First RCS now this, today has been wild
ABOUT FUCKING TIME. Take edge and shove it so far up your data tracking sphincter of a face hole.
Can we please get these laws on a global level.
Well they’ll probably reinstall it with every update anyway.
That is easy enough to block or deal with.
At least there’s the option to remove it at all that the non tech people can now easily access.
I can’t wait to see what this breaks and how the fix is to reinstall edge for all kinds of mundane issues.
Turns out edge is what renders the entire UI and uninstalling it leaves you at the console. Oh and you can’t access files because the file system is an http server accessed via edge. But it does come with QBASIC, so there’s that.
They would get massive fines if they tried that.
… then disable the update …
Not really possible anymore, Microsoft has been forcing updates since Windows 10.
I’m not disagreeing, but what entity would enforce those global laws?
Same way laws are enforced now? Each country passing it and the companies needing to comply to continue operations.
Why are they force to comply right now if the laws don’t work?
You’re missing the point.
The ICC only has power in countries that let them have power. If a given country doesn’t feel like doing that, the ICC has precisely zero recourse or ability to enforce.
What should citizens in countries like that (which may or may not be dictatorships, single-party states, theocracies, or some other restrictive, un-democratic, and/or xenophobic form of government) do?
Yes and I’m saying each country should implement it themselves so that we can reach global saturation. That is what I meant in my original response to op.
You are taking what I said out of proportion. Obviously we need Superman to enforce a global ruling hand over mankind.
I was about to say that I’d prefer alien overlords but based on Superman’s origin, he’s got my vote
Space force?
La Haye International Court of Justice, of course.
And what happens when the country in question is one that doesn’t care that much about the ICC, and responds “make me”?
To wit: The United States has famously refused to subordinate itself to the ICC
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If I have to keep a chromium browser around, in addition to Firefox, I’d rather edge than mainline Chrome.
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That’s a false dichotomy. There’s no shortage of Chromium browsers that are significantly better than both.
Suggestions? Preferably for both Windows and Mac
Not sure which ones are compatible with Mac. Brave is my choice but there’s also Vivaldi and several flavors of Opera.
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Which one comes with a VPN you can’t not install?
Arc is weird but pretty good once you get used to it.
DuckDuckGo is good if you want a minimal browser and don’t really care about extensions
Brave is OK if you want a slightly more private version of Chrome
Honestly though, just use Firefox.
All Mac browsers are just Safari anyway
You might be thinking of iOS browsers? Mac browsers use a variety of engines
Brave seems like a superb option.
Opera seems like a reasonable option, I guess, but I’m not sure if it has the market share to actually be seen and controversial if there was something to be controversial about.
I’m not sure I would. Edge is trash, it keeps shoving the AI bullshit, all the MSN news stuff, ads for cheaper shopping, all in your face when you first start up. While you can turn it off, it gets annoying doing that every time you reinstall or spin up a new VM. Chrome, for all its faults, is a lot less annoying freshly installed.
I appreciate your sense of relief, but don’t share it. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has been ordered to stop pushing its stuff (remember Internet Explorer?) and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
Nope. But hey look, the Democrats are coming to take your guns!
Why yes Microsoft, I am totally a European in Europe right now…
VPN to Sweden, update Windows to the EEA version, profit?
I’m not holding my breath, but we can hope.
Thank you Europe. Once again you prove yourself to be what we all aspire to be.
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It’s a shame that this is only for users in the EEA though, I understand why they didn’t make it a blanket change, but we can dream
Hey, I’ll change to use the N version of windows if it’ll get me this feature. Forced software on your devices is something I loathe.
You probably just have to change your region to any EEA country, such as Ireland.
As an American, all I can say is thank you Europe for continuing to have sensible legislation that forces these companies to have decent policies worldwide if only to comply with EU laws. I only use Windows on my company provided laptop but just because I don’t need to worry about it personally doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t care about how it affects others.
We’re basically dependent on the EU and California to have any rights as consumers at all.
That’s pretty crazy when I think about it. And I’m from within the EU.
