Windows 11 Start Menu ads - now coming to a PC near you

[Redaktion]

After spending some time in the preview build, Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to all users of Microsoft's operating system. The "recommendations" can be disabled, but the "switch to Linux" comments are coming in hard and fast on social media.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-Start-Menu-ads-now-coming-to-a-PC-near-you.831210.0.html

[Swizzy]

Lol good luck with that

[RobertJasiek]

"required a Microsoft account to sign into"

Wrong. It may have been difficult to avoid but could be avoided.

[Jakub]

Haven't used windows OS without classicshell/openshell since XP so whatever :)

[Neenyah]

"required a Microsoft account to sign into"

Wrong. It may have been difficult to avoid but could be avoided.

Yep. [email protected] is enough to use and probably the easiest way. The password doesn't matter since it's a locked account which Windows can't handle so it skips to local account.

[indy]

The enshitification of Windows is complete.

If people continue to use Windows after this point, well, I guess they enjoy being manipulated? More power to them.

[Neenyah]

Linux is not an option for everything, indy. Same as Wine/Proton, and not even Windows in VM, is not a good solution for many Windows software.

I don't talk about games here at all but Proton, while being a tremendous step forward over anything before, is still inadequate to provide the same experience that you get with Windows, especially in competitive titles with anti-cheat.

[indy]

I'd pick a closed console for gaming over Windows at this point.

Windows has legacy support, and a decent corporate infrastructure with Active Directory, but the cracks are showing with more zero days that are impacting customers, and a focus on ads/AI/Bing.

Just seems like a less customer-focused company to me.

Not saying Linux is better or worse. For my personal needs (zero advertising, period,) Linux is doing the job well& getting better.

[LL]

If i did not had some Windows only programas i need - but those have been reducing in numbers fast as years go by - i would already have jumped into Linux.
 I installed a Linux distribution for an older family member and it works perfectly for her office, mail, videos and generic stuff.

[LL]

I installed Linux Mint into a cheap Lenovo laptop.

[A]

Linux is not an option for everything, indy. Same as Wine/Proton, and not even Windows in VM, is not a good solution for many Windows software.

I don't talk about games here at all but Proton, while being a tremendous step forward over anything before, is still inadequate to provide the same experience that you get with Windows, especially in competitive titles with anti-cheat.

To be honest, anti-cheats are the dumbest things ever. You are effectively installing a rootkit into your kernel. There has already been cases of the anticheat being exploited to hijack people's system like the Apex Legends tournament

Lets be honest, anyone with any real technical skills can easily bypass them with external devices. For example I read the video out into a device pretending to be a monitor, then have AI auto aim and pretend to be keyboard and mouse

Since most of these games tend to be online, is there even a point to installing them? They might as well go into the cloud. At the very least that would fix "works on my computer" issues regardless the OS.

[Neenyah]

I'd pick a closed console for gaming over Windows at this point.

Windows has legacy support, and a decent corporate infrastructure with Active Directory, but the cracks are showing with more zero days that are impacting customers, and a focus on ads/AI/Bing.

Just seems like a less customer-focused company to me.

Not saying Linux is better or worse. For my personal needs (zero advertising, period,) Linux is doing the job well& getting better.

Tbh I wouldn't touch consoles as there is literally no freedom at all; you can't upgrade hardware to get better experience, you will likely lose everything you have at some point as they will just shut down online services (like Sony recently with Gran Turismo Sport), their politics (Sony and Nintendo) are even worse than Microsoft's... With Windows you have a pretty good set of options - use it, use it in VM, or simply don't use it and wipe it if you don't need it. Linux today is certainly capable and good enough for at least 80% of usage scenarios including gaming, but people are lazy to even try it, let alone to take a couple of days and learn its basics.

I installed Linux Mint into a cheap Lenovo laptop.

Mint is a rock solid choice, probably the best distro out there for people new to Linux. I installed it also on many PCs/laptops of my family, friends and so on, even on my gf's laptop which is now running Fedora, hehe.

