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Windows will let european users uninstall many system components such as Bing or Edge soon
(blogs.windows.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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So, they went to the trouble of keeping a different set of functionalities just for Europe instead of unshittifying Windows for everyone. Wow.
So it must be worth a lot of money to force al of that stuff on users right?
Nobody would be using their ad-bloated software otherwise
Is it that bad now? I don’t use windows products in my private life, only at work. And I don’t find things that bad over there, but maybe that’s because it’s windows for business
Your business sysadmins will have gone through the trouble of getting rid of any bullshit. My companies windows installs are more chill than default win11 versions.
Yeah, just like a home user can if they bothered looking into the settings.
~Sincerely a sysadmin
And tweaked some things here and there.
And dusted some stuff off.
And debloated a bit.
I’ll be sure to thank them!
It's not. People just like to complain. Ad-bloat in the Camera, and Photos app? Edge doesn't show more ads than other browsers without an ad-blocker. I don't think Cortana is specifically pushing ads and Web Search from Bing... well Google is also pushing ads wherever they can.
This is not about ads, it's about choice.
Edge used to be fine until the recent GPT craze. Now they added a giant obnoxious Bing AI circle ad in the top right. Bing is of course default everywhere. At this point I'm just waiting for the MSN bar to reappear
You're partly right, it is not about ads. It is about the integrated control of your camera, your media & other peripherals/software/data by Cortana - which rings home all day long - all from behind closed source software which does who-knows-what with the information it gathers.
You can use Linux for free which has never been shittified.
How quickly they forget. Canonical added Amazon ads to Ubuntu 10 years ago. They walked it back after huge backlash, but don’t believe that any corporate-backed Linux is immune to “shittifying”.
The good thing about that is that you have the choice to avoid Ubuntu and still retain 100% functionality (at least as a private user), but there's only a small handful of Windows versions with extremely minor differences.
There are plenty of community backed distros to install instead.
Linux distributions and/or components have been, and will be, shittified repeatedly. Not as badly as commercial operating systems, but pretty bad anyway.
Because it has never been good enough for the average terminal-averse user to begin with.
You don't need that in todays world. Otherwise the Steam Deck would have been dead on arrival
Counter-point, on the Steam Deck/ SteamOS almost anything involving getting past the one app shell (Steam) or installing from a store (flathub) requires terminal and often does not survive system updates. It honestly sounds like Windows 8 typing it out.
There are plenty of distros which can be operated entirely through graphical user interfaces. Ubuntu, for example.
You have not seen a Linux in what, 20 years now?
I love Linux, but I'll admit what you say has some credence.
Linux has a lot of polish now. Most big distros are going to have an easy to use GUI installer, and there are several mature very usable desktop environments.
But, for example, if a new user has an nvidia card it's probably going to be a poor experience for them and they won't understand why or how to fix it. So there's shortcomings there. I blame nvidia for this specific issue, but your average user probably doesn't care about that. They just want their video card to work well.
It is definitely getting better. I've been running the same Arch installation with KDE for the last 5 years at work. Surprisingly stable and had little to no issues.
Still, the issues I did have required a basic understanding of what a package manager is, what does sudo do, and other general linux knowledge.
The results difference between a newbie googling "wifi doesnt work" and an experienced user googling "networkmanager service logs showing error XY" is just too great.
Hmm... but the registry hooks for those uninstalls must be in there even if the option isn't surfaced in the UI right?
Maintaining different UI options is one thing, maintaining completely different OS versions is another... and it seems like it would be prohibitively complex and expensive to do that.
Probably all you'd need is for someone with the EU version to export a backup of the relevant parts of their registry, and distribute that so anyone who wants to can have the same uninstall options. The trick would be keeping it that way through Windows updates.
Well, they are no longer allowed to milk victims in the EU thanks to good laws. That does not mean they cannot exploit those who are not protected.
Don't worry, they'll invent a new way of milking in no time.
$$$ > $$
That sweet sweet data collection $$