The are a number of Windows settings for turning off what it calls "suggestions". Do a search in the Settings app for "suggest", click "Show all results" and see what comes up. Amongst them are:
* Show suggestions occasionally in Start
* Show suggestions in your timeline
* Suggest ways I can finish setting up my device to get the most out of Windows
* Get tips, tricks and suggestions as you use Windows
* Turn off suggested content in the Settings app
Changing these settings can greatly reduce Windows 10 spam.
Also consider this script if you're reinstalling Windows.
The fact that it needs to exist in the first place is itself a bit of an indictment of Windows 10, but running this during the Windows installation process will give you a nice, clean, non-animated desktop and start menu, with all of the shovelware and ads neatly excised and the privacy settings set to sensible values (admittedly for certain values of sensible, given that you can't disable all of the telemetry in most versions):
Imagine paying money for an os and having to go through this song and dance to not have your productivity tool become an ad infested unproductivity tool
Admittedly, it is awful and stupid. On the other hand, those of us who use it find the alternative to be even worse despite being free. Imagine what problems must exist with that alternative for this to be true.
> Some of us find the alternatives to be really really good compared to Windows.
Yeah, and some of us don't. A lot of us, actually. I personally get kinda sick of the arrogance of people who think they're above everyone else because they chose a different operating system.
Somebody just wants to choose their operating system without the whole market being coerced by a large hedgemonic monopoly and then you yell down from your ivory tower that everybody but you is arrogant.
Some people would like to use FreeBSD and other free Unix OSs without having to kowtow to Linuxisms too. It isn't the fault of Linux users that they have to do so.
No, it says "the pop-up will appear even when Microsoft Edge is the default browser... The company is not targeting people who use Google Chrome and Firefox as default browsers."
I.e., it shows up for everyone, not just people who aren't using Edge already. They aren't specifically targeting Chrome and Firefox users; they are just also included in the group.
It's interesting. Lots of people pay and put up with ads for the convenience of cable TV. But I'll happily pay and memorize where my shows are to enjoy Netflix, Hulu and one or two other streaming apps so I can avoid ads but still enjoy my shows (though for network shows, there's often a waiting period before I get to watch them). There, the price difference per month was one of the driving factors.
With my PC, I could dual boot, as it's just reassuring that I can fire up my favorite games and they "just work" on whatever the latest Windows OS is I'm running, and the convenience factor is so much higher now that I'm running WSL2 and can do various Linux things, too. But cost-wise, well I've only ever paid for Windows when buying a pre-made system. When building, I've gotten various free versions of Windows over the years, like when I did a "Windows party" for the launch of 7, and they sent me a free copy of Ultimate (which was free to upgrade to 8->8.1->10. But obviously not available in general if you want a Windows license.)
And the cost of time... to fiddle with Linux and try to get all my Blizzard games working, maybe it's not as bad as it is in my head, but it seems like a hassle, and quite often, my spouse and my family members and my friends and I spontaneously want to jump into a game of StarCraft 2 or Valheim or Diablo 3, and I don't want anything causing me to stop what I'm doing and try to troubleshoot it for 2 hours while everyone else plays.
So, I run only Windows, and I put up with the once or twice a year that a new update comes out and potentially introduces some kind of notification or extra Start Menu tile, and I turn that thing off, and then I go on with my life without it. If I could have Linux with a "Windows gaming" channel like Netflix that always just worked for every game I play or will play in the future, I think I'd certainly consider switching to that. But for now, I'm not confident enough that everything I use my PC for would "just work" if I switched, with the same performance and lack of troubleshooting, so I do not do so.
I just do work stuff on my Linux machine and play stuff on my Windows machine. Couldn't be happier! I've been running Manjaro Linux on 3 workstations for over 2 years now and, as a web developer who does mostly Node/React/React Native, I haven't needed anything from Windows. The best part is not having to fiddle with Windows specific issues all the time.
I have even worked on .net core projects with vs code and run SQL server in a docker container.
Definitely curious about the .NET Development experience in Linux. My past includes a lot of Visual Studio + SQL Server Management Studio, and I'll be working on some Azure data stuff in the future. For now I'll rely on Windows for that, but I'll still hold a small piece of my brain in curiosity mode.
