Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

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744 pointsextr0pian449 comments

Glad to see someone else chasing this down, and not surprised this is still not yet reproducible.

Paul Thurrott and I were also scratching our heads with this one on August 25. After failing to reproduce the behavior, he wrote up our collective experience [1] the next day. We chalked it up to yet another Windows Insider screw up, marked it as an unsolved case, and moved on.

I certainly hope the change eventually makes it into the OS before the Windows 11 "23H2" release is finalized (imminent).

[1] https://www.thurrott.com/paul/287711/scaling-back-the-terrib... (pay-walled)

I remember when we first found out that IE could be "uninstalled" from Windows 7 (it was a checkbox in an early build's programs list that let you have it removed, basically).

Interesting seeing the about-face over a decade later.

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for those not aware, Rafael's almost a two decade long authority on the topic of smashing Windows internals to bits to see how it all works.

I remember when we first found out that IE could be uninstalled from Windows 98 and thus what eventually lead the EU to mandate Microsoft give Windows users a choice of 3rd party browsers.

Back then businesses were a lot more scared of the repercussions of anti-competitive behaviour than they are now.

>Back then businesses were a lot more scared of the repercussions of anti-competitive behaviour than they are now.

Reasonably, too. Governments seem reluctant to actually regulate anti-competitive behavior these days, especially from tech giants. I think it must be a kind of technological "too big to fail".

Big businesses have more resource and more ability to manipulate the public than democratic governments

Big businesses buy politicians too...

The usual solution from libertarian techies is to remove what little power democratic governments have and let big business be unchecked other than some “invisible hand” from a collection of individual actors who can’t scale due to psychological warfare that big companies can easily scale to.

We are now at a point that billionaires openly make unilateral decisions about foreign and defence policy with little discussion in public eyes, let alone checks and balances.

I think this is curve-fitting.

Billionaires in the USA are completely and totally beholden to the military-industrial complex, for the most part. Look how they all scrambled for JEDI, for example.

The US military alone spends the entire net worth of the richest private person in 17 weeks, wealth it took him 30-ish years to accumulate; that's not counting the rest of government spending. There's an argument that any senator is "richer" than the richest private person in the country. It's not even the same ballpark.

Did you have specific instances in mind?

A senator is not richer than the richest person in the country. Neither in money nor influence.

The banana republics aren’t all that old. President Isenhour’s administration were toppling sovereign governments and democratically elected leaders directly at the behest of Dole Foods (United Fruit) well after World War II ended.

Unfortunately it's a Catch 22, because the most influential billionaires have direct ties to Establishment politicians, supporting and manipulating them freely to their liking, including brazen election interference, in which the same Establishment players all admitted to existing not long ago, while judges and district attorneys in their respective states have also been bought out by these same billionaires in an effort to squash these claims when raised by anti-Establishment players.

We need anti-Establishment players who are already willing to confront these billionaires by cutting off their influence completely, rather than taxing them more — which is useless, and conveniently replaces their contributions with tax dollars that can be used for the same manipulation strategies.

The bad news is, any criticism of these particular billionaires results in synthesized media campaigns crying wolf about anti-Semitism or anti-science, which causes the public to become distracted over manufactured culture wars, while the root issues go unchecked and the politicians willing to confront these billionaires are smeared, drawn, and quartered by the same media and voters who wouldn't dare to think outside their box.

> The bad news is, any criticism of these particular billionaires results in synthesized media campaigns crying wolf about anti-Semitism or anti-science

Who’s the billionaire you have in mind? Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.

Due to the nature of the discussion, if I mentioned their names here, I would get flagged into oblivion for daring to mention them — I'm not being hyperbolic either (I wish I was!). I neither believe it's safe nor fruitful to discuss that freely here.

I will say, I encourage anyone interested in understanding this better to spend some time researching: to who known billionaire individuals (and families) are donating funds to, or investing heavily into, whether that be corporate/legacy media companies, video game publishers, farms, as a few examples — you name it. Follow the money, and you will find power and influence causing rapid changes to policy, hiring, and public relations that all closely align to known political agendas.

I'll leave it at that. :)

>Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.

Yes, precisely. It's human nature, but even easier as someone with nearly unlimited funds and quite likely, power.

Also there is geopolitics involved. A war in the east and every EU regulation against US companies is seen a bit as an attack on the alliance while "we" must stand together against the east.

Also IE was the dominant browser back then, which it is not today, but windows itself is on the desktop. So I think it is abusing monopoly, but instead of trying to regulate it, EU should make a push for open source. Maybe fund it with a big fine for Microsoft. That would be EU politics I could engage with.

>I think it must be a kind of technological "too big to fail".

Microsoft was still big even back then, and yet they got regulated. Bell/AT&T was also a giant monopoly and it also got broken up. It seems that size wasn't the problem.

Not enough. They tried to make them separated their Office software business from the OS business, but failed sadly. Not to mentioned all the problems with them making unsupportable office files formats.

> It seems that size wasn't the problem.

The lack of will to regulate seems to scale with industry lobbing.

I used to hope we consumers would stop reelecting corruption. We never did and now we're too busy trying to keep even worse people getting into office.

There's a deliberate emphasis on the etymology of monopoly, ignoring that the word was created to describe the problems it caused and the n-opolies are causing all the same problems.

> Governments seem reluctant to actually regulate anti-competitive behavior.

The EU seems happy to stick to it’s guns, though the rest of us seem to have to suffer the deluge of sewage.

> Governments seem reluctant to actually regulate anti-competitive behavior these days, especially from tech giants.

True. US states are ramping up production of tech laws but those laws typically fall into two categories. Laws that only large tech houses can afford and/or unconstitutional reactionary laws.

At best these laws do no good for the consumer. They absolutely do nothing do encourage competition.

Most of them, however, bring tons of harm like gifting abusable power to govs and helping big tech further entrench their dominance.

A step further, these are understood to be very pro business before you even consider "too big to fail" (which itself is a very pro business platform anyway).

As an aside, I don't think anyone realistically thinks MS is failing if you're able uninstall edge.

I'm surprised no one has brought up United States v. Microsoft yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

They were successfully sued for favoring their browser over others, and faced being broken up. Though their actions now are not as egregious as those actions 25 years ago, it's obvious that no lesson has been learned.

Microsoft successfully appealed it.

They did learn a lesson; from Google and Apple.

- "their actions now are not as egregious as those actions 25 years ago"

Which part of the other case do you view as more egregious? They seem similar to me.

> Though their actions now are not as egregious as those actions 25 years ago

How so? They still bundle a browser, but now they go a step further and actively ignore user-selected preferences for the default browser.

> On June 28, 2001, the Circuit Court overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft. This was partly because Jackson had improperly discussed the case with the news media while it was still in progress, violating the Code of Conduct for American judges.[24] The Circuit Court judges accused Jackson of unethical conduct and determined that he should have recused himself from the case.

Lol.

Every time I log into windows and that “Lets finish setting up your computer” wizard starts, I feel abused, betrayed, and forced into whatever bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down my throat.

It sucks.

Have you tried not logging into Windows?

It was a huge effort for me to switch. Now almost 20 years later, I don't regret it. Wish I had done it sooner.

KDE skinned linux reminds me of the glory days of Windows, but modernized and upgraded. There is little reason for anyone of even modest technical abilities to be using windows now.

Gaming was the last bastion of having Windows, but with Proton, Linux can run nearly any "Windows-only" game.

It is a small effort to switch now. There has never been a better time.

Happily running Linux now that my job no longer requires windows development ;)

I don't care for edge for the most part, but there is actually one integration with edge that I have come to like. When I click on an email link inside outlook, edge opens the link, and also displays a sidebar which displays the email. Super handy IMO.

Somehow we need to find a balance that allows vendors to tightly integrate their apps but prevent abusing this.

MS is everyone's favorite whipping boy, but I fear what kind of ads Google while shove through if they ever get a dominant market share in desktop OSs. Apple seems to be the only sensible alternative.

Ubuntu is very usable for a desktop OS.

Except they too pushed ads (ubuntu advantage) and snap and other annoying stuff.

Windows: ads in the start menu, candy crush, hey you are trying to install chrome and I don't like that.

Ubuntu: one line message in the terminal about we released <new thing> thing, feel free to try it.

Yeah, basically the same thing.

It's the same thing, just one company has taken it further. I realize this is a slippery slope argument, but when there are countless examples of how this slopes is slippery, I think it's a valid point of contention.

I think it’s a very different thing. The slope doesn’t seem particularly slippery. Choosing to be anti-user in your marketing seems like a form line.

It's not the same thing for the same reason that a shiny billboard for an ad right outside your bedroom window that you can't not see every time you look outside is not the same as a text ad on the first page of a book you want to read.

A text ad on the first page of a book is not a slippery slope to a billboard right outside your window.

I use a Linux terminal everyday. I completely forgot it has any ads at all until reading this thread. I have to put conscious effort to find where the ad is.

It would be impossible for a daily Windows user to forget their OS has ads.

My 2 cents at any rate

I’ve never noticed, which means their “pushing” is at a totally acceptable level.

personally i would recommend zorin os before ubuntu since it has a similar desktop layout to windows or if someone doesnt care about that then pop os is decent as well

Yes, I'm sure it is. But for me, so is Windows and OSX.

> Somehow we need to find a balance that allows vendors to tightly integrate their apps but prevent abusing this

A vendor of a web browser and email client, sure. A vendor of an operating system and one (or both) of a web browser and an email client, hell no. If anything, an operating system should be forced _not_ to tightly integrate to vendor-specific apps and instead should provide integration loosely and in a way a user can plug in their choice of app (or disable entirely).

I do think people like Dolby Atmos, Android Auto, Airdrop, SMB, systemd, the whole of SteamOS and I think when you get down to it "tight integration but I don't like it" is the only definition you'll get that actually will encompass what people mean. Because what makes Springboard on iOS okay when on Android you can have Nova? What makes NFS okay to build in the kernel but not Airdrop? What makes Steam's overlay browser okay to tightly integrate but not Edge?

The whole OS is a mess of tightly coupled software with messy boundaries. I don't think the coupling is the thing that matters.

Dolby Atmos, at least, sounds good but it's pretty annoying because it's had the practical effect of making height channels proprietary in most systems.

Springboard definitely isn't OK.

There's no good reason that Airdrop shouldn't be in the Linux kernel and it probably would be if the protocol were well documented.

You can use game overlays other than the Steam one, so there's nothing stopping Microsoft from creating an overlay that provides the Edge browser.

Rich integrations are great but when the boundary is perceived by the user as being two different programs or systems, both sides of the integration should have well-documented public interfaces that support swapping out the other side (no "private API" funny business).

"Tightly integrated" can mean "We designed A and B to fit together well. We built them side by side and tested them together" That's perfectly acceptable and can make a fair direct case to the customer.

What's not:

* Not allowing controls to manage integrations. Maybe I want to connect A to C, D, or Q instead, or not allow a connection at all.

* Accidentally-on-purpose clobbering customer choices (ooh, whoops, we reset all your file associations for the sixth time this year, perhaps now you'll stop changing them).

* Using undocumented APIs or similar gimmicks to ensure a competitive product will be inherently hamstrung.

* Pretending a seperate product is an indivisible component of the whole. I'm sure there are a bunch of places where Edge could be pulled out in favour of an external help-file/PDF/etc viewer.

At a certain point, you’re pretty much asking for socialism. No one should be obligated to build an entire operating system that works on billion combination of potential parts, and then cater to everyone else so that they get the native experience in every way integrating with the OS.

Obviously, I want the best experience as an end-user. But I think it’s ridiculous, at a certain point you should have to invest the billions of dollars to build your own equivalent operating system. You really can’t expect all of that. Microsoft already has a pretty flexible system.

Maybe there is a business model for that massive investment. I don’t think that 100% native integration for third party applications is a big draw to most people. It’s mostly something people complain about on this forum.

Proof of that is Apple. It’s relatively inflexible, and people seem to like it quite a bit. They are doing very well. Then there’s also Linux but then people complain things aren’t tightly integrated enough.

Basically people want to have their cake and eat it too on someone else’s 1 billion dollar investment.

I think you should be able to embed a browser with your os (the browser is almost part of an os now, and there can be links between those integration), but not prevent 3rd party browsers or tie services to your browser. There is no technical reason for bing.

Your comment is ridiculous to me. We have Linux, probably supported on billion combinations, not too closely integrated with "vendor-specific" things. It's also free to use and free software, constantly being improved and extended by people around the world.

I don't much care about Windows, but as someone who has to use it for certain work I feel like I have the right to complain about Microsoft trying to force it's other products on me. And they probably could survive by having their OS be a bit more end-user friendly,, and if they couldn't, we would use some other OS.

If that’s how you feel, that’s fine. But no, Linux is not supported on 1 billion hardware combinations. It works with a lot, but there’s no single entity that supports it all like Microsoft. You’re digging into C code if you run into a problem, someone else has not before.

Linux is a server kernel primarily. It gets used elsewhere, but that’s the core focus for development. Windows is a consumer OS. They’re really two different tools for two different jobs.

The comment I was responding to asserted "we need to find a balance that allows vendors to tightly integrate their apps but prevent abusing this". My response argued that no, we don't actually need this. I don't think that being unwilling to go out of my way to find a way to support a business model I don't like is socialism because I don't happen to be a billionaire making a competing problem; if anything, you're arguing that I shouldn't use my power as a consumer to choose products that I like to influence the marketplace, and that's a far more anti-capitalist message than anything I've expressed here.

Using it and demanding that they lose pretty much all power over their own product, is nearing socialism.

What you didn’t mention before, but now you are, is that you would choose a different product that works as you described. That sounds better. The only problem is that it doesn’t exist. Again, no one is going to spend $1 billion to build a system for everyone else to essentially have native integrations into as they sit back having spent all of that money to build this hypothetical extremely flexible product. Those types of ideas are basically the typical HN pipe dream.

