Windows 11 KB5023778 update adds promotions to the Start menu
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
This is not a small advert in a small corner of the start menu. These are full-screen adverts that interrupt your use of the computer until you click.
What on Earth could they possibly do now to top that ?
I disagree for three reasons:
1. Apple Ads are incessant about their own services. Why is (or was?) not having iCloud set up showing up as a permanent notification badge over Settings? It was a while ago, but I remember I subscribed just to shut iOS up. It worked for Apple I guess, but only in a shortsighted way.
2. Ads are big business. Microsoft didn't start with shameless ads, and I don't think Apple would stop at current ad levels. They have to show growth quarter after quarter, so in all likelihood, like we have seen with other companies, it's only gonna get worse. I would love to be proven wrong, but I would also be surprised if I do.
3. The gap between "no ad" and "low ad" feels much bigger the gap between "low ad" and "more ad". Just replace Apple and Microsoft with Netflix and imagine how we would feel if Netflix started showing some—not too many and not too outrageous—ads. For me at least, it moves the service from the "no ad" category to the "with ad" category, and I hate the latter category. So at least in my view, the gap between Apple and Microsoft in this regard is not "way ahead", it is "slightly ahead and getting closer". So while I would be happy to spend an extra X$ for a "no ad" product compared to a "with ad" product, I wouldn't feel the same about a "low ad" product. The Apple premium makes much less sense now, and I am not sure if I am gonna go with Apple for my next phone or computer purchase.
I was already in the market for a new PC. I'm just finalizing what version of Linux I want to run for my dev work and then I'm going to offload my Adobe work onto a Mac Mini and finally get rid of Windows once and for all.
In an ideal world, it would push people toward real life.
"Another ad on my computer? I don't need to Candy Crush that bad. I'll go outside."
Sports leagues are expensive, time consuming, and prone to serious injuries you’ll be feeling for decades (and expensive too).
And then there’s the short and long term costs associated with long term exposure to the sun.
Granted, I’m cherry picking negatives. But by that same token, so is equivocating PC gaming with Candy Crush.
No regrets.
Only in America. Thankfully, 95% of the world's population lives somewhere else.
I feel very sad for you.
What has gotten into the minds of these people? Why do they think this is at all acceptable?
You're still a Windows user, aren't you? (No judgement, just answering the question!)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
(reminds me of the IE market share graph actually)
For convenience:
Windows 96.37%
OSX 2.37%
Linux 1.27%
And from the looks of things, Windows is on the decline. Linux and Mac are actually beginning to rise. Unknown are generally unknown Linux distros, and then there is ChromeOS and the recognized Linux distros. Together, that makes Linux about 13%
According to that, Windows' world wide market share is now under 70%. It lost 6% in the past few months starting in December.
A lot of this I find have to do with Valve pushing for Linux gaming. And there is also ChromeOS too (which is Linux). Then there is the unknown portion (which are mostly unrecognized Linux distros). That altogether makes Linux about 13%.
Really, it's the end of an era were Windows is actually relevant for the majority of PC gaming. And with people hating Windows more these days, they are weighing their options from the looks of it.
I haven't touched windows 11 at all beyond some idle poking of a display computer at Costco.
That prompt never comes back for me in 3 days though. Just at the next major OS update about every ~3 months.
That said there should be a setting for savvy users or enterprises to disable updates.
It's a very stressful thing to deal with, and congress does nothing to stop it because they're too busy trading stock investment info for insider profit...
We are not totally powerless though, hacking and warez are on the rise again, lots of people are declining updates, and even returning to older software versions, and nothing has ever stopped us from creating a good old-fashioned picket line in front of Microsoft HQ, or any other predatory software making company for that matter.
Autoplaying videos with sound
...do you think anyone who knew anything about it would breathe a word of its existence?
After I select Windows in the boot menu, I'd spend like ten minutes waiting for Windows Update to complete. Then I have to click through a series of full screen ads and prompts to disable my privacy settings, which is getting increasingly difficult with all the dark patterns thrown in after every new release. It really shows a lack of respect for the user, taking my computer hostage while I resist their attempts to enable numerous privacy-invading settings that I declined over and over and over.
Over the years, this made me distrust Windows so much that I removed anything critical off of it. I removed my password manager, deleted my browsing data, and made sure to remove anything tied to an online account except Steam.
Then I finally had enough and moved my games over to Linux. So far, the experience is good and I'm glad that WINE is going through active improvements.