Oh yeah SSMS was one thing I missed. Switching to Azure Data Studio was slightly painful since it didn't handle big SQL files as well and the UI was generally a bit slower, especially with large result sets.
However, I forgot to mention - FreeRDP is a wonderful tool and it works perfectly for me. If and when I need to use a Windows only tool like SQL Server Profiler, it's easy to RDP over to a Windows machine to do that.
I know lots of people do everything on their one computer, but I just love keeping all the OSes separate so I don't have to deal with the possibility that some interoperability layer is actually causing me issues. And look what you can get for $299 that Linux will run perfectly on after you throw an SSD in there - https://www.amazon.com/HP-EliteDesk-800-Cerfified-Refurbishe... - and you can go even cheaper if you get an i5-4590 or i5-3470 instead. For a laptop, I have an old (2015) Acer Aspire E5 that runs Manjaro perfectly as well.
Here are the instructions to setup the dotnet host and runtime on an Arch based distro (Although, I just use the GUI add/remove software control panel in Manjaro called Pamac) - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/.NET_Core
It's fine. I use Rider, and work with databases through its built-in tools, which are pretty decent (the same functionality as their separate paid product DataGrip). I've never needed Windows in 4 years of doing this.
Aside: Search in Settings is a bad user experience.
If I search for "suggest", click a result, press mouse-back button: It loses my search results. I sent back to a blank index page.
So I have to search "suggest", find my place in the results, click result, back, search again, remember where I am, click, back, search, etc etc.
If you're going to make desktop software "browser-like" then actually commit. Don't add a back button but not have it act like a browser back button. Just obnoxious.
There are so many things that need/should be turned off nowadays in Windows that it is ridiculous. And some "features" are nearly impossible to turn off... you would think that Windows was free software with all that crap that comes with it.
Just this week, I discovered that even after installing Python from the official website, if you happen to run a script that executes "python3" instead of "python", you'll instead trigger an unhelpful link to the Microsoft Store suggesting to install python from there.
Yes, the command line itself has ads for the store sprinkled throughout it.
Later, when I needed to pull down the Rust compiler, I discovered that the C++ redistributable package, despite not including Visual Studio, helpfully adds an explorer shell link to "Open in Visual Studio" which I suspect is meant to open the Store again, though on my system it appears to do nothing. So that's another ad.
Clearly I'm not the target audience for this kind of stuff, being a Linux administrator and using that as my daily driver, but there's still something inherently creepy about all of this. I don't trust marketers, or the advertising industry at large, and while I understand Microsoft is a business and is necessarily going to engage in some marketing, there's a time and a place. Basic features of my operating system are not it.
Even worse, you're paying to be spammed by Windows. This overly-creepy direction Windows is taking is, more than anything else, why I don't trust their recent seeming friendliness to FOSS.
Even Android doesn't get that intrusive, not that it's much better.
if you happen to run a script that executes "python3"
Funny thing is, this is actually wrong on Windows and always has been. Unless I'm missing something. I recently traced back the earliest python3 installer on the official ftp site of python.org and even that one didn't have a python3 command. No official installers seem to have had it. Nor does an Anaconda install. So I don't really know why the 'official' (that is, the one on the MS store) is pushing python3 as a command (apart from 'other OS do have this'). Anyone has any insight on this?
Yes, the command line itself has ads
Technically it's just an executable in the PATH so anything, including any terminal application, which uses that gets it.
helpfully adds an explorer shell link to "Open in Visual Studio
Care to post the link to that installer? Never saw that, curious to see which one that is.
The official Python installer in the Windows App store installs a handler for python and python3 .. or rather, the stub of the handlers already on your system calls into the app store and it's behavior changes after installation. Regardless of the technical implementation, after you install Python3 from the app store, running python3 from the command line will open the Python interpreter.
No clue why the standard non-app store installer doesn't add python3 to the path to mimic this behavior.
The standalone installer is quite old and frankly weird. You're meant to use `py -3` or something like that. I don't know why it works this way. Tbh I think the official store installer works much more sensibly.
Back when I had a large python2 and python3 code bases side by side, I had a small handler that I installed for .py files that read the #! line and tried to figure out which python version to call, and defaulted to Python3 if it couldn't find a #! line. I always felt this was the "correct" way of solving this.
