Users can already uninstall all of this easily enough with powershell. I assume what this ruling changes is that they have to let users uninstall with the standard tools, which was disabled because it may break things that rely on edge and they didn’t want people doing it accidently.
Winget like everyone said. But you can also download the exe with powershell if you know the url (otherwise just download the page and have fun finding the link haha)
At last. This is actually good news for Windows itself because people will be more inclined to use it again if they don’t see ads, aren’t tracked, can set any default browser etc.
So it’s good for both users and Microsoft.
Sometimes these corporations just can’t help themselves by adding trash and they need a mommy figure to force them to stop doing that which ultimately benefits themselves.
Thing is for me windows opened a pandora’s box that goes further than just ad-free, once I started getting into open software thanks to switching to linux, I realized it’s not just the them saying there’s no tracking, it’s the being able to see it for yourself, it’s the there being a 1000 eyes on a project that don’t have a motivation to lie to you, checking making sure that there are no trackers.
It’s no longer just sbout them saying “it’s all good we ain’t spying” it’s about a project with a thousand eyes on them making sure this is actually the case, plus the nature of most open licenses where every fork also needs to follow such license.
It’s starting to become a sort of change in how I see society working with each other and I whish there were other aspects of life where such a philosophy vould be applied.
I do wonder about that, Gen Z and Alpha are less tech savvy than millennials, so there’s non zero odds that it doesn’t work out because Linux isn’t easily accessible in the tablet/phone space yet.
Mobile Linux is a thing, though I think it would take governments mandating unlocked/user-unlockable bootloaders to gain literally Any market share. It would also probably take a compatibility layer for running Android apps similar to Wine in desktop Linux, but Android already runs a Linux kernel, so projects like Waydroid are most of the way there already by just running Android inside a container.
I think we need rock-solid Wayland before we can expect TYLD. So I’m feeling 2026 minimum, then add a couple for some padding; so 2028 realistically. Think of how far we’ve come in 5 years, then imagine 5 years more.
If Nvidia’s consumer GPU market share dropped a bit too, that’d help.
Why do you think that Wayland is necessary for adoption? In my opinion it is the missing hardware drivers, compatability issues and “getting your hands dirty” while constantly tweaking stuff. Yeah it got better over the years, but most people want things to just work.
Wayland is necessary because Wayland will be necessary in the near future, if it was next year then that would put a lot of people who don’t know about X.Org and Wayland through a major shift which could rock-the-boat a bit too much and cause them to go back to Windows for the “just works” experience.
Look, I just finally tried steam on Linux and the game booted up. I am absolutely amazed as I thought I’d never see that day. Also windows is somehow just getting worse and worse. It’s like they just want an entire ad platform. They lost me at this point. I have 0 need for any ms products again and that’s a great feeling.
I know that phrase is the most beaten dead horse around at this point but the year of the Linux desktop is going to be different depending on what your requirements are.
If you just need to browse the web, it’s been there for over a decade. Same for most dev work.
For gaming, it’s already there for most titles. Pretty much everything I try works now unless it has anticheat. It’s been in a pretty good state for 2 or 3 years now at least.
For media creation and specialized software, it’s not there yet. The big stuff like adobe will probably never get ported and the free alternatives vary wildly in quality. Blender is awesome. GIMP is not. There’s also issues like lacking color management and iffy HDR support.
Yeah people often forget the sheer amount of quality checks and testing that windows updates go through. Sure it might do annoying things like changing your default browser but it never truly breaks.
There’s also the fact that Windows native antivirus is so good that installing antivirus software is actually a downgrade. On Linux meanwhile you gotta run third party antivirus.
It should not happen if you use debian, Ubuntu or Mint stable. As long you don’t do anything exotic it should not break, at not since 2018.
And if it breaks remember you compare free software made by volunteers (and paid employees from companies) with much less money and they still manage to compete with the multi billion dollar company Microsoft.
Is exactly what I’m trying to say… this is why Linux will not be ever better unless it is an actual product that can have real money poured into it. Except they don’t really “manage to compete”. Unless you count 1vs99 as non-laughable competition. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to use something else but as of right now, nothing can really compare with stability and being “plug and play”
Hmm. My partner’s Linux machine is perfectly stable and has been for a decade. I administer it for them, but that’s just running updates and distribution upgrades every now and then
My server takes more effort, as distribution upgrades sometimes break stuff, for example the mailing list manager I have used for a long time became deprecated and was disabled on the recent LTS upgrade
My laptop running Ubuntu from the factory is perfectly fine, I’ll probably make it less stable by moving it to Debian
This is terrible news for everyone like me that wants to incessantly tell people to switch to Linux. While I’m here, do it. Any distro other than Ubuntu and it’s deranged derivatives please.
I mean it’s a good thing they are doing this, but I was kinda hoping they would go full suicide like unity or musk’s twatter. It’s also too little too late. They should allow straightforward telemetry disabling.
How do they verify that I’m in the EEA? Do I need to sign up through a VPN when I register Windows or do I just specify an EEA country during the install?
USA politicians are paid for and if anything they will never do this in fact they will do the exact opposite and make it easier for corporations to exploit people.
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