Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu.
Luckily you can disable these ads, or “recommendations” as Microsoft calls them. If you’ve installed the latest KB5036980 update then head into Settings > Personalization > Start and turn off the toggle for “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more.” While KB5036980 is optional right now, Microsoft will push this to all Windows 11 machines in the coming weeks.
Microsoft’s move to enable ads in the Windows 11 Start menu follows similar promotional spots in the Windows 10 lock screen and Start menu. Microsoft also started testing ads inside the File Explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment and saying the test was “not intended to be published externally.” Hopefully that experiment remains very much an experiment.
If I see your company or app advertised on windows 11, you can be sure I will be actively avoiding said company/ App. Even if I need the services advertised, I will be looking for an alternative just because.
I have the same policy for pop up ads.
Don’t disagree with the sentiment but I didn’t think companies had this much leeway in how their ads were displayed.
Meirl
How did the default attitude toward the user get so hostile? The amount of toggles you need to set just to have a smooth experience with minimal tracking is insane. The people in here defending it by the fact it can be disabled are missing the point: we shouldn’t have to deal with it in the first place.
This is a direct result of our Wall Street economy. Wall Street demands that each corporation’s stock price shall increase every quarter. No matter what. If that means the customer is unhappy or that a corporation must consume itself from within. Doesn’t matter.
Pretty simple. Stock go brrrr.
Fewer people are buying PCs now that Smartphones have replaced the need to have one for most uses, but Microsoft still has to make more money every quarter than the quarter before because the stock market doesn’t value stable profits.
Having control over other people’s computing gives you power over them: you can gain from their detriment. It’s not like everyone is uncaring or greedy but even people with good intentions do not have infinite willpower to resist temptation. When the user doesn’t like a change from an update their choice is usually to put up with it. Defending ads in a menu or opt-outs that should be opt-ins in hidden menus is less mental work than learning what an operating system is and that you can use a different one.
By sharing the source code instead you give up that power - if you fail to be good to the users then other devs can work on it without you.
You don’t give up anything by sharing source code. If anything, you share your power with the world. All other perceived outcomes are attributes of capitalism baked into your thought pattern.
MS doesn’t care about the desktop operating system except how can they control it like Apple and iphones. All the money is in O365 and Azure these days.
Didn’t I pay for the OS?
Did anyone pay for 11?
Microsoft has been giving it free left and right.
I did. I was naive and had just built a gaming pc. 10 was no longer for sale
I didn’t pay for the OS.
No you are just renting to see more ads.
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I installed Linux Mint a few days ago. It’s been great so far.
I wanna like Linux but I play too many games with anti-cheats that just don’t work on Linux yet :(
I mean, you’re not wrong. Anticheat is pretty much the one thing that Linux doesn’t play nicely with. Given, it’s largely on the game producers to fix, not on the OS. But it’s still a valid complaint from an end user perspective.
If Linux fans truly want to encourage migration, stifling valid complaints isn’t the way to do it. The issue with everyone going “oh it’s so easy, it’s so much better, you won’t regret it at all” is that as soon as a user encounters a hangup they’ll be more inclined to just abandon it altogether. Because if everyone is going “oh it’s so easy” but you’re not having an easy time with it, then you’ll quickly conclude that maybe it’s just not the right fit for you. And the people going “lul just don’t play those games then dummy” need to get some friends. Because when all of those friends are playing the shiny new game but they’re locked out of it due to their choice of OS, they may consider dual-booting Windows just to be able to keep up with their friends.
But this is Lemmy and the Linux fanboys can’t tolerate a single toe out of line. So I guess it makes sense why you got downvoted.
But it’s still a valid complaint from an end user perspective.
If Linux fans truly want to encourage migration
it’s technically a valid complaint, it’s not a linux problem though. Don’t come crying to us when your game doesn’t work, we’ve literally made 90% of all games ever work under linux with zero effort for the end user.
It’d be like buying a proprietary macbook for instance, and then when you find out that the only people who want to service it, are the people who sold you it at an aggressive price, who will then still, ask you for even more money. Only to complain about right to repair not letting you repair your device, even though it’s an apple issue.
What do you want us to say? We can’t physically test every game to ever exist, and premeditate every issue to ever have possibly occurred to someone. Part of linux is literally learning how to solve these problems, that’s why linux is such a great system OS, when you have problems, you can often just fix them yourself.
I mean sure maybe linux is too hard for you, how hard did you try to understand it? Maybe it’s not the right fit for you, but then i would expect people to just not care about linux. Rather than call it shit, because they didn’t understand it.
Also, dualbooting is a valid option, a lot of linux users even have a dedicated windows machine somewhere in their house just because of how shitty everything is these days. Nobody is saying you can’t do that.
Hopefully those games go to steam deck as that seems like a way to have a market share they might then cater for (I can’t play BF on Linux due to the antichear requirements)
Only BFV. BF1, BFBC2, BF3 and BF4 all still run perfectly.
Is this true for 2042? Honestly would use a Linux distro otherwise (probably Ubuntu but might look for an alternative)
2042 always used EAC, and EA refused to enable EAC for Linux.
