I assume it’s just a test they’re running on specific groups of people just to see how effective it is in getting people to switch. I’ve never had any of these types of things happen to me either, so, yeah.
I’m in the US and the only time I see mention of edge is when installing windows and then again when changing my default browser, which is kinda silly but not something I bother wasting mental energy to care about when it’s something that shows up once and then never again. I would love to see legislation in the US match what some of the European countries have but considering how things could be, it’s of least concern to me. I paid for Windows once in my life via an OEM license I ordered from a German retailer and I’ve had about 16 or so computers since then and all of those have either been custom built machines, used computers, or parted together boxes so if they want to bug me about installing their browser which effectively will recoup revenue based on data from me which varies from useless to misleading and probably becomes a net negative and moves them further from their goal. Then sure, I don’t mind clicking that “no thank you” button
After 30 years on MacOS (yes, I am older than dirt), I switched to Windows 11. I love it. With a few software add-ins, notably Better Desktop Tool and Start11, as well as a deep-dive into Settings/Notifications, etc., it’s useable, comfortable, fairly Mac-like, and not too annoying. I guess I’m lucky as I don’t have any UI/UX baggage from past Windows OSs to drag behind me. Yeah, it’s different than MacOS, but I can get stuff done.
yes, I just got a new (referb) laptop for the kids - fuck MS was anoying trying to install chrome on it (yes I know, but all their bookmarks/setting/etc in there…)
I found edge mysteriously on my phone yesterday I’m not sure if the culprit was the bing app or the Microsoft launcher (not my main launcher I was just curious).
One thing I do know is I didn’t install edge myself I use mull.
On newer Android versions you typically aren’t prompted when you install the app but rather the first time it attempts to initiate an install of another app (or update itself)
That was my thought also I am on Android 13 and even double checked the permissions on the two Microsoft apps I had installed. I’ll be watching to see if this happens again or to anyone else as I immediately removed edge once noticing it.
Shouldn’t be possible I would never voluntarily download it, yet it got on my device somehow.
They also rolled out some change where long pressing on text in android would suggest bing search. I found out that happens if you just have their outlook app installed. Never uninstalled something so fast.
OK, that really makes me suspicious that they’re installing Bing via MS Authenticator app as well… Bing app showed up on my phone and I just noticed it yesterday. Hmmmm.
I did 2 months ago. The OS is truly awsome but many many software are just inferior to the windows version. For example there is no proper pdf reader that can sign a pdf and add or remove a page. You have to do it in two separate software or with a CLI application. I’m a daily anydesk user, I have license as well, their console is broken on ubuntu (or just gnome, not sure). I had to weed out certain things from gnome from a javascript file so I can use my PC while anydesk running. So depending on what you want to do it can be a very good experience or a borderline hell trying to replace your basic software with something worse. I will not give up at this point and I stand by it it is not linux’s fault, however you are not just using an OS but many software on that said OS and many of those software will suck. Fortunately things like Photoshop no longer an issue as you have Photopea in the web browser. Web3 is really helping linux out.
you can but it has many other issues as it is not a PDF reader. It has no bookmarks, every PDF is opened editable so if there are shapes or text you can accidentally move them, there is no continuous scrolling through a document it is divided into individual pages. PDF is simply not solved on linux at the moment.
No. I rarely edit PDFs. I sign them, bind them, reorganize pages, comment on them. I was an adobe x user then a foxit reader guy on windows, there you can do it all. There is a foxit reader for linux with fraction of the features and have crashed for me constantly (back to my original point that multi OS developments have inferior linux version) Ideally I would prefer a single software to manage my PDFs just like for example I prefer a single software to play my different format of videos.
For example there is no proper pdf reader that can sign a pdf and add or remove a page.
Unfortunately, pdf signing is problematic still on Linux, I use it as a daily driver and found a compromise with existing functionality. You can try okular, which is able to sign PDFs without altering them, but has a huge signature block and doesn’t permit adding a scan of a signature. My workaround: I created a stamp in the PDF reviewing tools with my signature, I can place that on the document and then sign it afterwards. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for pre-signed PDFs as it will alter the signed version.
Alternatively, LibreOffice Draw can sign PDFs, but also can’t insert signature scans (yet, there’s an open feature request) and is sometimes not understanding when PDFs change to landscape, in general it’s not nice to render a many-pages document in LO Draw and hope that it won’t mess up the document upon signing.
For adding / removing pages, I agree - it’s a pity there’s no GUI application, but I have gotten used to qpdf / pdftk and they are quite powerful and more efficient 90% of the time. Still doesn’t excuse no GUI application, but it keeps me able to work.
Xournal++ is old, but it can directly write on PDFs with both pen tablet and scanned image insertion, and can probably add/remove/reorder pages too— Technically I think its file format links to/embeds the whole PDF file, and then probably exports a new one with stuff added on top, or something like that, but the end result is usually that you can directly edit the PDF.
Or do you mean some kind of cryptographic signing? Well, it looks like Adobe offers a webtool too?
