Let’s put it this way; when Microsoft announced its plans to start adding features to Windows 10 once again, despite the operating system’s inevitable demise in October 2025, everyone expected slightly different things to see ported over from Windows 11. Sadly, the latest addition to Windows 10 is one of the most annoying changes coming from Windows 11’s Start menu.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a so-called “Account Manager” for Windows 11 that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu (apparently, my 43-inch display does not have enough space to accommodate them). Now, the “Account Manager” is coming to Windows 10 users.
The change was spotted in the latest Windows 10 preview builds from the Beta and Release Preview Channels. It works in the same way as Windows 11, and it is disabled by default for now because the submenu with sign-out and lock buttons does not work.
Well, I was gonna run win10 until its service life ends next year. I guess MS want to speed up the timeline a little.
Arch here I come.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a so-called “Account Manager” for Windows 11 that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu.
How the fuck are people OK with this?!
What are you gonna do about it? Install Linux?
Followed by smug mentions of cheap OEM keys and massgrave repo. Yeah, that ain’t gonna fly for work laptops, guys.
Obligatory PS mentioning that I do use linux everyday on my personal machine
How to avoid: right click the start icon (or press win + x) and go to “Shut down or sign out” that way.
I try not using the Windows start menu anymore because I hate seeing the little “notification” bubble on my profile, when dismissing it it returns within a few days!
Yes Microsoft, I am aware I cancelled 365. Thanks for reminding me why I did so.I shit you not, whenever the issues of Microsoft are brought up in my friend group, there is one guy who pops up and defends Microsoft with “Well it’s not a problem for me. I do t see the big deal at all! It’s only a few ads.”
I don’t think you get a choice.
You DO get a choice. You can shift to any other operating system in the world. I did go to Fedora with KDE.
Buy an expensive license
Install the software on hardware you own
Company puts ads on it that weren’t there when you bought the license
2024 is wild. Run Linux.
It’s kinda like AAA game companies waiting for a couple of weeks after a title’s release (and all the reviews are done) before rolling out the micro-transaction market (and the corresponding game-balance adjustments).
Funny how when Windows XP had dial-in activation we warned that this would drift over to games if we tolerated it, and then it did.
100%. Every time consumers tolerate something, it will get worse. On the other hand, it seems so simple to tell people “just don’t buy a product that does X”, but in practice, it’s almost impossible to get people to stop giving these companies money.
but in practice, it’s almost impossible to get people to stop giving these companies money.
This is why consumer-protection regulations are necessary.
Well, hardly any consumer actively buys Windows since it comes pre-installed on most PCs.
People will yell, gnash their teeth, and greivously complain about terrible things and issues.
but they, for the overwhelming majority of them, will refuse to ever give up their precious shiny and make a change, and will eagerly throw out money at every opportunity for it. If not directly at buying them, then at buying secondary related items, or by watching ads.
I jumped ship to PopOS a few months back.
There are some issues, like Bluetooth not starting without some terminal commands, I think I have to wipe or otherwise mess around with my 1TB NTFS storage drive to mount it and stuff like that.
But all the games I’ve tried to play work fine.
CPU: 3700x GPU: 4090
PopOS is pretty great. There is a polish to it that I haven’t seen in some other distros. Which is why it remains on my main gaming rig even though I have considered distro hopping for a while now.
Windows 10 will be my last Windows operating system. It’s been fine and it works well enough. I’ve already started setting up a drive with Linux Mint 22 for use moving forward.
In the same boat. Mint has some growing pains but for mainly web browsing I’ve been enjoying an OS that doesn’t feel like a ad billboard or a data snitch.
Yess yesssss let the linux flow throughhhh youuuuuuu. Manjaro XFCE here. Play with the distros in Oracle Virtual Machines and find the right one for you. Linux desktop is seriously worth the effort. Check out Yakuake as a Quake style drop down terminal to get to hacky stuff. Learn everything about Linux. It’s fun!
if you don’t feel like setting up a vm, use distrosea :] free website that sets it up for you in-browser
Microsoft believes if they worsen the enshitification of Windows 10, more people will just upgrade to 11 quicker.
