Windows 11 now comes with its own adware | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

engadget.com

69 pointsgulced49 comments

Thankfully I've moved away from Windows completely. Unfortunately I still need to use it at work and using it for development is a pain compared to Linux.

Today's Linux is not the same clunky mess it was 15 or even 10 years ago. If you don't run any strange hardware or don't require Windows-only applications (that Wine/Proton don't handle) then the experience is great.

The main blocker for me is still the Nvidia drivers, with Xorg itself having deal-breaker limitations that are never going to get fixed and Wayland on NV still not being quite there yet. Yeah it would be smoother sailing with an AMD card but that's a pretty big caveat when Nvidia has 78% of the market per the Steam survey.

I've been running a RTX 3060 on Debian 12 under Gnome+Wayland for quite some time now (Nearly a year I think!). It's stable enough that I rarely notice anything to complain about. Sleep and resume works, though resume is quite slow. I can play just about any game on Steam including most Windows-only titles, not to mention GPU Compute workloads. It hasn't always been smooth sailing on Linux but I haven't experienced any significant problems with this platform:

- Asus Motherboard - Intel 13700k (not significantly overclocked) - 128GB DDR4 - nVidia 3060 12GB

Most of the issues I've run into are related to multiple monitors, on both Xorg and Wayland. Xorg can't do mismatched refresh rates, or VRR at all with multiple monitors, or HDR at all. The last time I tried Wayland (with KDE) it ended up in a bizarre state where my mouse clicks were going to a different point on the screen than where the cursor was, which was fixed if I disabled one monitor but I couldn't figure out how to get both working at once. As a 4K monitor user I also need 150% DPI scaling to work properly and from what I gather fractional scaling is still very rough on Linux.

Hopefully one day, I'm not happy about the direction Windows is going either. But all of the above Just Works on Windows.

Admittedly I haven't been using a multiple monitor setup since I bought a 43" LG 4k screen. 1.5x scaling is no longer an issue though, as of the latest versions of gnome and wayland, that just works and I haven't noticed any problems with scaling at all (still requires the "tweaks" app because gnome can't be arsed to expose any power-user features in their settings ui).

Agreed. I've always found the nvidia drivers to be a pain in the neck and a source of system instability in Linux systems and have actively avoided nvidia hardware.

Historically better compatibility of nvidia and amd hardware for Linux was changing quite often.

I believe it to be hugely neglectful for hardware vendors to not invest here. The windows drivers suites is awful as well and I believe it to be vastly neglectful that they don't provide drivers for as many systems as possible. Somebody is sleeping in those orgs as they certainly would have the resources.

I moved to PopOS about a year ago; I've tried a few times to move to Linux and until this most recent jump I've had to move back. It's gotten a lot better than it used to be, although I have to acknowledge that it's still got some rough edges. In a vacuum I'd probably go back to Windows, but Microsoft has been actively making the Windows experience worse as well to the point that I'll deal with the occasional Linux hiccups.

(Well, that, and I'm actually having FUN with my computer again...)

Mostly agreed. Though WSL+Docker do make Windows more tolerable for work chores.

It was literally an ad in the start menu search that got me to start using Linux full time. (Insiders a couple years ago).

I use WSL for work as well and in my opnion it fits Microsoft's classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" paradigm.

WSL basically prevents most from requesting from the IT dept, A full blown Linux desktop/Laptop because they will simply say "you want Linux? here have WSL, it is 100% Linux", Which it is really not, WSL's idiosyncrasies from a true Linux Desktop drives me nuts at times.

The issue has more often been about the security tools and monitoring for Windows, along with account federation. These tend to be more broadly available and polished on Windows and Mac.

I'd prefer a full Linux workstation, but if it's locked down like some Windows I've experienced, I'm not sure it's materially better.

Right now I'm working in a remote, secured, locked down Windows VM... Without WSL or Docker. That sucks a lot.

Chances to find common language with CorpIT going higher if you will bring not just "Linux laptop" request, but request + ready to be used and proven to work tooling for good MDM, integrated into common system; way of limiting privileges (i.e. no local admin), Full Disk Encryption with TPM and other basic things.

Same here, I migrated to Linux a few years ago and have backhandedly enjoyed reading the continuous flow of headlines such as this one.

The only thing I've needed to bit into Windows for is Android rooting programs that are Windows only. I'm a long-reformed hardcore gamer, so I can't speak to Nvidia drivers, but did recently today through Deus Ex via Steam on Linux, the setup for which was a relatively pain free experience.

Edited to add: PopOS, Debian, and Ubuntu have been the flavours, with my daily driver being Pop.

Scaling is still a mess.

I use Windows for one thing now. To play a single game that is not available on Linux or the Mac. I don't know how much longer I will be playing that game.

Which game? Have you checked Proton (or Wine) compatibility?

Has to be a competitive fps. I’m in the same camp, I boot into windows for call of duty.