Nowadays, I just only install Python3 on machines, so it's not really a problem for me anymore.
"Yes, the command line itself has ads for the store sprinkled throughout it." - this is a bit of a leap... Those helper scripts have been mostly applauded in the Python community for offering an easy way to get Python installed on a Windows computer. If you are seeing the store links after installing the official version of Python, then you've probably just got an issue with your PATH. Perhaps you chose not to add Python to the PATH?
Yes, and as a linux admin and user who is stuck on MacOS for work, it drives me absolutely nuts, even more so when people defend apple or microsoft with justifications that the other does it. They both suck.
I don't really think being told to run `xcode-select --install` is worse than being thrown into the Microsoft Store, because one is a flow-breaking action, and the other is not. If I'm at a Terminal and I don't have something installed, the fastest way to resolve the problem is with a Terminal command.
It's not that simple. That command forced me over to the app-store to log into my apple id the last time I ran it for example. You may run it enough or be inside the ecosystem enough that you haven't run into that, but then when my apple-id had errors (I don't buy apps, and only have it because apple forces you to, so I almost never log in with it), I couldn't install xcode... and had to go find a fix on some random forums. Now that I finally fixed all that, the updates are smoother, but it wasn't a pleasent initial experience and did not allow me to stay in the terminal.
iOS and OSX are littered with Ads. I've even seen ads in Apple apps (Music for example) where there shouldn't be any (for example, popping up a full screen ad in front of the screen to play a song I already own). I use both Apple and Microsoft OSs on a daily basis. Anyone who thinks Apple doesn't do this stuff isn't paying attention.
No. At worst it prompts you to download and install the Command Line Tools (all actionable inside the prompt; it doesn’t use the App Store) if you try to run a command not included in the OS by default like `git`.
In fairness, annoyed though I was, the command line message you get in Windows includes directions into the settings page to disable the feature, and any others like it while you're in there.
The real surprise was mostly that python3.exe isn't included in the 3.9.x download, despite the documentation mentioning it in a few places. Since the error message didn't name drop the executable, and it appeared python was otherwise installed and working (and even available as "python" on PATH) it took some sleuthing to locate the real issue. I'm sure there's a better fix than copying "python.exe" and renaming it "python3.exe" but that worked, and I had stuff to do, so it's fine. :)
Windows doesn't present you with any actions or choices inside the command prompt. It just immediately opens the Microsoft Store to the Python 3.9 page.
It doesn't do that, if you install git in some other way (via homebrew, or manually). So it is definitely different from this:
> even after installing Python from the official website, if you happen to run a script that executes "python3" instead of "python", you'll instead trigger an unhelpful link to the Microsoft Store
The point is that python3 was already in place, and the package on the official website only created the python executable, so the stub linked to the Microsoft Store wasn't overwritten.
This is no different than macOS. If you don't overwrite the existing stubs, you get the "install xcode" message when running git or cc.
But if Apple does it, it's OK because they're the good guys.
There's no overwriting stubs in MacOS. With SIP enabled, not even root can write into /usr (the apple stub is /usr/bin/git).
Many users use git from homebrew; once you do 'brew install git', the stub won't bother you, despite homebrew not overwriting anything. It is just earlier in the $PATH. And that's the issue with Windows: the standard installer does create python3.exe, it is just later in the %PATH%, because Microsoft placed the stub in one of the early directories. Normal, well behaved installer, which places its entry at the end won't be able to override anything.
- google can push chrome on people in their search results. and google pushed HARD. So hard they dominate the browser market and chrome is unfortunately not known for privacy.
- google pretty much makes it impossible to get away from chrome entirely in android. Example being that you MUST use chrome webview when using the google search app. Even though everything else uses firefox for me.
- ms doesn't have search results. sure they try with bing but its not nearly as good or widespread. MS does have windows itself though, so they push where they can.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to MS at the moment. And this is coming from the pitchforks and torches guy against IE6/7/8/9 back in the day.
No there won’t. The only reason why there was an anti-trust case against MSFT back in the day was because MSFT was too busy making and neglected to do political “contributions”.
Silicon Valley took noticed and now they are the top political “contributors”.
The difference is that people are stuck thinking it's still 1997 and that when Google does it, it must be good, because Google is an upstart and on our side. When Microsoft does it, it must be evil, because they're big and evil Microsoft and not on our side.