I decided to move to Linux and my other family went with Macbooks.
Sadly, I’m at a Microsoft office and do not have this option for my work machine.
It does look like I’ll be forced into Linux on my personal machine before too long, though.
Not much to be done with a work machine, but for personal use, I believe the more people moving away from Windows the better.
Lucky for me I only use my windows work laptop to remote into Linux.
It’s like riding a chariot made of dog shit into a wonderful land of freedom
Similarly, I use my windows work laptop for accessing remote (usually Linux) systems, and a few specific apps that are windows only.
My desktops are Linux (and of course my servers here as well), and I have a windows VM for those tools that are windows only that I need. Which I’ve modified that VM heavily to not have the normal junk from windows.
A recent decision for “security” will require using AAD joined machines only to access email/teams/etc. I was going to make an exception for my machines, then decided against it. My laptop now just sits off to the side, with only teams and outlook running, and its basically all I’ll use it for.
This. I mainly keep Windows around on my old laptop for Office development and I don’t need another subscription so won’t pay for 360. I’ll most likely just stop messing with Office and give Windows the boot altogether. Some of my computers already run Linux (mainly Debian). Office and SubtitleEdit have kept my laptop on Windows 10, but fuck getting ads from the OS.
Learning Linux gets more tempting every day. Either that or government needs to pass laws against shit like this but I doubt that will ever happen.
Let me give you a tip. Theres nothing to “learn” it’s just a different way of clicking on some things. If all your gonna do is use steam and Internet browser just do it. There is nothing magical. Just use popOS or Ubuntu. They’re made for ease of use.
Mint is great for beginners IMO
I use Mint on all my devices right now. Mint is great! My favorite part being it’s an operation system that stays out of your way.
I mean, there’s a LOT more to it than just, “a different way of clicking on things”. Let’s be honest and help define proper expectations. You will be messing around in the terminal a lot. Even for installing simple programs, you’ll at minimum be copy-pasting a bunch of commands from the developer’s website straight into the terminal to install most stuff. There are package managers, to help alleviate some of the pain, but there are multiple ecosystems and each one has it’s own contributors, meaning that overall development and technical knowledge is gated behind silos.
I love Linux, but let’s be honest, it’s not exactly user-friendly.
Absolutely! To make it easier you can even tell chatgpt to write a whole terminal script to install X or do Y. And then never think about it again. But for the average user, setting up proton on steam is as deep as it needs to be.
I would recommend Fedora as it’s been the most stable regularly updated distro for me.
Finally they are actually using there brains. They need to make Windows 10 as bad as possible to get people to switch.
I have to use a windows 11 machine for work, and it genuinely surprises me how terrible it is. I don’t understand the opposition to local accounts - if I’m working somewhere with public WiFi/capture portal, I have to use my phone as a hotspot first.
The PIN log in seems to roll a random number and decide each morning whether it is going to work or not.
I also got a laptop with 11 on it for gaming. So much spyware I’ve had to uninstall, configuring anything is a nightmare. I was trying to adjust my mouse sensitivity/figure out why the scroll wheel is either 0 or to the moon, but even when you dig into the control panel, half the settings are missing.
I also had to turn off my WiFi and google commands to make a local account, because otherwise Microsoft accounts are mandatory.
Every change seems to make the experience actively worse for the user.
Can’t stand them forcing onedrive on users as well as pushing online versions of the applications that are inferior in every way.
Every time I see crap like this makes me even happier I ditched it a year and a half ago. If you switch to Linux and started with mint but don’t like it, give PopOs a test drive. It’s been flawless for me.
My main issue is my home computer is for gaming. Have you gamed on Linux? If so, are most games compatible?
I’ve gamed on Linux for the past 5 years. If you use Steam, most stuff works out of the box after you enable a single setting. Now that the linux gaming community is growing it’s easier to find workarounds for the games that don’t work. The only games that are hopelessly broken right now are games with intrusive anti-cheats that don’t support Linux. You can head over to protondb.com and check compatibility status for your games, including workarounds when necessary.
