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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.