Demand better from the devs. And seeks out games that work on linux. There are plenty of them.
Windows 11 made my girlfriend’s laptop so slow, even she asked me to install Linux, and she is not even a techy type.
I installed pop os and libre office on my wife’s laptop not long after Pop was released, and by now I don’t think she would know what to do on Windows or Mac. So proud of her.
What do you like and don’t like about it so far? What system did you install it on?
For now it just works. I have no complaints. I ran into just a few tiny snags and was able to resolve everything with a google search. It’s installed on my 10 year old desktop.
Welcome to the good life, with the exception of VR and (rootkit) anticheat for multiplayer, it’s all smiles over here.
Hope Mint treats you as well as it’s treated me! (Even though most of my tinkering breaks stuff, reinstall incoming I suspect)
I don’t play anything multi-player so it’s not an issue. And I have to little time to play single player games I can simply ignore stuff that’s not compatible.
As far as VR, I am holding out hope that valve will make a Quest like VR headset.
Win11: less functionality, more ads
And what’s with the weasel words like “recommended”? Just call them “sponsored” or “ads”, like they really are.
Windows 11 (and how much I like my experience with the Steam deck, if I’m being honest) has me seriously reconsidering switching to Linux for my gaming desktop
I’ve only been playing games on Linux for the past year and it’s been a pretty smooth experience. Go for it!
How hard is it to make a decent OS Microsoft? Haven’t you got enough of our money already?
Honestly they peaked at windows XP.
I haven’t needed a upgrade and every time for the past 15 years, it’s been forced on me.
XP was great, but Windows 7 was the peak.
its been all down hill from 7.
Yup. I feel like people saying XP was the peak is mostly nostalgia.
You could make barely any UX changes to Win7 and people would still happily use it today. I don’t think the same is quite true for XP.
To be fair, though, I also have nostalgia for XP. I’ve played a silly amount of Space Cadet Pinball on my steam deck lol
I wouldnt say I have nostalgia for XP itself, but I do look on it fondly, the same reason I look on 98 fondly.
It was better than its previous OS. More stable, more usable, requiring less reformats to keep it snappy and healthy, etc.
Which is one of the many reasons why 7 is the peak. Cause you didnt have to regularly reformat 7. It was just that good at managing itself, and its snappiness, that you never had to reformat/refresh the install cause it never got bogged down.
edit You can download and run space cadet pinball on linux, I think i got mine off Discover (which probably is the same thing as every other distros app store/house/whatever)
Except for the task manager. Windows 8 to Windows 10 had a good one.
I’d rather use tabletified 8 than 10.
The task manager in win 8 wouldn’t stay/come on top if there was a frozen program. This would make the new task manager unusable to kill the problem program. And then the half-assed solution of preemptively enabling always on top did not even work reliably. A pretty fundamental issue, which for me far outweighed whatever improvements that new task manager contained.
I never cared about task manager outside of the 5 seconds it took to kill the occasionally obstinate/frozen program, so as long as it did that much, I didnt care about the rest.
Which sounds like 8 ruined even that.
Win7 was somewhat better IMO, at least at one point.
well i mean tbf, most modern software doesnt work on XP anymore, so.
The shareholders must be appeased.
I’m getting extremely close to making a tiny partition for windows (so I can play gamepass) and then using a Linux distro for my day to day. Are there still issues with Nvidia drivers on Linux? Its been a long time since I’ve run Linux.
I’ve used both Linux Mint and Manjaro, and my Nvidia card has done fine in both. I switched to Mint from Windows because it was easier and faster to set up under Mint (Windows was missing a bunch of drivers and the OEM’s site didn’t have updated ones). The only configuration I had to do was select the proprietary driver (and Mint has a nice little GUI for that). If you’re on the fence, I highly recommend trying Mint.
I installed Mint last night as a dual-boot and had a few issues, the boot loader would not load into Windows Boot Manager and when I manually selected Windows Boot Manager in UEFI Windows booted but hard locked until it reindexed the drive I partitioned for Linux.
The Mint OS works fine, to be clear. My issue with the dual boot is mostly getting Windows to play nice.
Dual boot is definitely more tricky to get going. I just set up a Windows partition again to play a game that uses Easy Anti Cheat, and it took some time to have everything working happily.
Seconded. Mint is the best distro for anyone who wants to get started with Linux with the least amount of hassle. Installation is a breeze and it just works.
I have not tried it, but I’ve heard good things about bazzite as a good steam deck clone that has a strong community committed to Nvidia support.
Worth looking into at least!
steam deck clone
No way Jose. If anything their approach is inspired by Fedora Atomic, which is the cornerstone of Bazzite.
Other than that, yes, a very very solid approach for daily usage for casual gamers.
Bazzite is a neat concept, and I run it too. Still haven’t gotten VR to work properly, though (Quest 2)
I made it through two whole top level comments before getting to a switch to Linux comment.
It was my turn this week!