If you don’t use Steam, then I’m not sure. Last time I played non-Steam games there was more troubleshooting and tweaking required but it’s been a couple of years and I don’t know the current state. It’s worth noting that Valve’s compatibility layer, Proton, is open-source and based on other open-source projects. There’s work currently being done to port the functionality outside of Steam. Hopefully, this will mean that in the future all launchers will behave similarly.
But that’s just the software side of things. Don’t forget to check how your hardware works on Linux as well.
Use Heroic launcher for Epic games, it works great for everything I’ve put through it (including anti-cheat riddled stuff like GTA5 and Fall Guys). Heroic also supports GOG games. Lutris does the rest but can be a bit hit and miss compared to Steam/Heroic.
Since Valve released the Steam Deck, which runs on Linux, there is an increasing number of games that are compatible. In some cases you can also emulate windows, or just keep it on your computer and use a dual boot system (even tho Microsoft messed up big time with this kind of installation recently)
somehow I guess it’s still not common knowledge yet but basically everything that doesn’t need a kernel anti cheat will work. or maybe not newer dotnet crap but usually those aren’t games. mods and cheats are hit and miss and require some setup, but mostly work anyway. for most games protondb lists what works with and without tinkering but even some of the stuff listed as not working actually does in my experience. pcgamingwiki info is still usefull for a lot fixes to known problems on all platforms.
amd graphics should work out of the box but sometimes the newest cards have issues for a while after release. Any modern distro will not need extra setup as long as the maintainers aren’t too far behind.
nvidia requires manual intervention for most distros but some have installers that default to nvidia graphics. expect some jank, there’s a lot of weird shit that can go wrong with kernel modules not matching the kernel version among other things.
other hardware can also be problematic and people like myself who have been selecting hardware specifically for linux compatibility may give the idea that nothing is wrong.
I recommend nobara or bazzite for gaming setups that will require little to no addititonal work to play games and most hardware that is possible to work just working out of the box or with a guided config.
If you want to go with a non gaming oriented distro (trust me don’t unless you do it on a spare comp or vm for experimentation), then debian, or mint debian, one of the easy arch installers even, but don’t do ubuntu. Weird shit will inevitability happen eventually and the old guides and crap ai articles with outdated information from the mail order ubuntu cd days will make it way too confusing to fix unless you are a web search sorceror.
All I do is watch some vids and game. I have only come across one game I can’t get to play and it’s flight simulator x. If steam says it’ll play on steam deck, you’re 100% golden. If it says unsupported, do a quick web search for protondb and search the game there. I’ve played a few that steam said wouldn’t work and they do. As far as how well they play, it’s been awesome, no complaints. I’m a linux newbie and don’t know shit and it’s been painless. I did try mint and nobara, and had issues trying to get mint to play games, and nobara worked good but after a week I lost my sound and I liked the way the workspaces works much better with popOs
Appreciate the time taken to type a response. Did you follow any videos or guides of any sort? It’s been a loooong time since I’ve setup dual boot on a system and I’m wondering if complexity has been simplified at all.
I went full send and didn’t do dual boot. It’s not bad to do dual boot though, however, I would watch a guide on it.
Only issue I’ve had is helldivers 2 being slightly finicky and needing to delete the config file occasionally. Otherwise 10/10
I also only game on my home PC and I’ve been using it for over a year now with Linux. I play CS 2, WOWS and Battletech mainly but check protondb.com for your games. My kids are also using Linux and they also were able to play everything they wanted.
There are a few AAA games with cheat protection that won’t work. Other than that: It’s awesome and you feel the freedom instantly!
It depends on the games
Do you play older or newer games? Do you play competitively?
