I reinstalled Windows 10 on a machine recently and like half the setup process is now ads for other Microsoft services or things related to ads. Do you want Office 365? OneDrive? Xbox Game Pass? Can we use your location for ads? Kind of ridiculous. I don't think there was any the first time I installed Win 10? Maybe just Office 365?
I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of Mountain Dew during install.
>I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of Mountain Dew during install.
As a Linux user, I look forward to that, so I can laugh even more at Windows users and what they're willing to put up with. I just wish Apple would follow suit with this kind of bad treatment of users.
The sad part is that even despite the horrific bullshit that's become bundled with Windows since 10, Linux Desktop market share still hasn't changed.
At the end of the day, what the average person wants is an OS that works properly without requiring complex configuration, and the people making Linux distributions don't understand or respect this.
Many many years back, when I knew nothing of programming and very little of tech words, I used to wonder why people don't use Linux instead of Windows if it is so great. Then I realized Linux is good for nerds. For the rest of tech ignorant people, it is Windows. As I read somewhere long ago, Linux is for people who know what they are doing. Windows is for people who don't know what they are doing.
I would consider myself fairly tech-literate. Software engineer, use git from the command line, can exit vim. Even then I gave up on Linux after using it for a couple of years because it's just so darn stressful.
When I need to get shit done, the last thing I want to is read pages and pages of documentation about someone's pet project or some Stack Overflow post containing the random incantation I need to fix some hardware incompatibility that is fixed out of the box on some distros but not others.
The Desktop Linux experience, at least for me, was like owning a car with an incredibly detailed repair manual and amazing parts availability but broke down every 6 weeks. Even the best mechanic in the world wouldn't want to use that car as a daily driver.
It's weird. I had that exact experience with Linux. Had to reinstall the system from scratch every major distribution upgrades because they always screwed something up. Fedora's package manager corrupted its own database once. Support was just badly answered forum posts.
Then I switched to Arch Linux and never had problems ever again. Been running it for years with no problems despite its inexplicable reputation for instability. Whenever I want to do anything, I just look it up in the Arch Wiki which is the best Linux documentation ever made.
I have to use Windows at work and it's nothing but constant never ending pain. The god damn OS just does all sorts of stuff I couldn't care less about that have absolutely nothing to do with my job. It actually costs me money in lost productivity. All this for what? The only thing it does is launch the browser, and very rarely Libre Office when the network is down and I have to save a document locally. Yes, Libre Office.
>It's weird. I had that exact experience with Linux. Had to reinstall the system from scratch every major distribution upgrades because they always screwed something up. Fedora's package manager corrupted its own database once. Support was just badly answered forum posts.
I feel like most of the people complaining about constant trouble with Linux were using Fedora...
>Then I switched to Arch Linux and never had problems ever again.
Same thing here with Ubuntu-based distros. Sometimes I wonder if Fedora is secretly made and pushed just to ruin Linux's reputation.
On the flip side, I had the opposite experience. With Linux it was just the matter of compiling from the source. And most of the time, it would just compile without any issue. With windows, I needed to download MSVC and the whole studio and wasn't able to have the app running. I really did not understand why it had to be so complicated. At least with linux there is a support from the community because the same problem might have been encountered by someone else.
Further, in Windows, whenever I was trying new things or doing out of the normal stuff, it required modifying a lot of registry values. I found it horrible compared to Linux, where everything is a file and you can immediately change the file.
It's weird how people are still complaining about this stuff. I never have any trouble like this; I just use an Ubuntu-based distro, and get well-supported hardware (i.e., just buy a Dell or Lenovo laptop), and everything "just works".
If you pay attention closely, you'll notice that sometime in the last year, the Windows 11 installation slide for onedrive went from "hey do you want onedrive, yes or no?" to "hey here's onedrive, we've enabled it for you" (with no option now for opting out of one-drive).