Microsoft and Google are both monopolies, and thus bad for competition. One has a desktop/server operating system and office productivity monopoly and the other search and smartphone software monopoly.
Google figured out that to compete with Microsoft and Apple you have to basically give it away for free. Look no further than Android and Google docs.
> - google can push chrome on people in their search results. and google pushed HARD. So hard they dominate the browser market and chrome is unfortunately not known for privacy.
I didn't pay Google $200 (Windows 10 Pro retaile I payed for recently) for the privilege to use their search, so they are free to push some advertising alongside it. When I will pay $200 to use their search then I don't want any advertising from Google either.
> - google pretty much makes it impossible to get away from chrome entirely in android. Example being that you MUST use chrome webview when using the google search app. Even though everything else uses firefox for me.
Funny, I have used InBrowser ever since I started using Android 10 years ago (which btw, makes it possible to read all those news articles without running into free article monthly limits because InBrowser doesn't store any state between sessions). Doesn't seem impossible to not use Chrome at all to me.
> - ms doesn't have search results. sure they try with bing but its not nearly as good or widespread. MS does have windows itself though, so they push where they can.
They are free to do whatever they want with their software but I don't find it acceptable to pay $200 for that and still get ads. If they were to give me Windows 10 Pro for free, then sure, go ahead and put a bunch of ads on my desktop.
> google can push chrome on people in their search results. and google pushed HARD.
And still push hard. I use whichever browser is most "native" to the platform I'm using at the moment (Safari on macOS, Edge on Windows, Firefox on Linux) so I see prompts to install Chrome constantly. Very irritating.
Pushed extremely hard: no one else was allowed to advertise on the front page of Google, not even humanitarian organisations during the worst disasters as far as I know. Chrome were allowed.
Still pushing hard: if I open the gmail app on my iPad and click a link it pretends I need to choose a browser every single time it seems and one if the choices is always Chrome (that I haven't installed and won't install).
I've already been writing relevant authorities here (Norway) twice last year and I'll keep pushing.
The moment they kill competition, that moment ad blocking disappears.
How did you get it to do that? I have a Pixel 4a, but the Google app will only open results in a Chrome webview, even when I use Firefox or Brave as my default browser everywhere else. I don't use the Pixel launcher if that matters. I would actually like to fix it.
Edit: I figured it out. I'm not allowed to uninstall Chrome, but disabling it made it finally use Brave as a fallback. So they actually implement using whatever browser you want, but they just ignore it unless it's actually impossible to use Chrome.
You can open the destination pages in your chosen browser with the Google Search App in Android: (1) Tap "More" at the bottom of the screen, (2) Tap "Settings", (3) Tap "General". Then disable "Open web pages in the app".
You can choose not to use google (it's hard but possible - my default search is DDG on all my machines - amusingly that uses MS Bing for the most part).
However, if you want a non-Mac PC, your choices are slim to none to avoid Windows.
Microsoft a convicted monopolist, DoJ has acted twice already against them. Google isn's there yet.
The fact that they regularly "accidentally" reset the default browser or "suggest" Edge on my Windows 10 machine is probably helping those numbers a lot.
How often have you had windows switch your default browser? Genuinely curious as I've been using Windows 10 since release and have never had my default browser switched away from Firefox.
I've been on w10 since release too, and i can't recall it ever changing default apps. I also don't have the cmd adds or the task bar adds these people are talking about either.
Ironically Firefox's privacy orientated features may make it appear artificially unpopular in certain rankings.
For example Wikimedia shows Firefox at 12%~ of desktop browser usage whereas W3Counter has it at only 6.1% and StatCounter 7.95%. With the latter two being JavaScript based.
No idea what Edge's vertical tabs look like, but I like vertical tabs in Firefox because it lets you have simultaneously on screen a ton of open tabs without reducing the tab's size.
I don't care about the loss of horizontal space most of the time. I have a 16:9 screen and most web pages grow vertically anyway.
As a matter of fact I use a vertical Windows taskbar as well, since it lets me have many applications open while still displaying their window titles. It's not usual for me to have 5 file explorer windows open, and their taskbar buttons won't combine.
Yes precisely, standard tabs get unusable quickly. I know some people can deal with dozens of tabs shrunken down to the size of a favicon, but I can't.
