Did KDE get a recent makeover? Last I saw, the window decoration still defaults to half rounded and half square. Devs can’t decide which one they like.
I assume the window decorations are like that because rounding the title bar is safe whereas rounding the bottom of the window has the potential to partly obscure content
This is hilarious. It really cut me deep. I don’t think I’ve seen Harold used in the Drake format like this either. The look of dejected shame is priceless.
X11 came out in 1987. Windows 1.0 came out in 1985. Not sure why that is relevant or represents some kind of point since a lot of windowing UIs were emerging around the same time.
It didn’t come out in 1984. And that’s without pointing out that X11 is a protocol, not a window manager. I.e. it rendered stuff in a box but didn’t say what to do other than that. It took the likes of xt and window managers et al to place some semblance of widgets on apps and they were still a disconnected mess. The first time X became a “desktop” were things like Solaris, XDE, CDE etc. It was still disjointed dogshit compared to Windows, MacOS, AmigaOS, GEM, RISC OS, OS2 etc. The first time that something approached being a modern desktop was with GNOME and KDE but even those spent a long time getting anywhere close to usable. E.g. GNOME sucked untl GNOME red carpet / later ximian was the first pretty good Linux desktop.
Oh wow, I’m glad to see there’s other people who are reminded of Plasma by Win 11. As someone who never installed or used it the first time I saw someone using it I made a comment about them using Linux. Until I realized…
Copying stuff that enhances the UI/UX is something that I’m personally not opposed to but stealing another foundation’s motto is just lame and shameless.
KDE: Welcome to Linux. Do you like the UI of Windows? Well we have an excellent offering for you if that’s your choice. There’s also other DEs that you may select from if that’s your choice.
Right just in the browser, start menu, notification panel, and whatever it’s called that pops up when you accidentally hover your cursor over the weather thing in the bottom right by the clock/calendar for .2ms too long.
Supposedly it’s being trial run in file explorer on 10/11 and will be present at launch on 12
These are annoying as heck but I don’t consider them ads at all. Sure they probably launch some ad riddled page, but no direct ads in windows.
They can all be turned off and I am a bit annoyed that our desktop team hasn’t turned them off in our org’s standard images. I cringe anytime I have to remote in to troubleshoot with a user. Thankfully it isn’t very often.
My solution was to migrate to Windows 10/11 Enterprise. No ads, no nothing. The LTSC versions are even better but they’re a little too barebones for my use case. Keep in mind that those SKUs cannot be activated legally but as with anything: There are ways to circumvent that issue.
You make it sound as if I have to evade the police and steal it from a store lmao. It’s pretty openly available and even a simple utility like RUFUS can disable all the shit in the iso itself before making it a bootable drive.
These links to install things like Candy Crush are only seen until you remove them. Once removed, you never see them again. This is no different to a lot of physical products and software products - including FireFox.
Software managers in some distros like Mint have ‘Featured’ apps that highlight some applications; applications like WhatsApp, Dropbox, Spotify, Skype, etc - smells like adverts to me.
I don’t use the Microsoft Store on Windows, nor do I use software managers on Linux. But what do you expect with these, it’s like going to eBay and complaining you see adverts.
Okay. Original person this whole thread spawned from. I think you all went down the rabbit hole of "what's an advert" and lost the entire point of my comment which is lack of choice.
But before I address that choice thing let's address the "Ads" of Linux as you would call it. The "Featured" apps in a lot of software managers for Linux are selections that come from folks who manage the distro wanting to ensure that people know that "Linux can do that stuff that Windows can". The "Feature" is not there to promote Dropbox and pray get some money, it's there to point out to people "we can do that here as well, just FYI."
So you may feel that the featured in the software managers is "ad" but you can ask the folks who run the distro how they arrived at what's there and pretty much every case it's so they can show that the distro has some feature parity with what people are expecting. Now you do mention Firefox and they are indeed hawking their own product. Interestingly, Mozilla maintains a page about just this thing. And it's come up time and time again in mailinglists. Distro builders absolutely have the option to disable this in their repo, but by default build, it's allowed and default options is how a lot of distros choose build the package. And it's this later part that leads me to the point of my original comment.