Well, everyone has their view, I don't think I'm any more right than you. You can give a technical definition of an OS from a CS textbook, but ultimately all of these are consumer/retail products created to benefit the end-user, not so much to create a technical design masterpiece. But that is just my view. I tend to side on the practical aspects more than design purity.

> I tend to side on the practical aspects more than design purity.

I do too, but as someone who doesn't use Outlook or Edge, having those two specific products integrate doesn't give me any practical benefits, whereas having the OS try to force products like Edge that I don't use on me because they happen to also be made by Microsoft gets in the way of me just trying to use a computer the way I want.

Oh yeah, I completely understand. I'm not necessarily in favor of forced bundling. All I'm saying is that sometimes there are benefits when there is a single vendor who can do tight integrations. Apple being the other obvious example with their (supposedly) seamless hardware ecosystem integration.

In theory, something like Linux has a good model with multiple distributions, with each making different choices for the end-user. In practice, only a handful of distributions get any kind of traction and/or support.

Sad you didn't see Linux as a better alternative to OSX. I credit it with making me at least 10% more productive over the twenty years I've used it, partly because it is stable and fast, but mostly because it isn't trying to sell me stuff while I work.

My experience is the opposite. I spent 15 years on Linux desktops until finally switching to Windows for the sake of my producivity.

I've seen promoted links in Win10/11, but never anything that harmed my productivity. Most importantly, the OS just fades into the background. I never think about it.

Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.

> Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something.

I usually try to avoid discussions of the OS, since it's such a terribly boring topic. However, this is quite an extraordinary claim that is made without any details. Perhaps you could elaborate. As someone that has used various Linux distros for nearly twenty years, I don't think I could construct a scenario in which someone doing the usual things has to open a terminal to "fix or change something" on a daily basis. It's probably less than once a year that I have to fix anything on my Linux desktop computers.

Did you build your own Linux distribution? Were you running IT at a company with 50,000 Linux desktops? Were you testing the development version of a desktop environment?

I believe it. I've used linux desktops for 20 years also and command line is definitely a must on a daily basis. Ive also used Windows and agree that it just fades into background. Windows 10/11 definitely less paiinful on the desktop. These days with better integration with and tools for Linux cli, Windows is definitely my preferred gui productivity environment. Many Linux fans don't know better or won't admit it because hate tends to blind.

I just set up Windows and spent an entire week googling how to tame it. Turns out dism.exe at the CLI is required to make it free up 20 to 30GB! of disk space it was wasting.

Many, many hours and late nights figuring out how to turn off telemetry, Edge and more. Multiple Group policy editor settings to force it to do what is asked and no more. For some reason updates and uninstalls take forever and uninstalls can’t be batched. (A powsh I found didn’t work) I could go on…

“Fades in the background” my ass. :-P

> spent an entire week googling how to tame it

Part of the reason Windows doesn't fade into the background for you is that you insist on fighting it, you're tweaking stuff you should just leave alone... according to Microsoft.

Physically it's not possible for me to use Windows, my hand cramps up, not completely sure why that happens, but it provides a constant physical reminder that I'm using Windows.

2TB 2.5" SATA SSDs are $61. 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs are $63.

Why are you worried about 20-30 GB again??

Bandwidth - was building a VM. A 10GB VM is much more convenient than 40GB one, to move copy, share, run from network drive etc.

And yes, a few older drives are kinda small here. Laptop vendors overcharge on storage so most of ours have a half TB, which goes fast.

We could buy a number of new drives, or we could look up an esoteric CLI and free up 30g.

Ahhh yes, now that makes sense.

Point taken!

Nonsense. They've moved so much stuff about all my windows knowledge from 7 is useless. You'll be in the same spot when 12 comes out.

I'm generally onboard with hating on windows, but windows 7 was 14 years ago. (Almost) everything software realted has changed in that time, not just Windows.

Well it's hardly my fault that I've not had to use windows in the past 10 years.

And no, not every UI has made needless changes since then.

Could it be because you're more comfortable with the CLI than any GUI alternative? E.g. I wouldn't go clicking about for installing packages when it's just one line away.

I know many power users of Windows that bring up their terminal frequently as well.

>I've used linux desktops for 20 years also and command line is definitely a must on a daily basis.

What were you using if I may ask? I use manjaro with plasma and.... idk I really don't have to use the commandline much if at all when i'm not coding. Last time I was forced to was a few months ago in fact with an old niche wifi dongle that didn't work without some tinkering but this now works out of the box as well.

> Windows is definitely my preferred gui productivity environment

lmao, not because I don't believe you really think what you write, but because how user hostile everything in Windows seems to me, if you only want to change a single setting. It will be hidden behind 3 level deep settings dialogs and a "material design" flat links connecting those setting dialogs, so almost no visual indication, to make things stand out. It is horrible UI design. Basically any modern GNU/Linux DE will offer more feedback and visibility in their settings dialogs and windows.

Whenever I have to change any settings on Windows, I get a feeling of dread, because I know I will be searching for that setting. And never is the search any help, because they will name things different than I expect or it simply will not find the settings dialog I need to change that setting.

It is almost like they intentionally hide the settings ... Windows feels like a system that protects clueless users from themselves.

The main problem with Windows' terrible settings is that they are constantly changing. So when you search for how to change something all the instructions are obsolete.

There's a frustrating trend across the software industry-- chasing that hypothetical "next billion" users by removing customization, complicating discovery, and nerfing advanced features.

I'm sure Windows 11 works perfectly if you teleported in from a dimension without computers and never had to unlearn any prior experiences. You'll use the defaults, which of course expose you to the most possible Microsoft revenue streams, and not notice the friction points. It's probably a net positive for that user if they make customization limited and frustrating-- don't give him any paint and he can't paint himself into a corner, resulting in an expensive support session.

The most cynical take on this is that the advanced users, who are suffering from the constant abuse from the software undermining attempts at personalization and breaking workflows, are not a priority. They've already paid, and are unlikely to suddenly turn into a new revenue centre.

It's 2023 and I still can't get a Dell laptop with Linux pre-installed to sleep properly without crashing without editing things in the terminal and mucking about in the bios.

Even giving up on that and disabling sleep on lid close requires using the terminal. Sure the Gnome Tweaks tool has a setting for that but it's not installed by default and check the comments here, it doesn't actually work.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/15520/how-can-i-tell-ubuntu-...

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz/000179566/how-to-di...

It is 2023, and they seem to have completely broken hibernate on Windows. Didn't work reliably for a while, intermittently failing to wake up correctly in various ways, one of those ways being a black screen with no choice but to reboot¹, and it seems to have vanished as an option on most (maybe all) laptops I've used recently².

And sleep doesn't always stay slept. We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty³.

So sleep/hibernate not working right is hardly a significant difference when comparing Linux to Windows. In fact one of the laptops I had trouble with did sleep and hibernate properly when Linux went on it for a while, so at least sometimes the difference is not in favour of Windows.

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[1] the couple of times that happened to me, the machine would still work via RDC and other such so an orderly restart could be arranged if I had another machine on the same network, but if I had no such machine available like when travelling a hard-reset had to be forced

[2] I'm told you can force it to be available again, but I assume the removal is an admission that is doesn't work properly so enabling it is risky

[3] being in a bag isn't great for cooling airflow!

> We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty

I've seen a hypothesis for this relatively common issue, which is: laptop goes to sleep while connected to charger, then charger is unplugged but the laptop still believes it gets charged and starts downloading OS updates, emptying the battery and almost overheating in a bag.

I don't have a Windows laptop to test it myself, though.

I sometimes use windows on my work laptop and usually keep it up to date, meaning I won't let the installed updates wait around for a reboot. It still ends up hot for no reason while I carry it around, and the battery half empty.

Hell, while asleep on the desk (so plugged-in, grated) it tends to be hotter than while under active use. Under Linux, the fan basically never spins as long as I don't compile stuff and the PC is cool to the touch.

I also make a point of unplugging it before I close it because, contrary to Linux on the same machine, there's a very high probably that if I unplug the dock while the PC sleeps, the screen won't wake up again in a usable state (it's typically on, but it's either blank or it displays random colors). It gets its power via said dock.

This is a run-of-the-mill, full-Intel HP Elite book, with an HP dock running Windows 11, as recommended by HP.

Be mad at Dell, not Linux.

Pretty much every sleep issue I've encountered in the wild is due to the hardware manufacturer's shitty implementation.

The only reason some features "just work" with Windows is because they only care if it works with Windows.

Ultimately it still sucks if it happens with your hardware, but you should direct your frustration to the right party. Maybe one day people will care enough and interoperability can become the default.

Its often the case that when apps crash (on any OS) due to bugs, its the OS that gets blamed by the user. It is easy to say "blame Dell", but you'd have to be familiar with the code-base to know whose fault it was.

Either way it doesn't change the fact that you need to do this on Linux but not Windows. There's dozens of fiddly little things like this that you don't need to do on Windows.

I use each OSX, Ubuntu and Windows daily but I could never recommend my mother switch to Ubuntu or Mint because of things like this.

Come on. Linux is stable enough for anyone. So many people have done exactly what you said can't be done, and then never again had to play tech support for their relatives. I can get a flash disk with Linux and it will work for the proverbial mom for years without touching it.

What I found happens often is pure confirmation bias. People already hate Linux and love Windows/OSX, then find reasons to confirm that. I'm sure I have some of that too, but I try to see all sides.

The amount of blue screens and shitty issues my wife puts up with on Windows is astonishing. Disconnecting/reconnecting dongles so they work again. Manually searching for drivers. She re-installs Windows every few months and normalizes it.

Same goes for OSX. Apple fanboys at work having random segfaults on services, OS upgrades that sometimes takes them down a full day. A coworker of mine still runs a years old OSX version because last time he updated he had to pay hundreds of dollars for Apple care to get his MacBook working again. I still remember when I had to use OSX, wasting days searching for solutions after every OS upgrade.

My point is: there are issues with all OSes and this generalization that "Linux is the bad one" is a plain lie. Especially for basic usage, which is what normal people usually stick to.

Yes, if you pick a bad distro and sometimes gets hardware from manufacturers that intentionally fuck Linux over, you're gonna have a hard time.

But on the other side, you have a choice. You can choose a more stable distro, you can tweak it as you like. Something other OSes can't offer.

Everyone is free to choose, but this meme against Linux is plain tiring.

I think when you are such a proficient user of some technology you don't even realize how many mistakes you can make along the way. And some small annoyance that you don't even notice might be a burden and a day-long struggle for someone less experienced.

As an example of such a behavior on Windows. My customers (too often) complain that my console-based program suddenly stopped and they tried everything and can't make it to restart.

The problem is that they don't realize that selecting some text in the window blocks the stdout and the program won't continue until they remove the selection.

So for a more experienced user it's nothing, but for someone new to terminal behavior it's a huge obstacle.

On Linux you have much more traps like that.

GP said 15 years though, not exactly someone less experienced.

I know people who seem to have managed to have the same year of experience 15 times over, learning nothing along the way…

Time spent is not necessarily experience, especially if you are trying to do something else at the time. In this case trying to do DayJob so not having time/care to commit much operating system management knowledge to memory, which is more understandable than the people mentioned in my first sentence who were failing to learn what was their job.

My son got a Lenovo T16 AMD for school, wanted to go with Kubuntu and spent one week setting up hibernate. Only solution that works is still hacky, he runs a script that disables then enables some things after returning from hibernation to make networking work.

This, on a machine that you can buy with Linux.

My dad bought a Dell and reboots it almost every day because the wifi or USB drivers randomly stop working, on Windows. My own old Dell had a similar issue with the audio driver, it would just randomly stop working and every app trying to play a sound would instantly crash. Luckily in that case a generic Windows driver worked better. So two of three Dell laptops in our family were basically shipped in a broken state. My Surface Pro soft bricked itself during a normal shutdown.

I had great experiences with Windows in the past, but not anymore.

I don't think I agree with this. I left Macos for Linux a few years ago and the first month was pretty frustrating, but it got much easier after that. I think it does help to invest time in making it work though. On the upside, I've had many fewer instances where an update suddenly breaks things and causes me to stop working unexpectedly to fix them.

I work on Linux and game on Windows (for the moment). I switched to Linux around 12 years ago, after Entity Framework was the last straw developing .Net stuff.

Configuring Linux is fun, so yes, I've done a reasonable amount of playing around with it. But I chose this. There was always the option of picking a "batteries included" distro and just running that with no playing around. I've never encountered a situation where I had to open a terminal to fix or change something that I didn't cause.

Windows repeatedly gets in my face about updates, often at inconvenient times. It's just generally a worse experience, in part because it seems so condescending compared to Linux. The tone is always "are you sure you want to do this?", "these are super-advanced settings that we don't think you should be messing with", and so on. I'm always swearing at the bloody thing to just get out of my way.

it seems so condescending compared to Linux

This is my experience as well. To use a power tools analogy, Windows is the DIY line of equipment: moderately powered, relatively easy to use, if it breaks/wears down you buy a new one. Linux, on the other hand, is the professional's choice: much more powerful, harder to master, but it's user servicable and infinitely better customizable for each use case.

> Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.

Really? What kind of things do you have to google for Linux to work these days? The opposite is true for me in Windows, I am not about to relearn how to use the Windows terminal.

In my personal experience it's usually random little things that technically work but not quite right, and occasionally it's stuff that's just outright broken.

There's also been a fair amount of googling for how to set up X in Linux to do Y only to find a trail of half-functional or abandoned packages. Getting global menus set up in your DE of choice for example takes a surprising amount of twiddling and even at its best doesn't work with a lot of software. Getting everything functioning as expected with a minimal WM setup is also a surprising amount of work (e.g. laptop volume keys not working if some daemon isn't running). Admittedly it's not as bad if all your want is a Win9x-type or iPad-type desktop.

It's frustrating that you can't change DE in Windows though, and that it changes from version to version.

You actually can, but there is no viable alternative DE. If only KDE had a Win32-free build for Windows.