Don’t forget California’s emissions standards effectively forcing car manufacturers to make more efficient vehicles for the entire NA market!
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So apparently having consumer-friendly laws does in fact lead to better products. Cool.
Perhaps the USA and other countries should follow the EU’s good example on this.
But socialism! They’re all gonna be starving and homeless! Any day now…
(they’re starving and homeless under capitalism)
must be evil socialisms fault /s
USA politicians are paid for and if anything they will never do this in fact they will do the exact opposite and make it easier for corporations to exploit people.
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Yeah this isn’t as good as it sounds, the other 5 continents are still stuck with all of this garbage.
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They’ll just enable/disable features based on geolocation. I doubt it’ll be a whole different version like in the good old days.
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Yup, but then you’ll still have the same frustration we have now, running the script every time there’s a feature update and the bloat gets reinstalled. If it wasn’t for games and work I’d be using nothing but macOS and Linux.
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I used to be super anti-apple but now buy MacBooks for the longevity. Less ewaste. Over time actually more cost effective. My daily driver is a nearly 9 year old MacBook that I replaced the battery on 2 years ago. Still getting official updates too. My father laid out twice the price of it for a high end XPS machine in 2019 and it died inside 5 years. Apple actually fix manufacturing issues without a huge amount of fuckery like HP/dell. I can’t speak to iPads and iPhones but Macs just last longer so end up being cheaper in the long run.
Skill issue, what’s stopping other countries from creating better laws?
The problem is that showing enough politicians money effectively makes you become the government. There’s minimal chance of a law being introduced unless a rich person or corporation backs it, and EU laws would interfere with their shady business practices.
Not big enough to force companies to make large changes. The US is, China and India are. But what about Australia or New Zealand? Or any of the individual south american countries? Too many changes, microsoft or one of the other big players will just pull out of the market, or threaten to pull out.
If they already have a version compatible with EU law, they will just roll it out instead of removing an entire country from their market.
Would be a bad business move otherwise.
Of course, only if the laws don’t force even more restrictions.
will just pull out of the market, or threaten to pull out.
That would be wonderful. They would no longer be able to enforce their patents in countries they don’t trade in; GNU/Linux users worldwide will have (patent infringing) access to the Australian/NZ version of whatever
It would suck for the games I play that need windows, but it would also give more incentive to those to port them to Linux
Lobbying, at least here in the US.
Valve only started doing 2-hour refunds after Australia twisted their arm about it. They brought it to the world, and it became an incredible selling point. Perhaps this will be the same thing.
Valve is a lot more consumer friendly to begin with, though. Don’t get me wrong, they did heaps of bad things too, but compared to Microsoft?
I’m not gonna hold my breath on this one
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I was going to say, this sounds fantastical in some places.
I got Dev Home on my home rig. Swifly executed the powershell command to uninstall thr sYsTeMs aPp.
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We don’t need another web based app…Just give us the .deb, .exe, .msi or whatever…
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No thanks. I don’t need more apps bloating up my browser and slowing it down even more. Plus what if they don’t support my choice of browser? Now we’re back to square one. Just port the programs over to run on the OS. Much less headache that way
That’s more finger printing to get tracked by, no thanks. I like to keep my browser apps slim and generic as possible to blend in with other privacy concerned people.
At th same time, I 100% understand why you would find it appealing, and recognize it may very well be a good thing overall.
Lots of things already have Linux alternatives; I’ve heard people mostly stay on Linux for the anticheat-enabled games that are usually only one developer setting away from Linux compatibility.
Wrappers can be used to do it locally.
Some Android apps are basically nothing more than a web agent.
Give me the basics of the web end with a pretty html5 rendered front end locally and done. No need for web apps for which you are required to be online at all times.
I can’t think of tasks that can only be done with MS. unless you mean playing specific games, then that could be something
excel VBA macros is very bad on Linux
if you’re stuck on Excel VBA macros and are not open to other options, then you get what you deserve
Thank god for Europe!
god has nothing to do with it
You know what I mean. Sheesh.
Thank our lizard Queen in heaven.