CHOICE. Long story short because I feel I've already made this comment pretty long. You don't get choice in Windows. There's not some magic build that you can use to do away with all that Candy Crush and what not and still be this side of the TOS for the OS. And for Linux there is choice. It's less about ads and more about "do you get a say in any of this?" With pretty much every Linux distro, you always have the option to become a contributor in some manner. (As an aside) This is actually the friction that a lot folks talk about with how RedHat and the Fedora project have been doing things lately. They're sort of removing this option for the general public to have a line of commentary into the project. It's a bit more complicated than that, but even with the notions that they're toying with, it's been met with pretty strong reactions against what they're doing. And lots of distros have pointed out, that they are going to be doing the opposite of what RedHat is doing going forward on that front. (but I digress)
But that all said, looking at Windows. You don't get a say in the build process. There's not an option for you to rebuild the software stack to your liking for distribution between your machines. There's what the SKU offers and then there's just finding some other OS. And yes, that's not ignoring that enterprise Windows allows pretty much all of these things to not be a thing via group policy objects in the active directory, but it still sticks to the core aspect of only if your SKU offers that option and you need to use that SKU in accordance with the TOS for that SKU. Those are your options. That's the thing and while I'm sure the debate about "what constitutes an ad or not" is a noble one to have, I think you all lost the entire point of my original comment to debate this point that's not really a point that anyone was making to begin with. And also your view on that point of "what's an ad" is poorly informed from the Linux distro makers perspective. There's a need to point out to users coming from Windows or Mac and trying "Linux" for the first time that "we can do that too". That's distinctly different from Microsoft's goal of letting you know that you too can sign up for OneDrive.
I haven’t gone down a rabbit hole at all. There are only three very short and sweet comments from me on the subject.
I think it’s interesting that people frame it differently depending on whether it’s Linux or Windows. Product placements in Windows are called adverts. Product placements in Linux and software people run on Linux are called helping the user.
I’m just here to defend the position that Windows doesn’t serve adverts. At least to me on any of the Windows computers I’ve used in the past several years on both pro and home editions. I haven’t used any of these tricks or scripts that attempt to cripple Windows either. I’ve only disabled web search in the start menu because I think it’s a stupid feature. And yes there are product placements on the start menu by default but they’re never to be seen again after you delete them in the first 30 seconds on the very first boot up.
I use Linux and Windows, so i’m not a hardcore Windows user come here to troll. Although, it feels like I would have received less negativity if I had trolled. 😂
With Windows and adverts, maybe it’s a your mileage may vary situation based on your region or something. All I know is, I see zero adverts on Windows.
Have you ever gotten a windows update? (The sponsored bit came back regularly with most updates for me, I’ve barely used windows though.) Also by software managers I’m guessing you mean the ones with a GUI or do you install everything manually?
The only ads I see are the clickbait garbage MSN shit that the browser defaults to but I’ve disabled it. I don’t really see ads other than that. Then again I live in Europe and I upgraded from a purchased copy of Windows 10 so maybe there are lesser or greater degrees of advertising Microsoft puts on users depending on their location, version of Windows 11 etc.
Nono Win11 has sponsored apps automatically pinned to start menu (at the latest with the next update) and Win10 has weird things in the search bar promoting ms edge and other things. Also there’s some news thingy in the task bar that’s really annoying to disable (and I forget how to each time)
I wish Microsoft kept Windows as a paid product, instead of making it effectively free (with things like free upgrades from older versions) and sticking ads all over the place.
It’s because for Microsoft a user using Windows for free is better than a user using some other OS.
At least when the user uses Windows for free they still tell everyone at work and home that you have to run Windows because there’s just nothing else out there.
Correct, but that’s cost is only if you buy windows 11 for a machine that has never had windows on it,
11 is free for any windows user that has 10. It also comes pre installed on most PCs you buy and very rarely is that cost of the license noted on the device your buying (unless you use the customize settings on an online store)
I’m also pretty sure there are still ways to upgrade to 10 from 7 and 8. Windows did this to make it harder for people to switch to a different OS because most people remember when they had to “pay” to upgrade to the latest version.
The average consumer either doesn’t go to the manufacturer site or doesn’t care enough to look into alternatives. They want something that gets their school/work done.
As some in the IT field who regularly deals with people that have a 4+ year degree and then tell me they are “tech illiterate” is astounding.
In the past they were hand held so much that the previous techs had a password book of everyone’s password for multiple applications.
Luckily with a lot of pushback from our current members about how insecure and dangerous that is that has changed, but we still have users even after 3 years since the change message us through a depreciated system asking for their password.
Knowing a few people running lubuntu doesn’t make it an average. That is just a personal bias.
From experience almost all the computers I serviced over the last few years were either bought at Walmart, Best buy or Amazon that could also be a bias, but it spans over multiple cities with a good hundred clients The only time I started to see computers that were consistently bought from the manufacturer is in a business environment. But the specific one I’m in doesn’t support Linux at all within production.