I return to my main Mac after 2 months on the road, and nothing has changed. It boots right up, and might occasionally ask me if I want to install updates in the evening.
I bought another Mac recently. I didn't have to turn a bunch of things off. I wasn't tricked into accepting anything. By comparison it took me a whole day to update my Surface tablet and turn off all manners of growth hacking before I returned it.
If someone behaved like Microsoft does, I'd keep an eye on my drink when they're around.
Oh! And if you go into the task scheduler to hunt down the half dozen different places this function is called from, they just get turned back on with the next update.
I got so tired of Windows turning on my computer in the middle of the night, checking for updates (but never actually applying any) to apply updates, and then leaving it on all night afterwards, like WTF.
Now i don't have to be afraid to go to sleep at night...
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-10/why-am-i-g...
This kinda of user-hostile malware is very frustrating, as many of platforms Microsoft creates I find quite pleasent technically. However some small hoard of product managers and growth engineers chasing their metrics are ruining Windows.
Let me close the Apple Music window for this App I can't uninstall, and that popup that says I can't save my notes unless I have iCloud, and look past the automatically included Apple News and Apple Financed widgets in the notification panel I accidentally opened to go open a browser that defaults to showing me the shortcuts for several third party companies whose services I do not use to get on the internet to gloat about my superior choice.
/s
[For the record, all of this is bad, and I constantly wonder why my government thinks there isn't a monopoly problem here, I'm just kinda amused how much hate windows gets in particular, especially since I strongly suspect disabling this is a registry change away, which is not the case for many things I dislike about the computer I am using to type this.]
I think this is fine battle to pick, I have OneDrive uninstalled on my Windows machine, but I think it's a bit silly a lot of users on here are fine with functionally the same ad somewhere else, I don't want to be berated anywhere on any OS.
Not a Redhat user BTW.
+ Windows is very popular (so awareness is higher)
+ This behavior is bad and annoying
= many people complain
Windows is also adding this bullshit after decades of being bullshit-free, and even when you do sign up for all their services the overall experience of using them sucks ass compared to the Apple implementation.
In contrast, Apple’s ads are slight nudges at best. You can even uninstall the Apple Music app on your iOS device if you want. I’ve done this, and Siri correctly uses the Spotify app to play music every time I ask it to. Can you imagine Microsoft doing the same?
I already got fed up enough that I basically banned Windows at home and I am impatiently waiting to kill one last Windows box. It is our gaming machine that is generally available to entire household of 5 (3 adults and 2 kids). All other machines (we have 7 other machines, 6 laptops and a desktop) are either Windows laptops converted to Linux or new Macbooks and it seems we will only have more MacOS now that Apple got a bit more sane with their hardware choices.
I may leave one Windows instance running in Proxmox just in case if somebody needs it.
Sometimes I think it sucks that I can't play X because the anti-cheat won't allow it to start, then I remember it's a kernel level driver I cross my fingers and hope isn't doing anything nefarious and feel better.
Every time something like this ships out, guaranteed just about every CVP fields angry/annoyed/exasperated complaints about it.
This is where having a strong minded CEO comes into play. You literally have to have someone who can say "although this makes us less money, this is correct approach". In an organization whose entire purpose is to make money, very few people have the authority to make that call.
It's simplicity itself to attribute the revenue growth, and very difficult to link ads to negative sentiment leading to abandonment.
No doubt they see Apple's relentless iCloud spamming as validation, but it's grating to get spam from an OS that you already paid for.
That's the wrong metric; you should look at the LTV. Guess what: pissing off users reduces your LTV significantly. If their users are too dumb or tasteless to care then they deserve each other.
The next step for me here will be migrating clients off of Windows on their machines too.
For example the reason I keep using Linux on my machines is not because the OS works better for me -- it definitely does not. Things are crashing or doing stupid things and the entire ecosystem is completely disjoint and not integrated very well.
The reason I use Linux on my desktops is because I know I own the machine and it is doing my bidding (mostly, if we forget about the hardware part...) It is knowledge that if there is a problem there is a path to fix it -- it just depends on how much effort I am willing to expend.
The first definable moment where I think Windows started being at risk was release of iPhone and then smartphones that followed it (so say 2008). But even then it wasn't yet clear that smartphones will take over the world so thoroughly and drive people from using laptops.
Until that moment I would definitely project that the future will see more and more people having access to laptops. Only after it was clear people are more likely going to go with smartphones (around 2009-2010) it was reasonable to say that the market share of Windows has to start falling in favour of smartphones.
