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Comment by trimethylpurine | Hacker News Reader

You can turn all this shit off in the group policy editor. It takes less time than writing an article for The Verge.

>this is not my first rodeo. I can turn off most of this junk. Most people will never bother or won’t know how or won’t realize that it’s optional. They’ll just learn to tune it out, mostly.

They'll learn to tune it out like the ads on the Verge?

I'm sorry, but pretending that something is difficult for however many paragraphs he stuffed into these ads is simply not good journalism. Let's ignore that he's complaining about ads in Windows, while writing an ad page.

Most people don't know about the group policy. Also, it's a constant battle - today you disable this thing, tomorrow they add something else in an update that you have to disable again. Or it may not even by possible to disable on the Home version.

Most people know about Google and can find how to turn it off, including in the Home edition.

LOL putting a lot of faith in the average user to be able to Google something

Also putting a lot of faith in 2024 Google being able to find a result without tripping over a million pages of llm-generated nonsense and ads.

The very first results from DuckDuckGo and Google show how to turn this off. For end users, it's literally in the built in settings. Group Policy is just nice for enterprise. I think you are all making a huge deal over nothing.

This is why it takes so long to hire a decent group of people. It takes hundreds of hours to weed out people that would rather complain than find a solution, which is most of you, as you can see in this example.

Yes, it's trivial to change. And no, a random average user will not cross the "this is a Googlable problem with a solution" realisation stage. This is not a problem for anyone reading this, but every normie I know uses stock settings on windows and no ad blocker. I occasionally get to respond to messages like "I got an error saying 'do X', how do fix this?". Thus is the level of a random user - people creating software have to acknowledge that at some point.

>This is not a problem for anyone reading this

Then why is it posted here?

This is a marketing post, in a place where it doesn't belong, complaining about marketing being where it doesn't belong.

Apparently that's lost on at least a few regulars. Or more likely, they are upset that we don't want to see their garbage here too

> Then why is it posted here?

I appreciate it being posted, because I don't run stock windows, yet I deal with supporting many windows users. It's not something they'll raise with me if it's not completely breaking their workflow, so it's nice to know what is the latest badness I should be disabling.

Okay. Fair enough. But wouldn't a post be better simply explaining that a basic setting or group policy exists rather than complaining on an ad packed page for more paragraphs than you care to read?

Or malware. "Here user, just type this in the comand line and run as administrator"

Only if you have Windows Pro, for Home (and similar) users, gpedit is missing/unavailable.

There's guides online for using Microsoft's DISM tool to install the Group Policy stuff on Windows Home. There's also some surreptitious tools to change the edition of Windows, but that's more of a gray area.

The same registry keys exist in Home and you can find them with a very small amount of Google effort, even if you can't use the Group Policy editor.

Anyone created a meta-policy called "Windows 10 UX" or even "Windows 7 UX"?

You can't. Only some things.

The source of complaint in the article (Widgets) can be switched off with Group Policy on Windows 11 Pro and above.

If you find time, could you link me to a how-to source?

It's the first result in every search engine I tried.

Here's one: https://www.howtogeek.com/742414/how-to-disable-the-widgets-...

I too am surprised at how people seem unable to find the readily accessible options to turn these features off.

Many of the things people don't like in Windows 10 and 11 can be switched off from the Settings app.

That you get down votes for providing solutions should tell you that this platform is sadly flooded with sensational journalism as opposed to the expected technically and scientifically inclined patrons that we'd prefer.

Can you explain more how? Which policy at which path?

Sure. Here's a detailed step by step.

https://www.howtogeek.com/742414/how-to-disable-the-widgets-...

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