The "ad" takes form of familiar information bar seen in Internet Explorer; at the moment it seems to be less obtrusive than OneDrive notifications in File Explorer
My favorite part: "OpenOffice" is being used to refer to Microsoft Office.
Only half the ads use this wording. And no doubt this was not 100% intentional. Still, could this be a viable tactic to de-value poorly constructed brand names?
They say “Open Office”, not “OpenOffice”. “Open” there is a verb, not a noun (like in the “Open Word” variant). Never mind also
that OpenOffice was discontinued in 2011.
Wordpad is a free application included in Windows. Microsoft Word is a pay to use application not included in Windows.
Wordpad is not within the Office product family.
In fact, before the divisions got semi-unified Wordpad was developed by an entirely different division from Office. Hence why Microsoft had multiple what you see is what you get word editors.
Does LibreOffice work for you? I will also mention OpenOffice. LO is a forked of OO. Search online for the LibreOffice vs OpenOffice for more information. I also tried Abiword if you want another one (not sure if abiword is available on Windows).
As far as I know there is basically no reason to use OO, it is a completely dead project. All of the development effort is being focused on LO, so if you want a FOSS word processor use LO.
OO isn't completely dead, the Apache foundation is still maintaining it. It's more like it's on life support. But it is definitely true that LO development is far far more active and there's not much point in using OO over it.
And Abiword for Windows does exist but hasn't been updated in the past decade.
Using it now, for the first time in over a decade. I'm pretty pleased with libre writer so far, even though it is pretty bloated, relatively, when compared to wordpad.
To me, the advantages are support for multiple common file formats out of the box on Windows (text files with Unix line endings, DOCX, ODT, etc.). I know I have an option with a base Windows install for some file types if I'm ever using it.
It reminds me of how solitaire has "ads" now. Maybe its just me, but the only "Ad" I get is "Hey are you tired of ads? buy it here!" or "Hey you can change your card style". Both from MS.
WordPad is a rich text editor; Notepad++ is a text file editor.
WordPad lets you do stuff like boldface/italicize/change the font size of the text you're looking at, and it does the WYSIWYG thing of actually showing you the nicely formatted document.
I want to like the Microsoft that appears to be turning over a new leaf from their “evil” days. And their new hardware is legitimately exciting. However, between the telemetry collection in Windows 10, and straight up maddening stuff like ads in the OS, I just see red.
The last time I clicked on a start menu my jaw nearly hit the floor due to all the extraneous and very much unwanted junk. Microsoft is clearly doing a lot right in terms of UX, but I lament that it feels like one step forward and two steps back.
I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users. There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled? Do most PC enthusiasts figure out how to disable that stuff or buy professional editions? My experience is limited to occasionally seeing family and friends do things in Windows, so maybe I’m just unaware of what the Windows-using technorati have known all along.
My install seems to have no ads at all (including on the Start Menu) and I am using Win 10 Pro that I installed straight from the Windows download page. Maybe I don't get ads because I'm on the Insiders Slow Ring.
Maybe, I'll tell you next time it appears in my start menu. In either case it is not the size that bothers me, it's the fact they keep placing gaming icons in the start menu of an enterprise workstation, even after the user deletes them.
Yeah, I can't wrap my head around why they would do that.
Is it really a big enough revenue stream to inconvenience the consumer to such a degree ?
______
Maybe it is because the type of user that uses wordpad is also not concerned with advertisements or user experiences.
I mean, for most people a computer is either a Netflix + Internet + Office machine (they live in these apps, so the rest of the OS doesn't really affect them) or a device which runs significantly worse OEM software,(in which case, good UX was a lost cause anyways.)
> I mean, for most people a computer is either a Netflix + Internet + Office machine (they live in these apps, so the rest of the OS doesn't really affect them) or a device which runs significantly worse OEM software,(in which case, good UX was a lost cause anyways.)
I really wish tech people would stop with this fantasizing that users don't have good reasons for the choices they make. This is why Linux Desktop has consistently failed for decades: the conception that it is "good enough" for "most non-technical people" because they've imagined some ultra-simplified usecase and then convinced themselves that they've made an appropriate replacement. Absolutely nothing good comes of this mentality.
I don't see many people giving up their desktops for Chromebooks. Let's take a look at the stats [0]... Doesn't look like ChromeOS is significant. Hell, it doesn't even seem to beat Linux.
Granted, there might be other sources (I found this with 1 minute of Google searching), but I doubt they'll paint a much different picture. Chromebooks are just big smartphones and are not a sufficient tool for the tasks which people actually use Desktop computers for.
ChromeOS is a joke if you are offline or need to do any local work. Their 'file browser' has got to be an inside joke its so bad.
Its a great device for browsing + youtube/netflix + FB + gdocs. Which is why its so popular in edu because they basically give it away. And its enough for most people.
> ChromeOS is a joke if you are offline or need to do any local work.
I used to feel that way until I learned that recent Chromebooks can run Android apps and come with a Linux in a VM, and I am now a very happy Chromebook user. All the software I need is a browser, Emacs, git, SBCL, LaTeX and a few standard Unix tools: I use Chrome and run everything else in the Linux VM.
(And you're right that the file browser is very limited, fortunately I only need it ocasionally to move files between the Linux VM and the ChromeOS file system).
Google has been making half hearted attempts to merge ChromeOs and Android or at least provide a proper Linux distro without resorting to chroot hacks or replacing the fw.
I'm sure they have internal builds which are pure Linux with a compatibility layer to run ChromeOS legacy. There is absolutely no reason a Chromebook can't run that - but then its just another laptop and loses the marketability.
I think I like the current Linux (Debian 9) in a VM approach: it's off by default, easy to turn on for people who want Linux, runs fast enough (for me at least), and is simultaneously fairly well integrated but isolated so you can't easily screw up your Chromebook: if you hose your Linux installation, Chrome OS is still fine and you can just delete the VM and start over.
Crostini is still an esoteric dev only feature. No user is going to use it, or even be aware. When they need to run any apps or work with files, they don't have any options.
Why can't ChromeOS be a standard Linux distro which runs apps in a flatpak (and validated by Google). That way you can't screw up your machine, you don't really lose any perf, and you have the best of both worlds.
Agreed that candy crush as default is heinous, but it feels like "telemetry" is kind of brought up as a bogeyman. Clearly, there exist scenarios where device owners have a legitimate need for no (or minimal, considering updates) communication with MS regarding device activity, but that's not generally the case for the average PC user. I want my OS maker to get stack traces from stacks so that they can fix crashes. I want my OS maker to receive actionable data on highly-used features so that they can effectively prioritize what to improve and what can be culled. (And obviously, I want this data to be treated with appropriate security.)
edit: To clarify, users should be able to disable telemetry - it's the anti-telemetry rhetoric I find to be overblown - in general what I hear isn't nearly as nuanced as the replies here, it's simply blanket opposition to all telemetry.
I want my OS maker to get stack traces from stacks so that they can fix crashes
I want my OS maker to ask for stack traces so they can fix crashes. I do not want this to be a default with no way to opt out. Even crash data is my data, not Microsoft's, and Microsoft should ask my permission each time it happens the way that MacOS does.
Then again, that might make people aware of how often programs go sideways on Windows, which is not in Microsoft's interest.
