I find this mildly infuriating, I only use Windows for work, I even personally purchased Windows 11. Local account and disabled as much as I could. I personally do not like Windows or Windows in general.
Well, now I do an update and they throw this up like I need to walk thru these steps (again). Not even a “Skip”/“Don’t remind me again”. Windows is not what it used to be and after disabling half the Microsoft stuff I’d expect not to be bothered again. It’s really a built in ad more then anything.
2023-08 Cumulative Update Preview for Windows 11 Version 22H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5029351)
Use Linux
Ecactly , even though my work can be done better on a linux pc ( I am a dev) , my office has provided me with windows , since they have some group admin policy and shiz !
if you have group admin policies, then you won’t see such setup in the first place.
Note to be less pessimistic about this:
This is exactly how you are supposed to handle system settings being added to, removed or modified. You re-display a limited version of the first-run setup dialogue to the user. It feels familiar, they see it every so often, but you reduce it to the relevant pieces.
You may not like what MS changes, but from a user workflow this is sort-of the best case.
Yeah but the reason many companies stopped offering that (and we had this problem, too) is that users journalize clicking that like they click “OK” in installers or for cookies.
And when you have stuff that is important, they’re used to never interacting with it mentally.
Sure here it’s just about tracking shit and defaults, but there’s good reason to force the user to engage with something that could be an important setting.
None of these are important settings though. These are all just ads for Microsoft services. The only one that even appears remotely important, changing browser settings, is really just trying to get you to set Edge as the default browser again, so really just another advertisement.
I could imagine that for stuff like not having set up any internet connection, as long as there’s a setting to disable the reminder for those who know what they’re doing. But for these services, absolutely not, that’s literally spam at that point and arguably falls under anti spam laws which makes it illegal to not have opt-out available.
These aren’t new or changed system settings though, apart from maybe Windows Hello (which isn’t new anyway). Nearly everything on this screen is an attempt to upsell users on Microsoft’s subscription products.
If a user doesn’t want to buy those subscription products, and is given no way to properly decline, that it is a user hostile experience.
Im going to bat for Microsoft here, coming from someone who uses both for work+home.
How many tech enthusiast/pcgamers are paying customers of Microsoft? I’d bet that most of us are using grey market OEM keys or reusing a license we’ve had upgraded from a previous install.
Communities like ours love to harpe on about how 95% of people are not bothered by the invasiveness of the telemetry and advertising, yet those are the very same people that are likely subscribing to Office365, not changing their default browser from Edge, and not installing an adblocker.
These are, in a sense, the “paying customer” to whom any profit driven company would be trying to improve experience of. Setting up cloud backup, signing in to your PC with your phone, using an online account are all good things from a general user perspective. I’d bet they have the telemetry to back this up.
I wish MS would release a SKU which was targeted towards the tech enthusiast, but how would they make that profitable? Not to mention I think a lot of us have a few fundamental misunderstandings on the current situation, some examples;
- Telemetry is essential to modern software development, people don’t submit enough bug reports and nor should they be expected to for things like device drivers.
- The store/store apps is a better delivery model for software than going to a website to grab the setup.exe. It enforces standardisation, simplifies the process for devs to push updates and isolates user applications from the underlying operating system.
- Even these days you can configure Windows to not include a lot of the stuff people complain about if you’re ok with Powershell. At one point in time, being a power user in Windows for both home and work was just about knowing where the GUI buttons are. Now it is about being comfortable in a command line.
I need to purge myself after all that corporate shilling.
The Univ and College where I work are forcing every students and staff to use Office 365, and the MS authentificator app for 2fa. They pay millions every years to Microsoft for this, plus the thousand of licences for windows, etc.
Why in the world would you defend that greedy unethtical corporation that now incorporate advertisment directly in windows and keep pushing more and more of their products with every forced update. They make millions only with schools in my provinces.
Why do you need telemetry when you can simply do UX studies, which Microsoft can and already does. I’ve even been part of a few. Microsoft is also moving away from Windows being their flagship product and is focusing more on office services and azure in terms of profit.
You almost had me.
There is no way in hell Microsoft pays for UX studies and ended up where they are.
When I was studying CS I had a few courses on UX/UI design and the most interesting fact I learned there when looking for papers is: ~half the high profile researchers in the UX/UI field are on Microsoft payroll, and everything Microsoft does is highly inconsistent to contrary to all the insights of their own researchers. I think they buy as many of those people off the market as they can, just so they don’t work for somebody else, while shitting on their work, so their UX/UI just doesn’t look as bad in comparison to others.