I didn't know that, thanks for mentioning. It's apparently called shells in Windows lingo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_f...

>Getting global menus set up in your DE of choice for example takes a surprising amount of twiddling and even at its best doesn't work with a lot of software.

And is one click and works with all apps in Windows ?

No, but there’s no chance of Windows becoming my primary platform — I use it almost exclusively for games (some of which don’t play nice with Proton) — and so I don’t need as much from it.

Additionally, Windows isn’t usually sold on its flexibility to anywhere near the extent that desktop Linux is. As such I don’t think it’s strange to expect that taking advantage of said flexibility is relatively painless, regardless of what the user is trying to do — there’s no point in flexibility if e.g. there’s actually only a small handful of options that are practical.

But you realize that getting all possible apps to look the same and have same behavior is very hard, you have GTK2, GTK3, GTK4 with their limited customization, then you have Qt apps, KDE apps, Java with their different GUI frameworks, node apps, Wine apps, other smaller toolkits used in Python etc.

But as you admit in Linux you have infinite more power to attempt setting up a global menu, but this feature is not something a mainstream distro offers by default so IMO is not a fair complaint.

I don't think Linux is as bad as people claim, but it isn't as good/easy to use as people claim either. One problem I see is that the distribution of software is tied to the package manager. If you install any complex (esp stuff that uses web+database+python,etc) app outside of this system, I've seen dependencies break when updating software. MariaDB/Laravel upgrades have been painful.

> [Windows 10/11] fades into the background

I strongly disagree with this. When I am forced to use windows, I am constantly fighting with it to not be obnoxious. It takes many seconds to do something as simple as bring up an explorer window. I can't count the number of times I have had to dig into menus to disable this or that ad panel or other bloatware. In linux, I occasionally have to figure out how something works and fix it, but there are generally many months between those events, when everything just works and gets out of my way.

Windows key+E opens explorer. Or do you mean that it's so slow that it takes several seconds?

On my work machine (approx 4 years old, Win10) and home machine (mostly 2 years old, graphics card, a 1060/6GB is more elderly, Win10) both take most of a second to bring up a fresh Explorer window, timing by eye from Win+E to the whole UI being present. It seems far more variable (sometimes feeling quicker, sometimes taking a couple of seconds) on my laptop (<1 year old, i5 CPU 16G RAM, Win11). All are using decently speedy SSD drives.

Several seconds sounds like an exaggeration, but it never seems anything but sluggish to me.

One UX delay that irritates me is the time it often takes between hitting Win+R and the run dialogue finally being ready for input. Regularly the first few characters of what I type after that ends up going to the app that originally had focus. That used to be instant, on much older kit.

Several seconds is not an exaggeration. The window appears quickly enough, but then spins for several seconds (there's a progress bar in the path field) before showing any file. Win11 personal, on a brand new, middle-of-the-road desktop.

Have you tried opening some files over the network, then coming back to the explorer? It'll insist on showing those files in the Recents screen. Except it actually tries to touch them or something. Which, when I'm not at work anymore, takes forever waiting for a timeout. Hell, even at work it sometimes takes a while, while doing the AD handshake or whatever it is that it does instead of letting me use the freaking explorer.

I don't use Windows often enough to go out of my way to customize it, plus I know that the next update will probably undo everything anyway, but now I have to wait around multiple seconds for it to realize the files are not there. And it won't even remember it from one instance of explorer to the next, or try to check on those files without blocking the entire app's UI.

This shitshow also happens in the open / save as dialogs when called from other apps.

Yes, this matches my experience -- I assumed it was something to do with waiting for cloud stuff, but haven't dug too deep.

Just took me 0.5 seconds to bring up an explorer window.

I've mostly used OS X and Linux the last 25 years, but have been forced to use Windows at work and recently on my gaming computer, so I'm not really defending Windows here. But honestly, I don't have any big problems with it. It works OK for the most part.

super+e, clicking the explorer button? I think you're being purposefully difficult here.

I cannot list any of the bugs I have had with Windows off the top of my head, but I can with linux. Driver issues, Pulse audio randomly playing static, updates breaking my system, fractional scaling not working, I could go on.

Certainly some of the behavior I am complaining about is the intended behavior (ads in menus etc), but yes explorer takes several seconds to initialize for me, after the window appears. Not an exaggeration.

I've had the same experience. Linux just requires too much babysitting for me, while Windows 11 just works. I haven't had any major problems nor any issues with my productivity.

My 8 year old son inherited an old laptop this week, that was too slow to consider installing Win 11, so I ended up loading it with XUbuntu. The first thing I did was actually to install Edge, because that makes it possible to monitor his web browsing using MS Parental Controls. I actually think it's a good browser, certainly better than Chrome (too bloated) or Firefox (too buggy). I'll never understand HNs relentless hatred for all things MS.

When a company uses dirty tactics against your project, forcing its (at the time) inferior product by strong arming pc vendors, call your project a Cancer and tries to undermine java and the Web and has been found guilty on court, some animosity is in order. Yeah its been a long time. Seeing current practices, not so much it seems.

What are these bugs that people encounter that often in Firefox?

I've been using using Firefox on Linux and Mac for a long time now and I'm yet to see any bug(a rare occurrence) that is a show stopper(for me atleast).

I guess the "best viewed with" and "please use the last version of chrome" banners preventing you from logging in some services could be seen as a bug from normal users.

This is the reason. Too often I will go to a site and find that it's unusable with Firefox.

Some anti virus software will impede site loading times in firefox or even normal operation. Windows will protect edge and other microsoft software from AV. But depending on how bad the AV is, other software will have less luck.

Sure, nobody can say you "can't do" something with Linux. But the "can't" is more meant as "can't easily do".

To give you an example - I have a small+fast SSD for my OS and a large+slow spinning disk for data storage. When I install software on Windows I sometimes point to the other drive. This task is easier to do on Windows. The last I looked at it, Linux had a solution, but it was very convoluted. I see computer hardware and software products as purely a means to an end, I will use whatever that gets the job done.

Each person only has a limited quota of things that they can give a lot of energy to, and for me F/OSS is not something that I particularly go out of my way to support. My 'things that I give a shit about' quota is filled to the brim with the work I'm doing in healthcare.

> I fear what kind of ads Google while shove through if they ever get a dominant market share in desktop OSs

Microsoft already forces ads on Windows users so I guess it'd be something like the current situation.

Yeah, I've been using all kinds of browsers (Chrome, Brave, Edge, now Firefox) on Windows old and new (now on 11), never had any real issues. I don't even remember nudges to use Edge, to be honest, may be there was one after an OS update. Edge is actually really good now, with tight Bing chat integration, but the last dev version has been sluggish on occasion.

> Apple seems to be the only sensible alternative.

My Arch box has never once tried to display an ad to me, or coerce me to use any particular piece of software for that matter.

I have to +1 very loudly for Arch. It has an absolute dream of a documentation. Any configuration or cache paths are default, the distro doesnt try to fuck with it like Ubuntu and others do - you do `man mytool` or look at the official docs for that tool, and if that says the config is at /etc/monkey/mytool.conf, it is.

The package manager works well.

The installer is very solid by now.

It comes with absolutely nothing preinstalled, perfect for techie people.

And if one likes the Arch way, but a graphical installer and some things taken care of for you, I recommend EndeavourOS.

> but I fear what kind of ads Google while shove through if they ever get a dominant market share in desktop OSs

Google is the dominant mobile OS and doesn't cram ads into basic functionality of the device. You won't see ads when opening the app launcher or settings.

On Windows 11, you can see ads if you open the start bar.

This was one of the straws that finally got me to switch to Linux.

Enough complaining about M$, change to Linux and email every company that isnt fully supporting Linux that they need to adopt to 2023 computing.

This 100%. US regulation is woefully inadequate, and even if the EU has teeth, US companies are gonna treat them as toothless and see how far they can get screwing over the world.

It’s time to fight back against Big Tech by refusing to use it as much as humanly possible. Especially those of us on the software side that could contribute to improving the FOSS space.

I’m using Windows 11 and nothing forces open Edge on my machine. Every link opens in Brave like I told it to.

What happens when you press Win, type a query, then press enter, quickly? In Win 10 that opens a Bing search in Edge for me, no matter what settings I try. Very annoying when I type "(Win)chr(enter)" to open Chrome and get a search instead. If I do it slow it will sometimes work.

I haven't tried it on Win 11 because that was what caused me to drop Windows altogether. (Everyone has their straw).

The last time I checked, you can't change this to use anything but Edge either.

I have the same issue but even worse: If I do it too fast it works! Somehow it takes longer to find the app than it does to suggest a websearch, so I need to wait 1-2 seconds after typing not to open edge...

I launch apps from the Win key all the time, never ending up in Edge. The worst for me is ending up in “Internet Options” when I want to launch IntelliJ.

Try typing something that ends up doing a "search" is what they're suggesting.

I use Windows 10. I'm not sure what settings I applied (I did do quite a few), but I don't get that.

If I do Win+aoeuaoeu+enter, nothing at all happens. It just sits with a search box open showing "No results for aoeuaoeu". I can't actually see any way of getting to a browser search window from there (whether my preferred browser or not). So I must have found some way to disable that behaviour completely. Keep trying?

(FWIW yes that is the way I open my browser: win+fire+enter. Nothing bad happens if I do it too fast.)

I believe you've disabled Cortana or "search the web for result".

> What happens when you press Win, type a query, then press enter, quickly?

Also on Win 10. I get, in the start menu, "no results for <search term>". I know I turned of web searching when installing, but it's been so long I might have used registry keys[1].

[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-to...

A while ago I uninstalled IE from my pc. I'm not sure how, but now when I do what you say nothing happens. It says "search the web" but I guess it can't find IE so it just fails silently. It took me a while to recall that I uninstalled IE in a tantrum in the past so that puzzled me for a while

I disabled the ability to search the web through the start menu long before they started with the edge shenanigans. As far as I'm concerned that isn't the operating system's job, and the only things I should see when I search there are things actually on my computer.

I do the same thing with Apple's Spotlight.

Start menu search is unfortunate broken in Windows 11 (even more so than in W10). It needs to do a Web search before returning results, which makes it too slow to be reliably useful in my opinion.

It's easily solved by installing Power Toys and using the search feature from there instead (activated with alt + space, like in Linux & Mac)

The windows spotlight links from the landscape photos on my windows lock screen always open edge. I haven't dug in enough to find if there is a way to change that.

I dug through a bit (in mid 2022) and there isn't a native way to do this. You will have to use edge deflector or something like that. I am not sure if the brave/firefox intercepts added more recently work.

This drove me so mad I bought a Mac mini to replace my surface pro (which I wasn't using as a tablet anyway). Good job MS!

Try opening help or press F1 with the desktop in focus. This normally opens Edge.

Don’t ever hit the help menu. So the problem is that MS opens help in it’s own browser? That complaint seems disingenuous at best.

Except the same is applied to the start menu, help pages, system links, just to name a few.

Except edge then opens and presents you with some message about setting it to the default browser (which a lot of people will just click ok to make it go away)

That an internal OS system (help) opens in the OS browser I'm willing to accept. That every browser says "please please make us the default browser" is annoying but hardly unique for Edge. This is just the combination of the two.

I don't think enough people use Win+Type+Enter queries, nor F1 help in Windows to make the discussion very interesting compared to the really interesting ones like which browsers will open a hyperlink in a non-browser app.

Edge is the only browser that periodically captures you in a full screen multiple pages nag screen when it's not default. It's also the only browser able to set itself as default without further interaction.

It's not behaving the same as any other browser.

It does that when it's the default, too. I only occasionally use Windows, so couldn't be bothered to install something else. Yet, I feel that every other time I start it, I'm presented with some "use edge! it's so cool!" screen I have to sit through. It also insists on changing the search engine to bing. I'm usually pretty cautious and try not to press "ok" just so it leaves me alone, yet it managed to change it. For my needs, pretty much every search engine is good enough. I prefer google since I can convince it to use dark mode and use English instead of my local language (even though windows is set to use English as its display language).

How is it more acceptable because it's a combination of two things? Lots of objectionable outcomes are a combination of multiple factors!

Because I accept both things on their own, and I accept that the combination of them follows naturally. Then I must (reluctantly) accept unfortunate outcome of the combination.

I wouldn't say it's reasonable that browsers could never suggest they be made default, and I don't think it's reasonable that you can't have some OS function that wants to show e.g. a help section use the OS embedded browser.

Just because its 2 things you'd otherwise accept doesn't mean it isn't a dark pattern. Lots of dark patterns (like the setting up of privacy / data sharing settings on google) do similar things.

That might be acceptable if no thought went into the combination of the two things.

I accept people must work at height. I accept that people occasionally fall over by accident. We have guard rails and harnesses so that I don't have to accept people falling to their death every time they trip at height.

For example it wouldn't be ridiculous to think that if the browser is tightly coupled with the OS (to the point that it doesn't change when you set the default browser) that you can have the embedded browser opened with a no nag/no ad flag set.

Win10 in professional use turned me into Linux user. Sorry but I always lol'd people, when their box stopped working because of pending win update, ridiculous.

I'm running a lot of Win builds on VMs for debugging etc. and it's enough for me.

My wife’s laptop just upgraded itself to windows 11 pro form 10 pro unasked & unsolicited and all prefs were changed to microsoft traps including edge being the default. Dark patterns galore. Luckily I could revert back to the previous version.

Good husbands don't let their wives use Windows.

She needs it for some software at work so I decrapified as much as I could and decided to go along but it’s a never ending battle with Microsoft’s agressive force. I wouldn’t force her with Linux and Mac is not something I am familiar with.

Good husbands don't force their wives to wrestle with random daily problems like screen brightness not working on Linux because of their personal tech politics.

MacBook Air M2 should be the choice for any normal person who just needs to get normal work done. No politics, but clearly I've touched an insecurity here :/

insecurity lol. You made an unbased claim and retort with 'insecurity' when challenged. All operating systems have pros and cons, and people have preferences.

