I ended up blocking Edge in the firewall so it would at least close quickly without loading any useless stuff. Even then the firewall rule would reset periodically so I made a new one that points to the Edge binary.

Is it really that hard to innovate to differentiate yourself and steer the browsing experience somewhere else, away from this mess? Maybe the employee selection program is completely flawed at big companies like these or these people are purposefully suppressed. Because today's browsers, with their antiquated ui and the non existing user experience is really disturbing.

Windows 11 is awful. I'll continue to use windows 10 on my personal laptop for as long as possible.

"Hey friends :wave:, I call everyone my friend because I am a creepy old Influenza(tm) on TikTok trying to advertise snake poison to young folks. Don't be afraid, I'm just an innocent friendly neighbour hood virtue signalling Microsoft advocate. Look, here I use Edge, here I use Windows 11 with some bullshit hack to run Linux in my terminal and then I use (innocently) a bunch of other toxic Microsoft software to advertise this spyware to you in an unsuspecting way."

Yawn... I think people are slowly waking up to Microsoft and their antics and fake people.

I refuse to use browsers that come tied deeply with the os. Last one I used was IE6

Thats all I have to say about these tactics over the last decades

Who forced you to use Microsoft (at home).

Smells like typical knee jerk reaction for a product that doesn't perform to a vp's expectations. PM's asked to do something about it, and between making the product better to attract users, or implementing defaults and such to force it on them, they choose the expedient.

I am shocked a company with a very sketchy history with repeated violation with anti trust related to internet browsers.

But to be serious, I wonder what sketchy nonsense Microsoft would do if they could only compete on Linux or MacOS.

On steam and other stores they force you to login into Xbox services.

Edge is trash. If Microsoft wants to do something positive for the browser diversity landscape they should match Google $ for $ on support for Mozilla, with the stipulation that the funds can only be used for FireFox.

... If they could just do it to Chrome but leave Firefox alone.

It's their OS. Seems like an odd issue.

Good! Chrome is a monstrous application, and it's good when people are coerced off of it.

Am I the only one who thinks it's expected behavior for microsoft-edge://bing.com to open in Edge as opposed to any other browser? Edge isn't being forced onto people. People are just opening a deeplink into Edge.

Better than Google constantly asking me to switch to Chrome on google.com when I'm in Edge.

I share all criticism on the subject but I must admit there is a killer feature that alone converted me to use Edge on MacOS - native vertical tab bar with tab grouping. It worked much better for me than all Chrome and Firefox extensions I tried before.

I know Brave implemented it recently too so Edge is not the only player in town now, but it was the first! Hopefully the rest of browsers will follow the trend.

Microsoft only continue to make Windows desktop because businesses "need it", and it's a gateway to sell people azure and office. Eventually they will open source as much of it as they can, or rather, build a flavour of windows that is Linux and essentially distribute binaries for the directx stuff and other things they're not willing to fully release the code on.

mark my words, Windows isn't dying a natural death, it's parent is suffocating it in its sleep as a mercy killing.. mercy from having to support it forever

I use Windows 10/11 daily. The number of times Edge was "forced on me": 0 The number of times Edge launched when I expected or wanted my default browser (Firefox): 0 The number of times my browser default was reset to Edge: 0

I just don't understand this outrage. I spend 90% of my time in Firefox/Chrome - I've only started using Edge lately to play with Bing "AI" Chat. I had to search for it!

Visual Studio uses Edge when you submit bugs. There's some kind of integration where Edge collects diagnostics.

The problem then comes when you get emailed back from Microsoft. Other browsers can't log in correctly to Visual Studio's bug discussion board.

Are people hallucinating? If so, why? Mere prejudice?

That is literally forcing edge on people.. it is ignoring their choice, and forcing them to use edge or change the desired browsers.

It is not forcing them to use it (mostly) but it is forcing edge on them in a dark pattern which needs to be called out.

Maybe not forced, but definitely hostile

I am currently building a gaming PC for my partner, and the OS is my biggest unsolved headache. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC sounds perfect - can I ask you for a recommendation on where to get a license?

I haven't had to deal with Microsoft licensing in over fifteen years, and unsurprisingly the topic doesn't seem to have gotten any easier since then.

Of course, the only way to get it seems to be to pirate it. Is there a recommended way to do this? My partner isn't ready to give up on Windows yet and I'm trying to find the least bad path.

This doesn't answer my question... If an admin does not want their users using Edge, is there an actual way to configure the default browser that doesn't end up opening links and such in Edge?

