microsoft Word is a pay to use application not included in Windows.
Wordpad is not within the Office product family.
In fact, before the divisions got semi-unified Wordpad was developed by an entirely different division from Office. Hence why Microsoft had multiple what you see is what you get word editors.
Another one was Microsoft Works (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works) - another office suite by Microsoft that existed until 2009.
Not exactly. Ownership of the project moved from oracle to apache in 2011, but OpenOffice is still around and kicking.
The metrics show AOO development is moribund.
As it happens OpenOffice was never discontinued, it is still an active Apache project.
Surprised they haven’t done this sooner.
No doubt they’ll still offer a volume license/pro version with less advertising.
I haven’t used Windows as my daily driver since 2004 but companies pay lots of money for me to support it for them. More ads means more issues means more revenues for people like me to help companies.
Sucks for consumers who aren’t technical.
How so? As far as I can tell, even a Home edition license costs a rather significant chunk of money
After installation, the thing was self-activated. Legit ISO downloaded from Microsoft, though via that ISO downloader software, starts with something with "H" and runs ads when you use it.
Kinda makes me wonder why MS is even bothering gatekeeping their ISOs. Why not make them freely available?
...nobody makes cash of OSes anymore... It's market share they're after.
FWIW, this isn't exactly a new feature, just a feature which has been expanded on and is far more common with modern UEFI firmware on devices shipped by OEMs. If you notice, most modern laptops don't ship with a product key sticker anywhere. Instead they have a genuine holographic Windows sticker on it and have the license loaded on the device. This became standard for large OEMs with Windows 8.
They are freely available... kind of. There's a site[1] that generates direct download links from microsoft's CDN.