Unbased claim? I wouldn't call a stupid joke a claim LOL. It's an internet meme for god's sake and clearly some people really tight up their arse have been triggered by this dumb internet meme joke LMFAO.

"Friend don't let friends... <insert thing here>"

etc.

Anyway, enjoy wrestling your own computer if it makes you happy. I have no qualms with that :)

This is the worst answer. Office for Mac is horrible compared to the same for Windows, as is plenty of other very common software - if it runs on Mac at all. It's also much worse to administer from an enterprise perspective, so it's probably not supported by the wife's IT team, and if it is it probably would have some horrible software on it that makes it unusable.

Sorry, with all due respect you are the first person who has ever claimed that Office doesn't work on a Mac. In fact, Office on Mac is notorious for being BETTER than on Windows, even Microsoft employees say so themselves.

You must live in a mirror universe. Office on Mac is awful.

Excel doesn't even have Power Query!

Excel doesn't do half the Excel things, PowerPoint doesn't have reader mode, the list goes on. Anyone who thinks Office for Mac is any good hasn't used Office for Windows in 10 years.

I spent 2 hours trying to uninstall Edge unsuccessfully then decided to live with it.

https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect is a decent band-aid on the problem.

You can use Chris Titus Tech's Windows Utility: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

The Tweaks section has a checkbox for removing Edge. I removed mine using that.

On Windows 10 with IE and Edge removed I ran into a situation where Windows update stopped working. The only fix I could find was to install Edge then try the updates again, which worked.

I haven't seen any other reports of the unasked & unsolicited upgrade, but it is very easy to accidentally upgrade when you think you're merely applying an update. Too easy IMHO.

Ick.

I gave my old parents the latest hand-me-up laptop and installed ubutntu on it because of windows 11. The install process and default configuration is so user hostile to someone that "just needs to use chrome". My niece & nephew have only known ChromeOS/iOS/Android. They will never use windows until a college course requires some specific software, or they get a desk job. I think they will for sure eventually "learn windows", but I don't think the generation behind them will.

I get the feeling more and more that peak Windows is upon us.

Ubuntu is now bundling advertisements for their paid services in apt upgrade output and the GUI software sources manager, in packages which cannot be uninstalled because they're hard dependencies of the `ubuntu-desktop` metapackage. Plus they've replaced Firefox with a package which installs a Snap, which loads so slowly they added a "snap opened" notification.

This is one of the reasons why I stopped using Ubuntu and switched to pop os. Is there something keeping you from switching to another Debian derivative?

Honest question, why not just Debian and use a derivative instead? I took a 20 year sabbatical on Linux in the home. But with windows 11, I decided to go back. Stopped on debian, and chose Debian when I came back. I am super impressed with how it has matured and it seems to be built in a way that really does a fair job on looking out for you as a user, and as an administrator.

The main problem with Debian is outdated software. For servers the fixed release cycle is great, everything is properly tested and it should be rock solid without really needing to touch it.

But for a regular desktop/workstation system I want more frequent software updates even if it comes at the cost of a little stability.

(Of course there's Debian unstable, but I'd rather go with a distro where the rolling release is the main product, and they maybe do a little more testing before making changes)

I find that Flatpaks[1] work really well for getting the latest version of GUI-only apps. For CLI tools and libraries I haven't found a great solution but I make do with an Arch Linux distrobox[2] container.

[1]: https://flathub.org/setup/Debian [2]: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/distrobox

Flatpak is great, and Homebrew works nicely on Linux for other bits and pieces. Linux support made it upstream to https://brew.sh, so you get all the same things you'd get on a Mac.

This point is particularly pertinent if Debian isn't the only OS you're using. It can be problematic if the software on your Linux machine is more than slightly behind whatever is on your Win/Mac machines.

Well there are backports for some packages that require updates due to API changes etc.

> The main problem with Debian is outdated software.

I'm a Debian user. I see this a lot. Often in contrast with Ubuntu.

Yet Debian's cycle is roughly on par with Ubuntu's LTS - every ~2 years.[0]

Perhaps they mean there are interim releases in Ubuntu? It's hard to say for sure, as the phrase 'outdated software' can mean different things (more than 6 months old, more than 2 years old, in need of a security patch for > 1 week, etc).

> But for a regular desktop/workstation system I want more frequent software updates even if it comes at the cost of a little stability.

This sounds like you want Debian Testing (currently Trixie).

Much more frequent software updates, with an extremely small risk of less 'stability'.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history

Isn't Debian Testing also more outdated when compared against the main distros ubuntu/fedora/opensuse?

It used to be the case in 2010, but that is 13 years ago...

I use Debian, so I have no idea how main distros of ubuntu/fedora/opensuse work, or what versions of things they offer, and how that might compare to Debian testing.

The nice thing is, though, all that information is freely available if you wanted to compare.

I can save you a little bit of time by noting that the criteria for a package being promoted from Debian Unstable into Debian Testing has been honed over the years, and is the reason why a lot of people settle on Debian Testing for their day to day machines:

   The package has been in "unstable" at least for 2-10 days (depending on the urgency of the upload).
   The package has been built for all the architectures which the present version in testing was built for.
   Installing the package into testing will not make the distribution more uninstallable.
   The package does not introduce new release critical bugs.

If there's absolutely positively definitely a version of something you want that's in unstable, but not testing, and you are unwilling to wait a week or two before it turns up in Testing - you can usually just download the package and install it with little risk of conflict (presently or subsequently).

> This sounds like you want Debian Testing

Please, don't recommend Debian Testing to unsuspecting people. The distro is aimed at people that know what they are getting, and has no guarantee it will keep working unless you know really well what you are doing.

Even Unstable is supposed to be more beginner friendly.

> Please, don't recommend Debian Testing to unsuspecting people.

Was parent unsuspecting?

They said they wanted 'more frequent updates even at the cost of a little stability'.

They sound like they're very much in the suspecting camp.

The challenge with Debian Testing is some security exposures are longer than for either stable or unstable, hence the recommendation to keep unstable in your sources, ready to go, and maintain some awareness around CVEs / DSAs.

> Even Unstable is supposed to be more beginner friendly.

I can happily disabuse you of that notion.

Definitely, you should not recommend Debian Unstable to unsuspecting people.

I have occasionally run unstable on one of my machines over the years, but now pretty much avoid it.

When it breaks you either wait for a few days for it to be fixed, or you spend a lot of time trying to understand what's broken - usually with a machine that doesn't get you to a GUI.

> Was parent unsuspecting?

I really don't know. You don't get Testing at the cost of "a little" instability. You get it at the cost of things eventually breaking in an update, and you having to sort it out on your own. It's a failure mode quite unique to it, and nobody mentioned anything about this. So yeah, I don't get any reason to believe either way. (Also, Unstable isn't supposed to have this one failure mode, but it's supposed to have partial failures way more often. That fits the mental model of "instability" for most people much better than Testing.)

But then, the alternative people are talking about is Ubuntu. Ubuntu breaks much more often than Debian Testing... Up to the point where people don't upgrade it carelessly, so they experience a more stable system. So again, I don't know. IMO, it was worth at least putting a warning there.

Stock Debian has been pretty decent recently. I was surprised to find it either didn't require proprietary blobs or installed them when I wasn't paying attention.

I've also been playing around with BSD and it's like hanging out with a friend from elementary school: they're a little wonky, but you remember some good times together.

PopOS isn't my favorite, but it is pretty straight-forward. If it's working for you then it's a total win. (Which is my way of saying "though I like Stock Debian and BSD, there is absolutely nothing wrong with PopOS.")

You haven't stopped, PopOS is a Ubuntu derivative, not a Debian derivative. The future looks interesting though with at least the bulk of gnome dependencies removed with Cosmics - will still be a Ubuntu third-party spin / derivative though.

If they keep messing it up, you can try Arch Linux.

FWIW there's really nothing wrong with uninstalling this kind of metapackage. I've been uninstalling the "ubuntu-desktop" metapackage as I trim my ubuntu systems, for over a decade. I use a combination of "debfoster -n" and aptitude for the trimming ... it is a bit annoying but it's just once per install.

That said, for the past couple years I've just run Debian and Arch. But I'll probably use ubuntu again for a while when I get a new framework laptop later this month, the hardware is too new, some special/custom kernel package provided for the latest ubuntu will probably be the most convenient solution initially, and I find trimming back ubuntu isn't too bad. Yes, you have to remove the "desktop" meta-package. It's fine.

"It's fine."

No, it is not fine, that I have to fight my OS. It is managable if one has some skills with computer like we do, but it is not fine in general. I would like to trust the operating system I use.

This non-sense is everywhere in Ubuntu, out the box, not limited to Snap, I get "<Application> is ready" when it is raised after launching - wtf is this? Opening a browser, or text editor, I don't know who is responsible, Ubuntu or Gnome or it's some nasty default?

Do you mean you should just stick with Windows because Ubuntu now prints a line in your console when you apt-get upgrade telling you that Ubuntu Pro exists?

You should pick Linux Mint or another Linux distribution (if you can make it work for your use cases), and avoid both Windows and Ubuntu when they're built to act against the user's best interests.

> I get the feeling more and more that peak Windows is upon us.

Probably. But I don't think Microsoft cares. Just look at where Windows is in their org hierarchy; it's definitely not top dog anymore and it's not a "strategy" like it once was.

The days of Microsoft needing Windows to make money are behind us, that's for sure. Peak Windows is probably correct, but that fact is not going to usher in Microsoft's demise.

> I get the feeling more and more that peak Windows is upon us.

If only. I remember people saying the same when Vista came out.

Ubuntu kinda sucks now too. "Sign up for an account" is part of the install flow just like Windows.

Fedora is my default "easy" Linux install nowadays, the excessively corporate vibes I get from Ubuntu feel very wrong for a Linux distro.

First, there's nothing overbearing about the Ubuntu install.

Second, Fedora uses rpm management, rpm repositories sooner or later corrupt themselves, happened to me and others I know on Red Hat, on Fedora and on SuSE.

I'd use Debian but I've found Ubuntu's driver management to be far more stable and reliable, especially for WiFi.

Debian started shipping firmware in the main ISO this release. It mostly just works except Nvidia now, and even that's just an apt install away.

Does that make it any easier? You can download a live version and test instead of needing to find that firmware included release.

Exact opposite experience here. RHEL and friends have been much more stable reliable for me than Ubuntu.

> "Sign up for an account" is part of the install flow just like Windows.

There's nothing wrong with providing an easily skippable option to do that (ubuntu), a completely different thing to make it a mandatory part of the installation (windows).

I recommend to switch them to Firefox instead.

I hope so, Microsoft is a terrible monopolistic company and the PC landscape would be better off without them.

I'm a 'non-traditional' student (25) and my fellow students are normal undergraduate age (19).

Half are having a hard time with learning some of the CAD software because they lack the experience with full featured Desktop OS's like Windows/Linux/Mac. It's surprising how fast generational change occurs

What, you mean CAD software didn't fully migrate to iPads? ;)

I've heard the same from university staff. The last few years many new students are having problems with the simplest stuff like uploading their course work into whatever educational platform the university is using because they have no grasp of the concept of a file.

Directory structures is the ‘skill’ I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints about students not understanding. Particularly annoying for those teaching first year undergrad SWEng, since the gap between those self starters who have some idea of what’s going on and those who don’t really care and we’re pressured into it by parents is larger than ever.

It’s pretty unfair on those who have done the bare minimum amount of experience with computers that they have to sit through (and pay for!) being taught ‘this is what a file structure is and how it works’ for a not-trivial amount of time.

Directory structures is a skill that most people with low computing knowledge always failed. I went to a GIS course, and people had troubles following because they saved their work (like click on save button, write a name and click accept) but then they were oblivious in whatever folder had been saved (they were computers from the lab/course) and couldn't find them.

Also not understanding what a zip file is, (just a weird folder that sometimes fails).

I am not surprised it is being the very same case with new generations. But before people were saving things in their desktop, now they just use the most recent function.

Tell the university that they need to add a computer course to the required incoming freshman classes. Things like how to use the various systems the university supports. This was my experience at CSU, and very little of it was explained to me, other than a few quick mentions in the 1-hour library course (this is how you do this and that and the other thing on library systems. The school offers Citrix and access to network drive away from school. Ask someone about that if you care. This is how you access online periodicals.)

- Eduroam is available at many other schools if you happen to be there, but I never managed to actually sign in, because CSU never told me how, neither did UCLA when I visited - how to access the network drive, both on- and off- campus (sftp supported without a VPN, smb with). This was mentioned in a single 1 hour lecture at the library on how to use library systems. Access from the locked down public computers at the library without student logins was not mentioned (just mounting a network drive, but instructions previously given implied that the VPN was necessary if you weren't logged into your account on the network) - there were labs running windows 10, windows 7/8 (windows 10 came out while I was there), Fedora (network drive had to be connected manually), and even a lab full of Sparcs that I didn't use much (they were quite slow), the library computers, etc. There were also heavily locked down public computers in other areas that only allowed access to the browser, and a lab full of thin clients that offered no permanent storage for even temporary use (working with a local file? Better have a flash drive, or you're stuck with network drive latency) - Citrix allowed access to a suite of software including Adobe CS6 iirc as well as Office and other software; this worked from anywhere on-campus, but the software offering off-campus was different. This got a passing mention in the library lecture, mainly that this is available. Classes that actually made use of this software didn't mention it being available off campus at all. - some software was only available in private labs (acceptable not to mention this), but some was only available in certain buildings/departments and some was only available on Citrix. Fonts could not be installed anywhere, but windows offers a simple (if little-known) method to register a font for the current session, and this worked for using custom fonts in Adobe and other applications, both in Citrix and on lab computers. - there was a single cafe where students were _allowed_ (I think?) to plug laptops into the network (not to say people didn't do it elsewhere, but here the network and plug sockets were above the counter in the public seating area, and nobody would stop you from doing so) - part way through, I think there was a new network drive added, for a while there were multiple ways to access the network drive. - the network drive was (a very little bit) more than just a network drive; it allowed ssh access to edit files with pico; when I first started, it also hosted files for student websites; eventually the websites went away, but the ssh access never did. It was clearly an intentionally open SSH server, and was open outside the school as well; it had a (iirc pre-login) banner with some rules. - msdnaa was retired in favor of dreamspark, and free copies of office were phased out in favor of discounted 365 subscriptions when I was about halfway through. There was still tons of free software available, and none of it was ever mentioned until a cs course (the cs department had their own dreamspark subscription with an expanded offering, but there was software available to everyone as well, including Windows and office...which was available separately in the school/CS/business subscriptions)

When I was in high school (middle school?), I had a computer literacy class where a good quarter of the semester was teaching students how to organize their files. The teacher had a messy filesystem that was unzipped onto each computer, and during the course of a week or so, students were expected to rename files and the few directories and organize the files in a way that made sense. Mostly the files were empty iirc, but I think there were a few with similar names and identical content that could be deleted. I remember thinking at the time that this was the best thing I'd ever seen, having anyway seen the number of files left saved on desktop and my documents on the few machines at the school that allowed you to do so.

