In an unmodified windows it would also show random tabloid news from MSN or affiliates inside the start menu…
sub office 365 for access to ms movie store.
Without these ads how will they fund copilot for 12 more minutes genius?
It’s no longer meant to be used by computer savvy people. It’s meant for consumers. Literally. People that just consume and do not produce or think.
We are walking a different path now and need to say goodbye to windows and Microsoft.
I always dug into RegEdit to disable this crap. And somehow, each time, it was a different series of steps.
They paid people good money to design and crate that.
At this point windows is just msys2 to me.
This is why I have a custom shell on my work PC. This is the kind of shit search interface where the local hits pop up quickly after you typed but then jump away to display irrelevant guff like this just as you’re clicking on what you wanted.
Litestep was the shit years and years ago!! Last I looked into replacing explorer with a custom shell, litestep was pretty abandoned. What shell are you using? Are there multiple options nowadays?
Explorer7 is decent, allows the Win7 explorer to be used on Win8/10/11. https://github.com/world-windows-federation/explorer7
For an actual custom shell there’s xoblite https://xoblite.net/shell/ tho I haven’t used it personally. I just use bbZero https://archive.org/details/bbZero_install_1.18.0-rc6_mojmir, this still works on Win10 though UWP stuff are broken.
I didn’t think you could still get decent custom shells on Windows these days. What do you use?
What I do still have on my one Windows machine I need for a (staunchly annoying Windows only) company I do work for is a launcher program that I have been using for well over a decade. Super resource light and simple. I just don’t use the start menu at all.
I’m using Classic Shell. It’s a bit rough in Dark Mode though.
Ah nice, I thought Classic Shell was dead as of several years ago. Did someone fork it and revive it?
I use Revision from revi.cc
Basic start menu, fewer notifications, lots of options. There’s a slider to disable windows updates, but they still get through sometimes
It looks like what they offer isn’t a shell per se, but a playbook. Which is fine and all, probably far more viable than a true shell replacement due to Microsoft’s shitty shenanigans. If I still used Windows for a personal machine I’d be all about this. I’m worried it would interfere with the corporate garbage I have to deal with.
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What custom shell? For Windows?
My main gripe with this travesty of a “Start menu” is that it isn’t the Tom Hanks movie of a similar name.
The other is that even if it were, it won’t just play, but rather send you to the shiniest new subscription service to subscribe.
Call me old fashioned, but to me a search in the computers task bar should be a search in LOCAL files only. If I want to find random shit from the Internet I would use a proper search engine. Right now, windows search is just rubbish for both local files and Internet content.
Taking 10 as far as I can go then just installing Ubuntu.
Check out Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu but has Canonical’s controversial stuff removed, plus an added layer of polish.
I love Mint. I’m a Linux noob but took the plunge this year and installed it. Its not 100% plain sailing but it is close enough and worth it for the simple unintrusive OS interface that Microsoft has obliterated.
It’s so weird, because Ubuntu used to be the beginner distro. I started out on it and was hooked. The level of polish and out-of-the-box readiness was really welcoming to my old mac brain.
Ubuntu would actually still be a good beginner distro imo if it wasn’t for the way they implemented their custom stuff. Even the distinction between apt and snaps is enough to scare away beginners.
yeah, it started out as THE beginner distro, but as other distros got better for beginners, it didn’t, and instead canonical did weird bs
What version of Firefox does it install? I tried Ubuntu, but the Snaps are having real trouble with my N150 CPU in the mini PC I bought. Cannot do hardware video decoding at all, despite the CPU being more than capable of it.
Well, the Snaps are one of the things they took out. Flatpaks are enabled in the software manager by default though.
I believe everything that comes preinstalled, including Firefox and LibreOffice and such, is installed the traditional way as if you did “apt install firefox.”
I installed LibreWolf and like it. It’s just firefox with telemetry removed and some privacy hardening out of the box.
No snapd on mint at all.
Yeah that’s my plan. My processor won’t even support Windows 11, so that’s not an option. (I used to think it was a TPM2.0 issue, but checked more recently and it’s not. They just even more arbitrarily decided my processor is too old, while also claiming Windows 11 has the same or lower overhead than 10!) I’m also not far away from needing a hard drive, RAM, and GPU upgrade. So I figure some time reasonably soon I’ll build a new PC. That one won’t be getting Windows on it, unless I discover a game or something that I can’t run on Linux.
I haven’t met a single game yet that isn’t running, but I’m not into AAA games anyway. Worst case you just resort to dual boot (don’t forget, always install Windows first) or VM.
Amusingly, just a couple of minutes after posting that comment, I went to the aoe2 Reddit to check if I was missing some details about a recent patch (for details related to this Lemmy post I had just made). And one of the first posts I saw was this one complaining about that very-much-not-AAA game failing to run recently.
The games in that franchise are like 90% of my gaming tbh. They all get great scores on ProtonDB, but the use a kinda weird hybrid of your Steam account and your Microsoft/Xbox account for syncing player details, and one of my concerns is the Xbox account might not work correctly.
Worst case you just resort to dual boot (don’t forget, always install Windows first)
Yeah, dual booting was definitely the plan. I didn’t know you need to install Windows first though, that’s…disappointing. And frustrating. My plan was to install Linux, stick with that for as long as I can, and if I later decide I need Windows for something, install it then.
or VM
Could be a good option. Dunno how smoothly these games would run in a VM, but worth a shot, and much better than needing to dual boot, if it does work smoothly.