I think it's (and should be) up to the operating system, not the vendor. When programs eat themselves on macOS I get the option to send debug information to the programmer each time. Sometimes twice if the program has its own crash reporting mechanism, too (Panic's Coda, for example).
Maybe there's an "always remember my selection" checkbox, but I don't remember ever seeing it, except once a year when I install the new version of macOS.
There's even a comment box where you can explain what you were doing when the error occurred. I like to think someone out there reads my helpful comments. I would love that as a client developer. :(
Because it's no longer optional. Even if you think you're turning it off, they'll just redefine or outright revert the preference setting whenever they feel like it, typically as part of a forced update.
The user's opinions and desires are not on anybody's radar at MS, except to then extent that they coincide with the company's own desires.
> Agreed that candy crush as default is heinous, but it feels like "telemetry" is kind of brought up as a bogeyman.
In Germany, such "spying" features are really detested; there exists a very privacy-conscious culture that perhaps has to do with the experience of two surveillance states on German ground of which one only ceased to exist about 30 years ago.
Indeed, as native German, I observe lots of people that try to avoid having a Google account (in particular for email) (to at least separate the services that can be provided by a different vendor [email] from the Google account) and explicitly completely delete accounts of social networks (in particular Facebook/WhatsApp) if they ever had one.
To give an example: When at the regular's table of some group (details shall not matter) someone suggested to form a WhatsApp group, some people gave very direct and harsh words.
I personally observe that when I think about buying something at Amazon, I ask myself and look whether there also exists another possible vendor.
So the mentality that I described is in real - it's just not possible to avoid said "Facebook/YouTube/Amazon/$FAANGCORP" completely for now; so you look for areas where you can avoid them - step by step.
.. but even anecdotal evidence. I says nothing about the general situation. Personally. I never felt the need for FB. For a few years now my - large - family is running Threema. All of them, even the old folk. This is good for us, but especially the youngsters have parallel installations of WA, Signal, Telegram etc..
This is also anecdotal and I'm afraid, not typical. Some months ago I became member of a Skat club (a popular german card game). All the people are very different in social beckground to me and even to each other - real estate shark, musician, blue collar worker and more - and know what?
> some people gave very direct and harsh words.
I got these words for NOT accepting WA. Eventually, we settled to Signal - but even that not unanimously and it remains a slightly frustrating communication model.
Clearly, there exist scenarios where device owners have a legitimate need for no communication with MS regarding device activity, but that's not generally the case for the average PC user
Do you really believe yourself to be the ultimate arbiter of that question, for all PC users? Or just for the average ones?
I meant that observationally, the average home user I see who is hell-bent against Windows telemetry doesn't have reasons for it that are comparable to organizations with well-reasoned processes and procedures regarding telemetry.
I didn't mean to imply that said user shouldn't have the option to disable telemetry, even for no reason at all.
If MS were bound to only used telemetry in the way you suggest, it might be fine. But they specifically are not.
Here's the first part under "How we use personal data" in their privacy statement:
Microsoft uses the data we collect to provide you with rich, interactive experiences. In particular, we use data to:
* Provide our products, which includes updating, securing, and troubleshooting, as well as providing support. It also includes sharing data, when it is required to provide the service or carry out the transactions you request.
* Improve and develop our products.
* Personalize our products and make recommendations.
* Advertise and market to you, which includes sending promotional communications, targeting advertising, and presenting you with relevant offers.
So, points one and two are nice. Three might be nice, but really depends on the motivation for the personalization and recommendations. Four is full on, deep advertising.
BTW, you may want to make a distinction between your personal data and telemetry, but MS does not make any such distinction. Also, in the next section, MS notes they'll share your data with anyone they want.
I would be thrilled if MS (and Apple, for that matter) would divest themselves of all advertising-related business units and declare themselves explicitly anti-user-advertising, but to me that seems largely orthogonal to telemetry, despite the fact that their current legalese has put the two into a blender.
I can be anti-advertising and pro-privacy without being anti-telemetry.
Just as long as you understand MS will be using the telemetry data for advertising and marketing purposes (in addition to the more helpful purposes you are expecting).
This comment right here. Why anyone would give any corporation the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how telemetry data is used is beyond me. Especially in cases like Microsoft, where they are very clearly using it for advertising.
It's not only device activity. If you are a company and you have contracts that guarantee privacy for the data that you process, how can you uphold those contracts if you cannot disable telemetry?
You can't. And even if you could, the automatic updates could change things later so you couldn't.
Several governments and their regulators in the EU are currently at various stages of looking into this issue, because it may be literally impossible to be GDPR compliant if you're processing personal data on a system running a Windows 10 edition that requires this stuff. And that's just the literally-breaking-the-law part as it relates to personal data in general. You might also have contractual obligations like NDAs, or perhaps some more specific legal obligations to protect data if you work in healthcare, finance, national security, etc.
Telemetry is far more than stack traces. It includes domain names of visited websites, names of executable files you've run, names of documents you've opened via explorer, clipboard contents, keyboard logs and other privacy-sensitive data.
And switching between Basic and Full levels of telemetry in settings doesn't help too much. According to BSI (project SiSyPHuS), number of event providers for Basic telemetry level is 410, and for Full level there are 422 ETW providers.
Specifically, it has the option to enable a "Diagnostic Data Viewer" that shows the data it sends (as JSON). I've just enabled that, so there is not much to see, but so far it has only transmitted version information of OS software components.
(Mini-) crash dumps can contain all kinds of information but that is kind of unavoidable. As a developer, I'm gratefull whenever I get a core/crash dump, but yes, it shouldn't be automatic.
Windows 10, when left alone for 1 year, sends about 4.5 Gb of outgoing data. There are no apps running all this time, so there are no crash reports to submit.
To me, "telemetry" is a violation of boundaries. And I don't think it's necessary to provide legitimation scenarios for not wanting that.
For decades I have used personal computers and it was my machine and nobody constantly observed what I was doing with it. With "telemetry" I'm not sure about the relation anymore - do I own the machine or does the machine own me? It's a loss of control, I'm not able to make the decisions anymore about what happens and what doesn't.
> I want my OS maker to get stack traces from stacks so that they can fix crashes. I want my OS maker to receive actionable data on highly-used features so that they can effectively prioritize what to improve and what can be culled.
Why do you think this is even needed? Every software package used by more users than nobody (by Joel Spolsky definition) has their bug report system full of bugs, and solving them would take years of doing nothing but butfixing. Your telemetry won't help prioritizing them, or even lead to solving them, but it will be mined for info that can be used to monetize your behavior.
> Clearly, there exist scenarios where device owners have a legitimate need for no (or minimal, considering updates) communication with MS regarding device activity, but that's not generally the case for the average PC user.
I find it troubling that anyone thinks that a user must have a "legitimate need" (whatever that is) to justify not wanting to be spied on. Simply not wanting your machine to send data to should be more than enough of a need.
> edit: To clarify, users should be able to disable telemetry
Oh, then we are completely on the same page. It appeared that you were arguing in favor of forced telemetry for "average PC users".
> edit: To clarify, users should be able to disable telemetry - it's the anti-telemetry rhetoric I find to be overblown - in general what I hear isn't nearly as nuanced as the replies here, it's simply blanket opposition to all telemetry.