Windows is effectively also the reason for the modular PC platform to exist. If peak Windows also means peak modular hardware, it's a dim future with closed Apple and Android-style hardware. Nothing's composable, OS is bound to the specific piece of hardware.

Intel just announced that they will be putting ram on the package with their next gen CPUs...

One would hope they might instead consider the use of CAMM - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_Attached_Memory_Mo... - but I guess we'll see :(

I used to be ambivalent about Edge. It actually has some nice integrated features I would normally need (slow) addons for, and better integration in Windows features (like better DRM for video streaming).

I even used it in linux some.

...But I just recently tested it on a brand new Windows desktop, and I can't believe how slow and spammy it feels out-of-the-box compared to Thorium/Chromite now.

Yeah the actual product is great. But the KPIs at microsoft have lead to some extremely distasteful dark patterns ruining the experience.

The only time I've felt Edge was forced on my was MS Teams has its own browser binding and defaulted to Edge. Otherwise? The system-level "firefox is my browser" seems to be working fine.

I just got Teams autoinstalled without warning on an earlier version of W11 for which it was not present.

Promptly uninstalled it since I have no use for Teams.

I don't think Windows is very suitable for the internet anyway, but I really did like last year's Edge for its built-in PDF handler. That's all I used Edge for, certainly not browsing the web, but for some reason I connected anyway and in came Teams.

Now that the excellent old Edge PDF reader has been replaced by a built-in Adobe joint effort, Edge is now more useless than ever.

Horrible! At least Apple doesn't force Safari on iOS users.

They force the engine, which is bad, but much less bad (IMO, at least) than forcing a full-blown browser full of insanely privacy-invasive defaults on users.

And they only force the engine on iOS, not Mac OS, as far as I know.

Yes, on MacOS you can use whatever browser you like, engine and all, while being unmolested for favoring something not-Safari. That’s why, after a lifetime of being a Windows user, my most recent PC purchase was a MacBook Air. I would prefer to use Linux, but where I’m at in my life, I just want something that works relatively well out of the box, and I use some software that won’t run on Linux.

There are still ads for Safari if you use something else. MacOS will pop up a notification recommending Safari for battery savings.

Yeah, they do ask you to stay, but compared to what MS does, it’s nothing. They could be better, of course, but they aren’t in the same league with MS/Edge nags and abuse.

They indeed don't; they force browsers to use the WebKit engine instead. And comparing iOS to Windows is a bit unfair: one is a mobile operating system whereas another is a desktop operating system. You should compare what Windows forces on its users with what Mac OS forces on its users.

With that said, Mac OS isn't entirely innocent either, such as giving users a "Try The New Safari" notification when they run a non-Safari web browser on their machine.[1]

[1] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/TRYTHENEWSAFARI.html

Did you.... forget the /s sign? These days it's hard to figure out whether people are serious or satirizing on this website.

They finally convinced me to try bing chat. Made a shortcut like so:

microsoft-edge:https://www.bing.com/search?showconv=1&sendquery=1&form=MY02...

Can also use it to create your own bing chat links on your home page.

They've promised not to do it anymore in the EU apparently.

This makes me mad because I actually do like Windows. I don't understand the need to make it crappy considering their market share.

I deleted Edge from my new laptop installation. Yet I now have problems opening certain apps because they rely on Edge.

Why would anyone assume they will stop?

I'm trying to uninstall edge, but can't

I replaced msedge.exe with a blank, read only file. I was very surprised nothing ever fixed it. I've removed the exe before and it always magically re-appears.

Edge is my default browser on my Mac, and I get annoying when Safari gets launched somehow.

This is such a non issue. Might as well complain about ios shipping with safari as default.

But it’s not about it shipping edge by default.

Yeah, it's not. That's why I said it is "like" complaining about shipping safari as default. Because it is not exactly the same thing, but comparable.

No it isn't. Its like you ordering sushi and the restaurant gives you shoes because they know better.

More like, they bring the sushi, but also a pair of shoes. And when you throw the shoes on the floor because they are not what you ordered, they come back over and put them back on the table.

On iOS they only sell shoes, you don't go there if you want sushi. (and too bad if you find yourself locked into the apple ecosystem / restaurant, because shoes is all they have.)

Well, and when you use chopsticks to pick up the sushi and put it in your mouth, they come over, slap the sushi off your chopsticks, slap the shoes onto your chopsticks and stand there, patiently watching and waiting for you to start chewing.

And so you bring your own chopsticks so they won't be allowed to touch them, since they're not the chopsticks that the store provides, and they tape your hands to the table and try to force-feed you the shoes with their chopsticks, so you have to unstick your hands from the table, re-grab your own chopsticks, and fend your waiter off with one hand so you can pick up the sushi you want and eat it.

Only, the store is in your house. It's at your job, it's everywhere you go to eat and you can only get away from it by locking your access to chopsticks away in your own home. (Running linux on a personal computer and not having easy access to a lot of convenient software)

You mean like how the first time you use Chrome on macOS (which you obviously had to manually install), it checks with you to see if you'd really rather just use Safari instead (and Safari is the default answer, not Chrome)?

I like windows, but really considering jumping to NixOs. Edge really feels like spyware.

Edge is fun to use but has too many ads.

How’s this making ms any money?

More edge usage tends to translate to more Bing queries and clicks, more data, more targeting, more cross selling their services. Google as default search in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox is a major problem for #2 search engine.

Glad I switched to ReviOS and don’t have to deal with these shenanigans.

https://revi.cc/

As a person who only uses Windows for gaming (I use Linux or MacOS everywhere else), I worry about these custom Windows ISOs being merely reskins of Windows. I would love to hear what you like about it -- I think I may try it out, as the sales pitch looks compelling:

> It aspires to re-create what Windows as an operating system should have been - easy and simple

> ReviOS [is] a capable, efficient yet private operating system

Yeah I'll do the same and report back. Might make a Show HN to talk about it.

I need to better understand how updates work however, turning off auto updates is a concern. So I'll mostly be focusing on usability and how updates are managed as part of their tooling.

1st edit: Noticed a few broken links on their site regarding updates, I've created an issue on GH: https://github.com/meetrevision/revision-tool/issues/38

2nd edit: I'm not sure how I feel about disabling Windows Defender. https://revi.cc/docs/faq/after/defender/

If you're not using Windows Defender, you'd want to use something else and I don't know what to recommend except Malware Bytes. I do have Malware Bytes running too so perhaps it's redundant, but as far as AVs (antivirus') go, Defender is the best of a very broad, bad bunch.

Huh, I thought people around these parts knew better than to trust some hacked up Windows “distribution.”

At that point you might as well just use an illegitimately-activated copy of LTSC — at least you can be sure it wasn’t tampered with.

Especially since installing Windows using customized install media is explicitly prohibited by the EULA of almost all Windows editions. You have to have the same sort of enterprise support contract with Microsoft that would get you access to LTSC to legally use this thing anyway.

Interestingly, they seem to address this on their legal page[0].

Despite this, it does seem like just installing Windows and then attemting to debloat post-install is the least risky option than just trusting a third party Windows installer.

[0] https://revi.cc/legal

I used to like Blackbird for this, but after breaking updates and the Store enough times I’ve learned my lesson. O&O ShutUp10++ is all I used to debloat now, in addition to MassGrave activation. NTLite is the nuclear option if you’re prepared to invest a few hours crafting your “perfect” image.

I thought people around these parts knew better than to trust some hacked up Windows “distribution.”

That's what the corporate propaganda wants you to think --- that you are to trust Big Tech unconditionally, including all their user-hostilities, because they are supposed to be "good for you" somehow.

While I have no doubt that some customised ISOs may contain malware, in my experience the "official" malware is really no better, and I can't think of any well-documented instances of trimmed Windows distros actually containing third-party malware, so I suspect the campaign against them, much like the similar one against cracks/patches/keygens, is mostly FUD to advance the interests of Big Tech.

I understood more about it by reading the legal notice than the About section,

About,

> As a group of friends and tech enthusiasts from all over the world, we have dedicated ourselves to the idea of sharing insights and ideas freely among us. Our picture of the internet is that of a country without borders and we cherish cultural diversity without exception. We embrace the concept of open source, open knowledge and collaboration, sharing the belief among us that information should be free and never have a price tag. Where others hoard knowledge to gain an advantage, we share it and where people sell information, we give it away for free.

Still I know nothing.

Legal Notice,

> By downloading any of these images (ISOs), you agree to Microsoft's Terms of Service regarding (5.) Authorized Software and Activation. None of these pre-tweaked image files are pre-activated.

That's it, ReviOS must be a trimmed down Windows

I've been out of the Windows world for years, but seeing a lot of games are now available on Linux, and drivers, why not build a Linux gaming PC?

I mean what else would you need a PC with Windows for?

This ReviOS stuff has all the smoke signals of too good to be true.

I want less hassle, not more.

Linux still has a very long way to go in gaming - some things still require a bunch of tweaking, some games suffer from poor frame rates or just plain don’t work at all. Also I vastly prefer the windows desktop experience to any Linux distribution I’ve tried over the years.

I don't know, works on my machine. Basically any game I play works immediately out of the box. Last bigger issues I remember is Elden Ring crashing when opening sometimes.

Otherwise it all just works immediately, no issues at all.

Have you tried again in recent years?

Today it is much more of a binary experience. A game either runs smoothly out of the box or does not run at all. And the latter is the exception, not the rule.

If you need to run MS Office, 3D CAD or animation software, the Adobe suite, and other things, you need Windows. As much as I'd like it if Linux became the default, WINE just doesn't cut it for every program yet

So what is this, exactly? I download this, pay for Windows, use the Windows activation key with ReviOS, and I can get Windows 11 without spy-and-bloat ware?

And everything works? All my hardware, all my apps?

Basically it reads that way. Be sure to read the doco and the FAQ before jumping in.

Yes to all of your questions, at least in my experience.

Good to know, thanks!

Just so everyone is aware, ReviOS disables the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations, virtualized based security, Windows Defender, turns off and hides the ability to use Windows Update (no future security updates), disables Bitlocker, etc. Many of the performance improvements come from disabling security mitigations/processes. Just something to be aware of. I think all of these settings can be re-enabled through their Revision Tool https://github.com/meetrevision/revision-tool.

Interesting, reminds me a bit of 98lite which did something similar for windows 98.

Last time I tested an extension of mine on Edge, I counted four or five distinct ways Windows and Edge tried to convince or coax me into setting Edge as default. (Coaxing includes but isn’t limited to full-screen one-click “finish setting up your computer” on boot which includes adopting “Microsoft-recommended” browser security settings which of course means resetting the default browser. It appeared on every reboot until someone told me about a setting to disable it.) Mind you, the four or five ways I encountered were from using Windows 11 Pro normally or opening Edge briefly; I’m not even counting additional conditional shenanigans like special banner on chrome.com, or asking you to use Microsoft everything (including on mobile devices) to bump up your position in Bing Chat waitlist.

The brazenness and shamelessness is really appalling.

It always surprised me how even savvy devs bought WSL as proof of Microsoft's good intentions. If you lived through Microsoft's antics in the 90s and 00s you could never imagine them changing. Well, here's the proof - they haven't. WSL was introduced purely to grab a piece of the expanding Linux market and followed their attempts to extort money from Red Hat and Suse via their bogus Linux patents racket.

WSL allows me to use Linux from Windows in the most acessible way since VMs.

What drives you to claim that it is simply an extortion attempt?

I'm not parent, but you may have missed the word "followed". Patent is suggesting that WSL is a follow up to previous attempts to benefit from Linux by extortion.

This in turn followed their failed attempt to derail UNIX by bankrolling SCO's failed anti-UNIX lawsuit.

the new version still aggressively prompts you with a captive full-screen experience on start-up

IMHO that is the peak of user-hostile behaviour. The urge to pull the power cord or hit the reset button when I encounter things like that is very hard to resist because of how insulting it feels, but I do wonder if most of the user population have already been beaten into submission and consider it only a minor annoyance and almost trivial.

The big problem is the prompt, and the options.

Most commonly browsers just open full screen as a captive experience nowadays. There's no need to force me to click buttons before getting it.

The android experience does it pretty well. If you want a second view on the screen, you work for it

Doctorow's enshitification is everywhere. I use Debian so haven't experienced Windows for twenty years, but I recently travelled for three months away from the Pihole that blocks ads on my home network.

The web was practically unusable. I guess it's the boiling frog and most people have just got used to having to scroll past three pages of ads to see what they want, but suddenly experiencing "normal" ad loads literally stopped me browsing the web.

Not ever experiencing this stuff anymore on linux is the best feeling.

On my work computer there is Windows 11, and what we build can only be built on windows.

So naturally, I just accept almost all defaults. If you just go along with their (sometimes mindbendingly horrible) choices, you get to actually get work done.