I can’t comment on aoe2 specifically but Halo Infinite (through steam) and Minecraft both use my Microsoft account just fine on Linux Mint.
Is not strictly necessary to install Windows first, it just makes it easier, because Linux will setup the bootloader for you. Windows in the others hand tends to nuke everything that was installed prior, so you would at least need to repair the bootloader. To be completely safe you can just disconnect the Linux drive, while Windows is installing. Definitely a path, if you want to go for Linux only for now.
VM is a good method once it is set up, but needs more initial tinkering with the passthrough, depending on your hardware. I don’t know how those Kernel level anti cheat things work. Otherwise the game shouldn’t even know it’s in a vm.
I don’t know how those Kernel level anti cheat things work
Not something that matters to me anyway. I don’t own any such games currently, and don’t intend to change that.
But thanks for the tips re the bootloader!
Don’t dual boot. Instead, invest in two drives and dedicate each to each os fully. Way less headache and far more control. Easier to keep windows oblivious of Linux existence so it doesn’t fuck with it.
Isn’t that still dual booting? Unless you have two PCs (even if you somehow rigged both PCs up in the same case with separate power buttons), you need a bootloader to choose which drive to boot off of. And unless I’m mistaken, two drives is not going to look notably different to the bootloader from two partitions on the same drive, is it?
That’s also “dual booting”. The phrase never referred specifically to having two OSes on the same drive, just on the same machine.
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3-day timeout. Stop being a dick.
Ah yes, OP bad
sometimes OP is indeed bad
KDE’s Plasma Desktop has a web search plugin that I use all the time. Typing the Win (Super) key followed by
wp:Sistine Chapeland then the Enter key brings me straight to the Wikipedia entry on the Sistine Chapel.imdb:Jurassic Parkbrings me to the IMDb page for Jurassic Park.yt:will search YouTube, and so on. There are around 200 keywords pre-programmed into it, including for searching programming language documentation. Unlike the Windows feature displayed here, it doesn’t use the network unless you specify a prefix and it accesses only the service you specify by the keyword. Whoever added this feature had to do so very little work compared to the payoff. It just takes the part after the colon and inserts it into a search URL for the corresponding service and opens that URL in the browser. It’s very convenient. None of this web search stuff comes up when you’re just searching for apps and there are no surprises.Even macos spotlight knows to prioritize system apps over web searches and such. Iirc it’s like if the query exists as a system app that will be the top result, if two system apps share the query the most recent result selected will win (eg typed “ter” and last used terminal that will be the autocomplete and top choice but if you also have an app called like terminex or something you can down key to it), and web results are only if queries have no match in the spotlight db for files, contacts, etc (which would be in the match list after system apps. I don’t know what the hierarchy is but there is one iirc). So if you type in “phantom menace” and have no apps, files, contacts, etc matching that it’ll prompt to query google.
What you describe is far greater in functionality (and of course spotlight doesnt have plugin support, though it can be outright replaced at least (for now)) but it’s absolutely insane microsoft is going this way with ad nonsense. It’s just disrespectful and greedy. Who is even left using desktop OS anymore? It’s like power users and office workers. The power users are gonna switch to linux or m series macbooks (which doesn’t rule out linux). So is this just a play to get the administrative assistants and other office drones of the world to become a captive audience they can sell?
especially considering retail, windows 11 goes for AUD$199. They’re double dipping. Making money from windows purchases and from ad revenue. MS needs to die already.
Yes but this doesn’t generate ad revenue!
/S
Doesn’t anyone think about shareholders!?!!1!
I like that if I type an application (the main reason I type in that window) that I don’t have yet, rather than some nonsense like this it gives me a shortcut to the application IN the package manager.
Yeah, as far as i’m concerned that’s about the only acceptible thing to have come up that isn’t an application you already have. If I want internet results or files, I’d be using the appropriate browser for those.
KRunner is awesome
Had to use a W11 machine last week and this was one of the 1st things that annoyed the shit out of me. On W10 you start typing an app name and press enter and it opens. What the fuck are they at changing that. And don’t get me started on Outlook or Windows explorer.
Fuck you Microsoft. I’m going to Linux as soon as possible
What the fuck are they at changing that.
Ads. These are sponsored results, and they want them to show up first. Sure, you bought to OS (probably), but…
Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist. If I want to search the web, I can use a web browser to do it. I feel like it was added to try to make up for how bad the search used to be (and still is? I just never really had a habit of using it because it was so unreliable and depended on other ways to figure out where things were), so that it would give something, plus MS really wanted bing to be a thing.
I recently switched to KDE and their main search bar also includes web search. I haven’t looked at the settings for it and expect there’s probably a way to disable that, but I didn’t feel great about seeing that there.
Its pumping up those Edge numbers!
I honestly don’t mind the fact there’s search there. I do mind the fact that there are any circumstances in which it would default to the web search over a correctly-spelled (or even a correct partial-match) application on my computer. That should never happen.
Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist.
Maybe the average user is so ignorant and bad at computers they don’t understand this. They don’t know what a browser is. They don’t know what a website is. They don’t know what a program is. It’s all just stuff.
Personally, I’d rather spend billions on education than AI slop and other patches on “people are kind of dull”
It’s like, I get the idea of saying “this user is searching for a program they don’t have, let’s link to it” but then they’re like “oh what if we searched for everything?” and then someone else is was like “And what if we put ads in to monetize it!” Then that last person probably got a bonus.
or when you speed type something and it just opens edge and searches bing for the app you tried to open
Remember when Canonical pioneered this?
And it was bad then too; tho it was easy to uninstall those packages.
