It doesn’t seem like your computer, does it? It’s like you’re a user in their enterprise.

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.

I use Kagi, and so far, it seems to casually switch it back with that message about once a month.

Yeah that’s why you can’t give your computer to Fucking m$

Set it via group policy (local or domain) and forget about it.

Lol … you can bypass the Windows restriction by deleting the System32 folder

This is the way

Posts like this reveal how many people believe every word a megacorp PR dept announces

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.”

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.

Yep, I just switched yesterday.

If you want to keep your computer, yeah.

Might be rough, but, like… Windows7 isnt supported anymore.

Okay so KDE was okay 5-10 years ago. Ultimately crawled back to Windoze. What’s in vogue in 2024?

That’s one take, except even the article notes that’s a weak argument.

Incomprehensibly stupid, because all they have to do is ask the user to confirm. Forcing through their own default instead of asking is malicious.

Maybe it’s because websites should ask user before enabling cookies?

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@Naich @ardi60 Totally agree.

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.

#Linux #Windows #PC

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

Careful with that. Microsoft loves to periodically push updates that overwrite the boot sector to disable that dual boot configuration.

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.

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