Of course it's a wonderful moment to boot up my machine at home, which has ArchLinux on it, with KDE and all the things I chose because I like them, and I'm at least 2x more productive. Reading code is much easier without distractions, with the right font, with the right colorscheme that I'm used to. Writing code is much easier when the IDE doesn't hijack Tab to insert AI autosuggestions (which as I said, I leave on, because I dont want to fight MS as its a waste of time). I can use bash without 194728 incantations of setting up path variables and installing all the tools I want.

Yeah this is a rant, but man, Windows does a lot of work to force its defaults on you, and man, theyre horrible.

I go along with whatever our employer policies are and don’t even have much say in for example when windows defender agressively scans and scans and scans slowing my machine to a crawl when Im building a Visual Studio project. It’s infuriating at times but it ain’t on my dime, I try to go along with the program, go for a coffee or walk when building. From minutes it went to 1/4 or 1/3 hours. Good job Microsoft, you’re burning my company’s money on fire.

At work I eventually stopped caring whether I use chrome or edge, since Edge sets itself as default link everytime after a machine restart.

At home too I’m mostly on Linux.

For 10 years ago I was in the position of both of you. I hate being ineffective, but because of company policies I just had to go along. Anyway, the madness inside made me quit and after that I've booted several successful startups. Quitting was the best descision I've ever made. It is a big leap for sure, but heck. If you're not happy with current work, you shouldn't continue.

Great for you. Im still trapped for now and not ready for much risk as I have a young child to raise. But hope one day I’ll make a move unless I get neutralized and stop caring for good.

W11 forces Edge as default after every restart? How is that at all tolerated?

They do not give a damn about the user but justify themelves to the user with a corporate slogan: “we care about your experience …” but it’s mostly to a hostage or ignorant userbase.

Edge is insidious too, from a privacy stand point. There are literally dozens of settings that effectively send "tracking" data to Microsoft from Edge. All of the sync, shopping, points, url protection, etc. settings all effectively send data to Microsoft for evaluation. And they automatically sign you into your Edge profile (from your Windows profile). Ugh.

I get that HTML has taken over the world and that most of Office now is effectively a web app. So Edge is definitely a required piece of library software on any Windows install. But the inability to just open simple hyperlinks in an alternative browser combined with Edge's insistence that every "feature" is basically Microsoft profiling you... I guess it just boggles my mind how they get away with this.

Edge was even automatically sending every image URL you viewed to their servers to "enhance" the images via the "Enhance images in Microsoft Edge" setting, which was on by default.

It seems like this has since been removed, but what kind of crazy decision is that?

A literal MITM attack on by default. How that made it past legal we’ll never know.

Have they reversed that yet?

Has to be pretty embarrassing for the Edge developers that something they've worked on is mostly known as a punchline or an annoyance shoved down people's throats, rather than a product that can stand and compete on its own two feet.

And the strategy of your employers implies that your work to improve the product doesn't actually matter, only tricking customers into becoming users does.

There can be no discussion about the relative quality of Edge without this subject in the foreground. The only word-of-mouth is from the tricked users who don't know the difference and just see it as the button for the internet. It doesn't matter if you introduce a regression that makes it slower, they'll just blame it on the 'wifi'.

Precisely. It totally undermines their engineering efforts. There are people I know who use Edge willingly, and their anecdotal claims are that it has reduced resource usage over Chrome (somehow, which is weird since it's using the same engine). It was also used by a few in the Geoguessr community for a while since it didn't hit some annoying Google Street View bug that Chrome did.

I used Edge 2 for some time as a replacement for Chrome; I dumped Edge for Firefox once it became a hostile experience.

The AI integration is what put me off completely.

That's fair enough. I'm personally a Firefox user and I suggest my friends use it too.

After using Chrome (counting Edge v2 as Chrome) for years, I was pleasantly surprised by how good the revamped Firefox is so it stuck.

Otherwise I would've reverted back to Google Chrome.

It was already embarrassing that they had to give up on their own engine and had to adopt Chromium.

Chrome has its own bullshit. When Edge decided to switch to being based on Chromium I had high hopes Microsoft could build a better Chrome than Google could.

Man, what a letdown.

This is the best take. Edge is a really good browser.

It could use better privacy protection but it seems Microsoft & Bing want to make money off ads more than protect users privacy.

It has really good reader mode & read aloud features. I prefer it over Chrome. Firefox, Brave & other browsers have features that make them the right tool for the right job in other areas.

Microsoft is killing their good will & I question what they're getting for it. They're also disrespecting their employees who've put in work to make Edge a great browser.

It would have been great if they just made a perfect, de-googled version of Chrome with extra features. Instead, they violate your privacy more than Google ever dreamed.

This stems from modern companies’ obsession with measurable impact. If it can’t be measured it might as well not exist. Unfortunately UX has to become very very bad before the effect is measurable (losing users) and by then it is much too late, especially when the company has near monopoly power. I hope they figure out that they need to make feedback easier to gather so that they can get back to making good products.

I have seen firsthand these companies only promote based on 'new' UI. The higherups want to see new shiny features that they can take credit for; not an improvement on an existing design that their predecessor came up with.

Microsoft probably has better data than me, but I can't imagine that that many people switch to Edge after Microsoft forcefully opens it when you try to search for a local file.

Just show some fucking respect to your users, it will be worth more than the 0.003% market share you get from opening Edge when I click a pdf

Same deal when Chrome opens mailto links in gmail.com in the browser instead of my default mail client. Stuff like this made my switch to Firefox even more of a no-brainer.

I am totally pro-Firefox, but your case is not about Chrome being a bad actor. For websites to be registered as link handlers, the user gets asked and has to accept (like camera access)[1]. There is no difference between Chrome and Firefox in this case.

[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/set-gmail-as-browser-defa...

I use Edge on my laptop (because of Bing Chat, easy to use on Edge, without faffing around on OpenAI), and Microsoft still won't stop trying to push it on me every once in a while.

(on windows 10, because of TPM1.2, small blessings)

Like chill, you already got me. I am not going to remove Chrome and Firefox, but you are the default browser already and I use Bing too, now go away.

A: "Edge conversations are up 4%! What else can we do to increase them?"

B: "Users that already have Edge as their default browser also see these, shouldn't we first fix that?"

A: "That wouldn't increase Edge conversions, would it?"

B: "No, but..."

A: "Then we don't have time for that. What can we do to increase them?"

Been there - not at Microsoft, but it's not particularly unique to them.

Maybe B doesn't exist because B uses Chrome.

Yeah I was wondering if they even know about it :D You'd have to listen to users (at least accidentally) or do some specific data analysis to find out I guess, if nobody on that team uses Edge.

There's a special place in the inferno for Booking staff who send me distracting notifications about the fact that the hotel I'm currently living out of having availability. These are especially insidious as I dare not turn off their notifications, I'm staying at a place so traveler hostil they texted me 4 hours before noon check in day and said if I didn't reply by noon they'd cancel my reservation. It is a 13 hr flight to Indonesia and free universal in-air internet just ain't a thing yet. A 4 hour window to respond is beyond outrageous and irrational. Even a tourist from Japan could be without internet the whole while.

I uninstall edge from my laptop when bing search started to open a chatGPT prompt instead of showing me related links.

They push it to me all the time. Not because I'm not using edge, just because I'm using the insider (beta) version.

It's awful.

Windows 10 is just fine for my needs. Yet every weeks my system is kidnapped on startup by a menu full of dark patterns that tries to lure me into installing Windows 11. Not only is it hostile and deceitful, but it fails to explain the advantages of upgrading to 11, which makes it useless.

I use bios to boot my system and Windows tells me I don't meet the hardware requirements (because I don't use UEFI/secure boot). That completely stops any messages bugging me to upgrade.

I just think that the message is quite misleading, because it certainly can run on my hardware. I just need to reformat my drive and activate the TPM. Some people might be inclined to really buy new hardware...

I'd just disable the TPM in bios. Although I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to force install it on unsupported hardware.

Looks like nothing much has changed on Microsoft's end.

I posted this 2 years ago on HN[1] about how Microsoft goes out of its way to manipulate users when they search for "Firefox" on Bing using Edge:

> Tangentially related, but I recently spun up a Windows VM and used Edge to search Bing for "Firefox" and this is result I got[2].

> It's a giant banner that says, "You're already browsing in Microsoft Edge. Keep using to get world class performance with more privacy, more productivity, and more value."

> That banner is followed by another giant banner image telling me to get "Get Robux using Microsoft Edge. Join Microsoft Rewards and use Microsoft Edge. Get a 100 Robux eGift Card on us when you search with Microsoft Bing on Microsoft Edge for 5 days after you join."

> I had to scroll to even see the relevant search results for my search term. I'm assuming most non-power users won't scroll because they were just assured that they were "already browsing in Microsoft Edge", which is apparently more private, productive and valuable than what they intended to search for.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187

[2] https://i.imgur.com/blHGMgX.png

I installed Windows on a media PC (all other laptops are macOS or Linux) and it was like the entire OS is a web browser without ad block installed. Just endless nags, pop ups, notifications, ads in my start menu, ads in the login screen, holy shit. Who actually likes this? It’s insane!

> Who actually likes this?

Microsoft.

I don't think they like it. But their customers - advertisers - sure do.

You can turn all of that crap off with some effort.

Contrast that to the Linux desktop where you can't turn off the "it just doesn't work" (unless you mean just disable the GUI completely and only use the CLI), and the enthusiast who says they have it working just the way they want probably has "just not working" more thoroughly than the defaults.

The thing is that those ads are: (1) almost always for other Microsoft products, (2) frequently are for MSN articles aimed at Trump Voters, (3) probably destroy Microsoft products more than they promote them.

As an example of (3), consider how Microsoft launched a product called SkyDrive without doing a Trademark check, had to rename it OneDrive (just like they had to call the third XBOX the XBOX ONE, contrast that to Sony where even Mom can tell a PS5 is better than a PS4) then made Office save to OneDrive by default and leave you not being able to save at all if it couldn't connect to OneDrive.

That's like killing your product with 900 cyanide laced bullets, if they ever want me to use OneDrive again there is no amount of heavy handed marketing tactics that will work, even if I have to click 500 times and edit 30 registry entries to disable OneDrive I'll do that.

> Contrast that to the Linux desktop where you can't turn off the "it just doesn't work"

The modern Linux desktop is pretty damn usable, especially if you go with something like PopOS. It's got to be covering 99% of non-workstation-type of use cases out of the box.

Eh. It depends. If you have something exotic as analog mouse it just doesn't work on Linux.

And Linux suffers from OS version of Lisp curse - i.e. whenever two nerds disagree you get a new distro with slightly incompatible behavior.

Not to mention Linux breaks compatibility left and right, while Windows lives with its mistakes forever.

I was shocked when I was able to install Office 97 at work on a Windows 11 machine and… it “just worked”, paperclip and all the lame ways it tries to take over your desktop…

That’s what get when you don’t pay for... oh, wait.

>Who actually likes this? It’s insane!

It's not insane at all, it's good for business. Who likes it? Microsoft shareholders of course. All these annoyances help to increase Microsoft's profits, so they're good by definition.

If you don't like the modern Windows experience, it's simple: don't use Windows.

They really need to fire whoever keeps ramming non-sequitur rewards stuff into the windows product.

I have still don't understand what the rewards are for, despite having spent inordinate amount of time removing them from my windows machines, but it's bizarre that some product manager gets to piss a convoluted frequent flier miles scheme all over microsoft's premier product. That's akin to Ferrari covering their very exclusive cars with promo stickers hawking those ferrari licensed asus laptops.

They really need to fire whoever keeps ramming non-sequitur rewards stuff into the windows product.

How do we know this wouldn’t lead to firing the CEO? Frankly, I’m inclined to believe that enshittification [1] is the primary strategy of the company right now. They’ve had decades to build Windows market share and now they realize that growth in software license sales has all but dried up. On the other hand, they’ve seen how hard the wind is blowing in the services and adtech direction.

So they’re determined to monetize their Windows install case right up to the hilt. They know they won’t be able to sell these folks expensive software licenses anymore, so they’re selling their users to advertisers instead.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Most "rewards" programs (including for grocery stores) are to allow payment method-based tracking.

Right now it's illegal to track users/customers based on payment method. This is more than just an upsell.

> That's akin to Ferrari covering their very exclusive cars with promo stickers hawking those ferrari licensed asus laptops.

No it's not, because Windows is not a "premium" or "exclusive" product, at all. It's the textbook example of a mass market product. There are (far) more Windows installations than there are cars in the world. The average Windows user is almost indistinguishable from the average human. And the monetization strategies reflect that.

As with any person or business, you have to judge them not on what they say but on what they do.

You can assume that about 50% of whatever anyone says is either a straight-up lie, misleading, or bullshit.

Ironically I think non-power users will begin every browsing session by typing "www.google.com" into the address bar, avoiding this issue entirely.

Wasn’t this breaking the law the last time?

I remember it was calls to split Microsoft into separate companies, one for the operating system and one for the internet divisions. Looks like it’s time now.

Last time Microsoft had the default web browser they were horrible stewards of the web. I’ll never forget them delaying supporting PNG.

Looks like they really learned a lot from that $613M EU fine. I hope they double it next time. How much exactly do they make from forcing IE down users throats? Apparently enough to justify this behavior given the past penalties, just mind blowing that they’re able to continue to do this and just pay fines. You’d think there’d be more backlash at the board level to this type of behavior.

Browser domination is the Holy Grail. They will persist as long as the EXPECTED VALUE of the fine is less than the projected benefit - which is existential for the company.

Every day of bad new for Microsoft and Windows is another great day for Linux. You all have a choice. Make it.

Sorry, I don't have a choice. And I find it naive to think that I do.

You work with a MS stack? My condolences.

Yeah this is a point that a lot of people forget: we don't always have a choice. Same happened to me years back but with MacOS. CEO was high on how "startups" all used Macs, and forced me to use an old shitty Macbook instead of my Linux. What an awful experience.