Yea you gotta just go AMD gpu. I had an NVIDIA RTX 3070 and despite being decently technically proficient I could never deal with the hassle of Linux gaming. I bought an AMD 6950 XT and immediately many random issues I was having like league of legends crashing or bugging out just stopped. Granted I also switched from default fedora to fedora with the Sway WM so there are some confounding variables there. Even a brand new game like Starfield just worked™ for me, which was quite surprising. I do just leave Steam on Proton experimental so that may have something to do with it.

Anyways, I'd recommend Linux gaming now to anyone if they have AMD hardware and value privacy. There are definitely still some quirks and typical Linux configuring but even for someone as impatient and intolerant to that stuff as me, it's been pretty good so far

I'm not parent, but you may have missed the word "followed". Patent is suggesting that WSL is a follow up to previous attempts to benefit from Linux by extortion.

Dolby Atmos, at least, sounds good but it's pretty annoying because it's had the practical effect of making height channels proprietary in most systems.

Springboard definitely isn't OK.

There's no good reason that Airdrop shouldn't be in the Linux kernel and it probably would be if the protocol were well documented.

You can use game overlays other than the Steam one, so there's nothing stopping Microsoft from creating an overlay that provides the Edge browser.

Rich integrations are great but when the boundary is perceived by the user as being two different programs or systems, both sides of the integration should have well-documented public interfaces that support swapping out the other side (no "private API" funny business).

"Tightly integrated" can mean "We designed A and B to fit together well. We built them side by side and tested them together" That's perfectly acceptable and can make a fair direct case to the customer.

What's not:

* Not allowing controls to manage integrations. Maybe I want to connect A to C, D, or Q instead, or not allow a connection at all.

* Accidentally-on-purpose clobbering customer choices (ooh, whoops, we reset all your file associations for the sixth time this year, perhaps now you'll stop changing them).

* Using undocumented APIs or similar gimmicks to ensure a competitive product will be inherently hamstrung.

* Pretending a seperate product is an indivisible component of the whole. I'm sure there are a bunch of places where Edge could be pulled out in favour of an external help-file/PDF/etc viewer.

> I tend to side on the practical aspects more than design purity.

I do too, but as someone who doesn't use Outlook or Edge, having those two specific products integrate doesn't give me any practical benefits, whereas having the OS try to force products like Edge that I don't use on me because they happen to also be made by Microsoft gets in the way of me just trying to use a computer the way I want.

Yes, on MacOS you can use whatever browser you like, engine and all, while being unmolested for favoring something not-Safari. That’s why, after a lifetime of being a Windows user, my most recent PC purchase was a MacBook Air. I would prefer to use Linux, but where I’m at in my life, I just want something that works relatively well out of the box, and I use some software that won’t run on Linux.

No it isn't. Its like you ordering sushi and the restaurant gives you shoes because they know better.

And if one likes the Arch way, but a graphical installer and some things taken care of for you, I recommend EndeavourOS.

I believe you've disabled Cortana or "search the web for result".

I do the same thing with Apple's Spotlight.

Try typing something that ends up doing a "search" is what they're suggesting.

You should pick Linux Mint or another Linux distribution (if you can make it work for your use cases), and avoid both Windows and Ubuntu when they're built to act against the user's best interests.

"It's fine."

No, it is not fine, that I have to fight my OS. It is managable if one has some skills with computer like we do, but it is not fine in general. I would like to trust the operating system I use.

Exact opposite experience here. RHEL and friends have been much more stable reliable for me than Ubuntu.

Debian started shipping firmware in the main ISO this release. It mostly just works except Nvidia now, and even that's just an apt install away.

Does that make it any easier? You can download a live version and test instead of needing to find that firmware included release.

One would hope they might instead consider the use of CAMM - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_Attached_Memory_Mo... - but I guess we'll see :(

I used to like Blackbird for this, but after breaking updates and the Store enough times I’ve learned my lesson. O&O ShutUp10++ is all I used to debloat now, in addition to MassGrave activation. NTLite is the nuclear option if you’re prepared to invest a few hours crafting your “perfect” image.

I don't know, works on my machine. Basically any game I play works immediately out of the box. Last bigger issues I remember is Elden Ring crashing when opening sometimes.

Otherwise it all just works immediately, no issues at all.

Have you tried again in recent years?

Today it is much more of a binary experience. A game either runs smoothly out of the box or does not run at all. And the latter is the exception, not the rule.

Good to know, thanks!

Your comment is ridiculous to me. We have Linux, probably supported on billion combinations, not too closely integrated with "vendor-specific" things. It's also free to use and free software, constantly being improved and extended by people around the world.

I don't much care about Windows, but as someone who has to use it for certain work I feel like I have the right to complain about Microsoft trying to force it's other products on me. And they probably could survive by having their OS be a bit more end-user friendly,, and if they couldn't, we would use some other OS.

