Apple had to learn the hard way: Under the DMA (thanks @EUCommission !) they were forced to give users a choice regarding the default search engine and browser on their systems.
What are we going to do about Microsoft misleading users?
It is still required, as Google had to do the same with Android, offering multiple search engines and presenting them to the user (at least that happened to me with my phone), but after doing it in Windows 8.1, Microsoft probably thought that it was enough compliance to keep “those nagging EU politicians” away.
I just found out that the agreement between Microsoft and the EU commission was only valid between 2009 and 2014. So MS is no longer obliged to make the change of the default browser easy.
t won’t do anything on its own, you need to accept the repair step
Do you know what else works like that? Pop-up tech support scams. The target doesn’t have to do anything, but it’s become a thriving business in many poor regions (Kolkata, India is notorious) and a problem for moderately tech-illiterate users.
I would even say that this anti-feature promotes bad personal security practices because the user may be more inclined to believe “your computer needs repair” pop-ups if the first one they encounter comes from a legitimate, trusted party.
Yes, it’s not a great security practice, and it probably should work more like "we’ve noticed you have randomly changed your search engine from google/ddg/bing/whatever to this ‘random search engine no-one heard about’’ instead of blindly reverting to edge and bing.
It seems to be a tool for tech illiterates. A power user will know how to avoid malware, and remove it if they catch it.
They should do a much better job than that, but helping people that don’t know what they’re doing is not itself a bad thing.
It showed up on my feed. I see similar advice posts regularly "Just ditch windows and..."
Aside from my work tools not working on Linux natively, there are usually a few other steps involved in making the transition. Most people don't want to fuck around with that sort of thing.
I played around with Ubuntu back in the early 00s, before reverting back to Windows.
I looked into what was the easiest current distro to install in order to revive an old laptop. The consensus seemed to be Mint. It works fine and the old hardware was all recognized and so on. I'm still primarily a Windows user, even with all the the BS that goes along with it.
Using Linux is hardly a project anymore, unless you want it to be one. Plasma is just an interface, you can get many distros with it if you want including Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE, Kubuntu, Arch, and so on.
You can pretty much just install Mint or Pop OS and go. There are a lot of options (I would argue too many) but you can ignore most of them as a beginning user. No one should recommend arch to a beginner and anyone who does should be shot.
@kde@kde I've been using Plasma 6 as my daily driver for three weeks now, and it's really good! I'm grateful for all the time that developers, testers, and doc writers have spent on this project. I decided to ditch Windows after getting yet another nudge to "please create a microsoft account".
@qaz@shanesemler I can vouch this. The way Garuda used Plasma for a while lagged the heck out of my desktop. They switched it up a few versions ago and runs like butter now.
It doesn’t say anything about repairing, this is such a low class clickbait.
All it says is that the default settings are changed, and they recommend resetting to their service. Because of course a company is going to recommend their own services. Would be a bad company if they didn’t.
This is the actual picture they used in the article:
If you look at the screenshot, you can see this is the “Repair tips” tab/button. I don’t know what it looks like, but it does say something about repairing.
A tip for if things went wrong, like if some virus installed a weird browser and set it default, and you want a quick fix.
It isn’t saying that if you installed any other browser the system is broken and it should be repaired to Edge. That is just ridiculous and why I call this clickbait.
It is aimed at people who don’t even know what a default browser is. You know, the average user.
You are working with hypotheticals. We cannot judge what the reasoning is. We can only judge what it is. It may have been done with good intentions as you say. Given MS’s track record, highly unlikely, but either way the fact is MS is telling its Windows users that anything that is not Edge and Bing is damaged or malicious. That is anticompetitive bullshit (intentional or not) and FUD.
Add comment