- cross-posted to:
- stallmanwasright@lemmy.ml
- Fubarberry ( @Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz ) English113•6 months ago
Some people are saying this is good, but Microsoft recently changed my default search engine to bing “In case it was accidentally changed or changed by another program”. I have zero faith they won’t abuse this, they are becoming ever increasingly pushy about using edge and switching to bing.
- henfredemars ( @henfredemars@infosec.pub ) English46•6 months ago
It doesn’t seem like your computer, does it? It’s like you’re a user in their enterprise.
- TDCN ( @TDCN@feddit.dk ) 22•6 months ago
BS like this has made it impossible to maintain a consistent experience for my parents who aren’t super tech savvy. It’s so frustrating helping them over the phone for hours only to realise that windows just on a whim changed major settings without any user interactions. Changed theirs OS to Debian now. Much better.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 6•6 months ago
Seriously. Windows has become garbage enough that 20 years ago Linux is the better OS. Even though 20 years ago windows (well, let’s say 15) was better than modern Linux is.
- setVeryLoud(true); ( @isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca ) 10•6 months ago
I use Kagi, and so far, it seems to casually switch it back with that message about once a month.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 6•6 months ago
Yeah that’s why you can’t give your computer to Fucking m$
- pacoboyd ( @pacoboyd@lemm.ee ) 2•6 months ago
Set it via group policy (local or domain) and forget about it.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 5•6 months ago
How long til that’s deprecated though?
- pacoboyd ( @pacoboyd@lemm.ee ) 4•6 months ago
I would guess probably not soon. Windows still needs to be able to comply with many industries needs for compliance (ITAR, HIPAA, Financial, etc etc.) If they remove the ability to control this, they cut themselves out of their largest profit area (corporate licensing).
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 5•6 months ago
I think if they just unilaterally make the move, or charge extra for the feature, no regulator is going to crack down; their market share is too big.
- lud ( @lud@lemm.ee ) 2•6 months ago
Nah, won’t happen.
Microsoft is generally very reasonable when it comes to GPOs
no regulator is going to crack down; their market share is too big.
The bigger a company’s market share is the more likely regulation is. Hell, the EU has already done this but for internet explorer.
Microsoft won’t depreciate GPOs in many many years, at least.
Has anyone else noticed that MS switched their search engine? I have never heard of that. Sounds like a bug or something.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 2•6 months ago
“Won’t happen. Can’t flood. Hey does anybody else hear water?”
I genuinely can’t tell if this was intentional but its hilarious either way.
- lud ( @lud@lemm.ee ) 1•6 months ago
What water are you hearing?
- 0xtero ( @0xtero@beehaw.org ) 86•6 months ago
Luckily I’ve changed my default OS to Linux
- IninewCrow ( @ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ) English37•6 months ago
Lol … you can bypass the Windows restriction by deleting the System32 folder
- 0xtero ( @0xtero@beehaw.org ) 17•6 months ago
Microsoft hates this one simple trick
- r4venw ( @r4venw@kbin.social ) 12•6 months ago
Classic
- Jay ( @Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca ) English12•6 months ago
Instructions unclea—
- Grant_M ( @Grant_M@lemmy.ca ) English16•6 months ago
This is the way
- themurphy ( @themurphy@lemmy.ml ) 84•6 months ago
Posts like these reveal how many reads the article.
This is a good thing done by Microsoft. They make sure that 3rd party software can’t change the default browser without the user knowing.
They will get prompted with the choice screen showing all installed browsers. And when they make their choice, even Edge wouldn’t be able to prey people into clicking a button that makes it the default instead.
- wahming ( @wahming@monyet.cc ) English36•6 months ago
Posts like this reveal how many people believe every word a megacorp PR dept announces
- themurphy ( @themurphy@lemmy.ml ) 4•6 months ago
It’s literally to comply with the EU. Microsoft doesn’t do this to be nice.
- wahming ( @wahming@monyet.cc ) English8•6 months ago
No, somebody speculated it’s to comply with the EU. The rest of us are speculating that it’s to push up their market share.
- BearOfaTime ( @BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ) 30•6 months ago
Hahahahahaha, right, right. Hahahaha
And I did read the article. No, this is MS continually pushing users into Edge.