Either way you should checkout protondb
P r o t o n
It’s a complex issue and kind of depends on your games and your hardware and your software. In general, you can definitely count out major competitive multiplayer titles that rely on aggressive kernel-level anti-cheat software, since that is essentially spyware and it’s incompatible with Linux. Furthermore, very new titles often pose problems, as the primary target audience is always Windows. Linux compatibility is seldom considered by big publishers, and as such the FOSS community has to pick up the slack. With the release of the Steam Deck, Valve released a custom version of Wine called Proton, which acts as a compatibility layer between Windows and Linux specifically for Steam Games, but even that kind of is hit and miss. There’s a website called protondb that is trying to categorize game compatibility but even good rankings (gold / diamond) usually require some small amount of fiddling with settings.
Overall, if you want to have a single-click to launch games experience, you’re sadly still bound to Windows most of the time. But if you have the patience to experiment and learn new things, there’s way more tools and possibilities than ever before. Just be prepared to troubleshoot some things.
I don’t think it’s most yet, but it’s improving fast thanks to the Valve Steam Deck. Bazzite is probably the distro to look at for a machine that’s primarily for gaming; it’s based on the Steam Deck OS, but works on more machines. There are some high-profile games like Fortnite that won’t run on it, but a lot of stuff will, especially if it doesn’t rely on any fancy anti-cheat stuff.
Protip: Install Windows Server as your desktop OS. It comes without all that crap.
Protip: Install Linux because FUCK MICROSOFT!
Eeeeewww. Why would I want to fuck something so small and limp?
Some people need to use actually good productivity applications on their computers.
LibreOffice, Inkscape, OpenShot, GIMP, etc. just aren’t particularly good. No HDR support is embarrassing at this day and age.
I have installed Linux more often than Windows and MacOS and it’s not even my main operating system. What Linux offers me is a bunch of similar desktop environments all running the same mediocre applications. I want to get stuff done, not fiddle with window managers and packet managers all day.
Installing Linux to express your feelings about Microsoft might be emotionally therapeutic, but that’s about it.
IDK man, I’ve been using it exclusively on my main desktop at home and I’ve been getting along just fine with those “not particularly good” applications.
Well, it depends on what your cases are. It’s great that Linux can fulfill your needs.
Been using it just fine on my Desktop. Blender 3D and Krita are equally as good, and in some cases better, than the subscription based programs. Libre Office has the same functionality as MS Word, but supports more formats. Every other daily use program, such as Firefox or VLC runs just as fine on Linux as it does anywhere else. I’ve had virtually no issues running games from my Steam library, even ones that aren’t officially supported.
Sure. Everyone’s requirement for a desktop is different. Blender is very good for sure and Krita is decent. However for painting and drawing Krita doesn’t hold a candle to Procreate on an iPad. As for games, if you’re not a super serious gamer, there’s tons of stuff that runs on Linux nowadays for sure.
My phone records 4K video in HDR, which I then can neither view nor edit properly on Linux. Do you have VLC 3 running with working HDR support?
I was so startled to find LibreOffice Calc, the Excel-alike, had completely different keyboard shortcuts than Excel, completely messing with my muscle memory every. Single. Time. How are businesses supposed to adapt when they need to factor in the time loss for every Excel-using employee to learn the arbitrary new control scheme?
Just request Libre Office Calc to be able to import Excel shortcuts.
Having different keyboard shortcuts takes some getting used to for sure. However it’s not like Excel is the end all be all of spreadsheet usability. Business often depend on some idiosyncratic excel sheet, that doesn’t work in Calc in the first place.
LibreOffice isn’t terrible. The Writer is actually pretty okay. The spreadsheet and presentation software feels like something from 15 years ago though.
I wouldn’t as that’s expensive and way overkill. You want a Windows version that is LTS.
Evaluation licence can be used for 6 months and can be extended several times.
IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING ECONOMY BASED ON ADS??? WHO THE FUCK IS PAYING FOR ALL THESE SHITTY ADS??? WHO EVER YOU ARE, GET FUCKED WITH YOUR PRODUCT!
Who even buys shit because of ads?
Yes, literally anyone that wants to sell a product or provide a service relies, to a large degree, on advertising.