I think you should be able to embed a browser with your os (the browser is almost part of an os now, and there can be links between those integration), but not prevent 3rd party browsers or tie services to your browser. There is no technical reason for bing.

The comment I was responding to asserted "we need to find a balance that allows vendors to tightly integrate their apps but prevent abusing this". My response argued that no, we don't actually need this. I don't think that being unwilling to go out of my way to find a way to support a business model I don't like is socialism because I don't happen to be a billionaire making a competing problem; if anything, you're arguing that I shouldn't use my power as a consumer to choose products that I like to influence the marketplace, and that's a far more anti-capitalist message than anything I've expressed here.

Directory structures is the ‘skill’ I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints about students not understanding. Particularly annoying for those teaching first year undergrad SWEng, since the gap between those self starters who have some idea of what’s going on and those who don’t really care and we’re pressured into it by parents is larger than ever.

It’s pretty unfair on those who have done the bare minimum amount of experience with computers that they have to sit through (and pay for!) being taught ‘this is what a file structure is and how it works’ for a not-trivial amount of time.

Tell the university that they need to add a computer course to the required incoming freshman classes. Things like how to use the various systems the university supports. This was my experience at CSU, and very little of it was explained to me, other than a few quick mentions in the 1-hour library course (this is how you do this and that and the other thing on library systems. The school offers Citrix and access to network drive away from school. Ask someone about that if you care. This is how you access online periodicals.)

- Eduroam is available at many other schools if you happen to be there, but I never managed to actually sign in, because CSU never told me how, neither did UCLA when I visited - how to access the network drive, both on- and off- campus (sftp supported without a VPN, smb with). This was mentioned in a single 1 hour lecture at the library on how to use library systems. Access from the locked down public computers at the library without student logins was not mentioned (just mounting a network drive, but instructions previously given implied that the VPN was necessary if you weren't logged into your account on the network) - there were labs running windows 10, windows 7/8 (windows 10 came out while I was there), Fedora (network drive had to be connected manually), and even a lab full of Sparcs that I didn't use much (they were quite slow), the library computers, etc. There were also heavily locked down public computers in other areas that only allowed access to the browser, and a lab full of thin clients that offered no permanent storage for even temporary use (working with a local file? Better have a flash drive, or you're stuck with network drive latency) - Citrix allowed access to a suite of software including Adobe CS6 iirc as well as Office and other software; this worked from anywhere on-campus, but the software offering off-campus was different. This got a passing mention in the library lecture, mainly that this is available. Classes that actually made use of this software didn't mention it being available off campus at all. - some software was only available in private labs (acceptable not to mention this), but some was only available in certain buildings/departments and some was only available on Citrix. Fonts could not be installed anywhere, but windows offers a simple (if little-known) method to register a font for the current session, and this worked for using custom fonts in Adobe and other applications, both in Citrix and on lab computers. - there was a single cafe where students were _allowed_ (I think?) to plug laptops into the network (not to say people didn't do it elsewhere, but here the network and plug sockets were above the counter in the public seating area, and nobody would stop you from doing so) - part way through, I think there was a new network drive added, for a while there were multiple ways to access the network drive. - the network drive was (a very little bit) more than just a network drive; it allowed ssh access to edit files with pico; when I first started, it also hosted files for student websites; eventually the websites went away, but the ssh access never did. It was clearly an intentionally open SSH server, and was open outside the school as well; it had a (iirc pre-login) banner with some rules. - msdnaa was retired in favor of dreamspark, and free copies of office were phased out in favor of discounted 365 subscriptions when I was about halfway through. There was still tons of free software available, and none of it was ever mentioned until a cs course (the cs department had their own dreamspark subscription with an expanded offering, but there was software available to everyone as well, including Windows and office...which was available separately in the school/CS/business subscriptions)

When I was in high school (middle school?), I had a computer literacy class where a good quarter of the semester was teaching students how to organize their files. The teacher had a messy filesystem that was unzipped onto each computer, and during the course of a week or so, students were expected to rename files and the few directories and organize the files in a way that made sense. Mostly the files were empty iirc, but I think there were a few with similar names and identical content that could be deleted. I remember thinking at the time that this was the best thing I'd ever seen, having anyway seen the number of files left saved on desktop and my documents on the few machines at the school that allowed you to do so.

>Back then businesses were a lot more scared of the repercussions of anti-competitive behaviour than they are now.

Reasonably, too. Governments seem reluctant to actually regulate anti-competitive behavior these days, especially from tech giants. I think it must be a kind of technological "too big to fail".

