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Ya, for me, why even have them as part of the OS, another attack vector and bloat. It was, I think Windows 10 PRO, they have candy crush and all that crap default install, PRO is considered a 'work" OS, not for home users, but lets keep pushing the boundaries!
Yeah once added to a domain or Intune that stuff all goes away but until then is basically Home Edition with extra features.
It's worse than that for us lawyers. We have to educate the tech AND business teams about what these laws mean (and they usually screw it up even then). Plus, to do privacy properly, you REALLy need to inventory your data. All of it.
100%. Microsoft calls this user profiling "Insights". Being able to slice, dice and package behavioral profiles for their own use as well as sell to third parties is worth far more than the few pennies from people clicking on ads (multiplied by millions of clicks on those ads and it adds up, granted). They defend the practice "well the data is anonymized" - meaning names are disassociated from the dataset and that makes everything okay. But even then there's a big asterisk on the anonymizing part. Other companies doing similar will sell a separate dataset with all the names present but the behavioral datapoints missing, and then a client buying user data just merges both datasets for the complete picture.
Me. I don't have any spare licenses since I've never actually worked in IT.
HP discovered a lot of their win 8 and 8.1 keys that were for machines sold in Russia were resold some years back and they retroactively burned them.
Dude... .tell me this fixes the right-click "Show more options" bullshit...
Like some else mentioned now I exclusively press the windows key and type the first few letters of whatever program or file I need or am looking for. It's actually faster than even having the classic start menu. Then the few programs that I use a lot I just find the file and send to desktop.
I do this too except I sometimes forget the name of the program I need and have a hard time finding it. Though in Linux the start menu has categories so it makes it easier to find something I forget the name of. For example I need an application that encodes videos but I forget the name, I can look under Sound & Video and there's Handbrake and WinFF. The issue with the Windows start menu is that it's deliberately made to only be useful as a search function. Windows 11 somehow found a way to make it worse. Windows 7 has a more functional start menu than Windows 11. There's a reason why 3rd party start menu's like Start11 are getting more popular. Someone with a tin foil hat might say that by making the Start Menu into a search function that Microsoft is getting excellent analytics for when they collect data on you through their telemetry that you think you disabled.
Set this in registry:
Thanks for giving Microsoft more ideas. Bookmarking this post for Windows 12.
I have a pair of those glasses and I don't care if I look like Elwood wearing them at night so be it! :-P
Doesn't work. Still shows the "Show More Options" at the bottom and clicking it shows me a LOT more options.
This. Muscle memory of windows key + app name has replaced it for me. Most common apps have task bar icons or are in a launcher ( steam).
Yeah for Brave I've noticed an uptick in TV commercials, as well ad buys on major podcasts like JRE which is not cheap - always a bad sign. Too many projects that started small and built a rep peddling "privacy" get bigger and the monetization becomes irresistible. NordVPN another one. There's a whole fake privacy industry where the products abandoned actual or at least okay privacy long ago and are coasting on inertia selling overpriced pseudo-privacy to normies.
Sadly the "workstation version" officially supported by AMD even for Threadripper Pro (WRX80) is just stock Windows 10 Pro and 11 Pro. Thats it, the entirety of their OS support for their non-Epyc platforms. Imagine you bought a $7000 CPU, $1000 MB and $1200 in DDR4 and you're greeted with shopping suggestions, hollywood gossip and Candy Crush.
That all depends on your level of intelligence. Also yes it would. Besides the inherit nature of open source which means you can't do something for money without consequence, (looking at you CentOS), but there's also the fact that GNU Linux distros don't have a specific UI. If I want I can switch from Cinnamon UI to Mate, to KDE, to whatever I want by just logging out and back in. Which none of those GUI's have any sort of ads in the start menu or anywhere. Even if they did it would be one of many UI's people could switch to. I use Cinnamon because it's the most Windows like UI, but if they decided to inject ads then I'd probably switch to KDE or wait for someone to fork it since it's open source. This is why Open Office got forked into Iibre, and why Emby got forked into JellyFin. Someone does want to take their project to make monetary income but all that does is just force people to fork it. You can't fork Windows when Microsoft pushes for ads in a start menu.
Lets not get crazy here.
If they're putting ads in the start menu then clearly people are using it. You wouldn't put ads in places where people won't see it.
Brave is a web browser for people who don't realize it's just Chrome. Edge is now Chrome but Microsoft flavored. Looks like I gotta teach some people here. Why not FireFox? I use it and don't see problems. You know by next year Google is going to use Manifest V3 which won't block ads as well as V2. What do you think browsers like Edge and Opera will use when Google makes the switch? Brave may not, but you're delaying the inevitable by using Brave. FireFox is one of the few browsers that didn't just take Chromium and gave it a different skin. This is beginner stuff here.
Yep but I assumed it went without saying. But it's more nuanced than "Edge is just Chrome" oversimplification. And probably beyond scope of the thread. Firefox is fine.
Don't buy your phone from a carrier, buy from Amazon or something. I've done this for the past 10 years or so and it's so much better not having any of that crap on there.
What I do is buy a phone that is fully supported by LineageOS. The more popular the product, the better the support. My Moto X4 is on the list but I wouldn't say that it's got a lot of support from the community. Google devices has the most support from what I've seen. Once you have the ability to install a custom rom then you can remove bloat and block ads more effectively.
It's more that 11 has ratcheted user experience and privacy in the wrong direction another few clicks, just like every prior new version of Windows.
Also, buy unlocked phones when possible, so you have the option to keep it if you switch providers.