Knowing a few people running lubuntu doesn’t make it an average. That is just a personal bias.
I never said it did, I was just trying to explain/give examples that Linux isn’t just for tech professionals.
From experience almost all the computers I serviced over the last few years were either bought at Walmart, Best buy or Amazon
If that means that they didn’t even look at the manufacturer site, that surprises me, I’ve found often that some stats are just left out of product descriptions, which to be fair is the same on manufacturer sites (I’ve never found SSD speeds for instance) but nonetheless there’s usually a lot more info than looking at the label in a store. Even my less tech savvy relatives managed to figure that out, but then did ask me about the relevance of some stats.
Ah I just checked there used to be a loophole by going through a disability program or using an alternative authentication method provided by Microsoft that would activate the 10 license after the update. Looks like it was patched in September 2023 though.
In Soviet Russia Astra BTW use you. Seeing how “import-replacement”(read as corpos GTFO with protectionism on top) law is (un)enforced, I lost hope that this will happen.
The UI of Windows 11 is fine, at least visually. Windows 8-10 were mostly just ugly. When it comes to configuration options, they lose even against Plasma from a couple years ago.
I have a Mac like UI btw., there is no chance of confusing my Plasma with any Windows :P
I feel like the windows 11 ui looks really nice and it seems like they could do a lot with it, but at least last time I actually tried it it just felt kind of unfinished and there were a lot of weird bits where the theming looked wrong
I installed it recently in a VM for something and my first thought was "what the fuck?". My last proper Windows installation was 7 and W11 is barely recognizable. The amount of preinstalled garbage alone really shocked me. The system menus have become even more convoluted too and I actually seriously struggled to find various settings. I remember the first attempt at re-categorizing the system settings in I think it was Vista but this is even worse.
The number of times W11 menu has tried to convince me to install TikTok immediately destroys the OS’ legitimacy in my eyes.
And then there’s the lack of customization; the shovelware and bloat; the random crashes and hangs with only a blue screen with an emoticon frowny face; the constant advertising; and the tracking of everything you do with the OS to feed advertising; the forced integration of cloud services like OneDrive…
Fuck windows. I’m not a programmer but I’ve been running Manjaro (I know, I know) as a daily driver on three different devices for 7 years now. The only true problem I’ve ever had was theming grub2 and fucking up the config, which was entirely my own fault.
The privacy concerns were one of the main factors why I moved away from Windows. And when the "free" W10 upgrade killed itself, along with my system partition, I decided that it's the point where I have to make the jump.
Manjaro isn't as bad as its rep. I had way more issues with EndeavourOS, which also eventually nuked itself, which Manjaro never did in the (much longer) time I was using it.
I’ve started using endeavouros but haven’t had any problems, besides getting used to pacman and similar (also Nvidia drivers messing things up but that happened on my Ubuntu which recently killed itself too). Care to elaborate on which issues you had?
At first mostly smaller issues, but they started to pile up, with me not being able to find any solutions for them.
But then one of the updates in July killed grub, despite me always using the recommended commands after each update, causing me to lose access to the system. I was not skilled enough to recover it as all the guides didn't really give me enough information for me to handle my encrypted setup, so I tried getting help from their forums, where I then got insulted, gaslighted and trolled by a few users, trying to put the blame on me for using grub instead of the default bootloader, completely ignoring the fact that grub very much was the default boot loader, to the point where a moderator ended up locking & hiding the thread, so that it wouldn't leave a bad look on them, telling me I should probably create a new thread if I still need help. I decided this would be my last time with EOS.
I think the default bootloader might depend on some config, because for me grub also wasn’t the default, I had to reinstall it once though too, but that was because I accidentally booted into windows and it instantly gave me an update which messed up the whole efi partition. No idea if I have an encrypted setup though. I’ve barely used the forum so I don’t know about that. Thanks for the info though.
I'm not talking about dual booting but other Linux bootloaders during the installation. I've not had a Windows installation for several years now. If you don't know whether you encrypted your drives or not, then you likely didn't. Either way, if they are it makes figuring out their correct ID's quite complicated and confusing, which was part of the issue. All the related guides to that topic sort of assumed I already knew what the hell I was doing, hence why I tried to ask for help.
Eh, you only notice it when it’s bad, most of the time for most users it’s okay, though I generally argue they just make an unconscious decision to ignore most issues, even before trying out Linux I was flabbergasted at how people literally lose time and get flustered at a problem but then refuse to accept it as such.