Thankfully I now WFH with my own equipment and was never again forced into any particular OS.

So I'm not alone! Once worked for a Apple-only company using only Apple hardware and even their office and cloud stuff. Thought there can't possibly be a lot of those.

To give Microsoft some credit, at least you can run Windows in a VM pretty seamlessly. Low bar, I know, but Apple doesn't allow you to run macOS on non-Apple hardware IIRC. Using a Windows VM for a client that has a Windows-only (for now :P) stack, and the experience is a lot better than at that Apple-only place back then.

Mine was a cheap bastard... they gave me an old Macbook my boss had dropped from the top of a server rack. It still "worked" (with random freezes and other intermittent issues), so they thought: why not save a buck?

I'm sure my experiences with that tainted my views of MacOS somewhat, but still nothing compares to having real control over your OS. In the long run, Linux always wins in that regard.

Absolutely.

Plus I think I've gained a significant chunk of my understanding-a-new-system and debugging skills from growing up fiddling with Gentoo, Linux From Scratch and what not. Now I make my money from these skills. In this day and age I'd argue a major Linux distribution is generally less hassle to get started and work with than macOS or Windows, but it's still good to know that if anything _really_ bothers me, I _can_ change it to be any way I like.

In the meantime, make sure you email your software vendors asking for Linux support. Its getting late, and Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to handle their responsibilities in the computing market.

Yup. With Linux I don't get bullied to install their stuff. But you'll say "but you get bugs, less mature desktop environment" (just one point of my daily usage). Yeah sure, but instead of complaining about being bullied I get a chance to help the folks who make the programs I use (bug reports, small commits). So instead of a negative feeling, I have a positive feeling.

That's an enormous difference to me.

Let's have this cheap Linux phone and my life will be great.

> I get a chance to help the folks who make the programs I use (bug reports, small commits

Approximately 0.0% of users see that as an opportunity.

Approximately 0.0% of the users actually produce those programs. And yet, we got those programs...

Yes, the fact that there are far more users than developers is my point. "All users have a choice! They just need to learn to write and debug software to address the bugs they'll encounter in the alternatives" is a bit of an unreasonable position.

> "but you get bugs, less mature desktop environment"

I don't think a linux distro maintained since 2020 feels less mature of more buggy than proprietary alternatives.

Agreed. I'm currently on Mac OS and almost daily I get UI glitches/bugs in the dock and notifications, which puzzles me a bit. I mean I understand that they don't care about whatever crashes the terminal when it runs with 10 windows for weeks at a time, but the dock is visible for all users and I don't think I'm doing anything special to it.

> With Linux I don't get bullied to install their stuff.

$ sudo apt full-upgrade

...

Get more security updates through Ubuntu Pro with 'esm-apps' enabled

...

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro at https://xxxxxxxxxxxxx/pro

That's not even close to the same quality of nagging, on a single distro.

Yea, there are distros with ads and tracking, and that's a stain on them, and on the people who willingly put up with it. Debian and Pop!_OS are great, btw.

Oh yeah... I love the Linux version of Accounting CS. It's great. You know what else is great? The Linux version of CCH ProSystem fx is also rock solid.

Ohhh wait. Those things don't exist. Just like a bunch of EHR software that I have to support doesn't exist either.

They all run on Windows. Most of this stuff doesn't even run on Mac OS X.

The business world runs on Windows. Period. That'll change when Linux developers start making software of the same caliber and ease-of-use as Windows. Until then, nothing changes. And this childish - and I'm being very generous with that assessment - idea that everyone has a "choice" is ridiculous.

I'm not familiar with any of the software you've mentioned. But in my neck of the woods, more and more software is moving to web-based SaaS form. There's no reason to insist on using the PITA that's Windows when a Chromebook or similar would do as good a job, or very likely even better.

Sure, for "heavier" local software, you may not have a choice. But in the company I work for, nobody uses such software any longer, yet they still cling to Windows. "Because we've always used this".

I am still Win 10 user for my home laptop, but was thinking that it's about time to try the Linux OS, as most of my friends did a long time ago.

Bonus: No more forced reboots!

Switching to Linux has saved me sooo much time. I go to my computer, log-on, and it just works. No reopening files, nothing lost, no having to save 'recovered' files, no browsers reopening all your tabs for a few minutes.

Every week with linux has saved me something like 5-10 minutes.

Invest those 5-10 minutes into fixing those random Linux bugs until those random Linux bugs are gone. Now its just pure time savings.

All these comments about coercing Windows into some semblance of usability. After several years of not having a PC, I recently bought a new one to use Windows to play ONE game that several of my other friends play on it, and it has been extraordinarily frustrating to configure. From the on-topic charade of browser choice, to denying Microsoft's many attempts to take over several other defaults, or install Office, to power management robbing me of the performance I paid for, to OneDrive and it's confusing integration with the awful Explorer, to all the nagware buried in all the drivers, to the giant FUCK YOU in the Bluetooth stack that shuts it down after a minute to save energy(!?) forcing me to plug in a keyboard and mouse to fiddle with it until I finally found the setting to turn that off... And then making you go through the routine of turning down all their attempts to take everything over again every time there's a Windows upgrade. Seriously, how does anyone with a choice put up with an operating system that continually slaps you in the face and treats you with so little respect? Or, God forbid, think this user experience is superior to macOS or Linux?

IME, people who insist that Windows is somehow "better" are people with only a very very shallow level of experience with it, and who have zero or near-zero experience with Macs or well-configured Linux.

But they're a LOT of those people, and so it gets repeated.

Macs aren't for everyone.

I had a Macbook Air back in the days where they still came with spinning drives, and after dealing with random freezes for months, I finally discovered that the drive was failing despite there not being any warnings displayed. It was only when trying to upgrade to the next version of the OS that it told me it couldn't install on a failing drive... But it would have happily let me keep using the system without letting me know about it!

Don't get me started on the people at the Apple service center not understanding SMART status....

Sounds like you got a lemon. I'm sorry that happened to you.

I've never had trouble with Macs reporting hardware faults. I mean, drives fail WAY less often now than they used to, so it's a rare event, but the errors I've gotten have been pretty easy to parse and interpret.

Just out of curiosity, what is that game that convinced you to switch to a different hardware/OS? Must be the killer app.

Elder Scrolls Online. I was happily playing it after moving to Playstation a couple years ago, but my IRL friends sucked me back in. Now I'm all setup, and 2 of the 4 have stopped playing. Grrr. Maybe I'll just go back to PS.

EDIT: And before anyone suggests it, yes, I've tried it many times on macOS. On my $4000 Intel Mac with a Vega 20 GPU, it pauses so often to load textures, it's almost a slide show. It runs BETTER on a Mac WITHOUT a GPU. Even my buddy with his new M2 Studio only gets 30 FPS at medium settings, while my $700 PC gets 60 on high. If ZOS would somehow address this WIDE disparity, I'd GLADLY give up the PC, but they have officially given up on Mac.

"Freedom of choice for customers!

Microsoft edge is bringing me inconvenience. Just because a product is good doesn't mean I'm obligated to use it. I as a customer do not like this browser. I like another one and I want to have the options very clear to download the browser you want. Your browser edge is almost like a virus does not let me download another browser and we know clearly that all this is not to benefit customers and to direct us to the microsoft download store. I can't download another product other than microsoft this seems to me like monopoly syndrome,

I request a change to a list teaching me the steps to have other free browser options, I don't want to remove the edge any more than other options.

This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread."

Source: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftedge/forum/all/...

Microsoft is weird. People where pretty happy about Edge initially and Microsoft fail to capitalize on that.

Why not just create a good browser, bundle it Windows, ensure it has excellent privacy features and if people use it then great, if not, to bad. I really fail to see Microsofts end goal here. They don't need people to use Edge, they don't need to spy on people... So why do they feel like they must?

> You may have read stories in the tech media celebrating that Windows will finally respect the default browser setting.

As someone who hasn't daily driven Windows since Windows 7 this statement is hilarious, because back then, it did respect default browser settings.

You mean the same OS where the internet settings has a (default checked) toggle box for “Tell me if Internet Explorer is not the default web browser.”?

As long as it stays off when you uncheck it, that's better.

When you set your default browser to Firefox but using the search bar in task bar opens everything in edge, that's problematic.

Most of the people who participate in Windows Insider are amateurs, they don't have several PCs for functional verification, they don't have in-depth knowledge of software testing, and there is no point in blaming them. On the contrary, Windows 11 is entrusted to these amateurs for functional verification instead of QA, so it is not surprising that Windows 11 has bugs in every update.

Why should Microsoft spend any money on maintaining a QA team and doing functional verification? What's the business benefit?

Leaving QA to a bunch of amateurs is a good thing: it saves MS lots of money, and so increases profitability, and increases shareholder value. Windows users aren't going to stop using Windows because of a bunch of bugs that a dedicated QA department would have caught, so there's no reason to avoid bugginess.

Remember that those bugs and antifeatures may also cause those very Microsoft shareholders and employees to lose data (and money and time). It is not like Microsoft shareholders are forbidden to use Microsoft products.

I don't see the board of directors or other large shareholders complaining to Microsoft about their product quality.

I used to be a huge Windows fan, but shoving Edge upon me so aggressively has made me decide it’s time to move on. Moving forward, I’m only buying Apple or Linux devices.

I bought my pre-teen a prebuilt pc for gaming recently. Figured windows 11 would be easier due to compatibility with games and it being pre installed. After screwing with it for several hours to remove as much crap as possible, What I found was that every time it restarted there was a new prompt to reenable something, surreptitiously start using a ms service, etc. I gave up and installed Ubuntu. Not every game works perfectly, but most do, and its no longer a confusing experience for my kid.

I mean what the hell. My kid just wants to play minecraft for Christ's sake.

I would love to see my kids using KDE on some flavor of Linux, but the two biggest games they play have issues. Roblox and Fortnite.

Its such a shame, because from what I can tell, the only reason Roblox doesn't work is because they do some very goofy stuff to launch the game

Once Ubuntu breaks: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/

It's a gaming distro built on top of Fedora Silverblue, making it stable as heck while having up-to-date official steam, and other goodies. Works on Deck too, if you want that.

I am happy that my teenage dream of an actual sub-genre of desktop PC usage is finally getting distros designed that particularly purpose.

Only works with steam deck or amd GPUs?

No, there's also the bazzite-nvidia variant if that's the GPU you got. It's fairly easy to setup. Once you start bazizte ISO you're given a choice of the variant you want/need.

I myself run the nvidia variant on my new desktop and the OOB experience has been amazing.

Might be worth having a look under Settings / System / Notifications and the check boxes at the bottom of the screen which are:

Show me the Windows welcome experience

Offer suggestions on how I can setup my device

Get Tips and suggestions when I use Windows

(I've posted this in the past, but it does seem to help)

Microsoft Edge is a privacy nightmare. They have buried dozens of data-collection settings in so many menus under so many different names and categories it's insane. You literally need a book to know which settings to turn off, and even then they keep adding new settings at a very high rate hidden in "security updates"

I've stopped forcing myself on Microsoft. Works wonders. Moved my workflow off the platform over the last 6 months entirely.

I used a debloater on my windows 11 laptop which also removed edge. No big deal since Firefox is my browser if choice, but I'm a Web developer and need to test my apps in different browsers. I've tried to install edge multiple times, but I can never get it to work.

You can’t remove plankton and expect the whale to survive.

Try the second set of instructions here https://www.intowindows.com/how-to-reinstall-microsoft-edge-...

Edge is still Blink+V8. Just test Chromium or Brave & forget about Edge.

That’s not exactly true, there’s a bunch of ancillary code too. For example, image handling, where Edge doesn’t support AVIF: https://caniuse.com/avif

But that's (+ AV1) about it. I wouldn't install edge just to test whether there are any files encoded with these codecs. (unless there are a LOT of media encoded in different ways e.g. youtube)

Just test on chrome and keep in mind to avoid AVIF

…Which you should be using the picture element or image() to fall all the way back to PNG or JPEG in most scenarios anyhow. New & improved formats like JPEG-XL should be considered ‘enhancements’ rather than relied on.

Don't remember what it was exactly, but I did run into some obscure scenario (something with tab focus I believe) where Edge had a bug that prevented my code from working.

Just spin up a VM for testing Edge, the differences are small.

How about you get VMware and install in there a vanilla Win10/11 just for the testing of Edge? Yes, it is heavy. Yes you will only fire it up when you need it. And this won't contaminate your machine.

Honestly, as much as I avoid it as a primary browser, I think all OSes should have a default browser that one could use as a preinstalled webview. Some way to avoid having to ship a 100 MB electron with simple web apps.

I don't think web apps are ideal, but having edge installed and available as a native webview is relevant.

I don't think this dream works yet, I don't think one can actually make THESE kinds of apps without shipping electron yet, but that should definitely be an option. I have no problem with edge used as a random weview in random apps. I only hate it when edge is opened as a dedicated browser.

I don't think an OS API to use Firefox as a webview is a reasonable ask :(.

What made you think they'd stop?

I just want them to use clippy to force you into going from google sheets back to excel just for the memes. (and don't tell me to stop giving them bad ideas, I know the higher-ups love them)

I want the Chrome to stop being the majority shareholder of the market. But not like this.

Edge is effectively chrome under the hood. It’s not doing much for browser diversity

Exactly. If anything Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers gives a false sense of healthy competition.

I view Brave as very healthy competition to Chrome and Edge. Yes, it's based on Chromium. But it disables the many egregious privacy violations, as well as other bad things.

And whatever Google decides they want to implement or support in Chromium will be the web default, even just how they interpret ambiguities or undefined behaviours - standards be damned. We have tried this before and it was not pretty.

That is why we need competing browser implementations.

I'd argue for the opposite - we need strong standards and some methods to strictly enforce them. Governments could do that but the level of incompetency and politics are huge roadblocks

We have strong standards - but if there is only one implementation, that quickly becomes the standard no matter the text in the actual formalised standard.