MacBook Air M2 should be the choice for any normal person who just needs to get normal work done. No politics, but clearly I've touched an insecurity here :/

What are these bugs that people encounter that often in Firefox?

I've been using using Firefox on Linux and Mac for a long time now and I'm yet to see any bug(a rare occurrence) that is a show stopper(for me atleast).

When a company uses dirty tactics against your project, forcing its (at the time) inferior product by strong arming pc vendors, call your project a Cancer and tries to undermine java and the Web and has been found guilty on court, some animosity is in order. Yeah its been a long time. Seeing current practices, not so much it seems.

Windows: ads in the start menu, candy crush, hey you are trying to install chrome and I don't like that.

Ubuntu: one line message in the terminal about we released <new thing> thing, feel free to try it.

Yeah, basically the same thing.

I’ve never noticed, which means their “pushing” is at a totally acceptable level.

Except edge then opens and presents you with some message about setting it to the default browser (which a lot of people will just click ok to make it go away)

Except the same is applied to the start menu, help pages, system links, just to name a few.

Honest question, why not just Debian and use a derivative instead? I took a 20 year sabbatical on Linux in the home. But with windows 11, I decided to go back. Stopped on debian, and chose Debian when I came back. I am super impressed with how it has matured and it seems to be built in a way that really does a fair job on looking out for you as a user, and as an administrator.

Stock Debian has been pretty decent recently. I was surprised to find it either didn't require proprietary blobs or installed them when I wasn't paying attention.

I've also been playing around with BSD and it's like hanging out with a friend from elementary school: they're a little wonky, but you remember some good times together.

PopOS isn't my favorite, but it is pretty straight-forward. If it's working for you then it's a total win. (Which is my way of saying "though I like Stock Debian and BSD, there is absolutely nothing wrong with PopOS.")

You haven't stopped, PopOS is a Ubuntu derivative, not a Debian derivative. The future looks interesting though with at least the bulk of gnome dependencies removed with Cosmics - will still be a Ubuntu third-party spin / derivative though.

It does that when it's the default, too. I only occasionally use Windows, so couldn't be bothered to install something else. Yet, I feel that every other time I start it, I'm presented with some "use edge! it's so cool!" screen I have to sit through. It also insists on changing the search engine to bing. I'm usually pretty cautious and try not to press "ok" just so it leaves me alone, yet it managed to change it. For my needs, pretty much every search engine is good enough. I prefer google since I can convince it to use dark mode and use English instead of my local language (even though windows is set to use English as its display language).

You must live in a mirror universe. Office on Mac is awful.

Excel doesn't even have Power Query!

Flatpak is great, and Homebrew works nicely on Linux for other bits and pieces. Linux support made it upstream to https://brew.sh, so you get all the same things you'd get on a Mac.

Because I accept both things on their own, and I accept that the combination of them follows naturally. Then I must (reluctantly) accept unfortunate outcome of the combination.

I wouldn't say it's reasonable that browsers could never suggest they be made default, and I don't think it's reasonable that you can't have some OS function that wants to show e.g. a help section use the OS embedded browser.

On my work computer there is Windows 11, and what we build can only be built on windows.

So naturally, I just accept almost all defaults. If you just go along with their (sometimes mindbendingly horrible) choices, you get to actually get work done.

Of course it's a wonderful moment to boot up my machine at home, which has ArchLinux on it, with KDE and all the things I chose because I like them, and I'm at least 2x more productive. Reading code is much easier without distractions, with the right font, with the right colorscheme that I'm used to. Writing code is much easier when the IDE doesn't hijack Tab to insert AI autosuggestions (which as I said, I leave on, because I dont want to fight MS as its a waste of time). I can use bash without 194728 incantations of setting up path variables and installing all the tools I want.

Yeah this is a rant, but man, Windows does a lot of work to force its defaults on you, and man, theyre horrible.

Edge is insidious too, from a privacy stand point. There are literally dozens of settings that effectively send "tracking" data to Microsoft from Edge. All of the sync, shopping, points, url protection, etc. settings all effectively send data to Microsoft for evaluation. And they automatically sign you into your Edge profile (from your Windows profile). Ugh.

I get that HTML has taken over the world and that most of Office now is effectively a web app. So Edge is definitely a required piece of library software on any Windows install. But the inability to just open simple hyperlinks in an alternative browser combined with Edge's insistence that every "feature" is basically Microsoft profiling you... I guess it just boggles my mind how they get away with this.

Has to be pretty embarrassing for the Edge developers that something they've worked on is mostly known as a punchline or an annoyance shoved down people's throats, rather than a product that can stand and compete on its own two feet.

