This got me to convince my wife to switch to Linux again. She had the last Windows device in our household. She needed it for proprietary kitchen planners.
Now she’s ranting about enshittification.
proprietary… kitchen planners? wtf? wtf even is a kitchen planner?
That seems like the easiest thing to replace with something open source.
A kitchen planner is a program that lets you enter your room dimensions and then lets you fit kitchen cupboards, shelfs, cabinets and appliances in there. Ideally it comes with everything your supplier or contractor has on offer. Especially for colors and designs, but more importantly dimensions.
Luckily they are usually web based nowadays.
I totally misunderstood.
If possible you could have her try http://www.sweethome3d.com/
I like Sweet Home 3D. I’m slowly building my house’s floor plan and laying out furniture using it. Just using it sporadically once every few weeks. It’ll be done eventually.
I’m hoping to use it in Home Assistant with ha-floorplan (https://experiencelovelace.github.io/ha-floorplan/) so that I can have a floor plan with things overlaid on it (lights, temperature, etc) that you can tap to toggle.
Oh interesting! I was thinking of planning in the kitchen not planning for a kitchen build. That makes WAY more sense!
Have you not tried to run that software using proton?
Outside of games Wine still doesn’t cut it for many programs. Plus this was before Proton.
I see 😁 I plan to test a lot of windows software if it runs on proton 😂 it’s more fun than gaming for me: getting stuff to work that I’ll never really need
Thank you for your service! o7
Be sure to add your findings to Wine’s AppDB.
Right now my computer isn’t supported by Windows 11 so I have some time. But seeing this crap coming eventually in my future, I started dual booting Linux Mint to see if I could live with it. Turns out I like it better than windows. I haven’t booted my window partition in weeks. When I finally upgrade my computer it will probably be running solely on Linux now and maybe have Windows 7 running in a virtual box for the very few programs I still need it for.
None of this would have happened had Microsoft not pushed their corporate enshitification past my threshold. Thanks Microsoft.
Linux Mint is the shit if you want a to have just a smooth seamless transition from Windows or a Linux OS that just works.
I pre-ordered a Framework 16 laptop and will probably try Linux Mint Debian Edition on it when it arrives.
Debian Edition because I prefer Debian over Ubuntu.
What is your reason to pick Debian over Ubuntu?
I’ve been using Debian on servers for over 20 years. Rock solid. I like it. I like that it doesn’t have any corporate influence, and that the main repo consists only of free software. Changes are only made if there’s a good reason, unlike Canonical which seem to change things in Ubuntu just because they can.
The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2007 so I’m excited to get back into it.
Canonical is basically the closed to corporate Linux you will find on the free distro market… They are pushing stuff you don’t want for marketing reasons (for example their own proprietary Snaps when a better working open source solution already exists with Flatpack), love their telemetry (can be mostly disabled for now, but given the defaults and their other behavior we can already see where this is heading) and in general decide more alongside their latest business plan than actually making sense or listening to users.
Not who you asked but, Ubuntu is basically Linux from a corporation. They are forcing people to install ‘snaps’ instead of your typical .deb package. They are like flatpaks but way worse.
Weren’t they also the first ones to add ads to their start menu, a decade before Microsoft? I’m not an Ubuntu user, so I didn’t care enough to remember the details, but I recall something about them sending your search strings to Amazon to present you with ads.
I did the same a year ago and then I quite quickly switched over completely to Linux mint.
Depending on the software you need and how technical you are, Wine and Bottles may be a solution to not need an VM.
As a noobish user, I found it easier to use lutris. I think I’ll mess with bottles again, but i couldn’t get it to work for me.
The closest I’ve been to Windows since I’ve installed Linux is putting its partition in the NixOS (gen 19) filesystem list.
Worked on me. I left Win10 behind for linux a couple months ago. I installed Win11 in dual boot with an eval license but I just don’t use it anymore. I’ll probably just nuke it when the eval expires.
Didn’t the start menus have ads for several years now?
Windows 10 definitely has but they don’t come back once you delete them, which is garbage but less garbage
wasn’t the candy crush one notorious for being always reinstalled with every minor update?
Asking bc I haven’t used windows since 10 came out (using w10 at work, but it’s the enterprise version)
That’s exactly the one I was thinking of
Would you consider Candy Crush an ad? It was preinstalled. Was the pinball game that used to come with Windows an ad for Maxis Full Tilt Pinball? Was the U2 album that Apple gave away for free an ad for U2? (that was even worse since it was very difficult to remove the album from iTunes).
To be clear, I don’t like that Microsoft bundled Candy Crush. I even saw it on my work PC running the enterprise version of Windows! I’m just not sure I’d consider it an ad.
Its an ad because its a third party. Pinball is at worst bloat, but it at least doesn’t ask for money. If MS was really recommending apps then why not Chrome or LibreOffice? Its clear candy crush compensate somehow on top of not being a competitor. Thus its an ad.
Pinball was also third party, it was a free demo of Full Tilt Pinball. I still think it wasn’t as bad but I would say it still counts as an ad
Well I stand corrected.
Oh yeah, you’re absolutely right! it was a pre-installed app. which in my opinion is worse since it reinstalled itself (same with apple and U2’s album).
If you uninstall something from your computer, it should stay uninstalled.I understand why bundled apps exist, but they shouldn’t feel like malware that refuses to go.
No. I’ve never seen an ad.
You can easily turn these off in lots than a minute according to a quick Google search.
Which is it then? You never seen them or you turned them off?