[Neenyah]

Linux is not an option for everything, indy. Same as Wine/Proton, and not even Windows in VM, is not a good solution for many Windows software.

I don't talk about games here at all but Proton, while being a tremendous step forward over anything before, is still inadequate to provide the same experience that you get with Windows, especially in competitive titles with anti-cheat.

To be honest, anti-cheats are the dumbest things ever. You are effectively installing a rootkit into your kernel. There has already been cases of the anticheat being exploited to hijack people's system like the Apex Legends tournament

Lets be honest, anyone with any real technical skills can easily bypass them with external devices. For example I read the video out into a device pretending to be a monitor, then have AI auto aim and pretend to be keyboard and mouse

Since most of these games tend to be online, is there even a point to installing them? They might as well go into the cloud. At the very least that would fix "works on my computer" issues regardless the OS.

I completely agree with this comment, A. My point though was that you cannot install and run those games on Linux if their AC is relying only on Windows; Counter Strike 2 is one example to one extent. On one side you have VAC which runs on Linux but it hardly helps with anything as the game is cheater-infested but perfectly playable on Linux (if you call 3-6 cheaters per lobby "playable"). On the other side you have FACEIT and their AC runs exclusively on Windows; that being said there is hardly any cheating at all when you play Counter Strike 2 on FACEIT (like literally 200:1 is the ratio you get, so for every 200 cheaters outside of FACEIT you get maybe 1 on FACEIT and they get banned within minutes). With some (or many) other games the situation is probably the same so Windows is still the only alternative, heh.

I need Adobe to work (as a day job, for a living) and if they ever support Linux I won't ever touch Windows again except for a couple of games such as CS2 from my previous paragraph. Inkscape, GIMP, Krita and others are already phenomenal but, sadly, they are still far from Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign to replace them. At least the situation is better with video editors but then again After Effects has no functional alternative on Linux 🤕 And while running Adobe apps is possible to some extent on Linux there is a hell lot of compatibility issues so it's simply not a pleasant experience not even if you pirate them. When you have it legal on your business expense it's completely impossible to even start the Creative Cloud app 😑

[Done with PC gaming]

I'd pick a closed console for gaming over Windows at this point.

Tbh I wouldn't touch consoles as there is literally no freedom at all; you can't upgrade hardware to get better experience, you will likely lose everything you have at some point as they will just shut down online services (like Sony recently with Gran Turismo Sport), their politics (Sony and Nintendo) are even worse than Microsoft's... With Windows you have a pretty good set of options - use it, use it in VM, or simply don't use it and wipe it if you don't need it.

Have to agree with Indy here, Neenyah. The last consoles I had were the Dreamcast and psp. Been a windows pc gamer for over 2 decades but just don't see the point anymore.

Regarding the lack of freedom or closed nature of consoles, I'd say it depends which ones you speak of, if you mean the AMD based ones (e.g. ps4/5 or Xbox one/series) — sure. But the original Tegra switch is fully hacked and wide open. People running multiple distros and I think I saw someone even running windows on it. The only issue is it is underpowered but the switch 2 will rectify this and hopefully it'll get hacked fast just like every other Nintendo console.

You can't upgrade hardware yeah, but what does this accomplish? Still seeing digital foundry videos of people with RTX 4090s getting compilation stutter along with many other issues. Rather have weaker hardware with just more consistent optimized software experience. Current studios and / or game dev's really don't give a sheet pc market or users. Besides "lol, if it doesn't work well, maybe try upgrade to rtx 5090 next year" and it'll still likely run like trash. I don't wish to support such an industry anymore.

The argument of online services shutting down and likely to lose stuff in future isn't a pc specific issue anymore. It affects all including consoles and mobile. This is what emulation efforts for preservation are for. And I'd argue the console emulation preservation scene is light years ahead of PCs. Lost count how many older pc games from ms-dos era and after I just can't find anymore. In comparison, the entire console libraries are fairly well preserved (well especially the Nintendo ones). And even efforts for reviving or reverse engineering the online server emulation code are well under way for them.