I’d bet that most of us are using grey market OEM keys or reusing a license we’ve had upgraded from a previous install.
- It’s a hard number to figure out, maybe but I personally don’t know anyone since Windows 7 reusing licenses. But overall, a good point.
yet those are the very same people that are likely subscribing to Office365, not changing their default browser from Edge, and not installing an adblocker.
- This is another number hard to figure out. It seems to me most people who do complain about people being okay about it have at least something implemented which is still better then nothing. At least they are aware, most of the people I come across either A) Don’t even think about it, aren’t aware or B) They are aware and use at least something to reduce it.
are all good things from a general user perspective.
- Yes, I agree many of these services may be beneficial to general users who don’t have anything already. My issue is this is all covered during setup and I went out of my way to disable all the services possible, especially a Microsoft account but it keeps pushing for it…at least add a “Don’t remind me again” or something.
I wish MS would release a SKU which was targeted towards the tech enthusiast
- Yes, that would be ideal and it may be a product sold but from a business stand point I think most would still stick with using scripts etc for removing/disabling. So I could see why not.
Install. Linux.
Yes.
Yes, install Linux, yes, it’s better, yes, it’s a little different, but yes, you will like it better.
Bloat ware? Gone. Antivirus shit? Gone. Spyware? Gone. Reboots for bullshit reasons? Gone. Forced updates? Gone.
Yeah, but it’s so complicated and games don’t work because there are no drivers!
Bullshit. Drivers exist now for just a out everything and most drivers are put of the box, not like windows requiring installs. Most of not all games now work.
But I needy software X!
Many, not all, but MANY software packages out there have open source equivalents that many times are equal or better than what you’re using. If not that, Wine will allow you to run a huge amount of windows software transparently on Linux. YMMV of course but “I need software x!” barely has been an excuse anymore for using windows.
Did I mention it’s actually free, no piracy involved (though if that is your thing, lots of software available for that too)
Windows sucks. Microsoft software in general sucks. Microsoft platforms suck (looking at you there, outlook, teams, office, and SharePoint, oh my frigging god what pieces of shit you are)
Sure, backup is not something you can skip, but the others: Yes. And the backup option should show other alternatives like Veeam, otherwise they are abusing their position in the market and be banned from EU.
Yes, they dont respect the user choose either. Thinking it is their computer.
Shifting to Linux is a solution but not for everyone. Like IT only support Windows computers to minimize cost.
Me at home: If only I could pay someone to build as smooth fonts on Linux as it is on Windows in the web browser by default. Only when websites use fully custom fonts they look good. But default with new Times roman get unusual small or big without truetype etc. Also many applications in the Linux world have poor UI due to poor funding. Result is no designer and gigantic hit area for button due to too far between the buttons.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about but your typical Linux UI tends to look enormously better than windows, beauty being in the eye of the beholder of course.
The way you talk it sounds like you saw Linux 20 years ago and figured it still is stuck there. I have a 3D multi monitor desktop with all the bling you can imagine. Much of it is just that, bling, and I mostly use it to convince people that Linux is awesome (come for the bling, stay for the actual real awesomeness) bit seriously, typical Linux looks SO much better than windows… try KDE desktop, for example.
You can on a website with HTML 5 specify exactly the font and how it should be interpreted. Those look exactly the same. Good. But if they are not use then often some old font names are used with no more info than size. If nothing specified then browser default font is used. But what about anti-aliasing and handling the hinting? It is about trick the eye to think something is very round when it in reality it built based on squared pixels. Microsoft Truetype was a must when you made the transition from CRT screens to LCD screens. I have seen websites were the text makes the column wider, into the need row and messing up the whole websites layout due to this. I think what it all comes down is that Microsoft old fonts are therefore still used a lot. On Android it is all okey due to we have such high DPI screens.
Yes, over the last years fonts have improved a lot, making the Desktop look good.
My 3080 mobile didn’t work with anything but arch.
I love Linux but even I get fed up with it a lot. I do think that 90% of games work now though.
Everything driver related except my graphics cards have been great.
Just saying though, Linux isn’t a drag and drop replacement, but it’s still good
interesting. I wonder whether that’s specific to the mobile hardware. I have a 3080 running just fine on Mint.