“Kolbicz believes this change may be to comply with Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA)” (emphasis mine).
“BleepingComputer contacted Microsoft about the lockdown of these Registry keys in March, but they said they had nothing to share at this time.”
- pacoboyd ( @pacoboyd@lemm.ee ) 2•6 months ago
So many headline readers. To be honest, 99% of these problems that folks rage about could be resolved with a group policy (local or domain). The problem is, Windows is like 73% of worldwide OS usage, so like it or not, there is a lot of trying to protect the user from themselves. Team Linux can’t fathom that because they come from the perspective that they can build thier experience from the ground up to be exactly as they like. The VAST majority of people don’t want that, they want something that works and they don’t really care what happens behind the curtains. I would wager that 90% of users could care less what browser they use (or would even notice if it changed!) as long as they still had access to their bookmarks.
I would like to share a positive experience from this new driver the article is about. I use notepad++ and setting it as the default was kind of a pain in the butt. It would work sometimes, but not consistently, and often depended on a registry hack or symlink to work. Now with the new interface for default apps, as long as I have the new Windows Notepad app installed when I change the defaults for “open with”, it just works! For all the file extensions, all the time. Honestly it’s a much better experience and it’s ACCESSIBLE to the lay person.
- Ashtefere ( @Ashtefere@aussie.zone ) 48•6 months ago
Lin…ux?
- hitmyspot ( @hitmyspot@aussie.zone ) 23•6 months ago
Yep, I just switched yesterday.
- You Fucking Wish Bro ( @RealGuy@lemm.ee ) 23•6 months ago
Literally switched two days ago. Trying mint for now
- hitmyspot ( @hitmyspot@aussie.zone ) 7•6 months ago
Haha, me too. I tried opensuse first but switched to mint.
- Allero ( @Allero@lemmy.today ) 2•6 months ago
Manjaro is amazing, but might have a little steep learning curve should you use it for something very advanced. Also, no .deb’s and .rpm’s for you, but AUR is arguably even more based (don’t rely on it too much though, troubleshooting issues with AUR-sourced apps is an advanced task indeed!)
Other than that, an insanely snappy (thanks, Arch!), beautiful (thank you, presets for various DEs!), almost bleeding-edge and very novice-friendly distribution.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 4•6 months ago
PopOS uses the same core stuff as mint and is good at graphics drivers, does em automatically.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 5•6 months ago
If you want to keep your computer, yeah.
Might be rough, but, like… Windows7 isnt supported anymore.
- abcdqfr ( @abcdqfr@lemmy.ml ) 4•6 months ago
Okay so KDE was okay 5-10 years ago. Ultimately crawled back to Windoze. What’s in vogue in 2024?
- Allero ( @Allero@lemmy.today ) 3•6 months ago
- Budgie for minimalist KDE-like experience
- Cinnamon for good old Windows 7 vibes
- XFCE for going all XP
- KDE itself is really good nowadays, and probably the most popular option
There is plenty of choices, those are just some of the major ones.
- Nate Cox ( @natecox@programming.dev ) English31•6 months ago
I’m not sure that a protection against changing the default browser with third party programs (maybe without the user knowing) via the registry is the evil thing being depicted here.
The way I read this article is that this is a move for compliance with the new digital markets act and I’m not seeing the maliciousness.
Willing to be wrong, I haven’t used Windows regularly for like 20 years.
- BearOfaTime ( @BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ) 8•6 months ago
That’s one take, except even the article notes that’s a weak argument.
- Natanael ( @Natanael@slrpnk.net ) 3•6 months ago
Incomprehensibly stupid, because all they have to do is ask the user to confirm. Forcing through their own default instead of asking is malicious.
- Zerush ( @Zerush@lemmy.ml ) 29•6 months ago
At least not in the EU, there Windows should even allow you to uninstall EDGE. MS in the EU is way different, less restrictive and more private than MS US.
- michael_palmer ( @michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org ) 8•6 months ago
Maybe it’s because websites should ask user before enabling cookies?