I do understand - but as a society we’re working to remove unnecessary gendered terms from our language. I believe in doing similar with religious terms.
Language is important. If we’re thanking a deity for the work of government it’s both minimalising the work of elected representatives and exclusionary to other cultures.
In this moment, you are euphoric.
Ramen brother, Ramen!
Yeah turns out businesses behave when you legislate their misdeeds instead of just calling them job creators
Now there will be two versions of Windows. One that adheres to EU regulation, and another that’s filled with ads for everyone else.
Windows 12 Euro Trash Edition and Windows 12 Red Blooded God Anointed American Edition. If either crosses the EU boarder the computer will explode killing everyone in a 10 meter radius.
I feel like that might also violate some regulations
regulations that stifle innovation baby 😎
Yes, American munitions export controls
And the Geneva convention
Alright. What about Windows 12: European cringe edition?
There sort of already is https://www.howtogeek.com/322112/what-is-an-n-or-kn-edition-of-windows/
It’ll be one version, they’ll just force certain “features” on you based on the region you’re in as determined by your system time, GPS location, or IP address
system time, GPS location, or IP address
They can all easily be spoofed or changed.
They say if you don’t pay, you’re the product, but that’s obviously bullshit, paying solves nothing. The saying should be never trust corporations.
If you don’t pay, you are the product. If you pay, you are the product + you are paying.
Regulation works.
Once steam covers 90% of games windows becomes irrelevant.
So what you’re saying is, 2024 will be the year of Linux on the desktop?
I know that phrase is the most beaten dead horse around at this point but the year of the Linux desktop is going to be different depending on what your requirements are.
If you just need to browse the web, it’s been there for over a decade. Same for most dev work.
For gaming, it’s already there for most titles. Pretty much everything I try works now unless it has anticheat. It’s been in a pretty good state for 2 or 3 years now at least.
For media creation and specialized software, it’s not there yet. The big stuff like adobe will probably never get ported and the free alternatives vary wildly in quality. Blender is awesome. GIMP is not. There’s also issues like lacking color management and iffy HDR support.
I do wonder about that, Gen Z and Alpha are less tech savvy than millennials, so there’s non zero odds that it doesn’t work out because Linux isn’t easily accessible in the tablet/phone space yet.
And no android doesn’t count
They are also less wealthy than X and millennial were at first computer purchase age. GNU/Linux is cheap
The OS is but the hardware ya gotta install it on could be another story, especially with gaming distros becoming more and more common
Sure for gaming you want a pretty expensive machine, but for a user who wants web and email a used low end laptop will perform great
Mobile Linux is a thing, though I think it would take governments mandating unlocked/user-unlockable bootloaders to gain literally Any market share. It would also probably take a compatibility layer for running Android apps similar to Wine in desktop Linux, but Android already runs a Linux kernel, so projects like Waydroid are most of the way there already by just running Android inside a container.
I think we need rock-solid Wayland before we can expect TYLD. So I’m feeling 2026 minimum, then add a couple for some padding; so 2028 realistically. Think of how far we’ve come in 5 years, then imagine 5 years more.
If Nvidia’s consumer GPU market share dropped a bit too, that’d help.
Why do you think that Wayland is necessary for adoption? In my opinion it is the missing hardware drivers, compatability issues and “getting your hands dirty” while constantly tweaking stuff. Yeah it got better over the years, but most people want things to just work.
Wayland is necessary because Wayland will be necessary in the near future, if it was next year then that would put a lot of people who don’t know about X.Org and Wayland through a major shift which could rock-the-boat a bit too much and cause them to go back to Windows for the “just works” experience.
Look, I just finally tried steam on Linux and the game booted up. I am absolutely amazed as I thought I’d never see that day. Also windows is somehow just getting worse and worse. It’s like they just want an entire ad platform. They lost me at this point. I have 0 need for any ms products again and that’s a great feeling.
but WHY is it necessary??
But which distro though?
yes he did and if it doesn’t happen we can shame him for all eternety, but i’m right with you there buddy: 2024 lets gooooooo!
it already is irrelevant for many people
As long as many important games fall into that 10% many gamers won’t consider Linux.