It's still possible to disable one-drive once you boot up for the first time, but the steps are kinda hidden and convoluted:
1. open onedrive settings, go to the "backup" tab, then "manage backups" and uncheck all the folders
2. go to another tab to the left (whose name escapes me, but was something like "sharing" or "syncing") then go to "select which folders are shared" or something like that, then uncheck all the folders. You can even uncheck the "personal vault" folder if you expand it and uncheck its contents (consisting of a single subitem) first.
3. go to the first tab and unselect "start onedrive at startup"
4. Right click onedrive's menu and click "quit onedrive".
These steps are now necessary, when in the past you were able to opt-out of onedrive with one click during installation.
The home screen on my Windows 10 copy usually has a nice image and a few bits of text about that image or location.
Recently, I got an image of a tropical island. The text was all about how Jurassic Park was shot on the same island, and how, more importantly, Jurassic World Dominion was also shot on the same island, and that Jurassic World Dominion had X many dinosaurs.
A very thinly disguised ad for Jurassic World. Right on my home screen.
Unfortunately, it's a very similar situation for MacOS. Seemingly endless prompts to sign up for one service or another. At least Linux is viable for some of us.
These corporations are not bastions of self-awareness nor moral fortitude. They are machines with the singular goal of making the red line go up. It will continue to get worse as long as people continue buying their products.
That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people? I guess founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
If all these corporations will concern themselves with is "line go up" then it's time for society to step in and seriously constrain what they're allowed to do in order to drive that line up. Frankly, corporations making line go up by shoving advertising into everything everywhere aren't adding a lot of value. They're just increasing audiovisual pollution and that's an extremely charitable interpretation of their activities. What I actually think is they're violating my mind every single time they show me an advertisement. My attention is mine, it's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. I couldn't care less how much money it costs them, it should be illegal for them to do it.
> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people?
Unironically, they've already done that.
Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
Facebook connected the world to all their friends and relatives.
Amazon first revolutionized e-commerce, making it possible to buy almost anything from almost anywhere. Then they revolutionized server computing, making it possible for anyone to spin up a software backend and scale it out without buying or leasing your own servers.
Apple got pocket sized general purpose computers into the pockets of the majority of people in the world (through iPhone and inspiring Android).
Google enabled people to find pretty much any piece of human knowledge or information.
The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
>Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
As someone who was in the industry in the 90s and 00s, and saw just how many man-hours were wasted in dealing with problems caused by MS's buggy and insecure software, I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives". Even at the time, there were far better alternatives available; they just didn't have the same marketing or lock-in advantages.
I'll grant you the stuff about FB, Amazon, and Google though, and maybe Apple with their iPhone.
>The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
Yep, this is the problem: unsustainability. These companies should have been able to shift into a "utility provider" type status where they don't really grow much (except from expanding population, or new untapped global markets), where they can simply provide a fairly constant service and have a regular revenue stream.
> I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives".
Microsoft provided the operating system that allowed the commoditised IBM PC, and later laptops, to launch.
Without this, no Google, no Amazon and no FB.
Put another way, if every workstation still cost $5k and up to own, far fewer people would have bothered in the first place.
No complaints about your views on Microsoft software ;) I'd argue I'm not sure Google or Amazon are "making the world a better place" when you get into the details, but this is purely about the wider impacts of their strategy.
> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people? I guess founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
These were lies calculated to help them recruit idealistic young people, who lack the experience to disregard companies making grandiose claims about themselves and their motives.
Most of the most successful corporations/businesses have vision/innovation to begin with, they do create useful things that people didn't know they wanted but once they see it they do.
After a while though, the business gets big enough that no new innovation can actually move the needle on the businesses revenues, the people at those companies who do have ideas are better off getting paid well for some period of time and then leaving to make it themselves.
That's the stage google is in more or less, innovation won't move their bottom line very much so they're trying to extract as much as possible from their existing businesses, which basically means as many ads as possible in as many places as possible.
tech giants have the moral-teflon of their bastardized implementation of DEI. So they're obviously just and benevolent. If you think they're ratfucking their customers, then you're just a bigot who's mad about the diversity but won't say it.
I can't wait for Windows 13 when Microsoft has sold installer ads to the highest bidder and I'm asked if I want a case of Mountain Dew during install.