Ya’ll are nuts. I logged in to a windows 10 pc after ~1 year so that I could flash a SD card. Windows immediately updates and literally bricked an ssd. How is that “general computing”
Because that is not a common experience in the least bit. Windows 10/11, as far as general usage (Internet, media, games) works 99.95% well for those use cases. I haven’t got a blue screen or had to reinstall an OS for like…idk 6 or 7 years now. You might not like the level of customization or data collection, but most folks don’t care about that.
Meanwhile on Linux desktop (servers and infrastructure excluded) nerds (I use deprecatingly) get excited about idempotent updates so snap can’t break their shit because fuck usability, or gpl god must be appeased.
As someone who uses Linux servers and software all day Windows gives them normal user a far far more stable experience on the desktop.
Yeah for real, trying to get people to switch by saying that windows crashes all the time/ has driver issues/ bricks hardware or software is just not the selling point people think it is because windows doesn’t do that 99% of the time.
And does Linux ever do that? “wellllll yeah sometimes it can but only if you’re using it wrong.”
I haven’t got a blue screen or had to reinstall an OS for like…idk 6 or 7 years now
Also note that blue screens are almost always bad drivers, which isn’t a fault of Windows itself as the drivers are written by device manufacturers. It’s like blaming a Linux distro for crashibg all the time when the issues are actually entirely caused by the closed-source Nvidia driver.
A lot of drivers should be provided by the os though, for instance the touchpad on my controller works fine as a mouse only on Linux… (I know it’s a niche case but it’s just an example)
There’s generic drivers, for example any USB keyboard or mouse can use a generic driver. That’s usually developed by the OS developer, so for example Microsoft wrote a driver for this, there’s a driver in the Linux kernel, etc.
The other type are drivers for specific hardware. On Linux, sometimes this is written by contributors, while other times the manufacturer itself writes the drivers (eg Intel wrote a lot of the kernel drivers for their hardware like CPUs, network cards, etc). On Windows, these are almost always written by the device manufacturers.
The generic drivers are usually very solid but have limited features since they have to work for a large range of devices. It’s the manufacturer-written ones that tend to be buggy.
It’s managed to completely mess up my efi partition to the point where I had to boot from a live usb to be able to do anything… (after going less than a month without booting into windows)
For me that's a plus. I like that layout, which Windows also slowly starts to move away from now.
I think Windows more and more looks like a Plasma desktop though, like visually. That process is not super new and somewhat gradual over the versions but it is noticeable. There's also some desktop features that made its way into Linux that felt very close to some that are present in Linux for many years.
It was fine on Windows 7. Now you can’t open the start menu without 5 ads jumping into your face or open any app without a popup promoting a Microsoft alternative (note for the whoosh people, this is hyperbole). It’s even worse than the pop-up/pop-under phase of web ads.
Windows is not “fine” aside from all the non-UI stuff, they’re UI is annoying and slow to me, they moved things behind extra clicks/commands to make it “clean”- stuff I actually use.
And then there’s the whole tracking usage to drop adds in your notification thing… which is a privacy nightmare.
i have to use microshite crap every day.
It outdoes oracle at generating curse words.
and it gets worse. i'd take windows 2000 or nt4 over whatever shit they force on me at work.
XP was a disaster, security-wise. Vista was better conceptually but the tech was undercooked and win7 was basically a re-skin of vista plus some extra maturity due to time.
Then, there’s the entirety of the situation around those releases. Microsoft was so mismanaged under Ballmer that even though Windows 7 was maybe their best OS, it completely missed the smartphone revolution and set them back about a decade until they could be re-spun as a cloud technologies company.
Imagine how huge they’d be if they had successfully leveraged their desktop and business dominance to force their way on top of the mobile world.
Tl:dr Win7 was both Microsoft’s best and worst product of all time.
I mean I’m cheering for Linux adoption too, but I’ve never received an ad beyond the initial install crapware app stubs. I do a sweep on the system settings, clean the junk, and I’m off to the races.
For the unsuspecting users, the privacy concerns are quite bad though.
I havent had that happen, either - between 6 machines I manage and about the same number of reinstalls over the years, from 10 rtm to present 22H2 (or whatever its up to now); I’ve heard the claim by many, but my evidence is nil.
i.postimg.cc/NB5Lp7ZS/195124.pngIts right here with the most recent update, and no obvious way to remove them. I don’t want OneDrive, I don’t want Office 365. Get it out of my face.
That’s not the notification tray, though? I mean bleh but you have to go searching for that, and it is somewhat relevant given that most users are logged into their MS account, and this is the accounts settings page… am I missing something?