This stems from modern companies’ obsession with measurable impact. If it can’t be measured it might as well not exist. Unfortunately UX has to become very very bad before the effect is measurable (losing users) and by then it is much too late, especially when the company has near monopoly power. I hope they figure out that they need to make feedback easier to gather so that they can get back to making good products.

Microsoft probably has better data than me, but I can't imagine that that many people switch to Edge after Microsoft forcefully opens it when you try to search for a local file.

Just show some fucking respect to your users, it will be worth more than the 0.003% market share you get from opening Edge when I click a pdf

I use Edge on my laptop (because of Bing Chat, easy to use on Edge, without faffing around on OpenAI), and Microsoft still won't stop trying to push it on me every once in a while.

(on windows 10, because of TPM1.2, small blessings)

Like chill, you already got me. I am not going to remove Chrome and Firefox, but you are the default browser already and I use Bing too, now go away.

Windows 10 is just fine for my needs. Yet every weeks my system is kidnapped on startup by a menu full of dark patterns that tries to lure me into installing Windows 11. Not only is it hostile and deceitful, but it fails to explain the advantages of upgrading to 11, which makes it useless.

Looks like nothing much has changed on Microsoft's end.

I posted this 2 years ago on HN[1] about how Microsoft goes out of its way to manipulate users when they search for "Firefox" on Bing using Edge:

> Tangentially related, but I recently spun up a Windows VM and used Edge to search Bing for "Firefox" and this is result I got[2].

> It's a giant banner that says, "You're already browsing in Microsoft Edge. Keep using to get world class performance with more privacy, more productivity, and more value."

> That banner is followed by another giant banner image telling me to get "Get Robux using Microsoft Edge. Join Microsoft Rewards and use Microsoft Edge. Get a 100 Robux eGift Card on us when you search with Microsoft Bing on Microsoft Edge for 5 days after you join."

> I had to scroll to even see the relevant search results for my search term. I'm assuming most non-power users won't scroll because they were just assured that they were "already browsing in Microsoft Edge", which is apparently more private, productive and valuable than what they intended to search for.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187

[2] https://i.imgur.com/blHGMgX.png

Wasn’t this breaking the law the last time?

I remember it was calls to split Microsoft into separate companies, one for the operating system and one for the internet divisions. Looks like it’s time now.

Last time Microsoft had the default web browser they were horrible stewards of the web. I’ll never forget them delaying supporting PNG.

Looks like they really learned a lot from that $613M EU fine. I hope they double it next time. How much exactly do they make from forcing IE down users throats? Apparently enough to justify this behavior given the past penalties, just mind blowing that they’re able to continue to do this and just pay fines. You’d think there’d be more backlash at the board level to this type of behavior.

Every day of bad new for Microsoft and Windows is another great day for Linux. You all have a choice. Make it.

All these comments about coercing Windows into some semblance of usability. After several years of not having a PC, I recently bought a new one to use Windows to play ONE game that several of my other friends play on it, and it has been extraordinarily frustrating to configure. From the on-topic charade of browser choice, to denying Microsoft's many attempts to take over several other defaults, or install Office, to power management robbing me of the performance I paid for, to OneDrive and it's confusing integration with the awful Explorer, to all the nagware buried in all the drivers, to the giant FUCK YOU in the Bluetooth stack that shuts it down after a minute to save energy(!?) forcing me to plug in a keyboard and mouse to fiddle with it until I finally found the setting to turn that off... And then making you go through the routine of turning down all their attempts to take everything over again every time there's a Windows upgrade. Seriously, how does anyone with a choice put up with an operating system that continually slaps you in the face and treats you with so little respect? Or, God forbid, think this user experience is superior to macOS or Linux?

"Freedom of choice for customers!

Microsoft edge is bringing me inconvenience. Just because a product is good doesn't mean I'm obligated to use it. I as a customer do not like this browser. I like another one and I want to have the options very clear to download the browser you want. Your browser edge is almost like a virus does not let me download another browser and we know clearly that all this is not to benefit customers and to direct us to the microsoft download store. I can't download another product other than microsoft this seems to me like monopoly syndrome,

I request a change to a list teaching me the steps to have other free browser options, I don't want to remove the edge any more than other options.

This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread."

Source: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftedge/forum/all/...

Microsoft is weird. People where pretty happy about Edge initially and Microsoft fail to capitalize on that.

Why not just create a good browser, bundle it Windows, ensure it has excellent privacy features and if people use it then great, if not, to bad. I really fail to see Microsofts end goal here. They don't need people to use Edge, they don't need to spy on people... So why do they feel like they must?

> You may have read stories in the tech media celebrating that Windows will finally respect the default browser setting.