I wish vertical tabs were a standard option on all browsers, especially on Firefox where you need userchrome hacking on top of an extension to get something usable — userchrome css is deprecated and going away, which means integration deeper than is offered by extensions will be necessary in the future.
It is possible to display more than one application on screen at arbitrary sizes, so the shape of the window should be what matters, not the shape of the display. Browsing maximized on a 27" widescreen display is an uncomfortable waste of space. Vertical tabs or not.
Especially if you have an ultra wide screen this becomes really noticeable. Vertical real estate is precious (and which way do pages/phones scroll?) - but horizontal is not.
They won't remove it outright but we will get the option to collapse it. I've been using this mode on Canary ever since it landed and I honestly love it. Currently it's hidden behind a flag in pre-release builds but Stable should get it too in a matter of weeks.
Yeah, but that's Firefox and Edge fighting over scraps while Chrome, which has more than four times the market share of both of them combined (67% vs. 8% each), is still eating their lunch...
Edge is perfect for Windows or Microsoft 365 shops, and it's now the default Windows browser so obviously it helps. The suggestions are so bad, I would be suprised if it did anything other than pissing people off.
While this is likely yet another bad move by Microsoft I hope this pushes web devs to start focusing on web apps and puts a stop to all those websites packaged with a browser that are around 200MB each.
I think I used the wrong word, I meant to say this is likely going to become another wasted effort for something people aren't going to use much or at all.
I spent hours at the weekend making a windows 10 image with as much bloat disabled as possible. It looks like after just a few days, Microsoft have given me more stuff to remove. I only use it for gaming, so maybe my efforts would be better spent on getting games to work on Linux?
Most games work! Notably, if the game you're playing doesn't have an anti-cheat that's deeply tied to the kernel then there's a good chance it will work with Wine (or Steam Play's version of it) out of the box. The anti-cheats that are deeply tied to the Windows kernel are usually dumpster fires of remote code execution so I don't think there's much of a loss there.
Things I never liked - spending hours debugging WINE issues or browsing the wine compatibility website trying to get things to work to play a video game, which I'm already using to get away from doing tedious work.
These days, most games run fine out of the box with proton. As the parent comment stated, it's mostly games that rely on invasive anti-cheats that don't work. For example, PUBG, Due Process, Valorant, etc... aka competitive multiplayer games.
If one really wants to they can dual-boot with windows, but I've found the better option is to just play games that do run well on linux, like tf2, etc.
Having to use something like Steam (Internet based DRM) to play games effortlessly on Linux seems to beat the purpose. At that point I'd rather just have a separate Windows 10 install where all I do is just gaming.
You don't have to use Steam. I just use it as a one-stop shop for updates and launching. Some games work in native Linux and most of the rest work fine in plain Wine.
If you don't like Steam as a launcher then there's also Lutris and GOG.
By now there are plenty of tools out there which turn hours (I hope we don't have to take that literally? Unless you're not used to Windows and/or there's even more bloat than I know of) into a couple of minutes though. Check e.g. O&O ShutUp 10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10. Or else use an IOT or LTSC release or so.
Not only that but that point people are just running things they don't even know what they are doing and not all or them are open source. I started working on a DSC to actually changed the LGPO instead of just changing a bunch of registry keys so people can at least see what was changed from gpedit.
It's a little tricky to buy, but anyone can do it. I also like that it gives you multiple activation keys out of the box. Unfortunately it's a little pricey compared to OEM; it's about $300.
what version are you running. I reinstall my os every year, and I only disable start menu bing suggestions. I have no adds or default bloatware in my win10 pro and I've been doing this for years.
> It’s worth noting that the pop-up will appear even when Microsoft Edge is the default browser and you’ve already pinned sites to the taskbar. The company is not targeting people who use Google Chrome and Firefox as default browsers.
That statement implies to me that they are also advertising to people who aren't using Edge.
This is how the first sentence should read with correct parenthesization: "It’s worth noting that the pop-up will appear even (when Microsoft Edge is the default browser AND you’ve already pinned sites to the taskbar)"
Hmmm... good point. It would be nice if the article clearly confirmed whether the suggestions would appear for those with third-party default browsers.