Depends. what version of Windows? 10? I can agree for the most part that yeah, it’s fine. Most users loved 7, I…never paid it much mind (mostly because it was good, i guess? Got nothing bad to say about it, at least) and 8 was…Windows 8.
Windows 11 tho? Eh…the UI’s ok. I like it better than 10’s, at least. Ish. But whose bright idea was it to limit the number of items in the context menu? Or to hide the ribbon that, again, shows you more options? Or basically force ya to make a Microsoft account to even use the thing? (there’s apparantly a way to revert some of these things via messing with the Registry) Like, Windows 10 was fine like you said, dunno why 11 needed such drastic changes. And that’s without mentioning ads or the habit Windows has of reverting some of the setting you set after an update (tho that was a thing since 10, tbf. Still annoying)
I think Windows 10 was peak Windows. Controversial for many, I used a start screen too. The only thing I like more about the aesthetics of 11 than 10 is the window outlining with the color of your choice.
I’m not logged into my Microsoft account on Windows, nor do I see adverts. When you boot Windows 11 for the first time there is a trick into getting it to offer the option of a local account. I’m not sure why I don’t see adverts. The only mod I’ve done is to turn off web searching in the start menu. Where do you see adverts?
I’m inclined to agree with ya there since I have no strong feelings towards Windows 7 in particular and I’ve never tried earlier versions. Yeah, I can live with Windows 10 if i had no other choice or say in the matter, and it wasn’t my old install (see the other parenthesis if you care to know)
The ads are on the Start menu search. They’re not that bad as far as I remember, but i can see for others why’d they’d be annoying–in particular, those who paid for the software liscene already. it’s the small little annoyances when it came to Microsoft’s decisions (and the fact i wanna believe my Windows was just messed up from the word go…seriously, that thing was laggy as it was slow and just…strange is the best word I can describe using it, compared to other machines running Windows 10. So yeah, I already had one foot out the door as it was) and the fact I realized I had a choice that was NOT apple that moved me to Linux and it’s been pretty good, considering 95% of my needs are met on Linux
I got a goddamn pop-up ad for an XBox controller. That really says all you need to know. When there are advertisements in the operating system, the operating system is fired.
I loved it when windows recently started giving me Xbox achievements (aka ads for Xbox) notifications just for playing any PC game on my computer. Like I’m trucking along, playing a steam game, and Xbox game bar shit, just has to wake up from its slumber to say: we randomly noticed you played something on this computer! Have you considered Xbox today?
It did something like that to me when I played Minecraft just not an Xbox ad. I think it was something about the game bar. (which I would absolutely love to disable if possible for just one user)
If Linux was fine, then I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of looking for an alternative and taken the time to teach myself Linux. I don’t know anybody else who uses it so it’s not like somebody twisted my arm
honestly endeavouros and fedora (at least the i3 spin) are really easy too and you don’t even need a mouse… (yes windows does for some parts of the installer.)
Eh, it’s okay for most people, I guess. I am just not comfortable being the product. I want to be in control of the things I own.
There is no shortage of different programs that can neuter Windows telemetry and ads but they’re always finding new ways to fuck your shit up and I’m done playing the game.
It’s very constricting and now with ads and forces updates upon the user that cause more problems than they solve (at least in my experience) but other than that I think it’s ok, just not for me.
The pro versions of windows don’t get as disrupted as windows home (the version everyone complains about because they don’t know there’s a difference). And the pirate ones I’m mentioning usually are iso images that have been preemptively unshitified as to not have most of the unnecessary bullshit out of the box but still get the security updates.
Used to be you had to pick and choose updates or get your system gimped for not being a legal copy but Microsoft kinda gave up on that when they went freemium
No, it isn’t. File explore is dog slow (though wiggling the scrollbar helps WTF), they don’t support no-brainer UI niceties such as being able to change volume with the scrollwheel when hovering over the task bar icon, middle click on scrollbars to jump to a location still doesn’t work, no focus follows mouse, double clicks everywhere, settings are… where? There’s like 20 different different UI interfaces to different settings in Windows, half of them dating back to Windows 3.0.
Oh and can you fucking let me set start menu favourites without trying to second-guess what I want there. “Recently used?” I never fucking used that shit you put there and stuff I used isn’t in there.
As to Windows 11: I heard that you can’t have the task bar at the top. Why. Seems like nowadays MS is breaking more stuff than they fix. I was kinda miffed at KDE disabling alt+left/right click move/resize… but then I googled and they moved it to meta. Which is actually sensible. I ceased to be miffed. I probably should read release notes on updates it’s all there.
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