As someone who hasn't daily driven Windows since Windows 7 this statement is hilarious, because back then, it did respect default browser settings.

Most of the people who participate in Windows Insider are amateurs, they don't have several PCs for functional verification, they don't have in-depth knowledge of software testing, and there is no point in blaming them. On the contrary, Windows 11 is entrusted to these amateurs for functional verification instead of QA, so it is not surprising that Windows 11 has bugs in every update.

I used to be a huge Windows fan, but shoving Edge upon me so aggressively has made me decide it’s time to move on. Moving forward, I’m only buying Apple or Linux devices.

Microsoft Edge is a privacy nightmare. They have buried dozens of data-collection settings in so many menus under so many different names and categories it's insane. You literally need a book to know which settings to turn off, and even then they keep adding new settings at a very high rate hidden in "security updates"

I've stopped forcing myself on Microsoft. Works wonders. Moved my workflow off the platform over the last 6 months entirely.

I used a debloater on my windows 11 laptop which also removed edge. No big deal since Firefox is my browser if choice, but I'm a Web developer and need to test my apps in different browsers. I've tried to install edge multiple times, but I can never get it to work.

What made you think they'd stop?

I just want them to use clippy to force you into going from google sheets back to excel just for the memes. (and don't tell me to stop giving them bad ideas, I know the higher-ups love them)

I want the Chrome to stop being the majority shareholder of the market. But not like this.

Windows continuously monitors what browsers users have installed. If you uninstall Chrome, it immediately tries to make Edge the default browser.

And it never respects my wishes for a default browser. Any OS embedded help link will open Edge, wasting me time, memory and screen space.

Microsoft is also forcing office 365 support to end on windows servers in 2025/2026. It's going to be a blood bath if you run on prem.

Microsoft and their stupid OneDrive needs to stop trying to co-mingle all my data all the time.

It’s gonna start getting really hard to have all these affairs on the side /s

Just out of curiosity, what is that game that convinced you to switch to a different hardware/OS? Must be the killer app.

Great for you. Im still trapped for now and not ready for much risk as I have a young child to raise. But hope one day I’ll make a move unless I get neutralized and stop caring for good.

They do not give a damn about the user but justify themelves to the user with a corporate slogan: “we care about your experience …” but it’s mostly to a hostage or ignorant userbase.

I don't see the board of directors or other large shareholders complaining to Microsoft about their product quality.

Yeah I was wondering if they even know about it :D You'd have to listen to users (at least accidentally) or do some specific data analysis to find out I guess, if nobody on that team uses Edge.

Its such a shame, because from what I can tell, the only reason Roblox doesn't work is because they do some very goofy stuff to launch the game

The usual solution from libertarian techies is to remove what little power democratic governments have and let big business be unchecked other than some “invisible hand” from a collection of individual actors who can’t scale due to psychological warfare that big companies can easily scale to.

We are now at a point that billionaires openly make unilateral decisions about foreign and defence policy with little discussion in public eyes, let alone checks and balances.

Also there is geopolitics involved. A war in the east and every EU regulation against US companies is seen a bit as an attack on the alliance while "we" must stand together against the east.

Also IE was the dominant browser back then, which it is not today, but windows itself is on the desktop. So I think it is abusing monopoly, but instead of trying to regulate it, EU should make a push for open source. Maybe fund it with a big fine for Microsoft. That would be EU politics I could engage with.

Brave and a few other derivatives will block these high profile features. But they don't have the resources to maintain many of these exceptions. For example look at Brave's response to manifest v2. They say that they will try to support it for longer but they are careful to promise little. Because they know they don't have the resources to maintain all of the underlying APIs and their own extension store.

Plus this helps entrench Chromium as the only browser engine. Because even the addition of many non-harmful features that other engines don't implement create compatibility issues that results in developers using these new features so sites break. Firefox gets unsupported so people have to switch to Chrome or a derivative.

So yes, a derivative is better than using Google Chrome. But it is a small improvement compared to switching to a different browser engine.

> This sounds like you want Debian Testing

Please, don't recommend Debian Testing to unsuspecting people. The distro is aimed at people that know what they are getting, and has no guarantee it will keep working unless you know really well what you are doing.

Even Unstable is supposed to be more beginner friendly.

Isn't Debian Testing also more outdated when compared against the main distros ubuntu/fedora/opensuse?

It used to be the case in 2010, but that is 13 years ago...

   The package has been in "unstable" at least for 2-10 days (depending on the urgency of the upload).
   The package has been built for all the architectures which the present version in testing was built for.
   Installing the package into testing will not make the distribution more uninstallable.
   The package does not introduce new release critical bugs.