I mean... call of duty is a hell of a lot of games, so no idea which one you play. Most of them are pretty old so modern hardware should easily handle it. I don't care for first-person shooters so no idea what the actual situation is there (competitive fps is ambiguous - you could mean competitive first person shooters tend to have anti-cheat that requires windows, or that you feel that frames per second is not competitive on linux). I do know that proton seems to perform very well for me in other games on the linux living room gaming system and the steam deck (Xorg for both). Valve claims in general outperforms windows for similar hardware. But I suppose it could depend on your graphics card and drivers.

PUBG. No Proton/Wine support.

Ah. Gotcha. Yeah, odds are high it's got some anti-cheat/anti-copy with deep hooks into the windows kernel. Not uncommon with FPS. That makes emulation tricky.

Wow, they finally did it. I remember “third party ads in the Start menu” was brought up inside MSFT back in the early 2000s, in a mostly joking fashion. I guess it was inevitable.

There were actual internet ads in Insiders builds a couple years ago... that is when I switched.

Didn’t that accidentally get turned on for some insiders?

I seem to remember articles about that.

Yeah... I was one that definitely saw then. Pissed me off anyone even considered, let alone implemented such a thing.

I've only booted into my Windows drive twice since.. and now it's been so long that I'll have to reinstall to use it since it's too far out of date now.

I've been perfectly content with Linux.

That’s why I migrated my gaming machine to Pop_OS!

Is it actually any good for gaming?

Pretty good. There is only one exception, RDR2, there is a mission where it was crashing for me. Switching to proton experimental solved the issue and I am about to finish it (again, love this game)

Gaming on Linux is actually pretty great these days - thanks in no small part to Valve and their momentous efforts in the space, proton included.

If you run into an issue, it's almost always the Anti-Cheat software to blame. There are many games that run very well in single player modes, but then force-quit if you try to join multiplayer (as-in the anti-cheat kicks you or deliberately crashes the game). I'm not aware of any work-arounds that are reliable for this - and you risk a ban in trying so. They detect you're not on Windows and refuse to work.

Games that don't use aggressive Anti-Cheat work fine, even in multiplayer. There's a huge catalog of games that work natively these days, and proton takes care of just about everything else.

Steam mostly "just works" with all games. There's Lutris, Bottles and more for everything else.

I've been playing Baldurs Gate, and Guidwars 2 without issue. I originally started out on endeavorOS which lasted a while, but eventually needed the stability of PopOS since I have dev work on the same machine.

Pop has a version that ships with Nvidia proprietary drivers which made things easier (RTX 4080). Only thing missing for me is HDR support. I'm very happy to give that up to avoid Windows.

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based).

The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected.

I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers.

[1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

I was unable to use silver blue on my comet lake based laptop with a Nvidia Optimus secondary card. Once I finally got nvidia's proprietary drivers installed and I tried using parsec to remote to my windows desktop using hardware decoding for video I was getting 80 milliseconds decode time as opposed to 8 milliseconds on software decoding.

I gave up on Linux and reinstalled windows 11 and everything's working perfectly without a hitch.

I'd wager this had little or nothing to do with SilverBlue itself, and more had to do with your configuration. Did you experience this issue on another distro too?

> Guidwars 2

I had to replace gpu because nvidia did something at some point to the drivers and I couldn't load Shattered Observatory and few other places without crashing, no matter whether I launch the game by Lutris or Steam

Yeah, I had a few driver versions cause issues. I'm usually able to get around it by switching proton versions. Sometimes the experimental version works when others don't. There was a driver version a month or so back that broke gw2, but it seemed to be fixed by next driver release.

I think about picking up a cheaper amd card for those unstable periods when Nvidia can't seem to get it right. I know its nowhere near the top of there todo list, but really wish they'd give more attention to the Linux driver.

Earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40142667

I've replaced my start menu with Open-Shell which is quite customisable... and doesn't need settings changed on a regular basis to opt-out of advertising!

Microsoft is emulating the Meta business model now: The customers are the product....

Key difference being that Meta products are free for consumers, while Windows licensing is very much not free.

Microsoft are just attempting a classic double-dip; pay for Windows and also get the ads endemic to digital life! What's not to love...

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40142667

I'm fine with paid software licenses, but ads and telemetry embedded in a product with a payed license is a hard pass from me.

Sweet, I don't need to rely on third party viruses and scammers anymore to unlock that feature!

"now"? It was adware, along with Windows 10, the moment they were released.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27337382

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449607

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37321002

I'm no fan of the direction Windows has been going since 7, but this is exactly like the default behavior of KDE Plasma (at least on OpenSUSE).

I guess HN is just a more pretentious version of Reddit now? Share simple facts and people downvote/flag you for not being sufficiently outraged about the subject?

First rule of getting downvoted - don't talk about getting downvoted

Windows 11 costs money, KDE does not. Changes things slightly.

This would be a more charitable argument if Discover was in the habit of promoting proprietary software for sale. Perhaps that's true on OpenSUSE specifically? On KDE Plasma on my system, the search lens only seems to suggest things in the local repositories, which are all free software. It's also trivially easy to configure which lenses are enabled, and as a bonus has a local file search that actually works (and quickly at that)

I'm on Kubuntu and don't have ads in my menu bar.

Now?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com