I’ve had the rare issue with my 4070ti that probably wouldn’t have been a problem with AMD, but most things run great. Using endeavorOS
I haven’t had driver related issues with nvidia for a long time, last was some kde wayland stuff fixed a while ago, before that using x no issues for a long time
Think I will try Linux for real now
Two big things to do before you decide that.
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Do you run nvidia graphics? cause they are a PITA and influence your distro choice (you’ll want a distro that has nvidia drivers baked in.)
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If you game, go to https://www.protondb.com/ and check out a handful of the games you play. 99% of games work on linux with steams Proton (lets windows games run on steam), the only ones that dont are ones with invasive anti-cheat, so use protondb to see if any of your important games have issues.
and as a final note of encouragement… I made the swap years ago, it was daunting…and there were a couple issues, but overall, far more easy than I ever expected it to be. (for me, cause I built the PC with the switch to linux in mind, so all my hardware is AMD). I am not a sysadmin or anyone who had any significant experience linux before my swtich, and I switched cold turkey after a brief weekend of basic researching. In other words, I’m a moe-ran. So if I can do it, pretty much anyone can. Good luck with it if you do try to make the switch :D
Thanks for the advice, my PC is already full AMD so I guess that makes it a bit easier? :D lucky
It does. AMD support is baked into the kernal.
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Yeah I’ve been thinking that too. Not sure I have time to learn it though so I keep sticking with windows. But I really have to make the effort to switch.
I will just dual boot at the beginning and play around with Linux for a bit.
DO IT
I reccomend fedora KDE
Nobara.
Its Fedora, but for gaming.
That’s what I am running! Just we don’t know what the other comentors main intentions are and if they’re gaming or not
“All you have to do is set some flags in GPO policy editor and relogin the first time and every time there’s an update. Easy”
- some Windows fanboi probably
The post literally tells you that the option to turn it off is in the settings menu at: Settings > Personalization > Start Menu > “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more "
It’s not good, but it’s way better than you are making it out to be.
At least until Microsoft decides to hide it deeper, like they do with all of their most useful options. Nothing like navigating fifteen layers deep into your settings just to change something basic.
Hopefully WinToys will have an update with this option, so it won’t matter where Microsoft decides to move it this week.
yeah and they also made an online account, optional.
Good thing it’s still optional.
Did I miss something about online accounts being required? I don’t remember hearing about that.
yeah no, so there’s this cool thing, where when you install windows, it shows you this screen where it asks you to connect to the internet, and if you do (because god forbid you want updates) it requires you to sign in via a microsoft account. (yes technically you can just enter bogus information, or not connect to the internet) but you can also just not get caught by the police after committing a crime.
They USED to have a “skip” button, but they removed that years ago.
dude istg i see windows users coping harder than linux users.
It’s kind of sad.
Fucking unhinged idiocracy. Capitalism is the cancer of humanity
Everyone? This shit will be on my work computer???
I’m not sure tbh, but this should be deactivateable by gpos. Work machines should not be affected if the IT staff is on to it.
I hope they are and the world will be forced to either make a law against it or goodbye windows because fu.
Imagine having to pay employees to watch ads that make microsoft money, what a fucking joke that would be.
Just like other enshittification, they don’t care if you turn off the ads because they have a captive audience in your grandmother. Think of all the non-techies who will just accept this. Or not even conceive of a way to turn it off. The question is how many will this push to give up Windows? So far it’s proven extremely “sticky”, they have freedom to abuse their customers, who have to come back for more.
So it’s at least somewhat of a losing proposition for Microsoft as well, if people follow through. There are more choices available everyday, but it means learning something new.
I do need to revisit Window’s myself. I consume media on iOS, work on OSX and Linux, do home projects on Linux, so a lot of my time is other platforms. However my laptop is still Windows, for one remaining game plus tax prep software. I should try these again
what the fuck is a gpo? Is it like a gmo?
Group policy. They’re a windows feature for domain management that allows admins to make lots of changes to a potentially infinite amount of computers remotely. Efit: for example, changing the start menu to be on the left automatically, setting default home pages in the browser, mounting network drives etc
When they rolled out the beta Microsoft said it wouldn’t be, but they could always change their mind with the general release. Excerpt from a previous Verge article about the beta rollout (https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/12/24128640/microsoft-windows-11-start-menu-ads-app-recommendations):
“This will appear only for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel in the US and will not apply to commercial devices (devices managed by organizations),” says Microsoft in a blog post.
Unfortunately, this article doesn’t actually quote Microsoft saying it’s rolling out to ALL machines. That bit in the article is from the author.
For those who want to stay on windows and avoid this trash:
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
An open source start menu replacement. Been using it for 6 months seamlessly and it’s great
cant wait until 6 months when this breaks completely.
MS: “were just gonna break that next update…thaaaeeunnnks.”
Yet another bullet dodged since my move to Linux, thank fuck. Fuck you cunts at Micro$hit.
So angry
Wouldn’t be if they weren’t constantly trying to load hardware I own with unwanted ads, software and unnecessary shit nobody asked for.
Windows sucks. I wish I could put Linux on my work computer.
I brought an acer leptop a couple of years back and acer made it nearly impossible to install any other os then windows onto it
And the wind screams Linux