Respect begets respect. If Microsoft gave me the choice to disable telemetry, I would probably leave it on. The fact that they don't give me that choice motivates me to find a third-party tool to disable it, if only as a way to express my annoyance.
Yes, I know, I'm not representative of the vast majority of users.
>I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users. There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled?
The closest you have is LTSC. No ads out of the box. Still has telemetry though, although you can turn it down to "security" level. It costs like $300 for a license[1], and they won't sell it to you unless you commit to buying a bunch (although that can be worked around by buying a bunch of cheap CALs).
They've gotten a taste of the surveillance revenues and won't look back. When you install Win10 there is a nag screen to make sure you opt-in to all kinds of data collection.
It's more than one screen. And the workarounds to not signing into a Microsoft account just to INSTALL the OS are becoming more and more tedious by the month.
Agreed on the start menu, that's an own goal. The telemetry in my opinion is a non-issue. To my knowledge nothing that's sent is actually harmful, and no harm has been demonstrated since they started gathering telemetry a decade ago.
The more interesting point of criticism for me are the in-app ads. Not so sure on what is meaningfully different between ads in wordpad promoting word and ads in macOS and iOS music apps promoting apple music. Or, in the same vein, why it is fair to flame microsoft for integrating onedrive throughout the OS but nobody complains when apple does exactly the same with icloud (to the point where basically you have to really go out of your way not to get sucked into paying for icloud).
Why is it ok for apple, but not for microsoft, to do these things?
Not only the "ads" in the start menu but the fact that they're actually INSTALLED APPLICATIONS that are part of the update packages.
Who knows how much bandwidth and time has been wasted at my job alone with folks' computers force-updating with included installations of Candy Crush, Spotify and Disney Kingdoms.
AFAIK these apps are not actually preinstalled, they’re simply shortcuts to the Microsoft Store. But I never got any of those “preinstalled” apps even on Windows 10 Home.
I've had Pro installations where I got the shortcuts, and others where I didn't. All on OEM machines that were licensed automatically, all in the same location, and using the ISO from MS's website (maybe not always the same exact ISO so that may be it). I couldn't come up with a solid explanation on where the difference comes from.
Windows 10 LTSC is common among some enthusiasts. No candy crush or start menu ads, but it still tries to trick you into using an online account during the install if you make the mistake of connecting to the internet when asked, and you still have to change a bunch of privacy toggles. I don't like or trust it, still, I just put it on my parents' machines since they probably would've resisted switching to GNU/Linux and Windows 7 lost support.
> I want to like the Microsoft that appears to be turning over a new leaf from their “evil” days.
Embracing open source is just the first step of an old, old strategy of theirs. Maybe I'll be proven wrong on that, but you'd be a fool to forget their past. This the company that brought down IBM.
> I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users.
No real choice, unfortunately. Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise, but the reality is that Windows and Office run the business world. Microsoft put a lot of effort into delivering good products and keeping compatibility with old software, in addition to shady anti-competitive practices, to ensure that. Meanwhile, the Linux Desktop is still a fragmented mess that breaks every few years (at best). I really wish it weren't true, because Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.
> There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled?
That may be true of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, which can not be purchased individually and is expensive.
> Do most PC enthusiasts figure out how to disable that stuff or buy professional editions?
There are readily available tools to disable it, like O&O ShutUp 10.
> Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.
I often ranted about this: after running Linux as my daily driver 2004-2017 (and a few years before that in dual boot and since 1993 on servers) I switched to Windows + WSL in early 2018 and I am OK with it.
I use an eGPU. Now, of course, Linux does not even support changing the video card under X Windows. And I am not so sure about supporting hotplugging an nVidia card either.
And when I was running Linux I ran into problems with enterprise wifi and VPN all the time and my multifunction devices and bluetooth.
https://xkcd.com/619/ rings painfully true. Linux is a great server operating system with a desktop badly cobbled on top.
I have a Linux laptop and an eGPU. I dual boot Windows when I need to use it. I didn't even try to get it to work on Linux because that's a good way to lose a week and gain nothing. Switching between dedicated GPUs and integrated ones is still barely functional after heavy tweaking, and laptops have been doing that for I don't even know how long.
That xkcd is extra painful because there are still, 11 years later, zero Linux browsers that support hardware-accelerated (i.e. smooth) video playback.
On my desktop with a GTX 1060, Chrome can play 4K60 YouTube videos without issues.
But yeah on my laptop with Intel integrated graphics (I thought Intel was supposed to be better supported vs Nvidia under Linux?) I can barely play a 1080p video without frames being dropped. It even struggles displaying a 4K desktop so I have to run at 1440p, while Windows handles it fine.
1) Chrome does not use hardware video acceleration under Linux. Some distributions' Chromium build does (the code is there, and is enabled under ChromeOS). Why Google didn't enable it for desktop Linux is a question for Google.
2) Intel GPUs do not have problem with 4K desktop under Linux, they are capable enough to run two 4K display at once, at least since Broadwell. It's 8K capabilities that are currently under development.
>Linux is a great server operating system with a desktop badly cobbled on top.
Especially the most popular flavor, Ubuntu.
Between releases which require reinstallations to get new features, hardware support, and bugfixes (bugfixes are supposed to be backported, but fresher DE versions have worked much better than old ones for me, so I'm skeptical) and the awkwardness of PPAs, it's sad it's the go-to assumed distro which everyone writes articles for and tests hardware/software against when rolling release is such a better model (that Windows now ostensibly uses with 10).
Manjaro seems to be gaining popularity as a user-friendly, nerfed rolling distro which offers safety and fast features+hardware support+bugfixes and can use the AUR, where everything in the Universe is and can be browsed with a GUI package manager -- no PPA terminal imports needed. But so is MX Linux, a Debian-based, Xfce distro whose selling point seems to be "no systemd", which speaks to a misalignment of priorities between many Linux users and the average PC user... if "average PC user" means "vaguely technical person who games and wants fast drivers + new hardware support", which is already wrong.
But FWIW, >>Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.
Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though; I don't even know what an eGPU is. For me, there seems to be a magical effect of using Linux for a long time and then returning to Windows. Windows doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. There's permission problems with the new 10 Settings interface when trying to access the core system apps like Device Manager. It can't connect to the Internet when I turn off my VPN, when Linux works fine on the same VPN. So many little things.
Suddenly, Windows seems like the janky, ersatz OS I force myself to go to sometimes while Linux feels like the more intuitive "home" system. But I've been on it for like 2 years now, so I'm probably brainwashed. And in 10 years Linux will get worse so I'll boomerang back to Windows like you? Or maybe something better will take over, like Fuchsia.
> Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though;
Windows desktop usage is somewhere north of 80%. Consider that Linux can't even do many common use cases right, it's just that it can do your use cases.
Funny how things go! I had been using Arch Linux for about 4 years and recently I switched to PopOS.
I never had problems with updates, but had a lot of problems with non-standard locations. For example, getting Vim to work inside of Tmux with eslint and auto complete just wouldn't work perfectly no matter what I tried.
It's a different world with Gnome and PopOS, and I really miss the AUR and Pacman but other than that I feel like I'm spending more time on my system than before.
You got your facts wrong, Ubuntu supports updating in place no need to reinstall, maybe you confuse Ubuntu/Debian with other distros that require a reinstallation.
