I saw the headlines about W11 go by, but I recently helped a family member with a new Windows 11 laptop and I was still stunned by the tying and the ads on the desktop, lock screen, and menus. There’s two free utilities that I see as pretty much mandatory now. O&O ShutUp collects toggles for privacy, cross-selling, and misfeatures, which is much easier than this article’s list of where to find each toggle. O&O AppBuster allows uninstalling bundled apps, which allows removing many of the ads and reducing some of the enormous OS install size. (I know I started with PCs when hard drives were an optional feature but the fresh install was 27G.)
I believe it really is time to give up on Windows now. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows 3.1 - I literally grew up with it - and it has become obvious to me that this ecosystem no longer offers me what I want and need. But, worst of all, there is no end in sight for all this nonsense. It’s not like we have to go through a period of hardship and it’ll pay off in the end. In fact, the pace at which they harm Windows with terrible decision-making seems to be accelerating. Linux desktop software like KDE offers production-grade quality that has far fewer bugs and far more features than what Microsoft is currently inflicting on their users.
Yes, the battle lines have moved. Windows is a lost cause and all efforts should be to not depend on it as an ecosystem. Valve smelt the enshittification very early and wisely worked on their Proton runtime to be able to detach itself from Windows.
Regarding enshittification, let us all watch out for those trying to enshittify the Linux ecosystem. Isn’t it beautiful and poetic, by the way, that Lennart Poettering - Red-Hat-sponsored inventor of systemd and pulseaudio - joined Microsoft last year? Microsoft is all-in to enshittify and EEE (embrace - extend - extinguish) Linux by giving it a deadly embrace, let’s hope they’re not successful.
Systemd has its good parts, but it’s not built with a collaborative/modular system in mind, and more like for a deeply-integrated vendor-based system - no wonder Red Hat pushed it so hard. OpenRC needs to be replaced, but there were many many other solutions that looked much more promising and kept to their core task of being an init system, e.g. runit. Pulseaudio is fortunately replaced with Pipewire, but the damage is already done insofar that Pipewire has to emulate the horrible Pulseaudio APIs for compatibility.
The KDE Plasma 6 is such a wonderful release too, where they just fixed a lot of things under the surface, made the whole thing less buggy, faster and more convenient than the previous version. I wish big software updates would still be like that: like, Apple did it over 15 years ago with OSX. Don’t break anything, just make work better and faster with fewer bugs.
I’ve been using Sway and i3 for almost a decade, but Plasma 6 might make me reconsider of using a desktop again.
Adds in a paid product feels like something gone very wrong. I wonder what’s a reasonable systems fix here? Ban adds and tracking through regulation? Break monopoly to make it possible to compete on “no ads”? Fund free software competition through taxes?
I find it deeply offensive that I subscribe to the New York Times and they still show me ads. Real Soon Now™ when I get my networking decent (read: replace the garbage my ISP gives me with an OpenWRT box) I’m going to set up a PiHole and email them to tell them I’m blocking ads in their app, and if that’s a problem then give me the option for an ad free plan. I’ll pay. (I know not everyone will, which is fine, but I personally will totally pay to not feel like I’m being tracked and sold in a news app.)
Yeah, this is very much the comment on the trailers before Dune 2 also.
It makes sense economically: an ad space is a positional good — ad customers outbid each other in an auction, which guarantees much better margins than from selling non-positional good like a newspaper itself.
I saw the headlines about W11 go by, but I recently helped a family member with a new Windows 11 laptop and I was still stunned by the tying and the ads on the desktop, lock screen, and menus. There’s two free utilities that I see as pretty much mandatory now. O&O ShutUp collects toggles for privacy, cross-selling, and misfeatures, which is much easier than this article’s list of where to find each toggle. O&O AppBuster allows uninstalling bundled apps, which allows removing many of the ads and reducing some of the enormous OS install size. (I know I started with PCs when hard drives were an optional feature but the fresh install was 27G.)
I believe it really is time to give up on Windows now. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows 3.1 - I literally grew up with it - and it has become obvious to me that this ecosystem no longer offers me what I want and need. But, worst of all, there is no end in sight for all this nonsense. It’s not like we have to go through a period of hardship and it’ll pay off in the end. In fact, the pace at which they harm Windows with terrible decision-making seems to be accelerating. Linux desktop software like KDE offers production-grade quality that has far fewer bugs and far more features than what Microsoft is currently inflicting on their users.
Yes, the battle lines have moved. Windows is a lost cause and all efforts should be to not depend on it as an ecosystem. Valve smelt the enshittification very early and wisely worked on their Proton runtime to be able to detach itself from Windows.
Regarding enshittification, let us all watch out for those trying to enshittify the Linux ecosystem. Isn’t it beautiful and poetic, by the way, that Lennart Poettering - Red-Hat-sponsored inventor of systemd and pulseaudio - joined Microsoft last year? Microsoft is all-in to enshittify and EEE (embrace - extend - extinguish) Linux by giving it a deadly embrace, let’s hope they’re not successful.
Systemd has its good parts, but it’s not built with a collaborative/modular system in mind, and more like for a deeply-integrated vendor-based system - no wonder Red Hat pushed it so hard. OpenRC needs to be replaced, but there were many many other solutions that looked much more promising and kept to their core task of being an init system, e.g. runit. Pulseaudio is fortunately replaced with Pipewire, but the damage is already done insofar that Pipewire has to emulate the horrible Pulseaudio APIs for compatibility.
The KDE Plasma 6 is such a wonderful release too, where they just fixed a lot of things under the surface, made the whole thing less buggy, faster and more convenient than the previous version. I wish big software updates would still be like that: like, Apple did it over 15 years ago with OSX. Don’t break anything, just make work better and faster with fewer bugs.
I’ve been using Sway and i3 for almost a decade, but Plasma 6 might make me reconsider of using a desktop again.
I owe a lot to Microsoft. I never would have gone “full-Linux” if it weren’t for the way they sabotaged Windows.
Winaero is a good tool to quickly run through these fixes: https://winaero.com/winaero-tweaker/
Adds in a paid product feels like something gone very wrong. I wonder what’s a reasonable systems fix here? Ban adds and tracking through regulation? Break monopoly to make it possible to compete on “no ads”? Fund free software competition through taxes?
Funny how newspapers are paid and still contain adverts. Or TV shows fwiw.
The apt reader will notice that these two statements do not contradict each other.
I find it deeply offensive that I subscribe to the New York Times and they still show me ads. Real Soon Now™ when I get my networking decent (read: replace the garbage my ISP gives me with an OpenWRT box) I’m going to set up a PiHole and email them to tell them I’m blocking ads in their app, and if that’s a problem then give me the option for an ad free plan. I’ll pay. (I know not everyone will, which is fine, but I personally will totally pay to not feel like I’m being tracked and sold in a news app.)
Yeah, this is very much the comment on the trailers before Dune 2 also.
It makes sense economically: an ad space is a positional good — ad customers outbid each other in an auction, which guarantees much better margins than from selling non-positional good like a newspaper itself.
We subscribe to the Boston Globe online. The cost actually went down when we signed up for the ad-laden physical Sunday paper.
I just used it to start a fire. Very cozy.