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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions

sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.

am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?

as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.

mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.

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>sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11

It's a setting called "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen", and it's checked by default.

Not only is it enabled hy default ... it magically gets enabled by default after some days, desktop spotlight feature that pushes some lock screen wallpapers and trivia overriding my personal wallpaper, Edge trying to do the same thing to homepage, edge trying to steal browser favourites and extensions from other installed browsers once every few weeks, edge stealing default app linkage for PDF viewing, copilot in various flavours appearing on taskbar, start menu, edge, ...it's mayhem out there.

Death by a thousand cuts. So many micro abuses by the OS that keeps reminding you who has the power.

I do get lockscreen wallpapers, but in general I find them quite pretty and interesting. I've never tried changing to a fixed lockscreen wallpaper, though I I do have a fixed, custom desktop one. I can't think that people are obsessing about the lockscreen???

I don't see any of the other things you do. I use Edge as my default browser, with uBlock installed and it all seems to work. There is a Copilot icon, but I think I could remove it if it irritated me, which it doesn't. My Asus Zenbook has a Copilot key which irritates me much less than other aspects of the keyboard layout which have nothing to do with Microsoft.

All in all, I like Windows 11. I don't see how it has made things worse than any of the other NT versions.

Ah, it's available only if you pick a specific wallpaper image, that's why not everyone sees it.

> pick a specific wallpaper image

you interest me strangely - which one?

Oh I didn't mean a specific file. Lock screen wallpaper has three options, custom image, custom slideshow, and Spotlight. The former two have the "Get tips (...)" checkable, the latter doesn't.

For some people the threshold for "ad" is an uninterruptible segment that they are forced to watch, or a typical banner ad placed on screen. For others it's the visual presence of any set of pixels that can be connected to a business entity or revenue stream.

Oh I’ve definitely seen all those things… in the short minutes after a fresh install, before I wipe them out.

I have the same experience. I'm on a Windows Surfuace 7 Arm laptop right now. There's no Copilot icon next to the start menu. I press the start icon and I don't see a single ad anywhere. There are no ads on my screen. I use Edge and I don't see anything odd while I shop. Granted, I run "Pro." Maybe the home edition has more of this?

I pay for a 365/OneDrive subscription and it works well. I get the apps on desktop/laptop/phone and 1 TB storage for a decent yearly rate. I log into the PC and laptop on the same account and useful things sync.

I've done mild tweaking to turn a few things off, like the icons in the "search" bar, but nothing's been "hacked". On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?

> On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?

Really? Isn't this only for App Store and other Apple services? You can still do your everyday basic things, including downloading and installing software from internet.

Macs don't need Apple accounts at all. I just set up three Macs with no Apple accounts, not needed for intended use. They all work fine. Apple accounts are only needed if access to Apple services is desired.

Same for me - I find Windows 11 pretty good and I've never seen an ad in the Start menu. It might be specific to some editions or regions?

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