> "the pop-up will appear even when Microsoft Edge is the default browser... The company is not targeting people who use Google Chrome and Firefox as default browsers."
Translation: it will show up for everyone, not just for Chrome and Firefox users.
It's a weird sentence. Doesn't "The company is not targeting people who use Google Chrome and Firefox as default browsers." imply that they aren't showing it to Chrome and Firefox users?
The former part seems to imply to me that you get this suggestion even if you've already used the feature.
> imply that they aren't showing it to Chrome and Firefox users?
No. It says that Chrome and Firefox users are not specifically targeted, it says nothing about then not getting the suggestions when they are a part of wider group, like Windows users.
I've been using Edge's pinned web apps feature for quite a while now. I love it. I've got pinned "apps" for a number of different PaaS portals, a number of different API documentation sites, a couple of internal apps at work, SoundCloud, YouTube Music, Teamwork, Twitter, etc. It's about 50/50 web-apps vs native apps. It's pretty great.
Apple's EULA prohibits you from installing their OS on anything but their own hardware- so they make their money there.
Microsoft trying that would absolutely kill the company- either by lawsuit or people getting up in arms over anti-competitive behavior. They make a small amount every few years when you buy a new computer, and hope you'll also pay for their other software (or give them data, which is tantamount to the same thing).
Given the upgrade cycle for computers, they are making substantially less (and OEM gets a massive discount over the store shelf price of windows).
Since they arent getting a massive markup on very well integrated, mediocre hardware, they need to sell more than just Windows. Office, SharePoint, etc are where the real money is at for them.
For free... Only after you buy their (overpriced) proprietary hardware. Where could I download a copy of their OS, for free, to install on my non-Apple desktop? Okay now do you see why that isn't a fair comparison?
It's pretty fair. You pay money - you get a product. In Windows, you pay money - you get ads and tracking.
edit:
To make it clear to people not reading the comment carefully, I'm not saying MacOS is "free". I'm merely saying that once you pay for the computer, the OS is included in the price.
And there is no additional monetization under the form of ads or tracking. Unlike in the Windows world, where you pay for the license, yet you are still being tracked and served ads.
I'm not defending Windows here, but you buy an Apple computer, you get the computer and their software. You can't get either independently without paying for the other, but neither could be considered "free."
>it is fair competition because in both cases you paid money for the product
The comment you replied to was a response to calling MacOS free, and was entirely about that topic. It's not a fair comparison to call MacOS free, that isn't justifying Microsoft's actions though.
Off the top of my head, Windows has advertised or directly installed Edge (are you suuuuure you don't want to default it?), OneDrive (in file explorer, no less), Office 365, Bing (in the system search bar), Xbox something or other, Candy Crush, Teams, Skype, and probably several others that I'm forgetting.
I would argue that macOS does have some advertisements , mostly for Apple services, they just tend to be cleaner and better integrated. (Also the free bit is a little fuzzy as the costs are baked into the hardware.) Microsoft is far more guilty however.
Imagine how nice Windows 10 would be if Microsoft didn't own Bing, Xbox, and Office.
Really where? I’ve never heard of adverts on a MacBook for their hardware at all. Only one is for iCloud and that’s if you got their 5GB limit. Other services for when launch the app for the first time and safari for when you use a browser for the first time that’s not safari.
* When I buy a new Macbook or upgrade the OS, I get a "walkthrough" of new features which tends to include integration with other Apple devices.
* Most Apple apps (e.g. Home, Messages, Photos, Maps, Podcasts, FindMy) advertise their integration with other Apple hardware.
* Only pre-installed browser is Safari, and the homepage is apple.com.
They might not be blatant, but I'd highly surprised if the marketing department isn't involved in their placement. They don't, for example, mention any competing products.
Also, there's no obvious reason Apple has to advertise the Apple Music subscription when I open the app to play my own MP3s.
>Imagine how nice Windows 10 would be if Microsoft didn't own Bing, Xbox, and Office.
Maybe I'm cynical, but if MS is adding ads to the OS that you paid for, then how much worse would it be if they didn't have these other platforms raising money to offset as well. I'm imagining your OS with a desktop that looks like a NASCAR car and driver's suit.
At this point they pretty much do. You can download an ISO of Windows 10 Pro, install it and never pay or register it and it will work fine indefinitely with no real restrictions. Last time I tried it, it just prevented setting the background image.
