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.
It’s also important to remember that Microsoft has no monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall.
With that in mind, there would be no reason for Microsoft to automatically enable Windows Recall in an update down the line. If it does happen, the user will be able to instantly tell thanks to that that visual indicator and turn it off again.
This article is nothing but propaganda. There is huge monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall and collect their data, and Microsoft routinely uses Windows Update to enable data collection. They began that practice years ago on Windows 7. It’s a ridiculously simple matter for MS to disable the visual indicator and force This Week’s Plan on their users to monetize their data.
Windows Central pretends to be critical of plans to enable a feature that can be made into malware by Microsoft in a couple of minutes, but then back peddles and says it can’t be done (utter BS) and if it could be, it wouldn’t be that bad.
Even if the database remains local only forever, which I don’t believe for a second, the computer will eventually make hyperspecific requests for ads based on the spying.
Only data that is not stored cannot fall victim to attackers. It does not matter whether it is a ‘nigerian prince’, Microsoft or some agency. Even if you completly trust whatever entity with your data right now, they may become problematic in the future.
This is why a low profile is a crucial component of OPsec.
Recall is objectively stupid, even if Microsoft only had their users best interest in mind. And they don’t.
Enshittification advances. Consoles already are the prime example of devices that act as if they are still owned by the company rather than the customer, but they somehow find even more ways to make it worse...
It was great. Even if I didn’t like the idea of “yet another walled garden, funded by a company known for its track record against open source software (this was during Ballmer era)”, I really liked the design and how fluid the interface was. It could have become another player in the mobile market and lessen the practical duopoly. Firefox OS tried this too, but it also went under.
Call me dumb if you want, but I still see a big issue in MSFT's naming convention for XBox. They need to stop trying to be clever and just do something sequential.
For those of you that are tired of Microsoft’s bullshit, a great place to start is Linux Mint or, if you want to be on the bleeding edge with a rolling distro that still gets some testing, openSUSE Tumbleweed (which is what I’m using).
Same reason I picked it. I did some distro hopping when I made the switch and Tumbleweed was the first one I tried that my motherboard audio worked with.
No, I tried Mint and Manjaro for a couple weeks each and a couple other distros I’ve forgotten cause I just booted them up, checked audio was broken, and replaced them. But I know Leap wasn’t one of them.
I started with Mint, but for Windows users I’d advise openSUSE too.
There’s an issue, though, with them preparing for the next big release to become something like Fedora Silverblue or I don’t remember. But for now it’s a distribution with the corporate feeling in a good sense as strong as with Windows, almost none of that feeling in a bad sense, and it’s very polished.
I’ve been driving Linux for about a year now, I ended up switching to Debian because I don’t want my programs updating with bleeding edge releases that can break things. The coolest part about Linux is that you can choose like that.
I found endeavour (arch) to be a much simpler experience vs fedora or opensuse or void. Tpm chip worked right away, clear instructions for setting up secureboot with a hook that signs everything as it’s updated, etc. I could barely get void to boot, opensuse worked well but after a power outage the tpm stopped working and I was never able to get it back, fedora I had no success with tpm. I’m sure that’s all pretty variable depending on hardware.
If you aren’t looking for full functionality of your hardware most any distro should be fine, but…why sacrifice security?
Tell me about gaming on Linux. Most if my gaming is via Steam and I have a Steamdeck which I know runs on a flavor of Linux so it can be done. Is it fair to say that any game that runs on the Steam runs on Steam Linux?
I just got a new prebuilt with Windows 11 Pro and I’ve been curious about Linux for the past few months. I know the variations have gotten better over the years but haven’t done too much research into it. I hear Mint and Arch quite a bit.
Did you mean to say “any game that runs on the Steam Deck runs on Steam Linux?”
If so, the answer is yes. It’s honestly surprising these days to run across a steam title that doesn’t run in linux (though always look into the anti-cheat situation for online games).
Is it fair to say that any game that runs on the Steam runs on Steam Linux?
No, it’s not that far along. A lot works, but if there’s invasive DRM or anticheat then it probably won’t. If you have specific games you want to play in mind check out www.protondb.com
I know the variations have gotten better over the years but haven’t done too much research into it.
If you’re curious you can just create a live USB stick to test drive it. Won’t work well for gaming though.
Straw that broke the camel’s back? Every vertebra in that camel’s back has been smashed with a sledge hammer over the past 30 years.
Windows 95 was the last version I was excited about; Windows 98 SE was the last version of Windows I willingly purchased, and XP was the last one I willingly used. When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, “Dapper Drake”. Since then, Windows has only existed on my computers as pirated, virtual machines.
I think Windows 7 was good, and their last decent desktop OS before they started backporting Windows 10 garbage into it late in the lifecycle.
I’m in the same boat as you now. Earlier this year I’d had enough and there was no way I was going from my de-shittified Win10 Enterprise install to Win11. I’m on Tumbleweed for my main PC now.
My job is in the early stages of planning for updating everything to windows 11. I just got my testing VM with it the other day which is my first experience with it and I had an almost physical reaction to how bad the gui looks when I first logged in. I haven’t even done anything with it and I already hate it.
On the other hand the Linux VM I set up at home to test my personal stuff out on has been going swimmingly.
I hated Windows from the day I saw the 3.1 floppies had no write tab (that tiny piece that allowed you to write the disk). My first though was “we’ve payed for this and they forbid us to write on them? Fuck MS”. It was the last original Windows in any PC at home. And I used DRDOS, so even worse (Windows 3.11 had a “bug” that made it crash if it ran on DRDOS).
You lasted until Windows 7? I’m guessing you didn’t have to deal with Windows Vista’s bs then. I changed ship thanks to Vista.