Ubuntu has a LTS version and it officially backports video and other drivers to allow support for recent hardware.
> Embracing open source is just the first step of an old, old strategy of theirs.
Sure if you ignore the fact that their major projects were not extensions, and they're MIT licensed. Their past tactics was to extend open standards and become the corporate standard.
> Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise
Non-evangelist here. I've been running Ubuntu as my daily driver for years, and mostly it just works. Not saying it's going to take over the business world, just saying it's not worse than Windows for me in any way.
> Non-evangelist here. I've been running Ubuntu as my daily driver for years, and mostly it just works. Not saying it's going to take over the business world, just saying it's not worse than Windows for me in any way.
Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.
I don't have a problem with people who use the Linux Desktop. Hell, if I bother to count all the desktops in my house then I use it on 4/5 PCs myself. What I have a problem with are evangelists who believe that anyone not using a Linux Desktop is doing so for stupid reasons. I can't even count the number of times over the past 2 decades I've had to listen to some Linux Desktop evangelist proclaim that there was literally no reason to use anything else, and then proceed to argue the case with no knowledge whatsoever of the needs of the person they're arguing against. It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.
It is a mindset I really can't stand about tech people: assuming that because something works for them that it therefore is the right choice for everyone else. That they are so superior to the rest of humanity that they can instantly understand everyone's use cases, and anyone who claims otherwise is just being a stubborn fool.
As a dev, but not really an OS power user: I've tried switching to Linux (ubuntu and mint) full time before and I really don't see any major shortcomings vs windows for regular desktop use - I know anecdotal evidence is pretty useless but it's all you really can get about this on here.
The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.
I suspect no retail PCs coming with Linux preinstalled, and general lack of knowledge that it even exists or what it is is just as big (if not more) of a contributor to it's lack of users for non techies as UX is.
Proton is nearly there and integrating in to wine in to Steam.
However if the game in question makes use of the Windows Video decoding APIs results are currently very disappointing; the last time I tested it (which was earlier this month) I still couldn't actually play Obduction (the Myst like game) due to none of the puzzle explanations / video data that make up the story of the game running.
Unfortunately, it's not a 100% complete solution. For example, no-one seems to have gotten Crysis (the original - and best ;) - version) to work, due to some kind of DRM thing in Crysis itself. :(
It really depends on your dev workflow. If you're a Visual Studio user, you might find it quite jarring, but if you are, there are probably plenty of other reasons not to switch (it's switching away from your target environment).
For non-devs, it depends on how much MS infrastructure and solutions they've already adopted and have resources invested in. For a lot of companies, all that really matters is that they have hundreds or thousands of excel documents being passed around, and they can get better support and licensing through Windows.
Online versions of a lot of these reduce this to some degree, but most people would probably prefer to run Word and Excel natively than through an online app, even if they sync to shared storage and occasionally use those to view/edit something.
Add to that the fact that MS offers an end-to-end environment where you can buy something for whatever you find your needs are and find directions on how to integrate it, and there's really not much to compare.
Anecdote: I recently purchased a laptop which came preinstalled with Windows 10. After trying 6 different Linux distributions -- Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Manjaro, Suse, MX Linux -- and none of them working (issues ranging from the installer not working to being totally unable to boot after the install to frequent freezing), I gave up and have gone back to Windows. I think I could've made Gentoo work with enough effort, but I don't have the patience for Gentoo that I used to.
I mean, maybe my experience would've been different with a different laptop, or maybe I could've put more effort in, but this is what stops Linux from being a daily driver for me. I don't want to spend all of that time just trying to find a distribution that works, followed by even more time trying to keep it working.
I disagree with Windows' direction more and more. I very much want to like Linux and use it as a daily driver -- I tried 6 popular distributions trying to get just one to work! -- but the reality of it stops me. If this is what someone who wants to use Linux experiences, how will it ever be able to catch on for regular desktop use?
(The best experience was with MX Linux. The hardware compatibility wasn't ideal; installing proprietary nvidia drivers broke the boot; power usage was kinda poor relative to Windows; but overall, I was able to at least use it.)
New laptops (or hardware in general) need a while to get going in Linux, I've noticed.
My mom got herself a new laptop while she was here to visit me, I installed Ubuntu on it, Wi-Fi kept crashing. It wasn't really stable.
Due to an unfortunate chain of events, her laptop spent another half a year with me, before she came back over to pick it up. I wiped it clean, reinstalled Ubuntu again, and now everything was working fine.
> The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.
Have you tried Steam within the past 6-9 months with Proton?
Steam is bundling a version of wine that Just Works(tm) in the Linux Steam client. Valve is claiming responsibility for all the goofy workaround configuration that accompanies setting up wine for any given game.
Native Linux games are listed alongside emulated Windows only games. This includes dx11 support. In the past 3 months they apparently added DX12 support, but I haven't tried it.
dx9 games have better framerates in Linux than windows on open source drivers. (not Nvidia) dx10/11 games have comparable framerates. Can't comment on 12. Obviously opengl or vulkan games have no issues.
It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.
> It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.
Easy to say when the OS is more important to you than the games. But when games are more important than the OS it's a different matter. Most gamers just want to click on the game and have it run, they don't want to mess with WINE or proton or Lutris or playonlinux
> The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.
Let me see if I can leverage this to help you understand why other people don't use Linux: WINE and Proton do a pretty incredible job of allowing Windows games to run on Linux, why isn't that good enough?
Now take whatever your response was, and replace "gaming" with "engineering", "audio production", "accounting", "video production", or whatever. You're viewing these things from a perspective of casual understanding and saying that Linux seems "good enough", but when you've got a deeper level of knowledge in something (gaming) you readily see the problems.
> Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.
I tried Linux a few times at home for 6m to a year, in this regard I missed nothing of Windows. However twice my instance was killed by Nvidia driver updates. People claim AMD has better drivers on Linux so I recently bought a Ryzen 7 3700x and 5700XT.
But after being burned and /never/ having anything similar happen on Windows, I can't bring myself to put Linux on my computer in fear of the same shit happening again...
The other elephant in the room is hardware acceleration in browsers. Fire up a Google Meet (or YouTube for that matter) on your distro of choice using Chrome/Chromium/Firefox and watch those cores shoot through the roof, the fans ramp up, and battery life nose dive. Now, try the same thing on Windows or macOS ... night and day.
The entire problem with Nvidia's drivers is that they aren't in the kernel, and the kernel driver API/ABI isn't stable, so potentially any kernel update could break the drivers.
That's not true for AMD on Linux. The drivers are in the kernel itself so any changes made to the kernel interfaces will include changes to the drivers that use them.
It's not the case for either vendor on Windows because Windows has stable driver APIs.
Basically, if you're on Linux and your hardware has mainlined kernel support you are not likely to ever have that kind of problem.
On Windows, since the vendors control the drivers, they can ship out new hardware support immediately.
On Linux, if the driver is mainlined, it's tied to your kernel. So if you have a really new graphics card you might need a new kernel also. If your preferred distro isn't Arch or Fedora (which have very up-to-date kernels), that might also be an issue. Debian Stable for instance might not have support for a new graphics card.
>It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.
Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement. Imagine if everyone whined about windows and also recommended windows. What would that achieve ? It's not like Nadella is lining up to listen to your whining either.
The license cost of Windows is less than 1hr of most people's time who post here. Focus on making Linux desktop a positive opportunity cost vs calling people whiners.
Also, Windows users tend to pay for software, Linux users less so. Guess which user base is going to be more valuable to 3rd party devs.
I have no dog in the game. Each person should use (or develop for) whatever they want. But coming to a thread that is critical of windows and still somehow bashing linux is beyond pointless. Either do something productive, or let others do their bit.
> Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement.
And that's an extremely arrogant mindset. They think because they know some tech shit that they understand all of that person's needs. I mean, they've converted an image from BMP to PNG in GIMP once, so clearly that's a suitable Photoshop replacement right?
I use a linux desktop personally, but when you open up a powerpoint presentation or submit a proposal you need to be reaaly sure it looks as is intended. That means real powerpoint or word inside a real windows OS. It's unfortunate, but it's just required. I wish VMware hadn't killed the mode where applications looked like they were on the real desktop.
> But LOTD is not any easier for your average non techie.
For non-techies, it is actually a non-problem; they are already used to fact there are systems different than Windows (they know about Android, iOS or ChromeOS). This kind of users are so undemanding, that sitting them behind stock Ubuntu machine they will relatively quickly go their way and are able to do everything they need.
It's Windows power-users who have it most troublesome. They learned something about one platform, and to move to another platform they have to start from scratch.
> And it was never about ease of use, its about adoption, presence and marketing.
Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there. Its a little ironic that NTFS isn't faster than ext3 (in fact its slower for many use cases) but Explorer is amazing - Finder is a joke and most Linux fm's are modeled after Explorer, so is taskbar and start menu.
> Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there
Ehm, no, you are just used to it. In my not-so-humble opinion, it is Finder > Nautilus > Explorer.
In Linux, the taskbar and start menus are not a part of the file manager, but part the desktop shell. The most used one is Gnome, which doesn't have taskbar and start menu.
This is clearly a matter of individual preference. Personally I cannot stand Explorer, but know many people who swear by it (although many of those are in the category of "know enough to be dangerous but not enough to download Midnight Commander").
I agree. When I switched to Mac, I missed Explorer more than anything else. Still do. It's a fantastic design. Finder annoys me still, 4 years after my switch.
>Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there
Last I checked, windows explorer lacked split windows and a popdown console, both of which i use constantly. Windows also lacks focus on hover, proper session restore, a simple, readable, usable applications menu, the settings were scattered between at least two different places with no real rhyme or reason. It also has built in ads which honestly kills whatever positives the ui might have.
Anecdotal, but the first time I tried to use windows explorer in win10 it hung for 5 minutes trying to extract a zip archive then crashed. I also use tabs in nautilus all the time, they're far superior to opening an extra window.
Same but that's not good enough. It has to be such that, say, an IT department could deploy and manage machines to an office of 500 people with questionable computer literacy. That's the market windows has nailed down. I remember reading about some German city trying to switch over to Linux and being forced to eventually switch back.
I'm a total libre evangelist but we don't have the power to overcome multi billion dollar engineering and sales departments...
> Meanwhile, the Linux Desktop is still a fragmented mess that breaks every few years (at best). I really wish it weren't true, because Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.
In Brazil we used to say that the year of linux (desktop) was current year + 1. Because people who used it would always tell others that "next year is going to be the year of linux on desktop", only for that not to happen and then they adjust their prediction for the next year again...
Windows 10 LTSC is great - it doesn't have Cortana or the Windows Store and it even has a nifty search icon beneath the Start menu which says "Start typing to search..."
Not that I would recommend it but you can purchase LTSC on Ebay for about ~20 to 30$. That is where I got mine... Sketchy? Yes, but worth a chance in my book
> No real choice, unfortunately. Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise, but the reality is that Windows and Office run the business world.
Also mind that "professional" editions of windows contain less of the crapware than Home or similar editions...
Pro has slightly more knobs exposed than Home letting you adjust behavior but it’s nothing like the corporate version of Windows, no. I use tron script regularly to cut out what I can and it does help. Reading online the true believers load LTSB or LTSC licenses instead although they give up latest-gen CPU support by doing so.
Linux desktops are rare because there are few companies selling them. See for example Redhat. This is a pretty lucrative business opportunity. I think Microsoft is seeking other revenue models (ads) because once they get competition prices will drop.
Embracing open source may be even sincere as companies go. But being a company means that it may eventually all change without notice. Companies change people and their positions, but even people change minds.
I'd really like to believe that the embracing open source is different than the embrace, extend, extinguish mantra they had. I really do see a different attitude towards developers with VSCode, GitHub, Bash on Windows, etc (long time Mac user here - not on the Microsoft bandwagon).
For the OS Ads... I also see red. But I try not to forget that a corporation isn't a person, it's a large group of people. History doesn't mean that a corporation always acts the same with the same incentive structure. Look at Apple over the years. Now corporations do have a culture derived from history (and leadership obviously). And that culture is different in different places of a large company. I believe the ads in the OS is something that is culturally wrong with the group developing that OS. And likely, knowing nothing of Microsoft's structure, the culture of the people working on the projects I mentioned above is drastically different than that team.
Point is, because Microsoft is a large organization it can be "evil" and "good", it depends where you look. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
Im sure, there will be a nice little soundbook added, that allows everyone concerned to press alot of buttons and push a lot of levers, to not change a thing, but feel acomplished and back in control.
> I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users.
They don't. It's not a ultra-premium edition that disables it. The extra apps installation is easy to turn off via registry and can be applied to new users. In better controlled corps, your apps whitelist will not allow you to run extras anyway. The ads are either not a present: if it's a corp, everyone has office, not wordpad. In a completely controlled environment, the network won't allow you to connect back either.
I've set up a win10 pro laptop very recently and getting rid of the extra apps, disabling promotions, and most of ads takes maybe 30min. I'm not saying I'm ok with them, or that everyone can easily fix it - but if you have any kind of experience with windows, you can do it.
I could maybe understand this for the home edition but people pay extra for Pro. The whole point is to not spend 30+ minutes removing crap.
Also those registry fixes frequently get reverted by updates. It’s happened to me multiple times. Even if you succeed your greeted with a start menu that looks half broken.
I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users. There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled?
More-or-less. The large organisation editions of Windows 10 (Enterprise and Education) are basically a different product to the others, with most of the unpalatable junk able to be disabled. But you can only legally get them through the organisation-level licensing schemes, with all the extra cost and hassle that brings.
The really surprising thing to me is that the Pro edition -- the one that historically was aimed at power users and smaller businesses -- is basically dumped in with Home now, with little of that same flexibility even though these users probably have much the same concerns about controlling updates, telemetry, ads, etc.
So for some of us working in small businesses, Windows 10 remains a no-go area regardless of any attempts by Microsoft to promote it and demote anything else. It appears to be impossible to retain proper control of your system and the data on it, which leads to all kinds of concerns about reliability, security, statutory and contractual data protection obligations, etc. Presumably this is why various government regulators within the EU are already going after Microsoft on the basis that it's essentially impossible to be GDPR compliant if your organisation is using such an OS.