I meant tamper-proof cryptographic signatures, yes. A webtool is absolutely out of the question if you consider that it means uploading your potentially confidential document to an enterprise like Adobe.
gnome has those little icon on the top bar and anydesk also creates one while running. That little icon created a big unclickable are in the corner of the screen and i could not close my full screen windows. I had to delete a javascript file from gnome that places those icons in the topbar to solve this issue as anydesk has no setting to hide it.
For example there is no proper pdf reader that can sign a pdf and add or remove a page.
Xournal++ should be a proper PDF reader that can sign a PDF and add and remove pages. Haven’t tried doing the latter personally though. It looks a bit old and might be hard to find, but it’s always worked suspiciously fine for me and is still in active development.
The “Adobe Acrobat” brand apparently also has a web app for signing PDFs. This is like, the first web search result for “PDF signing”.
I’ve also tried Inkscape import as vector and then reexport, which works fine for visually signing single pages. Just make sure you render the text to paths on import, instead of converting them to SVG text— And don’t actually do this, because it’s kinda dumb, so just use Xournal++ or the Adobe website instead, but there are options.
Granted, depending on how your experience with Xournal goes, these options are indeed not as convenient or easy as they should be.
Web3 is really helping linux out.
No! This term refers to, like, three three different things already, all of which have largely been either practical failures or grifts. Prescriptivism is usually just pedantry, but HTML5 web apps aren’t even on that inauspicious list.
There are already solutions to sign a pdf or reorganize the sheets or make comments. My point was its all a separate tool which defeats the point. Like if you want to use paint and the fill bucket is in a separate application. Just makes no sense. I honestly willing to pay for a complete solution I dont want it for free.
My point was its all a separate tool which defeats the point. […] Just makes no sense.
Ah, well, “UNIX Philosophy”, maybe. Each tool does one thing, and does it well, and it’s up to the user to figure out what they want to accomplish by using multiple tools together— Though it probably made more sense in CLI than in the GUI realm. I think it works for 95% of cases. I don’t want to need an entire office suite just to be able to make a mark on a page. But when you’re working a lot on one particular document (be it a PDF, video edit, source code, digital illustration, or whatever), then yeah, having a “complete solution” with an efficient workflow can be hugely important as well.
I honestly willing to pay for a complete solution I dont want it for free.
You could check if CodeWeavers Crossover, the money behind the WINE project, can run your preferred Windows applications but do it on Linux:
Kde neon user here, so kubuntu with latest kde apps.
No not even close. I can turn off any reporting and tracking. Yes cononical is moving more and more towards snaps but i can always just download and use the deb or flatpack
Oh my god! ReactOS is so old, I completely forgot about it! My first thought was “I hope this is not written with ReactJS”. It’s nice to see that they’re still active.
Depends on what you want to use it for. Run age-old hardware requiring age-old NT-only drivers? Sure. Run modern games? Forget it. And for the age-old hardware stuff (think control board for an electron microscope or something) people usually use FreeDOS, the number of devices that specifically need 32-bit NT is comparatively small. And that’s if they even upgrade at all often it’s just easier to slap an RPi in front of ancient hardware to isolate it from and adapt it to modern surroundings (but yes mainboards with ISA slots are still getting produced, electron microscopes are expensive).
Microsoft loves popups. It feels like it is at least a few times that MS office puts a pop up in front of some button that I’m going to click to tell me about a new feature that I won’t use. Admittedly, I don’t know how to tell users about new features in a better way, but annoying users can’t be right.
I remember an old anecdote from sometime around 2005, that Microsoft did a survey to see what features people wanted added to the Office suite, of the top 10 requested features, 8 were already in the products and the users didn’t know about them.
The whole suite was bloated with stuff most people didn’t need, or at least very rarely needed, but no one wanted to take time to take a class on Excel, or read patch notes, or whatever.
Perhaps I just did something stupid, but I just found Bing and anothernMS app in my Android phone’s app list… never explicitly installed those. I do have Authenticator, though (for work). Has MS stooped to piggybacking their crap from others silently now?
LineageOS? plus Magisk (yes I have rooted it, so perhaps that allowed an opening somwhere). I will have to watch to see if anything re-appears I suppose.
Last weekend I talked my wife into trying Linux on her desktop on an extra SSD I had, she loves it. Loves that she can customize everything, says it’s faster (especially boot time), we put it on her laptop last night
What distro did you go with? My friend is showing intrest in trying Linux but I’m not sure what to recommend him. I use more advanced distros myself but I want it to work well for him OOtB while also not requiring any tinkering. I’m think of either some ubuntu-flavour or fork, like Kubuntu or maybe Mint.
Mint is for sure a good place to start. I personally run EndeavourOS with Cinnamon desktop and it’s been more trouble-free than anything Ubuntu based I’ve used (shocking, I know).
Interesting! I used arch for about 2 years on my gaming rig and it worked fine but I was worried if he went with something based on Arch that he would eventually run into issues due to not properly maintaining it (avoiding partial upgrades for example). But I’m probably overthinking it. If he sticks to a GUI for installing and updating packages and avoid messing with the terminal initially it should be fine.