I've seen ads in the form of notifications. And Apple Music and Apple News tried to guide me to subscribe to those services even though both do have functionality that doesn't require subscribing.
Also the OS isn't free. When you buy an Apple computer, you're also purchasing a license to use macOS on that machine.
As others have pointed out, it's more accurate to say that Apple includes an OS with their hardware. Similarly, Microsoft includes an OS with the hardware they sell, but they also sell the OS to hardware vendors (their customer) or direct to consumer.
Now to say "virtually every corner of the experience" seems like a massive overreach. When you first install Windows, or buy hardware with Windows, you are likely to find some advertisements, i.e. programs pre-installed, and start menu tiles that offer other things they want you to install. And there is this obnoxious taskbar notification, which I abhor! It happens once after a major software update.
That doesn't cover nearly all corners of the Windows experience, though. It's just two items, and you can uninstall or dismiss the notification and it mostly never shows up again (except next time they release a major update.) About 363 days of the year, I will see zero advertisements in my Windows 10 experience from Microsoft.
Now, I'm not saying we give them a pass. We should absolutely be critical of these user hostile moves, but we should describe the experience using accurate terms and phrases.
I don't get the question. You can only run macOS legally on a Mac, there's no other option. And any new-ish (ten years or so) Mac is able to download the latest supported macOS completely for free.
So the OS is basically included in the product (just like a washing machine or a car) and upgrades are free.
Legally, you can run macOS anywhere you want. Apple cannot and has not stopped anyone from doing that. There is no court of law anywhere which will prevent an end-user from doing what they want with macOS.
However, you most certainly are paying for the OS whenever you buy Apple's overpriced hardware. Perhaps the receipt does not state this fact, but we all know that the only way anyone will get macOS is if someone gives Apple money. So, the people giving Apple money are all paying for macOS... And if you're one of those people, you've paid for macOS.
Saying that you're not paying for the OS is like saying that you're not paying for solar panels when you sign a 15 year deal with some energy company middle-man. It's like saying that you're not paying the full price of a smartphone when you buy it subsidized from the phone carrier. You actually end up paying more for the solar panels and the smart phone in those cases. In this case, you're most likely paying more for the OS as well.
If you want to play games with semantics, anything you want can be true.
> Legally, you can run macOS anywhere you want. Apple cannot and has not stopped anyone from doing that. There is no court of law anywhere which will prevent an end-user from doing what they want with macOS.
I think you'll quickly find out that's not the case if you, for example, start a macOS VPS hosting company that doesn't use Macs or that lends them for shorter time periods than one day.
> Apple's overpriced hardware
This meme needs to die, now more than ever (because of Apple Silicon).
> ...for example, start a macOS VPS hosting company that doesn't use Macs or that lends them for shorter time periods than one day.
That's not an end-user doing whatever they want, that's a company providing macOS to end-users. End users can do whatever they want.
> Apple's overpriced hardware...This meme needs to die, now more than ever (because of Apple Silicon).
Apple Silicon has nothing to do with overpriced base systems, SSD/RAM upgrades and overpriced accessories. Everybody knows Apple hardware is overpriced.
The fact that you actually get less functionality out of Apple hardware adds to the cost. For instance, I have an old 2012 Mac Pro among many other machines in my home/office. The amount of time, money and effort I had to spend to keep this thing running was ridiculous. I had to buy an RX580 to be able to upgrade it to the latest OS and then I had to spend time researching how to fix their locked down piece of shit UEFI loader so I could boot into a better OS (that would be Manjaro). After that I had to spend hours working around all sorts of little Apple-specific oddities like accessing settings that would be in a BIOS on a better computer.
Apple Silicon adds to the cost too because it's incompatible with everything. Now you can do even less stuff with your Mac, but you can do it really fast!
Any other PC in the house would have just worked. This one looks cool though and it's built like a tank so I spent my time figuring it out.
This may be true for Surface Book- an uber-high-end device. But almost any other Surface device you buy through consumer channels has "Windows 10 Home" edition on it. If you want to use it for business to join a domain, you still have to pay the $100 "Microsoft Tax" to upgrade the edition to Pro. The last 20+ Surface devices I've purchased were all this way.
