Without these ads how will they fund copilot for 12 more minutes genius?
I always dug into RegEdit to disable this crap. And somehow, each time, it was a different series of steps.
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.
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.
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.
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?
At this point windows is just msys2 to me.
They paid people good money to design and crate that.
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.
My main gripe with this travesty of a “Start menu” is that it isn’t the Tom Hanks movie of a similar name.
IKR? Probably because that one is called The Terminal and this trash “search” can’t even look around articles.
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.
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
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.
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?
There’s a technical difference. On a single drive, GRUB (or any other modern bootloader) can handle multiple OSs that coexist on the same boot chain. Windows doesn’t like this of course. On different drives it is the UEFI that chooses which drive boot sector to boot from, regardless of which bootloader it has. Here, Windows doesn’t get a say, and it is less likely to break.
Historically, the first case was called dual booting but the second is not called that. If the same result is achieved, maybe the distinction doesn’t matter anymore. However, in the olden days, there was only one disk allowed to have a master boot partition, the Device 0 in an IDE bus. Consumer PCs were limited to two IDE busses, with a device 0 and device 1 each, only one hard drive could have an MBR on the primary IDE. Now a days it is much easier to have multi-disk boot capabilities in hardware thanks to EFI system partitions (since mid 2000s), but it used to be necessary to fiddle with an MBR even if the OSs were on different disks.
It is an important distinction because dual booting, as a concept, almost always exists in relation with Windows. If you have two, three or more Linux OSs running on the same disk drive, it is not called dual booting, it is just booting and choosing your distro, as bootloaders like GRUB are multi-booting by default.
So, yeah, maybe it is dual-booting as well, but it is not what the original term used to mean. It is just Windows wasting space in a quarantined disk, which I still prefer.
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…
Best match
Sure thing, bud 😂
It even recognized the local app that matches, how on earth is this a better match
The sort order is Microsoft profits
It’s all relative. Best match for their user analytics. So they get good numbers to show user engagement in their board meetings.
Accidental clicks are engineered to juice those numbers too.
One pays MS per click.
I keep a small Win11 partition on my 2022 gaming laptop in case I need to take a cert exam or use a gov website, and I booted it for updating for the first time in 6 months. It took over 6 hours and 6 reboots to update! At one point, it was going bu-ding every minute from random notifications so I had to mute it.
Meanwhile, my 2012 Thinkpad T420 needed a full Fedora version upgrade, and that finished in 15 minutes.
No wonder MS is losing users
… You need Windows to use government websites? What kind of dystopian nightmare is this
This is still the case for many South Korean shits, tho these days you can also use a (Googled) Android or iOS device with some shitty app.
wait till you find out companies that operated in South Korea had to support Internet Explorer until 2020
Ha! Oh, if you think that’s dumb… There are certain key sections of the IRS website that only function during business hours. Imagine if more sites worked like that. “Dang, it’s after 5PM, gotta do my Amazon order tomorrow.
Honestly would be kind of great.
🤨
Serbia for example have it’s gov suit and drivers only for windows. You can’t login using your personal identification card on linux, afaik (like, even if you extract encrypted key from plastic card). Can’t even scan it to obtain profile pdf. They do have “consentid” app for android tho, that can be used to log in.
Russia also falls in same category, also they don’t have plastic cards for identification, only regular passport. Digital key (basically a regular encrypted cert) can be issued thru government department responsible for taxes and again, will only work on windows for login, due to required software. It should be possible to install certificate on linux, but to login on government site you will need to use browser in wine.
Dunno about other countries, only lived in those two. I heard some African countries also have same/similar system, don’t remember which one.
does wine or waydroid work for the serbia one?
Not knowing much about Serbian smartcards, but I had done quite a bit with smartcards in Linux before.
Have you seen this project? https://github.com/ubavic/bas-celik … looks to be cross-platform and do what you’re saying. Though you’d probably need pcscd, pcsc-tools, and possibly other similar packages, depending distro.
Wow, thank you. No, I was not aware of it, sounds like together with srb-id-pkcs11 it should do the trick, it will be wonderful to finally move my auth from windows vm.
Yes, smart card reader itself should work, the only problem is encryption of key on card and use of that key with website. That module mentioned above exactly the thing that required it seems.
Still, my point stands, cause project was created just two years ago and isn’t official in the first place. Unfortunately, government itself have no desire to support other platforms. :c
Ah if you want to use it on their website or in a browser you’ll probably also need a mini card driver like OpenSC.
And if you’re using firefox, you might have to go into settings to add a pkcs provider and tell it where
opensc-pkcs11.sois.There’s lots of generic info out there on smartcards in Linux if you were so inclined to “figure it out”…but I don’t blame them for not “supporting” Linux…that’s kind of a minefield.
Still, that’s the fun of Linux…realizing that “not supported” doesn’t mean it won’t work…just that they won’t help you.
yeah some government sites, regardless of what browser you’re using, think that you’re some “1337 Haxors” for using Linux Mint.
I use Qutebrowser on NixOS and sometimes it’s…yeah they don’t like that.
Can’t you trick it using a user agent switching? Been a long time since I’ve fucked with one so I forget it you can change OS on there.
Thinkpad is the tank of laptops.
I have a machine in my garage that gets used for music and the random football game. Starting it up after being down even a few weeks starts the churn of updates. It’s annoying.
Just in case you don’t know, unless it changed last time I checked, some organizations like Comptia didn’t allow computers with dual boot to be used to pass a cert exam.
I assure you my (virtual) machine only has windows on it.
tbf if you didn’t update fedora for 6 months you may aswell downlaod a new iso and they also do the windows reboot screens for no reason
or when you speed type something and it just opens edge and searches bing for the app you tried to open
