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Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

I quite like Windows 11, and to me it feels like the most uniform and stable version of Windows thus far. The claims of it being bloated with ads surprises me, because it has less ads on a fresh install than Windows 10 and most Android phones.

It's still a highly customizable platform and overall backwards compatibility is unmatched. If I'm honest, I hated working on Windows in the 7-10 era as a developer. Doing anything from the command line was painful, you were forced to use clients like PuTTY, there was no built in package manager, and development tools like VS were so unstable. As a .NET developer that also does a bit of frontend work, the experience is completely different.

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“Less ads than most android phones” is a low low bar. Try “less ads than a new Debian install” and then I’ll be interested. Until then.. no thanks, go pound sand.

Okay, sure, but I actually like using my devices. On 11 the only things I would consider "ads" are the shortcuts to stuff like Facebook and Spotify.

Even less ads than Ubuntu would be fine by me

Doesn’t ubuntu advertise its subscription service on every apt-get?

Do fresh Debian server installs have ads?

No. That's the point of the comment.

How can something be less than none? The commenr implies there must be at least one ad for the requirement of getting the attention of GP.

The login banner is kind of an ad for the OS.

Having ads at all is unacceptable. And yeah, they did it to Windows 10 too... but that's why I switched to Linux as soon as they did that.

Is it really absolutely unacceptable? This is not like ye olden days where you'd buy a Compaq and it comes preloaded with actual trashware. The only things preinstalled that I would consider ads are shortcuts to apps like Spotify, Facebook, Grammarly. All stuff that's very easily removed in less than 30 seconds.

Yes, any advertising in the base operating system is totally unacceptable since it means the OS is tailored to the needs of the advertiser instead of those of the user. The base operating system - that is everything needed to run the system as normal without compromising on functionality - should be a clean slate as far as advertising, and 'telemetry'/user data exfiltration is concerned. If a user wants to install anything on top of that base system which comes with advertising that is his choice but the base should be ad-free.

Easily removed, but new microsoft software seem to be magically added by default, and if you have to maintain a number of non-enterprise windows 11 installs, it suddenly becomes a game of whack-a-mole across multiple machines.

I'm happy for updates for existing software, but I draw the line at them adding new things that I can just remove in 30 seconds over and over again.

Yes, advertising is unacceptable. It's annoying, it's distracting, and it's an infosec risk.

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