You've been ordering the wrong SKU then, look for "Surface Go 2 for Business" as an example (the lowest end Surface) and it comes with Pro for less than the cost of upgrading from the Home version.
If you're a Microsoft partner or resell there are also options available for ordering for use with Enterprise volume licensing.
Something something Apple makes a bit over 40% in margin on $1000+ devices, and growing even higher for their higher priced devices. They can afford to not have advertisements.
Same for me - but the problem is we have to continue jumping through hoops to hide all the garbage MS is pushing in our face in Windows.
Once every x months, I have to install a larger Windows update - which has me click through a bunch of screens AGAIN, having to avoid accepting some kind of ad-pushing nonsense and tracking.
Generally there's a few lines script that disable a lot of stuff like onedrive, app stores, blabla and that's almost all I did when it comes to those things
I did it after fresh instal and didn't have to do anything for years.
I agree that sometimes there's that privacy settings screen once a few months
iOS Music app regularly asks me about Apple Music subscription.
Every corner of my Windows 10 experience is not riddled with advertisements. All I have to do is to remove few built-in partner apps after Windows install which I'm doing every few years.
You're really exaggerating it. I don't like that Microsoft tries to monetize already sold Windows. But it's not that bad. Open web browser with a typical website and you'll have every corner of the experience riddled with advertisements. That's truly embarrassing.
Interesting.
Don't you all think there is a site missing in the recommendation list that most average PC users would prefer? Perhaps a way to search the web?
That's my point, You don't pin Bing first however. After you pin the first set of sites it then shows the option to pin the search engine that does less than 5% of searches in the US. ;).
My point here is that it pretends to be neutral and allows Reddit, Fb, and Youtube...But google is nowhere to be found.
I've been avoiding Google for a while. Its search results have become significantly less quality than DuckDuckGo -- which I hear is a rebranded Bing anyway.
I am really disappointed in how Microsoft has managed Windows 10. It started with forced windows updates. Then it went to searches in the start menu triggering Bing web searches (which seems like a massive privacy/security issue). And now this. Windows occupies a space where it is more geared for power users than MacOS but easier to use than Linux. Instead of capitalizing on that identity, it is turning into something more like ad-supported spamware.
I really want to give Linux a shot for daily driver use on a laptop and desktop, and have avoided it thus far because it seems intimidating and potentially tricky to get right (for example I worry about getting security right). Are there any trustworthy guides that introduce newer users to using Linux as a daily driver?
All my auto-updates are off. I only update "manually" and one thing for the duration, so that I can isolate any eventual issues.
And Microsoft Updates specifically are banned for at least 6 months. I wasn't affected when it occurred, but I sure as hell won't let them exercise their incompetence of the "update deletes your data, users are our testers in production" kind upon me. (INB4: Yes, I do backup.)
I'm so lost. I see these "ms adding shit feature" to windows articles all the time, I go looking for the feature and I can't find it for the life of me. I have auto updates turned on, and the only "modification" I have is I disable bing suggestions in search.
why is it that some people see all this crap, and I'm just sitting here thinking win10 is working perfect and is the best os to date
Every time there's a major Windows update, I trawl through ALL the settings disabling marketing profile-enhancing 'features' like this. I find my online life is considerably less cluttered without them.
When I was a kid I remember Windows getting better every time it updated, and especially when new versions came out. Was I just ignorant? Why does the last five years feel like a whole new type of fuckery?
Because it was about 5 years ago Windows 10 launched and they switched from a model of getting people to buy copies of their OS, to making Windows into an ever-evolving service that exists to get people into the Microsoft ecosystem.
Now I remember why I never converted to Windows 10.
I still have a Windows 7 machine, but it hasn't been powered up in the last month. Wine 6 on Linux is doing most of what I need in running old Windows software.
I don't know how anybody uses the stock Windows start menu.
Classic Shell is the first thing I install on a new image.
Don't even get me started on that ill-starred generation of Windows Server that used the touch-screen influenced Start Screen instead of a Start Menu...
* Show suggestions occasionally in Start
* Show suggestions in your timeline
* Suggest ways I can finish setting up my device to get the most out of Windows
* Get tips, tricks and suggestions as you use Windows
* Turn off suggested content in the Settings app
Changing these settings can greatly reduce Windows 10 spam.