I will add EndeavourOS to a small list of recommendations (rolling vs point release) so he can decide for himself.
Mint and PopOS! are the ones I’ve heard thrown about for “Users First Distro” ever since Canonical decided to do… whatever the fuck it is they’re doing to Ubuntu proper.
I’m using Mint now, and have exactly one complaint: I don’t like the default Cinnamon Firefox icon so I changed it, but every time there’s an update to Firefox it changes back. All things considered, that’s nothing to worry about.
This “solution” completely ignores the volumes of software that is still only compatible with Windows. This is exactly the belief that Microsoft wants you to have: the illusion that you have a choice between Windows and other, equal alternatives. And before someone starts spouting off about WINE: it truly is a wonderful piece of software, and I don’t mean to disparage any of its talented contributors, but it will likely never even approach feature parity with Windows. I mean, it still can’t run the industry standard 3D modeling program.
I think that compared to video games, productive softwares, especially “industry standard” ones, rely more on Windows APIs at much more accuracy (and since Wine and its forks such as Proton have to rely on black-box reverse engineering to avoid copyright infringement), the API calls may not have the exact values 100% of the time which is more tolerable to videos games but much less on productive softwares.
Another reason is that most of these softwares unlike most video games are likely using many Windows’ quirks or bugs and are likely less using standard (such as WinUI, DirectX,…) or cross platform toolkit (Qt, GTK,…), making reimplementing the environments and libraries to run the softwares much harder.
Oh, and not even counting that many of those softwares may also use kernel-level DRMs which Wine/Proton/Crossover/… are only userspace level to prevent pirates. This was actually a problem in video games too when many video games, mostly multiplayer ones implement kernel level anticheats or DRMs, until Valve contacted the anticheat/DRM developer as well as the release and popular of the Steam Deck make developers care more about Wine/Proton compatibility, but even then there are some developers still don’t implement Wine/Proton compatibility or even worse ban Linux users for circumvent the artificial incompatibility.
Meh gamepass is cool for now. It will probably go up in price and become shitty when they get enough market share but until then it is super cool. And honestly I think bing/edge is now the better choice as a search engine/browser compared to Google/chrome. But no way I will give up my Firefox.
What part of the $1299 MacBook Pro and iMac, the $999 MacBook Air, or the $599 Mac Mini is over priced?
You would struggle to find the power of those for lower prices, especially with the quality and support Apple provides. And it’s nearly impossible to find hardware like that with full Linux support.
I’m holding onto hope actually. I recently started dual-bootung into Mint and the installation process was a breeze. The only thing I could imagine a “typical” user finding difficult is setting up the flash drive for booting/installation. The UI is nice and familiar too. As a Linux newbie I hear that Mint is basically Ubuntu, and that (modern) Ubuntu is hot garbage, but even if it caused my computer to take an actual shit on the floor, it still beats Windows by a country mile.
I think (perhaps too optimistically) that with some more awareness we could see a fairly sizeable migration.
I didn’t mean to make it seem like I had any opinion either way, just that it has received some hate over the years. I did some research - admittedly it was cursory - and it looks like the issues are somewhat exaggerated.
Canonical, it seems, has made a number of poor decisions but apparently they pay attention to user complaints and revert / make adjustments accordingly. Some of the controversial things I saw were related to the Snap package manager, possible telemetry, bloatware, and some partnership with Amazon.
Some of those things were either nothingburgers or simply overblown (one person said the only thing they could see as bloatware was… a few board games), so I would take their anecdotes with a grain of salt.
Again, I’m a relative idiot when it comes to Linux, but my takeaway is that Ubuntu suffers from the typical growing pains / compromises that a relatively popular OS will inevitably encounter. Especially when most of the Linux userbase consists of power users who prefer having complete control (which is perfectly fair too!)
Use whatever distro fits your needs; as long as you ditch Microsoft, you’re making a good choice :)
With the way the average person uses a computer, the Linux user experience would probably melt their brains. No offense to the average computer user, but we have seen time and time again that they are not the brightest when it comes to tech literacy or just don’t care and refuse to care since it goes against the grain, so to speak.
Hi, average user here, I’ve been daily driving Linux (primarily Ubuntu) for a decade or more. Most of my life in a computer is spent in a web browser, word document, or maybe a spreadsheet. Even at my office job it’s the same, except for some proprietary time tracking and billing software. I’d imagine 90 percent of consumers spend the vast majority of their time on computers in the web browser. Most people don’t mess around with much beyond that.
I just don’t understand what is lacking in the Linux user experience. It’s not any different from a Windows user learning to use a Mac computer. Figure out how to connect to wifi, figure out how to mess with the volume, open a browser and that’s it.
I’m sorry, but I kind of doubt you are what I consider a “normal user”, seeing as you’re in a technology community on Lemmy. Just the fact that you are here indicates a higher than average tech literacy.
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