Not gonna claim its eay to use, not gonna claim it’s easy to install, not gonna claim its easy to replace existing software wit OSS alternatives.
But damn, it feels so good.
Apparently DCS works (with lots of problems) through wine, but the trackIR doesn’t work and the HOTAS has issues. DAW works but MIDI also looks like a massive PITA…
It’s not always so simple. I would love to use Linux at work, but my work doesn’t allow me to.
I know, I had the same problem.leep asking them. I’m in the luxury position where I’ll be able to decide what we’ll be using
It’s not work as a company, but work I do in the company, that is preventing me from using linux. I am software delevoper, and we are developing desktop WinForms and WPF apps. The main problem here is that both WinForms and WPF are tied to Windows, and they are not working on any other OS. We would love to port those programs to another platform, but you can’t just port programs that are developed 10+ years overnight. Those project are just too big to port them in some normal time. And there are also 3rd party libraries, that we are required to use, that are made for .NET Framework only. I forgot to mention, that we are using .NET Framework, that is working only on Windows. We could use opensource .NET, which works also on Linux, but even in opensource .NET, both WinForms and WPF works only on Windows. We could use Avalonia instead, because it supports Linux also, but even that is not just straight forward. It would be easier to just create new programs from scratch, but you would still need to support older software, and we just don’t have time nor resources to do that.
Laughing from Ubuntu
I’m really considering switching back to Linux. I don’t really play PC games any more - I don’t have time for many games and just use my Xbox now. I do often use Visual Studio (could be replaced with Rider and VS Code), and occasionally use LaunchBox’s “BigBox” on my TV, but I could always just dual-boot. Most of the other things I do are available on Linux.
The last time I used Linux on desktop was around 2007-2008, when I dual-booted Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.06. It’d be interesting to see how much it’s improved since then. I’ve been using Debian on servers for over 20 years though, so I’m familiar with Linux administration.
Congrats on the consideration pal.
I use Ubuntu for my personal desktop and work desktop, and it works smoothly without “Microsoft surprises” like this post. I also don’t game in PC.
Want to make an easier move? If your Windows is EUFI boot, shrink your Windows partition in half, and on the other half install Ubuntu.
Then you can slowly, in your own pase, start doing more things in the Ubuntu partition, until you’ll find yourself not using the Windows partition anymore.
Not happy? Just remove the Ubuntu partition afterwards, and go back to Windows.
The last time I used Linux on desktop was around 2007-2008
Oh dear lord! You have no idea how much things have improved. I think you’ll be in for a nice surprise.
Also, games work fine on Linux now. The only games that don’t work are ones with invasive anticheat. Or if a developer is stubborn, like FacePunch. I can’t play on official Rust servers, but connecting to a friend’s who has EAC disabled (it’s a private server), it works 100%.
I think you’ll be in for a nice surprise.
Hopefully I don’t have to manually tweak ALSA configs for hours to get sound working any more :)
Any distros you’d recommend? I was just going to try Debian, but I’ve heard that Linux Mint is good too?
Vast majority of games work just fine on linux, can’t say for launchbox (looks like just a game launcher, if so, you can use Steam Big Picture mode, even for non-steam games, emulators etc.)
Visual Studio does not work, but if you’re a C# developer, there are cross-platform alternatives like VSCode and Rider.
Note: probably don’t use Ubuntu if you’re trying to escape a corproation dictacting how to use your computer though
Note: probably don’t use Ubuntu if you’re trying to escape a corproation dictacting how to use your computer though
Honestly I’d probably just run Debian. All the hardware on my desktop PC is a few years old now so I’m not too worried about compatibility issues. I’ve heard that Linux Mint is good too?
Visual Studio does not work, but if you’re a C# developer, there are cross-platform alternatives like VSCode and Rider.
I’m considering trying Rider. I really like ReSharper and know that a lot of its refactorings are included in Rider too.
VS Code is great too. For personal projects, I actually use VS Code and Visual Studio at the same time - VS Code for frontend JS, and Visual Studio for backend C#.
can’t say for launchbox (looks like just a game launcher, if so, you can use Steam Big Picture mode, even for non-steam games, emulators etc.)
I have a bunch of games in it, for example the whole library of NES, SNES, Sega Mega Drive, etc. games. It’s a nice interface for launching them. Maybe there’s an equivalent that runs on Linux, otherwise I could add just the emulators to Steam.
