Microsoft’s announcement: “We are introducing a new Game Pass recommendation card on the Settings homepage. The Game Pass recommendation card on Settings Homepage will be shown to you if you actively play games on your PC. As a reminder – the Settings homepage will be shown only on the Home and Pro editions of Windows 11 and if you’re signed into Windows with your Microsoft account.”
What kind of therapy do I go to if I’m in an abusive relationship with my Operating System?
Ethically, if not legally, this is terrible, as are all other steps Microsoft has taken to force ads onto your computer.
Seriously, think about it. You own the hardware, right? And the OS is present to run the hardware, right? To do that, it needs to be able to perform various tasks without your specific approval, and that’s fine, but using your bandwidth to download advertisements in the background, then using your computing cycles to force them in front of your eyes regardless of what you’re using the computer for, is awfully questionable. I would go so far as to say it’s a form of theft.
And no, ads on websites aren’t comparable. You, the user, are actively opting to view a web page that carries ads. You are choosing to grant them access to your eyeballs and the resources used by your browser. But nobody is actively seeking to view ads through their operating systems, and they don’t get anything in return (such as the content you went to that website for).
You want to advertise to me in the OS? Don’t charge me $200 for the OS then!!
The funny thing is, there isn’t even really a free OS with ads. At least none that I know of. Linux is open source and thus usually non commercial. Worst case you get a “please donate” the first time you log in. macOS is technically free (although you kinda subsidize it through the hardware, I suppose) and it doesn’t have ads and even chrome OS is ad free afaik. It’s really only Windows and some Android flavours, usually those running on very cheap chinese devices. And Samsung of course.
Ubuntu has ads, or at least takes money to have shortcuts to Amazon and the like
Edit: I might be wrong here, please read the replies
Ah right. Count on canonical to make my point moot.
IIRC macOS will sometimes beg you to subscribe for more iCloud disk space. Far better than Windows, but still an ad.
Yeah and Apple TV, Apple Music, and care plan advertising. It’s not as in your face though.
It’s less begging than a “Your iCloud storage is full. Want some more?” which is fair in my books.
This is what finally got me to switch to Linux years ago. Back when Virtual machines were relatively new I was messing around with them and hated having to scrounge for windows licenses to use in the VM’s. (Back then you had to enter the CD Key to begin installing the OS, they didn’t have trial periods, or ‘activate later’ options) started using Linux in VM’s to try it out, and boom 15 years later, I’m never going back.
Embrace, extend, extinguish, enshittify.
How about Microsoft goes out back and fucks themselves.
They’ll do that for $14.99/mo
CorpOS
I don’t mind having ads in my face every day and being tracked constantly if it means I can play games with my friends for an hour a week.
- Everybody, everytime someone mentions switching to Linux
They love rootkits as well.
makes me more and more happy i switched to linux. FUCK. WINDOWS.
Jokes on them, I already have Game Pass.
(They’re gonna make me switch to Linux, aren’t they?)
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I actually feel bad for people on windows 11. People, please just switch to Linux already. There just isn’t any real reason to stay on it anymore, and if you do you’ve got some ridiculous bullshit niche setup that 0.1% of people use. And for people on Nvidia just grab that Nvidia pop_os ISO for that idiot proof setup, seriously, there are no more excuses and it’s really not any more difficult to use than Windows. Don’t listen to people saying you have to open a terminal to do anything either, that’s a straight up fucking lie, and if you really have to, then copy/paste is all you need to know.
If you have to use rtx and dlss to justify your overpriced graphics card, then there’s AMD fsr that can be forced on damn near any game you want, it’s not as good but it gets the job done, as for Ray tracing, come on…be real with yourself for 5 minutes, what game other than control has use Ray tracing in any meaningful way other than to look pretty?
Windows is just not worth the hassle anymore, wake the fuck up people.
My only concern is league of legends. is it possible to run from neobara in vm? worst case I lose league. actually that sounds like the best case
Don’t play league, it’s filled with psychological bullshit tricks to get you to keep playing. If you have to play a moba play dota 2, it’s just a better game.
I hate what Windows has become as well, but I primarily play COD with my friends and I don’t see them moving to another game for my hatred of Windows.
Get an Xbox then and use m/KB with crossplay. Or play better games, apex runs through proton, get them to play that instead. Anyone switching away from cod is a good deed.
I don’t think you understand how group dynamics work, my friend.
And I’m not gonna play on an XBOX when I have an ultimate gaming PC just lying there.
I don’t think you understand how much I don’t give a shit that you have an “ultimate gaming PC” just lying there…I gave you options, take em or leave em, but ultimately you’re choosing not to do a damn thing about it and will just keep eating Microsoft Windows ads with every update. At least an Xbox is kind of expected to have ads since it’s somewhat subsidized. As for group dynamics, if your friends won’t try other games with you, sounds like you need better friends.
Oh boy, who pissed in your coffee?
That’s fair, just tired of explaining shit to uninformed windows fanboys that don’t understand what they’re talking about.
Want low latency audio production? There’s a distro with a low latency kernel for that.
Need a hyper focused gaming distro? Guess what, there’s a distro for that.
You want something so easy to use that even your tech illiterate grandparents can’t fuck their PC with something as stupid as updates? Well what do you know, there’s a distro for that as well with immutable OS’s that look and feel like Windows.
Windows fanboys spew bullshit like ease of use and not breaking their shit when they click buttons, but the reality is Linux is no different, it can be as easy or as difficult to use and break as you want.
The sad bullshit fact is if you use Windows, your PC is Microsoft’s and not yours, if you use Linux your PC is yours to control, and nothing hits that home like bullshit advertisements on your start menus and settings app.
For a community that loves Linux so much, Lemmy seems really obsessed with everything Microsoft does
Honestly if there was a Linux anything that I could just buy and install as easily as Windows, I’d totally be up for it because well I’m not completely tech illiterate, most of my computer knowledge comes from the '90s and early '00s when I was young. All I ever see about it online though is a bunch of conflicting tech speak that I just do not understand.
Tbh you can actually quite easily buy a computer with Linux pre installed (ironically they cost more than the ones that come with windows though). I wouldn’t recommend it though, regardless of tech literacy. The problem is that Linux is like 70% easy and great, 20% frustratingly glitchy and unfinished, and 10% getting stuck on completely impossible problems that you will lose weeks of your life to before eventually concluding that no solution actually exists. Nothing ever quite just works, there’s always some caveat or minor issue and you end up chasing rabbit holes instead of actually using your computer to do what you wanted to do
Sadly, I can’t choose Linux on my work machine.
