Just to raise awareness, you can absolutely disable all of this nonsense, they just make it a dark pattern to do so. Find the settings gear or however they disguise it and you can disable all news presentation. It’ll still show up if you scroll down, but uh… for your own sake just never do that
I the get the point of your comment, but the article does state that one of the proposed changes are that you can uninstall news and bing from the start menu / search.
I believe that's in sarcasm. If you uninstall the widgets bar (something called "Web Experience" IIRC) it will automatically get reinstalled upon next update. (USA based)
I got mine to perm disable not by uninstalling, but by changing the folder permissions so nothing has access.
I recently switched to linux desktop for my home PC. Compared to my last attempt at this, the experience is still...not great. There are some awesome features, but then you run into random issues that really sour the experience.
For example, my printer randomly disables itself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, but I have to go into the settings and enable it before anything will print. Searching for solutions to this and the best I found was a suggestion to add a cron job that enables the printer automatically every x minutes.
I have some notes I add to every time I find an issue like that. It's a few pages long as this point.
I still don't really want to go back to Windows. They really have ruined it.
My own anti-Windows rhetoric and that of others I chat with almost never includes the sentiment that "Windows is somehow the only OS in the world you can't customize." On the contrary, it does have considerable flexibility.
No, what we don't like is the bloated, boggy UX, the built-in always-on spyware, and the product-on-rails BS masquerading as predictive features intended to ease use. It's the OS for the lowest common denominator, and we avoid it because of that.
Even aside from the hostility, it just lacks in usability. Every month I find myself frustrated at something it can't do.
Most recently: you cannot even change where notifications get displayed or their behavior.
What??? Why am I forced to have them in a place where they interfere with the input box for many sites that I use? In my arch install I have them in the center middle with a hotkey to dismiss one or all. And that's just a basic setup.
> Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during device setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA. Once chosen in device setup, the region used for DMA compliance can only be changed by resetting the PC.
Why not militate to your politicians and law makers to have your country also adopt consumer friendly legislation? Genuine question. I know using VPNs is a lot easier, but I feel like that's not the real long-term solution.
Most countries are not as powerful as EU. EU can do this and that customer-friendly regulation because they are a huge market that even MS and Apple cannot afford to lose.
The EU is not the only place that implement this regulation. There are about 129 more countries around the world with similar laws, but MSFT apparently does not want to obey them in the first place.
If you are from a very small country, maybe... But there's a lot of mid-sized or other big countries who just have the power and don't do any of these regulations.
Brazil basically cloned GDPR and it worked (LGPD). For example, look at this Samsung tool: https://imgur.com/a/ycgkSCI
It's ridiculous that it requires a law to make companies dial back the pushy advertising and user-hostility on a product the user has ostensibly paid for, but here we are
Oh, so I just chose one of the many equally compatible, usable and accessible operating systems!
"Just don't buy it" is inversely proportionately silly to how many options people have (and how educated they are about them). In this case they have 2 that are roughly similarly viable and the vendors of both are increasingly pushing their services.
Consumer protection has been invented because it has been found that consumers don't deserve some types of harm, even or especially if they haven't been able to educate themselves about it and the market hasn't been efficient enough to provide (viable) non-harmful alternatives.
You're talking to me, specifically, or just the wind? I'm a Linux user who still owns a MacBook that won't be replaced when it quits. This doesn't affect me, but that doesn't mean I think everyone else who uses Windows because they have to, or don't know better, or aren't technical enough to deal with Linux, or don't have time to deal with its fiddliness and fragility, or aren't rich enough to buy a Mac should suffer.
I did a long time ago and I have been using linux exclusively for nearly 10 years in a the 3 last companies I have been working for. With nearly everything being web based these days it has become much easier than the decades before.
I've only ever seen the terminal on ubuntu and rhel machines in recent years so that must be the reason. At least they haven't started polluting our bash profiles.
I think that was in some Windows 10 versions where they flagged hosts files with those changes as malware threats, but I tested them on my W11 setup and all of those are unreachable from Windows.
Unless of course W11 kernel now silently ignores those host file modifications but pretends they work by only enforcing them when the user space apps tries to access them.
There’s always the option to run a PiHole or even NextDNS and block telemetry at a network level. I know it’s not the same thing but still better than nothing.
Does the DMA still allow forcefully bundling services with purchases? If so, that'd be a big missed chance.
Reminder: It means that additionally to assuming the liabilities of a purchase you also assume the liabilities of renting, but lose out on most of the benefits of both: You pay "owning" price, but still have to rent the service, having to regularly pay and depend on the vendor doing well and supporting the product for it to be useful for you. They have a monopoly on the service and can thus do classical rent seeking in nearly unlimited ways. Many companies have explicitly announced that this will be their strategy going forward, so the problem will almost certainly grow bigger: What's the consumer gonna do? Return the device they already started to depend on? Get one of the many alternatives?Haha, sure! The potential for abuse is huge and the future for abusive companies bright. Not only will you own nothing, you will also still pay a big upfront price to not own things.
If there was a provision that forced interoperability between platform services (e.g. let me configure my own iCloud server), there would be a market and competition for these services, which would keep companies honest and mitigate a lot of e-waste.