The vast majority of desktop users would be fine doing all their work (word processing, spreadsheets, email, browsing) in a browser. Thus a full operating system like Windows really isn't required. It's surprising more organizations haven't switched to this approach, it saves on costs and overhead.
> It's surprising more organizations haven't switched to this approach, it saves on costs and overhead.
The user experience with web-based versions of these things is substantially worse, though. I don't know, but perhaps that's why there isn't greater adoption.
I don't think it's substantially worse, and I'm a pretty heavy user of applications. It would be worth measuring impact on productivity compared to gains in maintenance and overhead reduction.
Fair enough, that's a subjective assessment. They tend to be substantially worse for me. The very best of them aren't substantially worse, but they are still worse. My complaints about them are the the UX tends to be unpleasant.
The telemetry collection in Windows 10 has been reduced a lot. And MS are transparent about it and give you lots of control and switches in Settings/group policy to turn it off, unlike everyone else.
Many other corps collect much more invasive telemetry and users have no clue - e.g Netflix is basically a data collection service with a side effect of video streaming. Same for FB, Google ads cookies etc, every retailer etc etc.
The difference is, that Neflix/Google/Facebook had their services with telemetry since start. If you didn't agree to their terms, you simply didn't start using their services. They don't even have network effects like Windows has.
Microsoft, on the other hand, added telemetry to already widely-used product, not giving the existing users any choice. Is it any wonder that Microsoft is being singled out? They deserve to be singled out.
"I want to like the Microsoft that appears to be turning over a new leaf from their "evil" days."
What appears to be "turning over a new leaf" may actually be nothing more than adapting to changing conditions. Of course they were not the ones who set those changes in motion, other than perhaps through evolutionary pressure. What Microsoft has done in more recent times has been largely driven by what other companies were doing -- making money from selling advertising, collecting vast quantities of data about users, etc. Not to mention using open source software internally, publishing source code and giving away software, often as a means to collect more data. That is why, e.g., there are ads in WorpdPad and telemetry is on by default.
I had a windows tablet sit collecting dust for months because every day when it ran an update it installed a broken sensor driver that borked screen rotation. Eventually I gave up and installed a third party Windows Update blocker. I can't be the only person sick of my computer telling me I'm a fucking idiot who's only good for shelling out cash to keep advertisements out of my file explorer.
> I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users. There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled?
Why would you think that? My enterprise loves MS. Literally everything is being moved to MS. Chat, documents, internal websites (sharepoint), all hosted by MS under their office 365 umbrella. It’s maddening.
I cannot imagine the security folks being bothered by some ads in windows or some extra telemetry. If MS can read that data they know everything already.
I have been using Windows Firewall Control (WFC)(https://www.binisoft.org/wfc.php) for some years now. I have the same laptop since 2015, it runs Win8.1, and WFC is always running in alert/block mode. If you remember ZoneAlarm from 20y ago, imagine something like that. WFC hooks on the Windows firewall but has a super-enhanced UI. I usually leave only Firefox, Outlook, and Windows Updates passing through, and my Outlook only to the mail server (no need to download all the crappy stuff that people link on their emails).
I could also never understand why explorer.exe (or wordpad.exe, or WinZip or solitaire, or majority of apps on a PC.. need to tell anyone on the internet what I am doing with my PC.
In the same spirit, I always suggest it to friends who ask me to help them setup a new W10 machine. I block almost everything that moves and this solves any ad problem and telemetry that W10 is running.
I think you can always count on smart companies to optimize for return on assets, including their brand.
Microsoft had some weakness on that front, but they've put significant, sincere, and welcome effort into building brand value with the engineering crowd over the last decade. Nonetheless, it's entirely reasonable to expect them to make use of opportunities to leverage their assets to build their business as well.
If you have the means, compile from source. And if not, then perhaps enlist the services of someone who does (directly or indirectly).
All the extraneous ads, tracking, etc in Windows 10 has made it so I have never bothered upgrading from 7.
It seems like it would be a huge pain to go through and disable or blocking everything, and even then how confident could I be that I didn't miss something?
> Microsoft is clearly doing a lot right in terms of UX, but I lament that it feels like one step forward and two steps back.
I disagree, they should have stuck with XP and just made incremental improvements like Apple have done with OS X. But no, every few years they have to change everything.
On a few people want that, most people what the OS to get out of the way.
> Microsoft is clearly doing a lot right in terms of UX
Such as? Win 7 is generally retarded as peak Windows UX, and its main feature was undoing junk from Vista/XP before it got rejunked in 8.
Windows 8.1/10 main improvement was in undoing part of 8.
Windows 10 is quickly becoming freeware. It’s smart. It’s probably worth much more to Microsoft to Track user behavior and sell ads through it than to charge for it.
Surprised they haven’t done this sooner.
No doubt they’ll still offer a volume license/pro version with less advertising.
I haven’t used Windows as my daily driver since 2004 but companies pay lots of money for me to support it for them. More ads means more issues means more revenues for people like me to help companies.
I recently reinstalled a colleague's laptop, with Windows 10, done quick and dirty, he was concerned he didn't have a key/license, said doesn't matter, we can install first and activate later.
After installation, the thing was self-activated. Legit ISO downloaded from Microsoft, though via that ISO downloader software, starts with something with "H" and runs ads when you use it.
Kinda makes me wonder why MS is even bothering gatekeeping their ISOs. Why not make them freely available?
...nobody makes cash of OSes anymore... It's market share they're after.
> Of course Windows gets the worse version of it..
Not really. Linux/Macs get iso, which has install.wim larger than 4GB. That means, you cannot copy it to FAT-32 formatted USB and boot it; you have to burn it (or mount as virtual cd in vm).
Alternative would be using dism to split it, but for that, you need working windows machine, leading to chicken-egg problem.
The windows version, although it gets media creator, has install.esd instead of install.wim (with different compression), so it fits into FAT32-formatted filesystem.
Some of them, it is not mandatory. The quality of implementations varies, some are so terrible, that they have problem with remembering what the user configured (hi, Gigabyte).
Yeah, they are, but why the hoops? I think they kinda have to justify that somewhere, someone bought the software for a non-neglible amount of money...
Modern hardware can store license keys on the motherboard's firmware. When you go to reinstall it checks the device to see if it has any valid Windows keys.
FWIW, this isn't exactly a new feature, just a feature which has been expanded on and is far more common with modern UEFI firmware on devices shipped by OEMs. If you notice, most modern laptops don't ship with a product key sticker anywhere. Instead they have a genuine holographic Windows sticker on it and have the license loaded on the device. This became standard for large OEMs with Windows 8.
This...does not seem as bad as I originally thought. Just a prompt bar to use Office instead of WordPad. I was thinking it would look like the start menu does. Admittedly I would be more concerned if it was advertising something other than a product most consumers regard as the default way to edit text.
Only if you're inured to this kind of corporate intrusion on your machine that you paid for with your money.
My toaster barking, "Hey, wouldn't you like a nice Thomases' English Muffin instead? Nooks and crannies!" is also fairly low-key, but not something I want.
Maybe more like you rent an apartment that comes with a basic toaster, and has a sticker on the said that says "full feature toaster available, inquire with the landlord if you are interested".
Mildly annoying and silly, but maybe some people wouldn't even consider the possibility if you didn't tell them about it.