I also suffered Windows Me, but I was too young and at that time I didn’t know there was an alternative.
I dual booted Vista/7 and Ubuntu/Mint for a while but after not using Windows in years ended removing it completely. Now I’m a happy Antergos Arch user ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Wow, I actually forgot about Vista. I never actually had it installed on anything. XP was the last OS I had installed on hardware. Win 7 was the first I knew only from VM installations.
When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, “Dapper Drake”.
Windows Vista was so bad that it gets forgotten even in a retrospective about how Windows versions sucked. But yeah, Win7 didn’t come out for another few years after that, to rescue the world from Vista.
Where was this outrage when Xbox blocked the ability to use third party headsets? This just seems like a continuation of their long-held policy and is likely only happening now that they have their accessibility controller on the market.
A local account is created on the device and doesn’t require Internet connectivity to sign in. It’s independent of other services, and it’s not connected to the cloud. Your settings, files, and applications are limited to that single device
A Microsoft account, on the other hand, is associated to an email address and password that you use with Outlook.com, Hotmail, Office, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox, and Windows. When you sign in to your PC with a Microsoft account, you’re connected to a Microsoft cloud service, and your settings and files can sync across various devices. You can also use it to access other Microsoft services
Like many other online services they’ve saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.
They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.
Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don’t see anyone being able to do that for free for long.
Unfortunately, if anyone is going to “disrupt” youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they’ll have to monetize as well.
My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.
I agree that the sheer quantity of resources required to host videos is hard to be able to compete, but there’s also Invidious, which is the fediverse equivalent. As with other fediverse applications, it will largely depend on the people running the instances and how much they storage they can support.
We need to think about what people did before YouTube. It was already gaining traction around 2006, but before that you could still watch videos on different websites, it was just decentralized and videos were hosted on smaller pages. You might even see a website dedicated to a single video. YouTube’s incredibly convenient, but internet video can and will survive without it.
I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won’t be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.
The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.
Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.
Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I’m sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.
There’s a significant aspect of scale being ignored when you talk about video sites before Youtube took off.
Not a single one of those self hosted sites had anywhere near the storage that youtube allows. Want a video from over a year or two ago? Hope you downloaded it or the creator loved it enough to leave it up. Frame rates? Resolution? What are those? I understand that tech has advanced as well, and those issues would not be as severe now, but I really doubt that a lot of channels even now would be able to keep the same lengthy back catalog of old content if they were self hosting.
I also think that there are countless channels that would never have existed if the creators had to figure out hosting their own site, setting up streaming of the video files on it, potentially managing their own comments plugins, potentially managing their own methods to keep viewers aware when new content was posted, and having to somehow spread the word of their existence without the aid of an existing platform trying to keep people viewing things for more ad impressions.
The monopoly of Youtube is a problem, the lack of easy to use and configure open alternatives is a problem… but we can’t ignore the massive impact Youtube had in lowering the barrier to entry and upkeep costs of being a content maker.
There are a lot of hurdles to content creation and hosting that Youtube enables creators to completely ignore.
Also, lots of the younger generations didn’t really mind the ads. After this news showed up, we had a discussion going on my company discord. Most of the older people started sharing workarounds but most of the younger people said that they’ve been using YouTube with ads and didn’t see any problem with it.
I’ve seen the same. I wonder if the older you get, the more you value your time.
I remember seeing lots of ad breaks on TV when I was a kid and it didn’t stop me from watching a show. Now if an ad break happens, I am reminded why I don’t own a TV and turn it off.
I’ve been using YouTube Premium (née YouTube Red) for so long that I totally forgot that there are ads on YouTube and was surprised by all of this news popping off.
Controversial take around these parts but… I don’t mind paying for services I use. A model where content is hosted and edited and provided for free by ads is already a bad and unsustainable model, and when most users use adblock too it just pushes companies towards ever more intrusive and unethical methods.
I have been paying for YouTube without ads since it was part of Google Play Music. I’ll pay for services as long as they meet some criteria I consider fair:
If I’m paying, you don’t get to also show me ads. I won’t even pay for HBO for this reason. They’re showing ads for their own shows, not from random advertisers, but it’s still obnoxious to me
The price has to be reasonable and affordable. Netflix has passed this line now, for me, but for example Crunchyroll and YouTube Premium remain worth it for now.
It has to be convenient. News sites are inconvenient because there’s a million of them and I don’t plan to use one as a central portal for news. I’d rather click on a link I see from somewhere else or that a friend sends me and be able to view. I’d kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.
I find the number of people saying “well I’m not going to use YouTube anymore!” hilarious. Yeah dude, that’s the point, you were just a cost to them, not a profit source. I’ll happily argue that capitalism is broken, that a lot of our most important services should be freely accessible, that corporations are seeking profit in increasingly unethical ways. I just don’t think being a complete leech is a reasonable answer.
Maybe I guess? People keep talking about Google selling user data but that is one thing they explicitly DON’T do. User data is their competitive advantage, not their product. They sell advertising, and advertisers can be explicit in who they target. If Google sells the data, they lose the value they hold to advertisers.
So Google is almost certainly still recording what I do and what I watch. But if I’m not seeing ads related to it, am I paying twice? What makes it different from, for example, Netflix keeping track of my watch history to recommend other shows?
I suppose that the videos I watch might inform the ads I see on search, so in that sense you could say I pay twice. But I don’t use Google for search anyway so it kind of doesn’t matter.
I’d kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.
This is exactly the reason I use Apple News+. I get access to multiple magazines I have read forever, actual well written journalism, news briefs tailored to my wants, etc. It’s very much worth the price for me.
Same here except I’ve always used adblocker. The contrast between YouTube with adblock + sponsorblock compared to stock, cannot be overstated. The site literally becomes unuseable. It’s awful.
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