Chrome does its own stuff. Lately, they added a tracking different from cookies, something that Brave has said they won't be adding. I want the market to segregate at every level.

Brave and a few other derivatives will block these high profile features. But they don't have the resources to maintain many of these exceptions. For example look at Brave's response to manifest v2. They say that they will try to support it for longer but they are careful to promise little. Because they know they don't have the resources to maintain all of the underlying APIs and their own extension store.

Plus this helps entrench Chromium as the only browser engine. Because even the addition of many non-harmful features that other engines don't implement create compatibility issues that results in developers using these new features so sites break. Firefox gets unsupported so people have to switch to Chrome or a derivative.

So yes, a derivative is better than using Google Chrome. But it is a small improvement compared to switching to a different browser engine.

Windows continuously monitors what browsers users have installed. If you uninstall Chrome, it immediately tries to make Edge the default browser.

And it never respects my wishes for a default browser. Any OS embedded help link will open Edge, wasting me time, memory and screen space.

One thing I really hate is that, I like to hit the windows key and start typing the name of an app I want to open, but if I mistype the app name, it searches the web for the misspelling... in Edge!

they have to get those bing numbers up somehow!

Microsoft is also forcing office 365 support to end on windows servers in 2025/2026. It's going to be a blood bath if you run on prem.

Meh. I just use text files and emacs. And I hacked sc to use emacs key bindings for spreadsheets. It's far from an ideal system, but it works for me. Simplicity can be nice.

It's like saying I'm having engine trouble on my big rig, and you telling me about how you upgraded your tennis shoes.

Don't ask the question if you don't want the answer. And sheesh, dude, how many alts do you have?

I don't know what an alt is. And this is not user machines, it's not like they can't run Word on their desktops, this impacts RDP hosts, machines that use an office backend for server based programs, etc. Hospitals, accounting firms, etc all will be heavily impacted by this.

Ah. There's the difference. In our organization, users edit documents on personal desktops, laptops (and sometimes mobile phones and tablets.)

How is your personal preference relevant at all under a comment of enterprise-level setup? You are going to ask everyone in the company to use emacs?

Everyone in my company uses emacs, except the few who use vi. There is one guy who uses VSCode. I have no idea what he uses to type text documents for human consumption. So, sure. Use whatever tool works for you. Kind of bizarre you're wanting everyone to use Word and Edge (and Win 11). I mean... you should use what works for you. But you shouldn't freak out when people use different things. I hear some people use Macs, for instance.

I mean... most of my daily effort goes into supporting a bank. There's A LOT of mainframe stuff. Some COBOL. Some guys using AIX (actually, a surprising number of guys using AIX) and (as mentioned previously, xterms and emacs or vi.) On the dev side there's more focus on file format standards than tools. So use whatever tool that generates files in the appropriate format. We probably could use Win11, but they started using AIX in the 90s and just never got around to moving to Windows.

And how is this useful and why should another company care about how things work at your company? Shouldn't those companies focus on more on the productivity tools their employees use?

Person 1: I have a problem. Suggestions?

Person 2: Here is a suggestion.

Person 3: How dare you offer a suggestion when someone asked for suggestions!

They aren't going to support on-prem Office 365?

Microsoft and their stupid OneDrive needs to stop trying to co-mingle all my data all the time.

It’s gonna start getting really hard to have all these affairs on the side /s

I ended up blocking Edge in the firewall so it would at least close quickly without loading any useless stuff. Even then the firewall rule would reset periodically so I made a new one that points to the Edge binary.

how can one do this?

Here's how...

1. Find out where the Edge executable is; copy its path.

2. Open 'Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security'

3. Select Inbound Rules (Left pane).

3.1 Click on 'New Rule' (Right pane)

3.2 Set the type of rule to Program, click Next and paste the exe path and delete the quotation marks. Click Next.

3.3 Set the Action to 'Block the connection' and then select where this rules applies (select all three options). Click Next.

3.4 Specify a name (and an optional description) for the rule.

Done!

I also made a blocking outbound rule, but I don't think it's necessary for this purpose.

Is it really that hard to innovate to differentiate yourself and steer the browsing experience somewhere else, away from this mess? Maybe the employee selection program is completely flawed at big companies like these or these people are purposefully suppressed. Because today's browsers, with their antiquated ui and the non existing user experience is really disturbing.

Windows 11 is awful. I'll continue to use windows 10 on my personal laptop for as long as possible.

Win10 requires a lot of tweaking to make it usable. Win11 just requires more. I'm guessing every windows version going forward will be on the same escalator. When it's un-tweakable it'll be time for me to go.

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC. Smooth as butter, I love it. No app store, none of that candy crush stuff. Its what I expected Windows to be. Its a shame that I considered myself a power user but only learnt about it 2 years back.

I am currently building a gaming PC for my partner, and the OS is my biggest unsolved headache. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC sounds perfect - can I ask you for a recommendation on where to get a license?

I haven't had to deal with Microsoft licensing in over fifteen years, and unsurprisingly the topic doesn't seem to have gotten any easier since then.

> Can I ask you for a recommendation on where to get a license?

You have to sail the high seas. Unless you are a business you cannot possibly get an LTSC license. Such a bummer that the quintessential Windows 10 experience cannot be bought by the average public.

Thanks! How unfortunate.

Maybe I'll have to give Linux + Proton a shot, although I don't relish the additional complication regarding hardware selection...

Yea you gotta just go AMD gpu. I had an NVIDIA RTX 3070 and despite being decently technically proficient I could never deal with the hassle of Linux gaming. I bought an AMD 6950 XT and immediately many random issues I was having like league of legends crashing or bugging out just stopped. Granted I also switched from default fedora to fedora with the Sway WM so there are some confounding variables there. Even a brand new game like Starfield just worked™ for me, which was quite surprising. I do just leave Steam on Proton experimental so that may have something to do with it.

Anyways, I'd recommend Linux gaming now to anyone if they have AMD hardware and value privacy. There are definitely still some quirks and typical Linux configuring but even for someone as impatient and intolerant to that stuff as me, it's been pretty good so far

Of course, the only way to get it seems to be to pirate it. Is there a recommended way to do this? My partner isn't ready to give up on Windows yet and I'm trying to find the least bad path.

"Hey friends :wave:, I call everyone my friend because I am a creepy old Influenza(tm) on TikTok trying to advertise snake poison to young folks. Don't be afraid, I'm just an innocent friendly neighbour hood virtue signalling Microsoft advocate. Look, here I use Edge, here I use Windows 11 with some bullshit hack to run Linux in my terminal and then I use (innocently) a bunch of other toxic Microsoft software to advertise this spyware to you in an unsuspecting way."

Yawn... I think people are slowly waking up to Microsoft and their antics and fake people.

I refuse to use browsers that come tied deeply with the os. Last one I used was IE6

Thats all I have to say about these tactics over the last decades

Who forced you to use Microsoft (at home).

Can you actually switch the default browser with group policy? What if your team only has the bandwidth to support a couple browsers, and your users say they want Chrome and Firefox?

If this is an honest question, then Microsoft's answer is that you use Intune to push the Chrome & Edge settings (via the same policy node, since they're the same engine, they just report their spying to different corporations) and import an ADMX for Firefox policy. That's two browsers worth of policy that you're supporting, but it actually handles three bits of software.

This doesn't answer my question... If an admin does not want their users using Edge, is there an actual way to configure the default browser that doesn't end up opening links and such in Edge?

Didn't realise that was what you were getting at. In short, no, you cannot stop deep-links for Edge from opening in Edge.

Smells like typical knee jerk reaction for a product that doesn't perform to a vp's expectations. PM's asked to do something about it, and between making the product better to attract users, or implementing defaults and such to force it on them, they choose the expedient.

I am shocked a company with a very sketchy history with repeated violation with anti trust related to internet browsers.

But to be serious, I wonder what sketchy nonsense Microsoft would do if they could only compete on Linux or MacOS.

On steam and other stores they force you to login into Xbox services.

Edge is trash. If Microsoft wants to do something positive for the browser diversity landscape they should match Google $ for $ on support for Mozilla, with the stipulation that the funds can only be used for FireFox.

Why do you say it is trash? I use it regularly. I use it primarily to test and code (e.g. inspect and tweak styles) a few web apps I code. I really like some of its features.

What I didn't like was how it kept asking me to make it the default browser every time it upgraded.

... If they could just do it to Chrome but leave Firefox alone.

It's their OS. Seems like an odd issue.

Wasn't there a major lawsuit long ago between Netscape and Microsoft over software bundling. Pretty sure it Microsoft in reaction made Internet Explorer free to avoid the monopoly claim effectively. This bankrupted Netscape because their browser was their only revenue driver whereas Microsoft could still sell its other products. Mozilla the non-profit was formed and inherited Netscape's browser software which was then supported by Google paying for it's search engine to be the default browser page in Firefox and funding the majority of the donations to Mozilla for years. So it's actually a huge deal with seemingly exactly the same precedent from the same company only a couple decades later. Kind of surprising they keep trying so it must be very lucrative.

See that's a problem. When you buy a license it should become YOUR OS.

But I didn't buy the OS. It was force installed while I slept after I failed a dark pattern check due to fatigue.

Good! Chrome is a monstrous application, and it's good when people are coerced off of it.

I spot a flaw in this, aside from the fact that the way this coercion is done is highly unethical and illegal, and it's that Edge is functionally a Chrome reskin with some added Microsoft bells and whistles.

People switching from Chrome to Edge won't help with the browser monoculture. And especially switching from Firefox to Edge will not help.

Am I the only one who thinks it's expected behavior for microsoft-edge://bing.com to open in Edge as opposed to any other browser? Edge isn't being forced onto people. People are just opening a deeplink into Edge.

Microsoft is the one generating the deep links.

Better than Google constantly asking me to switch to Chrome on google.com when I'm in Edge.

Is it, though? You can ignore that stuff and keep going. You cannot get around MS forcing links from the OS search, Outlook, etc. to open in Edge and nothing else.

I share all criticism on the subject but I must admit there is a killer feature that alone converted me to use Edge on MacOS - native vertical tab bar with tab grouping. It worked much better for me than all Chrome and Firefox extensions I tried before.

I know Brave implemented it recently too so Edge is not the only player in town now, but it was the first! Hopefully the rest of browsers will follow the trend.

Have you tried Vivaldi's vertical tabs? They seem quite powerful and I like the implementation more than Edge's.

More powerful does not necessarily means better. Vivaldi indeed allows much more customization, but for my tab-heavy browsing pattern Edge's (and now Brave's) way suits much more. For example some things I don't like in Vivaldi:

- No colors. In Edge/Brave new color is auto-assigned when creating new tab group and can be overridden at any time.

- When tab group is expanded, the group name/header is not shown. When you have many groups with similar tabs they are much less visually distinct from each other.

- Moving new tab to one of previous collapsed groups can be easily done via context menu in Edge. In Vivaldi you'll have to expand the group and drag the tab.

These are all minor inconveniences but together they make a big difference.

Microsoft only continue to make Windows desktop because businesses "need it", and it's a gateway to sell people azure and office. Eventually they will open source as much of it as they can, or rather, build a flavour of windows that is Linux and essentially distribute binaries for the directx stuff and other things they're not willing to fully release the code on.

mark my words, Windows isn't dying a natural death, it's parent is suffocating it in its sleep as a mercy killing.. mercy from having to support it forever

I agree that windows is a gateway to sell people on office, but open sourcing it? Getting decades worth of apps and drivers working on the Linux kernel instead of, you know, doing nothing? I don’t see how either one benefits them.

They’re just monetizing users as much as they can stand to juice revenue. No other explanation is needed.

Open sourcing windows probably would be so difficult that you could consider it a nearly impossible task.

Over 40 years of licensing and patent agreements with thousands of companies and institutions with the unavoidable flux of acquisitions, merges and deaths, big customer agreements. You'll need an army of lawyers and sizable team of developers working in a multi-year project to secure all the paperworks and sanitize the code where you couldn't reach an agreement with the other party.

I use Windows 10/11 daily. The number of times Edge was "forced on me": 0 The number of times Edge launched when I expected or wanted my default browser (Firefox): 0 The number of times my browser default was reset to Edge: 0

I just don't understand this outrage. I spend 90% of my time in Firefox/Chrome - I've only started using Edge lately to play with Bing "AI" Chat. I had to search for it!

Are people hallucinating? If so, why? Mere prejudice?

Tech bloggers looking for views find every single way (however improbable) that Edge will disrespect your choice. My experience as a "daily driver" shows these circumstances to be rare. Still waiting for the articles on iCloud.

I had Edge forced on me a number of times and had to change a setting to prevent it from happening.

The most recent case in point, I updated my wife's Outlook to the latest version and it started opening all links in Edge. I had to Google it and found that Microsoft forced this change on everybody and I needed to tweak a setting.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/3/23709297/microsoft-edge-fo...

It's not forced if there's a setting to disable. "Reset my default" would be more accurate.

That is literally forcing edge on people.. it is ignoring their choice, and forcing them to use edge or change the desired browsers.

It is not forcing them to use it (mostly) but it is forcing edge on them in a dark pattern which needs to be called out.

Maybe not forced, but definitely hostile

Maybe you don't but most people use the central search feature of Windows, which opens Edge and Bing on any web result. If you click on links in the most used email client (Outlook) and business chat app (Teams) Edge opens [1]. How can this not be an outrage?

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/topic/web-links-from-out...

I've tutored many clients (I provide services to small business owners) and haven't seen usage of the Windows search bar once (20 years exp). I understand the outrage about Outlook/Teams however I use neither and in fact see more prompts from Google to use Chrome than I do anything.

Visual Studio uses Edge when you submit bugs. There's some kind of integration where Edge collects diagnostics.

The problem then comes when you get emailed back from Microsoft. Other browsers can't log in correctly to Visual Studio's bug discussion board.

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