If done well, it could just be a way to inform customers of an improved product.
Lets say Apple launched iTunes2 as a separate product and one day you opened iTunes and saw the banner "Try iTunes2!" would that be equally upsetting? Or you go to gmail.com and see a banner for "Try Inbox!" etc.
This isn't candy crush in WordPad, it's an ad for an enhanced text editor
I honestly can't imaging who this could be "done well".
> Lets say Apple launched iTunes2 as a separate product and one day you opened iTunes and saw the banner "Try iTunes2!" would that be equally upsetting?
> Lets say Apple launched iTunes2 as a separate product and one day you opened iTunes and saw the banner "Try iTunes2!" would that be equally upsetting
It would, actually. I don't want to be sold to, at all.
> My toaster barking, "Hey, wouldn't you like a nice Thomases' English Muffin instead? Nooks and crannies!" is also fairly low-key, but not something I want.
On the bright side, my kids would get to (briefly) see a reproduction of After Dark's "Flying Toasters" screensaver.
They probably have a very different idea of "paid" from the companies creating the software. Even though you "bought" a piece of software, it's more accurate to say you "licensed" that software. Buying something in a box doesn't change this in the eyes of the law and companies take advantage of this.
What can be done to change this perception? If "software is eating the world" then it's hard to see where this ends. Soon you'll have ads in your car, or on home appliances.
Title is clearly click bait. This seems more like a message to gradually help people moving off a product that will eventually get retired. If MS is advertising you would think they would advertise in higher traffic apps (i.e. Paint) but most people don't even use WordPad.
Agreed. Most of my Windows-using family members wouldn't be able to tell the difference between WordPad and Word... until they go to share the file and discover that RTF looks different on every other person's machine. This is entirely a positive for the tech-illiterate portion of Microsoft's userbase, who probably intended to be using Word anyway.
It will also train them to further ignore the presence of these bars if they see them and close them without reading - these same bars that usually contain security warnings in Office products.
It could surely be worse, but it's still bad. I often pick Wordpad because I want more capability than a mere text editor can provide, but don't want to get bogged down with the overhead or complexity of the full Office offering. It's not appropriate for the OS to be second guessing my choices.
Actions like this are why I went to the trouble of getting Windows 10 Long-Term Service Branch (LTSB) now renamed Long-Term Service Channel. I can lock down more and I only get security updates, rather than games just appearing in my Start Menu.
That's strange. I still have a calculator on my Windows 10 install. Its resizable, has a history, can do unit conversions, a quick shortcut to keep on top, and has a ton more features than the old one.
The old Windows Photo Viewer still exists and is the default out of the box to open .TIF files. With a couple of short registry hacks you can make it the default for other photo types again. Other than multi-page TIF files, I usually do prefer the newer app as it once again offers a ton more features.
My biggest complaint is that I have to do anything. Viewing and picture and the calculator have been around forever. I should not have to do a registry hack to bring it back.
I usually don't learn that anything has changed until I actually want to use it then I'm like WFT where did X app go?
The calculator is included on any regular, unmodified install of Windows -- no registry hack required. There is still a photo viewing app available called Photos. Its different, but overall has a ton more features. Once again, no registry hack required.
Or are you arguing that default apps in Windows should just never change to newer, more featured versions?
The Windows 10 calculator is nothing like the old one.
It's somehow different from a native Windows app, it's somehow integrated into the Windows Store thing.
Right-click a shortcut to it - you can't set any custom hotkey for it anymore.
I can't use CTRL+ALT+C to open Calculator anymore. Thanks Windows 10, another step back. (Also, wow! I didn't think it would be possible to make the UI so ugly and the app so slow to start. What does it need to do? Oh, yes, telemetry, right?)
Funnily enough, there's still a "native" (?) .exe or two buried somewhere in the Windows installation directory, but executing them... bring backs the Windows Store Calculator.
I don't care anymore. Windows is dead to me. Except that I need to develop for other people who use Windows, but I can use Windows 7 for that, for me, personally, I'm quite hell-bent to change to Linux and forever excape the corporate software tyranny.
I honestly don't know what you are talking about, there is still a native calculator and photo viewer. I just verified I am on the latest professional version of windows.
On my system, the calculator only comes up if I explicitly type "calc.exe". "calc" gets me LibreOffice Calc, and "calculator" gets me... nothing.
I am forced to accept that either Microsoft's Windows division is so incompetent that they did this on purpose, or so incompetent that they did this by accident.
I suspect that the other major scenario is that you opened it by accident and thought you were opening Word. Features like this aren't for techies who already know the difference.
Wordpad is great for reading and authoring documents with text attributes but without page formatting. It's comparable to TextEdit on MacOS. And compared to Word or LibreOffice it produces extremely clean RTF code. (Or it used to, haven't used it in Windows 10.)
And yes, it's handy for opening .doc and .docx files if no office suite is installed. ("Because reasons" often being that it's not a machine under your control.)
As a former magazine editor and still a freelance writer, I use TextEdit, the Mac equivalent, and have done for years.
It's WYSIWYG; it's fast; it doesn't get in the way. It isn't a bloated behemoth like LibreOffice or MS Office or any other Office. It just pops up a window on the screen for you to type in. Any styling beyond bold and italic would be done by the designer in InDesign anyway.
Opening the article it seems like this has been more than a little overblown - I was expecting something like banner ads for random things, and it turns out to be small, dismissible, banner suggesting that you might like to use MS Office instead.
Before reading the article I had a worse version of this in mind. Cross-promoting their own products, while not especially great, is a lot less bad than having "regular" ads with all their privacy issues embedded in your OS.
Pretty similar to what Apple does with their "Sign up for Apple Arcade" push notifications, iCloud Login badges etc.
It's still pretty bad but the headline is blowing it a bit out of proportion.
Everybody defending Microsoft's actions is using some variation of "it's only a small ad for Office" but their Stockholm Syndrome is causing them to ignore that the word "ad" these days is a loaded term that also implies Microsoft is shipping your (WordPad) activity back to Microsoft to "improve user experience" and not just to tell you that Microsoft also happens to make software called Office, too. Get real.
A banner "advertising" a more feature rich version of the same application is a different kettle of fish to the actual paid advertisements that they are currently injecting onto lock screens and start menus. Granted, I wouldn't want annoying pop ups on any of the products I use, but I think at this stage "Microsoft are going to do anti-consumer things because nobody is going to stop them" is expected behaviour and if you don't like it your only real recourse is to buy a Mac or install Linux.
Having made the switch to Linux myself I feel like I can look at these things a bit more objectively. I can say "recommending Word isn't that bad" not out of Stockholm syndrome, but instead as a tertiary observer, watching the house burn down from the outside.
As a Linux user, I prefer much more the old Microsoft.
Nowadays Microsoft business shifted from selling licenses to making money selling the user data, that is something far worse and concerning. Take a look at this, they suggest the user to use Word online, buy for what reason? Simple, to collect their user data. Or have you tried to install Windows 10 recently? They do everything to force you to sign up with a Microsoft account, think about a non expert user that buys a computer and thinks that is necessary to register one, also they propose to accept default settings that enable all the possible data collection.