And it still wasn't clear that the same will be true even within laptop/desktop market.
Which MS was aware of but we all know what happened with Windows Phone.
Many recognise it, but don't care. Windows is not longer the cash-cow it once was even on the server. Azure is the new baby there – they don't care what server OS you run as long as you run it on their kit. In homes and offices Windows is just a vehicle for Office and Visual Studio, they are pushing people more towards the online office variants of Office (users therefore becoming dependent on a subscription for access to apps and storage/backups). Back to the server, and SQL Server runs on Linux these days or (even better for them) Azure-native.
If it wouldn't look terrible to just dump Windows, I'm fairly sure they would do so soon if they hadn't already. It would save them all the hassle of hardware compatibility, dealing with manufactures, being blamed for instability cause by bad drivers (on top of instability cause by bad Windows that is their fault!). They could let Linux & Apple deal with all that crap, and just sell cloud services, Office/SQL/Exchange licences, etc. to users of those OSs. They'd keep something of Windows on their console, but that is minute in comparison because it only needs to be the core & they control the hardware selection, and again that is just a vehicle with which to sell a subscription service to the end user and licensing/SDKs to developers.
Windows is only really moving forwards at all due to momentum, MS would rather be concentrating on other things that are more profitable for less hassle & questionable press.
Once my Windows 10 no longer works I will NOT be upgrading to Windows 11, I will either go linux or mac because I can’t tolerate microsofts crap anymore. I will never pay for an azure office or visual studio subscription, I will avoid microsoft products like the plague after all the crap they pulled and I have been using windows since version 3.11
> Windows Server still brings in revenue for licenses, so whatever development on Server that makes its way over to Consumer is probably a subsidy
Windows for desktop brought in almost $25 billion in revenues in 2022, which was more than SQL Server, Windows Server and Visual Studio put together.
I dare to say it's almost pleasant to use after a few Group policy tweaks (disable web search , telemetry, and widgets). No preinstalled Candy Crush either. Can run a local account without too much hassle but the Microsoft store is far more aggressive to make you login in 11 than 10 even for Education.
Honestly it's the only thing keeping me on Windows, but my laptop came with the standard edition of 11 with loads of preinstalled crapware that persists after a Windows reset and I was about ready to throw it out the window.
NB. I use the term "remote administration" in a general sense, not only in the "remote desktop" sense. Wikipedia's definition is "any method of controlling a computer from a remote location". For example, automatically connecting to a remote computer, downloading, installing and running code that controls the computer, without any user intervention.
No, I don't WANT to manage my network from a phone, save via a VPN into said network.
I'll be the classic Linux desktop optimist: the improvements over the last four years along have been fantastic and I really hope for a future when it can meet everyone's needs.
My OS shouldn't advertise to me. It shouldn't sell my data, or shouldn't do anything like that. It especially shouldn't harass me to log into the owning company's account. I shouldn't need any internet account to just use the OS (missing features relates the said account is obviously reasonable).
Upd: Im about win10.
Consumers didn't react harshly enough after the prism leaks. Microsoft has gotten the inch and is taking a mile.
Retail price is ~$140 for Home.
You launch Steam, see a bunch of ads, launch Epic Game Store or GOG Galaxy and see a bunch of ads, so why wouldn’t you see ads in the start menu?
Hell, you have to log in to an account for the “GeForce Experience”. Just to keep your graphics card drivers automatically updated.
As soon as you’re in a game, the game is full-screen. You’re not switching apps, you’re not creating anything, you’re just consuming content, and ads are a part of how we consume content these days.
TechPowerUp's NVCleanstall makes it easy to automatically update Nvidia drivers without any login, and also to remove any Nvidia application bloat you don't want. (I exclude GFE and only install the control panel, for example.)
https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/nvidia-display-dri...
They aren't a part of how I do it.
Why aren't we seeing ads in context menus? Why can't I yell "Burger King" into my mic every 10 minutes while streaming to get access to higher bitrates? Why hasn't Microsoft put ads on the BSOD? Why am I not paying a microtransaction every time I start up my computer to get it to skip an ad and boot faster? We are still missing out on some serious advertising potential! Every eyeball that isn't looking at a corporate logo is selfishly wasting time
Reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Y333JkwXQ
I would expect ads on Windows when I open the built-in app store, but not on the Start Menu.
To compare, I might see ads every time I bring up the start menu.
Auto-updaters are a bane unto themselves of annoying crap running in the background.