- Zerush ( @Zerush@lemmy.ml ) 20•6 months ago
MS US not only use cookies, it logs even your keystrokes and mouse movements, apart to pass your data to Towerdata and Facebook. Cookies are not the problem if yo use uBO, Cookie Autodelete or similar.
- Jo Miran ( @JoMiran@lemmy.ml ) 27•6 months ago
- Admetus ( @Admetus@sopuli.xyz ) 19•6 months ago
Presumably one can still set default in settings. I’m not giving up Firefox yet.
- Naich ( @Naich@lemmings.world ) 12•6 months ago
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - Windows isn’t ready for the desktop. Just use Linux.
- AJ Sadauskas ( @ajsadauskas@aus.social ) 15•6 months ago
I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.
It doesn’t use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that’s been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.
It also doesn’t use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.
Because it doesn’t use Linux, Wayland, or X11, you are limited in the desktop environment that you can use. There’s really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.
Instead, there’s a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to ship Unity as it’s default desktop environment with Ubuntu.
And confusingly, they’ve named that window manager Windows as well!
That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.
It also doesn’t ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.
There’s also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.
And sure, if you’re a nerd who’s into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.
But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he’ll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.
I’m sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.
But.
Windows on the desktop just isn’t ready for your average, everyday Linux user.
- Christian Kent ( @whophd@ioc.exchange ) 4•6 months ago
@ajsadauskas @Naich @ardi60 And if you thought that was confusing, the same company also makes a “Windows Subsystem for Linux” but appears to have got the name backwards — it’s not FOR Linux, at all!
- Aggravationstation ( @Aggravationstation@feddit.uk ) 2•6 months ago
I agree with every single bit of this but felt like I was being attacked the whole time I read it. Maybe it’s PTSD from asking questions in Linux forums as a kid and getting ripped into with long replies. Does anybody else feel that way?
- lemmyreader ( @lemmyreader@lemmy.ml ) English10•6 months ago
Shocking. Never expected this behavior from such a helpful and heart warming company like Micro~.sft /s
- tobogganablaze ( @tobogganablaze@lemmus.org ) English8•6 months ago
Does that mean Teams will finally stop opening links in Edge when that’s not my default browser?
- gomp ( @gomp@lemmy.ml ) 6•6 months ago
(only tangentially related) what does ‘driver’ mean in windows lingo? I thought it was hardware-related stuff but I’m probably wrong.
- Natanael ( @Natanael@slrpnk.net ) 5•6 months ago
It’s pretty much a program running in OS kernel space to handle specific function calls which need low level system access. Most hardware needs custom drivers to work because they need to interact with those low level OS components, so that’s why they’re mostly associated with hardware.
A lot of antiviruses use custom drivers to intercept and inspect program behavior to look for viruses, etc
- helenslunch ( @helenslunch@feddit.nl ) 5•6 months ago
I did a fresh install on a family member’s PC yesterday. Tried to change the region in the registry so I could uninstall Edge and it wouldn’t let me. I assume this is related.
But I also dual-booted Linux so they could try it at any time 🙃
- henfredemars ( @henfredemars@infosec.pub ) English6•6 months ago
Careful with that. Microsoft loves to periodically push updates that overwrite the boot sector to disable that dual boot configuration.
- helenslunch ( @helenslunch@feddit.nl ) 1•6 months ago
Been doing it for many years and never had a problem but thanks
- Koen967 ( @Koen967@feddit.nl ) 2•6 months ago
Man I hate Microsoft pre installing Edge on these laptops to push their browser. Anyways here is your laptop bro, also I pre installed Linux so I can push it to you.
- helenslunch ( @helenslunch@feddit.nl ) 4•6 months ago
Difference is I don’t profit off of installing Linux. Just encouraging other people to help themselves.
- millie ( @millie@beehaw.org ) English5•6 months ago
Is this why Windows has started opening all my chromium apps in edge? They fuck up constantly and it’s really making me want to ditch windows.
If I understood Jack audio as well as I understand Voicemeeter, and if I could get my damn push to talk button working properly in Solaar I’d be done by now.
If anyone has a solution to the edge thing please help.
- downpunxx ( @downpunxx@fedia.io ) 4•6 months ago
Looks like Microsoft is going to war