Also they are doing harm in other ways, especially against the FOSS community, despite the stupid slogans 'Microsoft loves Linux', no they don't, they are just trying to get the Linux developers to switch to Windows, they made installing Linux on a computer more complex thanks to UEFI and secure boot, and they offered the solution, why do you have to install Linux first place, we have the WSL, you can run your Linux software inside Windows so you have no reason to install it bare metal.
I think there's a simple explanation here which is a lot less exciting than you suggest. Namely that Microsoft is pushing Office online to better compete with Google's offerings. Similarly, they're pushing use of a Microsoft account mainly for the convenience this offers to non-technical users with things like synced settings and automatically backed up documents.
They continue to offer options to use a local account for those that want it and I really see no problem with pushing an account as the default option for the majority of users. No one complains that Apple pushes iCloud accounts on people.
> Similarly, they're pushing use of a Microsoft account mainly for the convenience this offers to non-technical users with things like synced settings and automatically backed up documents.
This doesn't jive with the progression of their efforts to hide the option away. At first it was a small text link on that portion of the install screen, then it was that link plus another, now it looks like this [0].
> As a Linux user, I prefer much more the old Microsoft.
Me too. I prefer excel from 1991-1993 era. It fit on three 2.5" floppys, and did the basics perfectly.
Around Office 2004 I started to encounter weird formatting bugs (e.g., rotated axes would sometimes be clipped off the screen if I resized the chart), and this has persisted to today where Office Excel (v15) on macOS still fucks up the fonts, e.g. this morning I couldn't change the the x-axis font label: it was frozen as Calibri. Maddening.
I try to use Google Sheets for simple sharing spreadsheets, or gnuplot+awk for technical precision, but the industry is so MS heavy it is challenging. I've seen an uptick in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides usage over the past 5 years that is encouraging.
MS is clearly a monopoly on office productivity software, but slowly becoming a duopoly as Google Apps pick up momentum. Star Office still hurts too much when switching between Linux <> PC. (And Apple's Pages/Numbers? LOLOLOLOL)
God, I hate when OS companies do this stuff. I remember back when Ubuntu had Unity as its default, it would send any app-search you had to Amazon to recommend stuff to you. Granted, it was trivial to disable it, but I really don't want to have my OS send a request to Amazon whenever I hit the Super key and search for Tor or something.
Honestly I still recommend Ubuntu to people; the smart-lenses were pretty unpopular and have been removed, and while it was annoying that it was enabled by default, at least you could actually turn it off.
That's good to know. I don't use Ubuntu myself (because I tend to have an inordinate number of technical problems with it), but tended to recommend it to newcomers based on reputation. Perhaps I should start again.
How disgusting. What they've done to Windows makes the Microsoft of the 90's look tame. It's not an OS. It's a malware and advertising platform that spies on its users. It's shocking to me that people who run actual businesses with sensitive data would even consider running Windows. Or any government. For people who care about their data and their computing, that's one less platform they can run on. All the pretty hardware in the world doesn't change the fact that they no longer make an OS to go with it.
I already feel bad for the bureaucratic hassles faced by physicians in the U.S. But...
I'm curious if HIPPA-related lawsuits against healthcare providers using Windows 10 could start mobilizing small businesses against what Microsoft is doing.
This functionality is locked behind a feature control mechanism, in a pre-release version of Windows 10. The feature is named BlankDocOfficeUpsell. The feature control mechanism is used by Microsoft to gate potential features in public builds for various reasons (e.g. experimentation). Using tools I wrote (https://github.com/riverar/mach2), and public debugging symbols, they can be manipulated on/off and is usually a good indicator at what's coming in a future Windows release.
This particular feature upsells Office online via a yellow bar, not unlike the Message Bar in full Office applications. The Message Bar is typically used for important security warnings and alerts [1], presumably one reason this particular design was chosen. At this time, the upsell notification can be closed but that action is not persisted -- the ad will re-appear at next WordPad launch. This could change but that's not a guaranteed pattern (see: permanent PowerShell Core ad in PowerShell).
> The Message Bar is typically used for important security warnings and alerts [1], presumably one reason this particular design was chosen.
...and which will continue to make this bar useless leading to people continue to ignore security warnings and drive on the train of vulnerabilities within word documents which has been so successful for decades now. Good job Microsoft.
I wish Microsoft would just start working on Windows 11 instead of doing this Win10Forever+ads. None of us want this model. The general public doesn't seem to care (unless they do and can afford a Mac), so Microsoft will probably keep going down this route.
It's bad enough I have to spend two hours digging through a new Android phone to turn off all the Google tracking (if there's no Lineage rom for it), but I also have do to it on my Win10 gaming rig. No one else seems to care about privacy.
Some of the buttons on the ads say "Open Office" [1]. I guess the intended meaning is "Click here to open Microsoft Office", but the wording is suspiciously close to OpenOffice. I'm sure that will account for some clicks from people vaguely aware that there's a thing out there called OpenOffice.
It would be mildly hilarious if Microsoft activated this, and then the EU issued an IE-style ruling that to avoid unfair competition it had to promote popular alternatives to Microsoft Office on an equal basis.
Is giving away that much of your privacy really worth $20/year? That's 0.02% of a regular software development salary. Two hours of work at minimum wage.
Maybe their plan is to ruin Windows so badly that people would voluntarily switch to Linux? Who knows. Most of their cloud is Linux, and Windows Division has been disbanded long ago.
It has been my suspicion for some time that they are intentionally ruining Windows. Not to get people to switch to Linux, but rather to just kill off the personal computer as a concept and switch everyone to some kind of Microsoft Live Desktop subscription.
Try SublimeText3 [1] instead. It is a cross platform editor. You can try it out and use it for free. The expectation is that if you like it and continue to use it, you will purchase a license. I really like it for programming any task I want to use plain text.
There is also a build system and one can download packages that enhance coding in many different languages. I have no economic interest in this, I'm just a satisfied user.
This sort of tackiness in Windows 10 is one of the primary reasons I've switched back to macOS.
Windows 10 is a great OS in many respects, and I like the hardware story more than in Apple world, but I just can't get over Microsoft's need to invade my workspace with tacky, distracting, irrelevant ads.
The first time I saw a "Candy Crush" ad in the Start menu (of Windows 10 Professional, not Home), I hoped Microsoft would get enough negative feedback to see the error of their ways.
But it seems like they're going the wrong direction.
And yes, I'm aware of the LTSC version of Windows 10. I have no way to install it legally.
I just switched back to Windows to get a reasonably priced laptop with a real keyboard. Booted it up, and got an ad for dropbox. Nice. Pretty much guaranteed I won't be a dropbox customer, and that I'm going to be searching for a Linux distro that supports 5k monitors...
i feel the same, It just build up resentment for these forced ads and preinstalled software. I can't even stand to see Skype and oneDrive icons anymore, I stop what I'm doing at the moment and go to uninstall them.
If there ever came a day when there was no option but to run this kind of software on computers then I'd just stop using computers. I'd pack it all in and go and live in the hills. It just wouldn't be fun any more.
Thankfully I don't see that day coming. There's enough people like me.
I’d say that’s an exaggeration - trying to take an objective perspective. Some users may not know a better option exists. The beige notification bar isn’t intrusive and can be closed. A significant question is whether the notifications will be able to be disabled (readily, from within the Wordpad app).
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