As are "quicklaunch" agents, or anything which claims to be some sort of "agent" to improve the user experience of their software.
Most of it delivers very little value, and who knows what the hell data it is hoovering up.
I think it's actually different. These are game stores. When I start Steam or EGS I expect to see game promotions (and *only* game promotions!) and targeting actually works there (e.g. I discovered a couple of games there I then bought and enjoyed).
And finally, at least in Steam I can start directly into my library view, skipping the home screen 'ads'. I would call all that completely acceptable, devoid of the usual dark patterns.
What they are, is basically all we have. Thanks mostly to WINE and Valve, Linux gaming is now almost completely tolerable, but it certainly isn't perfect and there are huge gaps in capability (VR, for one). So as much as we hate what Windows has become we are unable to switch to it without making some pretty big sacrifices.
Instead we use LTSC editions, O&O ShutUp 10, and some other third party utilities to mitigate the bullshit.
A lot of assumptions in such a short sentence. I suspect there's more than a complex set of opinions around Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, using Windows for gaming, thinking it's all fine, thinking lots of things suck, thinking it is a great operating system, thinking it's a shame it does things outside of the ideal scope of an operating system.
Anecdotally, most of the time I don't see the annoying things on my primary Windows 10 Professional machine. Upon a clean install, there were some nuisances that needed cleaned up. But the vast majority of the time, it is customizable as I desire, while being rock solid / stable, rarely needing reboots to apply updates, and when I go to play games, they just work, and they run super well.
I still hate those nuisances, and I hate that a reboot risks a dark pattern trying to push Windows 11. I hate Windows 11. It currently holds exactly zero advantages (for me) over Windows 10, and lots of disadvantages.
I really like Linux Mint, but I gave it a solid 2 months on my primary gaming machine (which happens to be a laptop) and it fell short in a few key areas. It has a lot of warts, and some games were unstable, performed poorly, or wouldn't connect to multiplayer. I also had no control over the brightness of my screen while using my discrete GPU. For the purposes of gaming, Windows 10 is vastly superior for the set of games I play. And it's a shame, because I do really like the Linux Mint experience for most things, including most games, but the issues are more problematic than the ongoing issues that I have with Windows 10.
- WiFi 6(e) 6Ghz band support is only in Win 11
- Direct GPU access from WSL2 for things like CUDA/ML programming is Win 11 only
I hate Windows these days, but the specific AMD video card in my gaming desktop has buggy drivers in Linux and reliably crashes the whole machine about once every four hours (or, much faster if I actually play a game on it—that's if I'm just web browsing and hanging out in terminals and such) versus my having had zero OS-level crashes on the same hardware over almost three years under Windows 10. So... Windows it is.
IDK, the driver may be fixed now, but the bug had been outstanding for 18+ months when I encountered it, so, I wouldn't bet on it. It seemed to have very little traction. And at this point it's really not worth my time to try, since the machine's working OK as-is, aside from Windows being crap.
Since all I do on Windows is game, having to avoid some ads isn't that big a deal. I spend nearly all my time on it in fullscreen programs anyway, hardly interacting with Windows at all.
So it's "great" in that it actually works correctly on my hardware, and ~all my games work just as they should. It's shit in every other way, but if it's effectively just a game launcher, oh well. I do anything important on other operating systems.
If you use another OS, you might have less of this crap to deal with but overall ever environment needs some customization and whether or not it's more or less is hard to determine.
Overall, this kind of thing makes the species worse off.
“we’ve all” kind of masks the way those who benefit the most from that decision are disproportionately influential it making it, both initially and on an ongoing basis,
Hell, not long ago I had someone challenge me on whether or not exploiting people for profit, in particular in health care, was wrong or not.
I started to regret my decision to upgrade, and this just adds insult to injury.
It's very important to me. :/
My work pc was nagging me to upgrade so I did, after about 20 minutes I realized the productivity loss wasn’t worth whatever supposed benefits IT would see from having everyone on one OS so I rolled back. And thankfully bec it’s not domain joined, just MDMd I can pause updates and block windows11 from ever coming down.
I'm currently using that setup and it does use the 2080Ti in this machine and I'm able to run SBERT inferences in a docker container at blisteringly fast speeds now.
I also had the feeling that even if I fixed this issue, that wouldn't be the last of it, so I just went back to where I came from where I can easily troubleshoot issues and understand all the moving pieces. I guess WSL2 is a bit too much magic for my old brain.
