As usual, it’s only Big Tech that’s able to compete with Big Tech. They all love to throw their weight around when they can, and join forces when it’s convenient.
Neither corporation should be defended or trusted with your data.
The only thing that’s kinda funny here is the irony of Microsoft tryna poach Chrome users into their own… wait for it… Chromium-based browser.
And it’s pissing users like me off. I have one laptop for work and one for home. My work laptop has a professional work profile and for some of the programs I’m required to use I need Microsoft apps like edge and office. As a result I get these popups non stop when opening edge. I also am not an administrator on the work laptop so I literally cannot just decide to upgrade from windows 10 to Windows 11. If the damn thing would stop blocking my work flow with full page ads, that would be awesome.
My personal laptop updated itself from 10 to 11, and 11 is infuriating. Never mind the pop ups and ads, the whole thinf just sucks. This was just the extra bit of incentive that I needed to switch back to Linux Mint. Thanks, MS!
After 30 years on MacOS (yes, I am older than dirt), I switched to Windows 11. I love it. With a few software add-ins, notably Better Desktop Tool and Start11, as well as a deep-dive into Settings/Notifications, etc., it’s useable, comfortable, fairly Mac-like, and not too annoying. I guess I’m lucky as I don’t have any UI/UX baggage from past Windows OSs to drag behind me. Yeah, it’s different than MacOS, but I can get stuff done.
yes, I just got a new (referb) laptop for the kids - fuck MS was anoying trying to install chrome on it (yes I know, but all their bookmarks/setting/etc in there…)
Maybe it’s because I disable things and go through the settings with a fine tooth comb after a fresh install but I never see this stuff. Not discounting others’ experiences either. Can’t imagine being inundated with this stuff like some are claiming they are.
Same. With Windows 10, everyone was like there are ads and shit in the Start menu and browser nagging and all that jazz - never ever seen any of them. After fresh install, I do my settings, let it sit for a while to do the Windows Update, delete (uninstall) all the unneccessary tiles from Start and that’s it, literally.
I mean, yes, you can do that, but then that brings us to the question: why does the user have to do that, spend a lot of time changing settings to make an OS bearable? Imho, any OS should ship with sensible defaults that have the user in mind.
If there’s little to no need to go through the settings, you probably will miss a lot of them and never know.
Also, I think after a fresh install going through some settings to check out what you have, what you don’t have and what you can have is not something only power users should do, but that’s a power user’s opinion 😅
Thing is, most normal users do not care about the settings. They use the computer like a TV, turn it on and expect it to work.
Nothing is stopping power users from looking through the settings to find good things to tweak, of course, but setting weird defaults to make a user look at their settings is indefinitely worse than, say, an optional tour of the OS that greets the user on their first login.
I didn’t feel like it was that much when I used windows either. But then I started dual booting linux, and I realized just how much I had been ignoring. I had just gotten used to closing every notification without reading it. It’s kind of cursed knowledge thing. It only takes like <10s a day, but once I noticed it it really bothered me.
Microsoft loves popups. It feels like it is at least a few times that MS office puts a pop up in front of some button that I’m going to click to tell me about a new feature that I won’t use. Admittedly, I don’t know how to tell users about new features in a better way, but annoying users can’t be right.
I remember an old anecdote from sometime around 2005, that Microsoft did a survey to see what features people wanted added to the Office suite, of the top 10 requested features, 8 were already in the products and the users didn’t know about them.
The whole suite was bloated with stuff most people didn’t need, or at least very rarely needed, but no one wanted to take time to take a class on Excel, or read patch notes, or whatever.
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