Yes, and it has one toggle to disable them all
And how many windows updates reset the setting??
How can I learn this power?
Do people seriously install the optional updates?
Don’t worry, the next “mandatory” cumulative update will take care of that, even if you aren’t installing it yourself.
Peter?Petah?
Microsoft is the “Linux salesman of the year” because most people switching to Linux do it just because Windows has become so terrible.
Really wish people gave Linux a fair shot instead of considering a $3,000 notebook from Apple. Maybe it’s mostly journalist that talk about it every time Microsoft fucks up.
So, as a software engineer who has also used Linux for decades, I get what you’re saying, but the simple fact is that Apple stuff tends to be way more rock-solid reliable for “normal users” (browsing, email, etc - basically, UI- and human-focused tasks) simply because they have vertically integrated everything.
That’s why their stuff “just works” pretty much always for simple activities - because when you control the chip architecture, instruction set, system hardware and integration, OS, the app code, and everything else I forgot to mention, you can do some really cool and hacky things to make the user experience incredible, but that cross some boundaries that a fully black-boxed architecture (that is: a design that strictly followed the hardware specs and didn’t rely on any nonstandard tricks or end-running of normal interfaces) likely wouldn’t.
I get why people do it. I just hate the proposition of throwing out a perfectly good computer that’s potentially upgradable and certainly more repairable compared to a Mac.
Ask anyone who had their Mac break and the answer is usually it can’t be fixed get a new one. Their hardware feels nice but reducing e-waste is a high priority in my book. MacBooks in particular don’t have a great track record for longevity when heavily used, most cheap laptops don’t.
An interprise computer designed to be repaired would always be a better option for professionals and individuals alike but even better is one that you already own.
To get someone to explain the joke, you have to spell it “Petah”.
Still not getting it.
So… Peter is Australian??
Ah my bad, thanks
It’s funny because the modern consumer doesn’t even care, everything is ad ridden these days, they won’t even notice. But yeah, fuck that noise. I slipstream windows for a reason (the reason is I have to use windows to support my IT customers 🥲)
I haven’t used Windows in so long. I wasn’t aware this was a thing.
Added this week, optional as the post says
How exactly are they spinning showing ads in the start menu as a thing that a user would want?
They aren’t, its just acclimation. Later they can say its been here for a while and the early adopters can say its not a big deal.
“Most [remaining] users found the recommendations helpful, so we made it the default. You’re actually the one being weird here.”
yooo, I haven’t used Win in a whileeee. did they move the start menu to the center of the panel?
Yup. Imo made the entire ui so much worse all in an effort to blur the line between macos and Windows.
Windows 10 already required 3rd party software for me to use it. Windows 11 was a complete no-go for me from the moment I saw it. I’m so glad my OS drive died last year, it was the push I needed to go Linux only.
GTFO here! That is sooooo much more inconvenient since it will block the view of anything you have open on that screen, and it just feels completely odd. wowwww.
You can move it back to the left, but I agree that MS seem to be trying to make it look like iOS for some reason
Windows 11 made it so you can’t move the taskbar to the side anymore either.
I can’t believe this is still not possible to do. I could create an endless amount of panels and move them anywhere I want in Linux 20 years ago, but a corporation with a three trillion dollars market cap can’t do that in 2024??
They stopped caring about the user experienc when they wrote QDOS
XP was the golden era, 7 was the last I feel they cared. Now it’s just proprietary malware.
This is one of my top two reasons for not using Windows. Wth can I not put the panel where ever the hell I want?? So freaking frustrating how they control what you can do just in terms of user preferences. Or like, why can’t I click on whatever window I want regardless of a prompt being open. “Oh you took a screen shot and want to save it, but you need to look at the site to remember the name? lol, fu.” Unbearable.
Fyi, the other top reason is that they shove a bunch of garbage in that I don’t want, like that Cortana bs they did a few years back. No thank you.
I always wanted to use Linux, so it wasn’t really anything that Windows did that drove me away, it was more I could finally play the games I wanted to when Windows 11 came out and needing to change my bios settings to upgrade was enough of a nudge for me to say fuck it.
I’ve been using startallback since I got 11, I’m holding on but I should probably move over to something else soon
Come to the dark side, we have cute penguins.
by default yes, this can be changed back though
I think your keyboard might be brokennnnnnn
awwwww beansssssss :(((
They have been there for a long time
Yup, I’ve been blocking them for months
I’m sorry, what is the problem here exactly? Are there default pinned app from their partners (I think I see Disney+) in the start menu, because I certainly don’t see any advertisement banners.
FWIW I’m on Windows 11 and have the latest update installed (just checked, nothing new there, but I recall installing one a day or two ago), and I’m happy to report it did not make any changes to the apps I had pinned. All available space was already taken up by my own pins so that might have something to do with it, but I definitely don’t feel like they’ve been trying to push something on me that I didn’t ask for.
As far as Edge goes, I don’t really care what they do to that because I simply do not use it.
Yep, have been hearing about it for months now, don’t have any
There is a setting to disabled them.
The problem with these “settings” is that Windows updates don’t respect them. They frequently get reset or superseded by new updates. This happened constantly if you tried to disable Cortana in Windows 10 - even if you changed the registry settings manually, they would get overwritten during updates. I don’t trust Microsoft to respect user choice, they have a demonstrated track record of ignoring it.
In my opinion, when using a paid product, an expensive paid product, ads should not be opt out, if even present.
Besides everything else, it makes Windows even less comfortable to use.
For now, yes. You actually believe that will continue to be that way in 12 - 18 months?