Agreed. I'm currently on Mac OS and almost daily I get UI glitches/bugs in the dock and notifications, which puzzles me a bit. I mean I understand that they don't care about whatever crashes the terminal when it runs with 10 windows for weeks at a time, but the dock is visible for all users and I don't think I'm doing anything special to it.

That's not even close to the same quality of nagging, on a single distro.

Yea, there are distros with ads and tracking, and that's a stain on them, and on the people who willingly put up with it. Debian and Pop!_OS are great, btw.

Sounds like you got a lemon. I'm sorry that happened to you.

I've never had trouble with Macs reporting hardware faults. I mean, drives fail WAY less often now than they used to, so it's a rare event, but the errors I've gotten have been pretty easy to parse and interpret.

I am happy that my teenage dream of an actual sub-genre of desktop PC usage is finally getting distros designed that particularly purpose.

Only works with steam deck or amd GPUs?

But that's (+ AV1) about it. I wouldn't install edge just to test whether there are any files encoded with these codecs. (unless there are a LOT of media encoded in different ways e.g. youtube)

Just test on chrome and keep in mind to avoid AVIF

Due to the nature of the discussion, if I mentioned their names here, I would get flagged into oblivion for daring to mention them — I'm not being hyperbolic either (I wish I was!). I neither believe it's safe nor fruitful to discuss that freely here.

I will say, I encourage anyone interested in understanding this better to spend some time researching: to who known billionaire individuals (and families) are donating funds to, or investing heavily into, whether that be corporate/legacy media companies, video game publishers, farms, as a few examples — you name it. Follow the money, and you will find power and influence causing rapid changes to policy, hiring, and public relations that all closely align to known political agendas.

I'll leave it at that. :)

>Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.

Yes, precisely. It's human nature, but even easier as someone with nearly unlimited funds and quite likely, power.

Approximately 0.0% of the users actually produce those programs. And yet, we got those programs...

I used Edge 2 for some time as a replacement for Chrome; I dumped Edge for Firefox once it became a hostile experience.

The AI integration is what put me off completely.

Don't ask the question if you don't want the answer. And sheesh, dude, how many alts do you have?

Everyone in my company uses emacs, except the few who use vi. There is one guy who uses VSCode. I have no idea what he uses to type text documents for human consumption. So, sure. Use whatever tool works for you. Kind of bizarre you're wanting everyone to use Word and Edge (and Win 11). I mean... you should use what works for you. But you shouldn't freak out when people use different things. I hear some people use Macs, for instance.

I mean... most of my daily effort goes into supporting a bank. There's A LOT of mainframe stuff. Some COBOL. Some guys using AIX (actually, a surprising number of guys using AIX) and (as mentioned previously, xterms and emacs or vi.) On the dev side there's more focus on file format standards than tools. So use whatever tool that generates files in the appropriate format. We probably could use Win11, but they started using AIX in the 90s and just never got around to moving to Windows.

I view Brave as very healthy competition to Chrome and Edge. Yes, it's based on Chromium. But it disables the many egregious privacy violations, as well as other bad things.

I don't think they like it. But their customers - advertisers - sure do.

So I'm not alone! Once worked for a Apple-only company using only Apple hardware and even their office and cloud stuff. Thought there can't possibly be a lot of those.

To give Microsoft some credit, at least you can run Windows in a VM pretty seamlessly. Low bar, I know, but Apple doesn't allow you to run macOS on non-Apple hardware IIRC. Using a Windows VM for a client that has a Windows-only (for now :P) stack, and the experience is a lot better than at that Apple-only place back then.

We have strong standards - but if there is only one implementation, that quickly becomes the standard no matter the text in the actual formalised standard.

> Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something.

I usually try to avoid discussions of the OS, since it's such a terribly boring topic. However, this is quite an extraordinary claim that is made without any details. Perhaps you could elaborate. As someone that has used various Linux distros for nearly twenty years, I don't think I could construct a scenario in which someone doing the usual things has to open a terminal to "fix or change something" on a daily basis. It's probably less than once a year that I have to fix anything on my Linux desktop computers.

Did you build your own Linux distribution? Were you running IT at a company with 50,000 Linux desktops? Were you testing the development version of a desktop environment?

> [Windows 10/11] fades into the background

I strongly disagree with this. When I am forced to use windows, I am constantly fighting with it to not be obnoxious. It takes many seconds to do something as simple as bring up an explorer window. I can't count the number of times I have had to dig into menus to disable this or that ad panel or other bloatware. In linux, I occasionally have to figure out how something works and fix it, but there are generally many months between those events, when everything just works and gets out of my way.