Don't get me started on the fact that you've to install multiple drm infested store fronts on pc or that pc games are 150+ gb these days because nobody feels like optimizing their sheet to get with proper compression.

Yeah, you can install VM to reduce risk, you can try to mitigate the issues by "upgrading" to the next RTX **90 every 2 years. But tired of having to go through all that effort and hoops.

Rather just get a switch 2 wait for it to get hacked and can then get my freedom without being forced to spend $3000+ including upgrades just to minimize stutter.

Literally nvidia is currently making a mockery of pc gamers at the moment, AMD is too busy supply/focusing on Data center, consoles and attempting to follow nvidia in AI market to care about pc consumer issues. And intel / Qualcomm I don't think they honestly have the competence to help pc gamers. No clue how anyone can support windows pc segment at the moment.

Entire market is a joke. Dont know much about Linux but I can't imagine it being all that much worse. The only bright side is I see too all this is that due to all this (inadept) competition, I do think we're going to start seeing quite some decent deals on meteor lake, hawk point and possibly even on snapdragon x elite (if recent rumors are to believed that it's a dud) by the end of this year for laptops.

Did I forget to mention how it's almost impossible to easily stop windows 11 home (literally what is preinstalled on 98% of laptops out there by oems) from force updating and restarting without paying Microsoft more to upgrade to win pro version? That alone has just almost killed any future interest I had in windows. And the fact that windows office is essentially limited time only trial ware these days on most laptops. Don't remember if this was always the case, and not such a big deal since most people are just moving to google docs these days anyways but you'd think due to all this increased competition now maybe the right the to do would be a more consumer friendly move?

[NikoB]

Did I forget to mention how it's almost impossible to easily stop windows 11 home (literally what is preinstalled on 98% of laptops out there by oems) from force updating and restarting without paying Microsoft more to upgrade to win pro version?

Officially, Windows is paid, but in reality no one is stopping you from installing the Pro version that comes from the factory in parallel with W11Home. By the way, W11 LTSC will be released in the fall, which means that M$ has finally decided that W11 has gone from beta to the final version, debugged with the money of stupid ordinary hamsters, who were its beta testers at their own expense... =)

I personally tested all versions and I can say for sure that W11 (latest build from December 2023) is much slower in response than even W10, not to mention W7, etc.

But they leave us no choice.

Is everyone aware that Google deliberately disabled VP9/AV1 hardware acceleration through the old API layer in LTSC 1809 from about version 100 of Chrome? But in LTSC 2021 everything works with the same versions of video drivers and the same versions of VP9/AV1 wrappers on VLD decoders from the M$ store. The problem is that it is 1809 that is officially supported until 2029, and LTSC 2021 only until 2026, like LTSB 2016. W10 support for other versions ends in the fall of 2025... I see in this the deliberate intent of Google and M$, a conspiracy to displace users from version LTSC 1809 with 10 years of support. Those. by disabling hardware acceleration in the most common browser and supported by websites, Chrome (Chromium), Google, by agreement with M$, is displacing users since 1809. The funny thing is that FF still uses the old method of hardware decoding and everything works there, but unfortunately, FF there are big problems with smoothness and Google deliberately, as everyone knows, blocks the normal operation of other people's browsers on YouTube. Therefore, we have no choice....either Chrome or nothing.

Remember how 14 years ago, Intel's sneaky collusion with M$ squeezed out users from XP in the same way when it was in its heyday? Then the scoundrels at Intel deliberately disabled the decoding layer via DXVA under XP in their drivers for the first Core I (Arrandale), but everything worked extremely sluggishly (and then SSDs were a rarity and, in general, a luxury then W7 when working with HDDs.

The history of meanness repeats itself - we are gradually being squeezed out using such hidden methods to new versions of the OS, where everything is done for interesting corporations.

At the same time, the "security" of all versions of Windows (which they constantly emphasize to fools as the need for new versions of the OS) was and remains a clownery.