Straight up the same playbook that other entities used in the past to get your grandma to install unwanted search bars in internet explorer. No wonder Windows Defender is so advanced, Microsoft has a lot of experience as the developer of the most popular malware in the world.
The above is my solution until taking the other advice on this thread and transitioning to Linux. Only thing holding me back there is gaming (which already works great for most people, I had trouble with my GPU). There are so many things about Linux that are just better than Windows now, and a high number of use cases these days are met with Firefox and libre office.
What GPU issues were you having btw? If they’re driver related you could use a distro that has Nvidia drivers baked into the ISO by default like pop_os, just use their Nvidia ISO for the install.
AMD actually, newer 7900 xtx I think. It wasn’t a problem with the Linux desktop environment, but games crashing. At the time I didn’t have much time or patience to get it set up :/
Win 11 just isn’t going to happen though, too many good options now. If something doesn’t work by then 🤷♂️, guess it isn’t that important.
Thank you, I can’t remember what I did try though, and it had been a while since I had Linux as my primary OS. I was still trying to figure out how proton worked with steam and whatnot.
By the time I get around to trying it again my card will be sufficiently aged I probably won’t need to worry about it :D
I’m both an AMD (7900XT) and NixOS user. AMD drivers are known for being a bit wonky when they’re brand-new on Linux.
I continue to have a particularly bad experience with anything Flatpak (I chalk that up to its Ubuntu influences, rather than Linux in general), but everything else works perfectly.
7900xt user here on Ubuntu lts: what worked for me was finding some Valve engineer’s ppa that has mesa drivers with modern chip support. I was honestly pretty pissed at how much work it was to get my gpu working in Linux after hearing so much about how good it has gotten. My experience was basically the same as ten years ago: a pain in the ass.
Do you just need an adblock extension on chrome? Should be an easy fix. Or the O&O shutup program may work as well, have used that in the past effectively.
I use Chrome on Windows and have never seen this, or at least, not for years so hard to know where the setting is to disable exactly.
Lol @ the responses saying to switch OS. Such extreme views.
All of this stuff is A/B tested, region/locale divided, edition divided, hardware divided, based on what other stuff you've agreed to and more. You don't have to do anything to encounter this stuff.
The comments are weird. How often do you even see this? I feel like I remember it once and hit don’t switch and thats it. Not sure why you keep getting it, but I also don’t use edge so maybe that is why. I would imagine if there is a way to stop it it’s in settings somewhere or possibly a local group policy maybe.
I saw this exact popup yesterday, I remember seeing something similar to it before but it has been quite a while. The thing is, this single popup broke my computer entirely, I was playing a game and it jumped in front of the game, immediately stole the games inputs and I couldn’t even pause it. Then clicking don’t switch did absolutely nothing and the popup remained there, and any attempt to forcefully close the popup failed. Also, I was streaming at the time to my tv, and attempting to use any system related screen is blocked (and this popup counts as a system settings screen!), So it just crashed the entire thing while I was trying to dismiss or close it. I was stuck and couldn’t even reboot, had to hold the button and lose any progress I had in the game.
So yeah, I would be very interested in not letting this happen again as well.
Now that is a crazy story and can understand being really annoyed if that happened! I definitely have had my share of wtf moments on Windows as well so I get it.
Got this via Mastodon which will not let me search for the source.
If you’re in the US, when you set up Windows for the first time, select English (Europe) or English (World), not English (US). That will stop it installing all the bloatware that USians are not protected from but everyone else is.
Throw all your important stuff onto a drive thay doesn’t contain the OS. Then remove the drive and wipe the computer. You can set it up again and choose the non-bloatware options.
From what I’ve seen online, it must be done during installation. So short answer, no.
As others have said, you could also backup your data and do a fresh installation (from a boot media, not from Windows itself just to be extra safe).
ThioJoe also has a video talking about this English (Europe/World) thing and also provide a Powershell script to delete Windows bloatware. This option could be interesting if you don’t want to reset your whole installation.
You must switch back to English (US) after installation if you want access to Microsoft Store (and even if you don’t, you probably should because most apps are now there).
I’ve seen a few tools to suppress most telemetry such as ChrisTitusTech’s winutil or O&O ShutUp, maybe you could give that a try. Microsoft is really pushing hard Bing & Edge…
Also, as a Linux user, I must obliged to the rules and say there’s alternatives out there if you want to try something new. :-) !linux
Ah okay, I didn’t know people used it that way and I don’t do XBox game pass or anything like that. It makes sense. My only real experience with windows store apps has been my work computer trying to install a “personal use” version of Microsoft teams from there and apparently I had to get the professional version through M365 downloads.
It's definitely a US thing, I'm on English (Singapore) and have not seen an ad, ever. I was perplexed by all the complaints of ads in the start menu and wherever, until someone pointed to me that it was a US thing.
I don't care that much about privacy anyway. I don't really get why privacy geeks talk about Google collecting your searches while willingly keeping Mozilla telemetry (which is something W disables by default) on. What's the difference? I get why Google shouldn't be collecting external data but I have no issue at all with giving them the data I actually input. Plus Firefox has a lot more deals with bad privacy groups like Google, Fakespot, and Pocket.
You can't make the assumption that they got worse on privacy just because they got bought. They're open-source, show me the code.
Waterfox is said to be slightly faster. They also seem to have a lot more focus for development.
Waterfox disables some of the Mozilla BS, like Pocket and that weird redesign of tabs to floating, by default.
feddit.uk
Oldest