I work on Linux and game on Windows (for the moment). I switched to Linux around 12 years ago, after Entity Framework was the last straw developing .Net stuff.

Configuring Linux is fun, so yes, I've done a reasonable amount of playing around with it. But I chose this. There was always the option of picking a "batteries included" distro and just running that with no playing around. I've never encountered a situation where I had to open a terminal to fix or change something that I didn't cause.

Windows repeatedly gets in my face about updates, often at inconvenient times. It's just generally a worse experience, in part because it seems so condescending compared to Linux. The tone is always "are you sure you want to do this?", "these are super-advanced settings that we don't think you should be messing with", and so on. I'm always swearing at the bloody thing to just get out of my way.

> Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.

Really? What kind of things do you have to google for Linux to work these days? The opposite is true for me in Windows, I am not about to relearn how to use the Windows terminal.

I don't think I agree with this. I left Macos for Linux a few years ago and the first month was pretty frustrating, but it got much easier after that. I think it does help to invest time in making it work though. On the upside, I've had many fewer instances where an update suddenly breaks things and causes me to stop working unexpectedly to fix them.

I've had the same experience. Linux just requires too much babysitting for me, while Windows 11 just works. I haven't had any major problems nor any issues with my productivity.

Eh. It depends. If you have something exotic as analog mouse it just doesn't work on Linux.

And Linux suffers from OS version of Lisp curse - i.e. whenever two nerds disagree you get a new distro with slightly incompatible behavior.

Not to mention Linux breaks compatibility left and right, while Windows lives with its mistakes forever.

I know people who seem to have managed to have the same year of experience 15 times over, learning nothing along the way…

Time spent is not necessarily experience, especially if you are trying to do something else at the time. In this case trying to do DayJob so not having time/care to commit much operating system management knowledge to memory, which is more understandable than the people mentioned in my first sentence who were failing to learn what was their job.

I'm generally onboard with hating on windows, but windows 7 was 14 years ago. (Almost) everything software realted has changed in that time, not just Windows.

Either way it doesn't change the fact that you need to do this on Linux but not Windows. There's dozens of fiddly little things like this that you don't need to do on Windows.

I use each OSX, Ubuntu and Windows daily but I could never recommend my mother switch to Ubuntu or Mint because of things like this.

Its often the case that when apps crash (on any OS) due to bugs, its the OS that gets blamed by the user. It is easy to say "blame Dell", but you'd have to be familiar with the code-base to know whose fault it was.

> We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty

I've seen a hypothesis for this relatively common issue, which is: laptop goes to sleep while connected to charger, then charger is unplugged but the laptop still believes it gets charged and starts downloading OS updates, emptying the battery and almost overheating in a bag.

I don't have a Windows laptop to test it myself, though.

The main problem with Windows' terrible settings is that they are constantly changing. So when you search for how to change something all the instructions are obsolete.

Have you tried opening some files over the network, then coming back to the explorer? It'll insist on showing those files in the Recents screen. Except it actually tries to touch them or something. Which, when I'm not at work anymore, takes forever waiting for a timeout. Hell, even at work it sometimes takes a while, while doing the AD handshake or whatever it is that it does instead of letting me use the freaking explorer.

I don't use Windows often enough to go out of my way to customize it, plus I know that the next update will probably undo everything anyway, but now I have to wait around multiple seconds for it to realize the files are not there. And it won't even remember it from one instance of explorer to the next, or try to check on those files without blocking the entire app's UI.

This shitshow also happens in the open / save as dialogs when called from other apps.

Several seconds is not an exaggeration. The window appears quickly enough, but then spins for several seconds (there's a progress bar in the path field) before showing any file. Win11 personal, on a brand new, middle-of-the-road desktop.

You actually can, but there is no viable alternative DE. If only KDE had a Win32-free build for Windows.

No, but there’s no chance of Windows becoming my primary platform — I use it almost exclusively for games (some of which don’t play nice with Proton) — and so I don’t need as much from it.

Additionally, Windows isn’t usually sold on its flexibility to anywhere near the extent that desktop Linux is. As such I don’t think it’s strange to expect that taking advantage of said flexibility is relatively painless, regardless of what the user is trying to do — there’s no point in flexibility if e.g. there’s actually only a small handful of options that are practical.

> spent an entire week googling how to tame it

Part of the reason Windows doesn't fade into the background for you is that you insist on fighting it, you're tweaking stuff you should just leave alone... according to Microsoft.

Physically it's not possible for me to use Windows, my hand cramps up, not completely sure why that happens, but it provides a constant physical reminder that I'm using Windows.

2TB 2.5" SATA SSDs are $61. 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs are $63.

Why are you worried about 20-30 GB again??