Not to mention Adobe/Office/CAD suites that will prevent others from switching.
And finally most pcs are sold with windows preinstalled and the vast majority of people don’t even know that other OS even exist.
Also a lot of high end medical equipment. Some stuff will only work/communicate with Windows XP, even today, for instance.
For gamers-only maybe lmao
E: and people willing to spend several hours a month wondering why their OS broke again
If you don’t tinker like the usual Linux user your os won’t break more often than windows
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As I said, not more often than windows
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Yeah people often forget the sheer amount of quality checks and testing that windows updates go through. Sure it might do annoying things like changing your default browser but it never truly breaks.
There’s also the fact that Windows native antivirus is so good that installing antivirus software is actually a downgrade. On Linux meanwhile you gotta run third party antivirus.
Windows updates break my clock… Idk about this claim that it doesn’t break stuff.
In my experience windows just breaks as often. Depending on hardware and software used.
Yes it might be better for windows 11 I haven’t run that yet. And windows 10 almost never broke either so it is maybe better now
If you stick to Ubuntu you usually don’t have that problem IMHO.
Hmm. My partner’s Linux machine is perfectly stable and has been for a decade. I administer it for them, but that’s just running updates and distribution upgrades every now and then
My server takes more effort, as distribution upgrades sometimes break stuff, for example the mailing list manager I have used for a long time became deprecated and was disabled on the recent LTS upgrade
My laptop running Ubuntu from the factory is perfectly fine, I’ll probably make it less stable by moving it to Debian
Does Linux let you disable its system-embedded advertisements? Didn’t think so!
I just switched to Linux. Get fucked!
and that’s the only long-term winning move, because MS shenanigans will never end
Exactly. All the latest chaos that Microsoft does, you know you’ll be immune and your desktop will be the same for as long as you get bored of it lol.
My laptop gets the fun experiments, my desktop plays the games
Same except in reverse lol. My laptop is out of date fedora because I’m lazy to update since it’s a youtube/twitch machine pretty much. My desktop gets the bleeding edge + games.
I’m testing stuff on my old ThinkPad!
I may have lost my sound card drivers, but at least I’ve not got to put up with windows (don’t worry I’ve got an external soundcard)!
I’m team Linux as well
I, really really want to switch to Linux. I duel boot and use Linux for study. but there are some apps I just can’t get around, and have to switch back to Windows for. I ran some cool scripts that stripped Windows of bloat and uninstalled edge and ads, and I have to say. it’s almost as nice as Linux now. runs faster too.
Its a bit of drama but if you have a look at setting up qemu with virtual machine manager its worthwhile.
It makes virtual machines that directly utilize the hardware, meaning you can run your stripped out windows inside a window on your Linux desktop.
Its pretty hard to get your GPU to pass through but if its non-gpu oriented apps you need its perfect. My fixed windows VM boots in about 10 seconds, has next to zero network usage, uses 2 cpus and 4gb of ram, and just runs its couple of little apps no trouble every day
I’ll check this out ty
You need 2 GPUs (essentially) for GPU passthrough to work correctly. I gave it a go once and it never worked correctly. Absolutely right for non GPU apps though, or with some VM’s, older games.
Honestly what finally pushed me was when windows suddenly decided that going to sleep and keeping on sleeping was too much to ask for. Haven’t found anything that doesn’t work on Linux yet, but I mostly play games.
Same, but I switched back today. DaVinci Resolve doesn’t support AAC audio on Linux, even on the paid version (literally everything uses AAC audio). The closest thing to any kind of usable photo editor is photopea, and that’s web only.
Linux is just unusable for media creation, unfortunately.
I really wish the affinity suite would make a linux version.
Same. That would help a lot.
Unless your media is made in Blender, then it’s pretty good. Inkscape has been getting nicer, too.
But that’s about it, yeah.
Man I miss Linux, I swear one day I’ll install it on my old Mac, at least as a funny project.
Only in EU/EEA countries. So us here in
GileadAmerica are SOL at the moment
