There’s an alternate timeline in which I actually give Bing and Edge a chance because Microsoft’s not flinging their feces at their users constantly the way they are now
I did that once. I’m Firefox and DuckDuckGo now. Love it. The difference in being served the internet and surfing the internet. Ha. Haven’t heard that term in a long time.
Until about maybe six months ago, Edge was great (please ignore the massive amount of data it sends to MS) as a browser. The user experience was top notch.
Some product owner with shit for brains was hired and started cramming Bing and AI nonsense into every corner.
The sad thing is that Edge is actually decent, and Bing is also not terrible… E.g. as an user there is absolutely no reason to use Chrome instead, but Microsoft managed to make it seem so annoying with shit like this.
Edge was decent in beta and upon release. I find now though they have slowly been adding in their own features and now it’s a browser packed with Microsoft’s products.
So to be honest, I did use Bing for a good while, mostly for the rewards, and it wasn’t bad, but at some point I was using a Canadian IP with a VPN, and Microsoft stubbornly switched everything to Canadian currency and would no longer let me redeem my rewards with US dollars or within the US lol. Honestly, it’s one thing that nudged me to start thinking more about using a search engine that’s not as problematic as Google or Bing.
I’ve actually found Bing to be way better than Google for a while now. It’s not even close, idk what Google did to their search engine but it’s pretty frustrating. It’s all ads and irrelevant links.
Bing sucks. Their customer support is absolutely terrible. They blocked one of my sites and I can never get a response, so I just don’t bother with it (and don’t advertise there)
I am actually not sure this is correct. Voicing your opinion about wantong native support is a much better direction than trying to run a more and more accurate windows emulator.
Just… Don’t use edge altogether? There are so many browsers with better privacy (librewolf, brave, ungoogled chromium, etc). Any reasons why you want to stick to edge so badly?
Anyone else notice the search (in windows 10 at least) suddenly being fucking useless? Used to be able to just type “disk man” and it defaulted to the disk management control panel, now it’s defaulting to a Bing search (in edge of course even though Firefox is default browser) for the phrase… Tried it on like 4 computers and only one was even offering the control panel as an option and it wasn’t the first one. Same thing with “default apps”…
Really glad I made the jump to Linux when I did, everytime I have to do something out of the usual user use case in windows at work I find myself more and more frustrated and jaded with windows.
Confirming this on (my sister’s installation of) Windows 11. Not even restore point would give me a result (switching to en-US at least found Reset my PC but still creating a restore point is nowhere to be found unless you know where to go from previous versions of Windows).
I actually installed Mint before going through the Windows OOBE. However, the laptop is so new that the touchpad, touchscreen and fingerprint sensor don’t work in kernels <6.5, and the Wi-Fi card in kernels below 6.0. Most distros ship with kernel 5.x and none have LTS versions with 6.5 (which only became stable this week). I am not nearly skilled enough to go with a non-mainstream or unstable distro. My sister will need Windows so I configured GRUB to boot that by default with 0.2 s hidden timeout and now I can’t boot to Linux at all. I’ll be reinstalling it anyway in a few months.
That being said, Windows is also terrible. You can’t configure the fingers to only scroll and the active stylus to only draw in a note-taking program, the touchpad’s horizontal scrolling is reversed while the vertical is not, the handwriting recognition has not improved since my grandpa’s 2004 Windows Mobile PDA, there is a shitton of telemetry, and uninstalling Edge caused the fingerprint reader to stop working somehow. Without asking, it encrypted my storage with BitLocker (which I cannot configure because it’s not the Pro edition) and I had to enter two 48-digit codes to unlock the D: and E: partitions on each boot (thankfully I removed that). I would welcome encryption if it unlocked on Windows login and didn’t completely lock non-Microsoft account users on the same device from the storage partition. NumLock stays lit in Sleep mode or when the display is closed. Also the manufacturer CaReS aBoUt pRiVaCy and therefore included a camera cover but has a fucking persistent app that “monitors the system” and shows extended warranty popup ads, but is required to limit the battery charging voltage.
And the internal PSU makes a maddening coil whine all the time but the company just said “manufacturing is difficult and we screwed up, just use headphones lol”. It could be fixed by some soft glue, foam or rubber around the inductors but I think I would lose the warranty over this.
Sounds like the biggest (only) issue is drivers, then? Most distros (mint too) have repositories for newer kernels,nyou can turn those. Should be fairly easy to setup
Mmm, as long as the kernels themselves are stable you should be fine. Worst case your computer won’t boot up and you simply boot back into the previous kernel
That’s asking too much from somebody who cannot fix a screwed-up GRUB config from a Live USB (it took me several tries to successfully update-grub from the Mint installation, and the one time I succeeded, the config is wrong and I cannot boot into it: GRUB menu never shows up no matter what I press, and I set Windows as default for my noob sister). As I said, I’m not the primary user and I will now be mostly debloating and customizing Windows for her, after which she takes it to college. So working Linux is not on the agenda until Christmas at least, and I’ll put up with WSL (or my own laptop) until then.
Did you read what I wrote? I did have a GRUB boot menu before accidentally disabling it. Now booting “ubuntu” or “EFI” from BIOS just boots the default GRUB entry (Windows).
And pen support is a disaster in Windows. It can differentiate the pen from fingers but giving each a different action? Nope. Krita works but the Erase button shows context menu while the Menu button scrolls. GIMP senses pressure but only allows clicking, not dragging (I can draw points, or straight lines if I hold Shift). In Pinta, there is no pressure dynamics and the Erase button does erase but only when the pen is hovering above the screen. This is what I’ll be resolving in the next days so that I can give my sister a decent guide to notetaking, writing & drawing with the pen.
I’ve had issues in the past where the local full text search index was broken and no apps or settings ever came up, so it only offered Bing searches for shit like “control panel”.
There’s a way to clear it and force it to rebuild, but I’m not so sure this is the same problem that you’re describing since you’re seeing it on multiple computers at the same time.
This is getting tiring, not microsoft or Google or apple or any other, its too hard to be private these days, using nextdns, vpn and mull but I still dont feel safe browsing
There was a thread on hackernews a few days ago (maybe even yesterday, time is a construct) where someone shared a screenshot of a pop up ad served to them by the OS itself.
Seeing a very popular and powerful $5 OS next to $100 Windows cards at the store would be pretty compelling. I guess their advantage would still be that all you need is a code to install Windows on many machines while you need to boot into an external drive to install Ubuntu (and any other OS).
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