For the record, I tried to use Arch Linux in WSL2 with a RTX 3090ti
But you pay for the licence (well, through an oem usually), and still get ads... well, that's really assholeish.
But maybe it's the right thing to do for them, so we'll get some more diversity in the OS space, and soon there might really be a "year of linux on the desktop".
My guess is that people aren't going through and disabling everything. Also, people aren't using piholes which are probably blocking everything that can't be disabled.
I'm curious, did you pay for the installer or did it come bundled with a device?
Yes you are correct, but Microsoft is hiding these options in at least 5 different places, and you need to follow a tutorial to disable them all. Not to mention new updates add new ads, like this one or a recent one that shows search box in the task bar. This is only Windows. If you use Edge, there are 10 other things Microsoft forces on you, recently sidebar, "Discover" and "writing assistance". Some of these, like "Microsoft Editor" of "writing assistance", sends data to Microsoft (written clearly in the settings), which could include trade secret. Well it's true you can turn these off, but they should never be turned on by default in the first place.
Because you can technically disable them for a period of time doesn't make it any less unacceptable.
I'm on Windows 10 at the moment and no way am I upgrading. From what I've seen and heard so far, 11 is an absolute festering nightmare.
In maybe 5 years I will have to think about what I do with it all...
Definitely guarantees that the fTPM stays off on all of my machines so they can't be force upgraded.
It's dumping clutter into things like "shut down" where you aren't expecting clutter.
That was the last time that windows caused me anything approaching joy.
As a big plus, your Win VM's disk C:\ is stored in a file, which you can backup and restore any time you want and not care about viruses/trojans/malware.
A little-known feature of the Windows bootloader is that it can actually load VMDK disk images from NTFS drives and boot them.
I still wouldn't use that for backups though, there are more practical incremental backup solutions for that.
- I have a VR headset, how much work and how functional is it to use under a VM? I heard you'd have to passthrough the entire USB controller which is.. not great
- Anticheat still isnt happy about VMs right? That would cut a couple games I'm currently into
- How annoying is it to share files? Affinity Photo/Designer not running well in Wine/Proton is one of my blockers to move to Linux, and even if I virtualized I fear it might be incredibly tedious to use because of them being in a VM (unless modern KVM/Vbox/VMWare has flawless copy/paste sync etc)
I currently dual boot my desktop, spending my time 50/50 between Linux and Windows.
Windows mainly for gaming, Linux for work (and some gaming). The biggest annoyance for me in Linux is that Chrome is a bit janky.
I am running Fedora with (as close as possible to vanilla) Gnome. I wish Chrome would just use GTK4 and integrate as seamlessly as Firefox does.
I use it with Wayland support and using the GTK theme option in the menu - but it's still a while away. Edge is better but it's still a bit odd.
Seeing the progress made in the Gnome project and Gnome 44 also being a great release - I have high hopes that my Linux desktop will be a better user experience than Windows or MacOS soon.
I guess this depends on your definition of "better". I'd say an OS that doesn't force me to view ads is already "better" than one that does.
I am in a really uncomfortable spot of mostly disliking all flavors of operating system now. I don't really like to play games anymore and linux is something I can only enjoy with unlimited free time.
MacOS is quickly becoming my favorite "around the house" OS, but I can't stand to do technical work on this setup for some reason - I'll just RDP into my workstation if I'm on the couch.
As complacent as most users are, MS could demand one of their kidneys and they'd give it up, grumbling, just so they can keep using Windows (usually to play a game).
I bought (UK) Windows 7 Pro (retail) many years ago, tied to an MS account for licensing. Free upgrade to Windows 8, then Windows 10, followed eventually by my current Windows 11 Pro.
No ads in the OS that I've ever noticed, and the minimal pre-installs (Candy Crush, Office 365 etc) are trivially deleted upon OS installation.
That's 3 upgrades of Windows at no extra cost, and all 4 versions without advertising significant enough for me to remember seeing. And to be honest, even though I'm about 70% a Mac user due to the M1 hardware, and maybe 10% Linux, Windows remains very productive for me (more so than the others) so it's been a bargain.
I appreciate opinions vary, but despite occasional comments in HN about Stockholm Syndrome or not knowing what the alternatives are like I personally enjoy Windows. Yes, even Windows 11. And not just for games.
Well, what a relief. All the more reason to stick to Win10 as long as possible ;)
> I see MS getting flak for something every other company has already been doing for a long time.
Yes, but every other company gets flak for it, too. They're just not the topic of this particular thread.