Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone

Upcomming, windows 12 will end up being a down-payment with “seasons” subscription to keep using the software fully. And micro transactions like “the ability to open documents in notepad the next two hours”, But on the plus side they’ll have daily reward loot boxes that give you a new PowerPoint or word document or similar valuable offerings.

It should be obvious by now that it has been years, if ever, that Satya Nadella has opened the box on a brand-new Windows machine and used it for any length of time.<p>Back in Detroit&#x27;s &quot;Malaise Era&quot;, all of the executives received company cars that had first gone through the workshop to correct defects. The executives had no way to personally experience the problems that regular customers saw and felt; even worse was that they only experienced a product that had been worked over and prepped - leading them to think that their product was better than it really was.<p>MS (and probably even Apple) is heading for disaster, and their cloud revenue is probably going to mask it until it is too late.

I&#x27;ve been very happy happy with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Open-Shell&#x2F;Open-Shell-Menu">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Open-Shell&#x2F;Open-Shell-Menu</a> as a Start Menu replacement. If ads have rolled out to my Windows install, I wouldn&#x27;t even notice.

&quot;Start Menu ads&quot;...<p>I would love to read&#x2F;listen the internal conversations at Microsoft about this thing.

And they expect people to ‘upgrade’ (downgrade) from Win10 to Win11?<p>Win11 is clearly the new Win8. Still hoping it can be skipped entirely and that a more desirable Win12 will eventually be announced.

I would at least tolerate this if Windows license is free.<p>But it’s not.

Well done M$. One more reason to move on to Linux.

It’s not enough for HN readers to move to Linux. We need to influence the casual computer users we know to also try it, or at least have them move to Apple to hit Microsoft’s bottom line and force them to change course.

There was a popular discussion thread yesterday on the steps Google took to ruin search (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40133976">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40133976</a>) I see a lot of parallels to how Microsoft is ruining Windows. I used to love Windows and it had a profound impact on my life. However, now that it’s in late stage enshitification, I am doing everything possible to avoid using it. It’s astonishing how Microsoft keeps making Windows worse. They just need to leave it alone and keep patching security updates.

The article says those recommendations are very easy to disable in the settings? If so, doesn&#x27;t sound like a big deal to me.

I&#x27;m glad I permanently moved to Linux 2 years ahead of this.

I hope my question is not too trite, I am asking here in case others benefit: I have been running Linux exclusively for over 10 years now, and I need to set up a Win10&#x2F;11 environment for my sister. To that end, I installed Win10 offline in a VM with virt-manager, but I do not have an activation key. Or rather, I have several coming from old computers of mine, but I am not sure if they are valid; I don&#x27;t use those computers any more.<p>So, here I am, with a Win10 VM at my fingertips. Do you have any advice or suggestions on how to tweak or configure the machine or the installation, preferably in such a way that gives me control over what the OS does? One interesting example is, can I configure the network to discard stuff sent to Microsoft servers with minimal disruption?

Just installed arch on my desktop last night. Going to daily drive and see if I can escape the windows madness. Only part I&#x27;m really worried about is all my music production stuff, going to have to try out all these new VST wrappers

Due to these changed I&#x27;ve reverted to Windows 10. W10 feels like an &quot;adult&quot; OS in comparison, free of frills and distractions. W11 is an experimental sandbox.

Windows 7 was &#x27;peak Windows&#x27; - becomes truer every single day that goes by.

ubuntu 24.04 will be released tomorrow and fedora 40 released today, perfect timing

Everyone including corporate?

I switched to macOS in 2020. This feels more-and-more like a good choice. I rather pay a (hardware) premium and at least be treated as a customer then as a cash cow.

I have Windows 11 on this laptop. I spent about five minutes turning off ads including reading the article and writing this comment.