It’s been this way for over a century.
Everybody should learn about pihole.
Or pfBlockerng
Pfblocking?
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/pfblocker.html
It’s a component of the pfSense firewall, although calling it a firewall seems like an understatement. It’s also capable of routing, DDNS, IDS/IPS, and lots of other things.
https://www.patreon.com/pfBlockerNG is a addon for pfsense which is a router os for X86/64 machines. If you don’t want to block porn it will run on nearly anything. You can block all dns over tls or https. Many of the list you need can be selected in the gui.
That won’t stop in operating system ads.
I’m in the EU and use Windows 10 LTSC so I mostly clear off of this bulshit. A few months ago I bought a cheap refurbished laptop to use occasionally and decided from day 1 it would be Linux Mint only since I only use it for the basics.
A few months later and I’m surprised how far Mint came. It’s so easy to use. Customizing it was a bit harder but nothing major. And to my surprise…even games. I threw a couple of games at it and everything the computer can handle would run. I was from the time where gaming on Linux was a no-no.
When LTSC support goes, I’ll most likely go full Linux. The only problem is the Adobe software but maybe I can fix that with a virtual machine.
I tried that LTSC a couple years ago when I had a Nvidia card and I couldn’t get a driver install that would let me play the new release games.
With the craziness around Adobe products you might want to move away from Adobe at some point as well.
I do, unfortunately there are no efficient alternatives.
…decided from day 1 it would be Linux Mint only since I only use it for the basics
What kind of out of the ordinary things cannot be done with it?
I switched from Windows 3.11 and I’m still puzzled by this.
I always love when people pretend to be mystified that someone has trouble running programs on Linux when I, a non Linux user, see plenty of examples of people having trouble getting programs to run on Linux scrolling through “Everything” on Lemmy
Well, some people want to run programs on Linux that were written for other operating systems.
As it happens, it can be done, but it’s not the simplest way to do things.
It’s like buying a PlayStation and complaining it won’t run Super Mario properly.
What if those are the basics?
If those are your basics, have you considered running a Nintendo system?
I tried but Nintendo issued a DMCA takedown
We need to remind ourselves that there’s an entire generation that has grown up with smartphones and only touching a laptop or a desktop pc occasionally. For them, windows or chromeOS alone is a challenge. Linux is just an isekai waiting to happen when you cross that bridge of no return.
Cannot be done with Mint? I’ve OS hopped every few years - currently running Windows 11 at work and Mint at home. I much prefer the Mint install. That said, I’m a video producer - and video production just isn’t there yet on Linux. CUDA’s a pain to get working, proprietary codecs add steps, Davinci’s linux support is more limited than it seems, KDenLive works in a pinch but lacks features, Adobe and Linux are like oil and water, there’s no equivalent for After Effects… I don’t doubt that there are workarounds for many of these issues. But the ROI’s not there yet. I’d love to see a video production focused distro that really aimed for full production suite functionality. Especially since Hackintoshes are about to get even harder to build.
I guess that’s a valid edge case. Although I thought that some professional editing suites had been ported (not Adobe’s, obviously). Apparently it’s not the case.
The way your comment reads, you’ve been using Windows 3.11 these past decades. 😂
Why fix what isn’t broken
I’m unironically beginning to view Microsoft as one of my favorite companies. They treat their cattle just right. Hopefully they’ll start arbitrarily deleting local files.
Is there anything the cattle won’t tolerate? LETS FIND OUT
Hopefully they’ll start arbitrarily deleting local files.
They already do that. If you click “yes” on everything they recommend like good cattle, they’ll upload the contents of your user folders to OneDrive and delete the local copies.
Yup, they already caught me once with that one when I was in a hurry and I had all these damn green check marks everywhere. I was so disappointed thought I had avirus. I will never use one drive just because of that.
The fact that people pay hundreds of dollars for this OS to get advertised to is insulting. Same energy as these smart TVs that feel like they have the right to show you ads.
If I’m dictator, I’m making this shit illegal, full stop.
