"Microsoft reportedly broke Windows 11 by injecting ads"

As someone who spent most of this blog's early years documenting the evils of Microsoft's Get Windows 10 campaign (that's small "e" evil, as in the banality of evil... but yes, it was still evil), a headline like the one above is obviously going to get my attention.

The story itself is... well, a delightful documentation of the banality of evil, exactly as you'd expect it to be, by Rich Woods at XDA:

Ever since Windows 10 was introduced, Microsoft has been pushing through ads in its operating systems, and that’s obviously not changing with Windows 11. It started with the infamous Get Windows 10 app that would force itself upon Windows 7 and 8.1 users, often presenting misleading options that would trick you into upgrading. That was a long time ago, and today’s ads aren’t as nefarious.

Except when they break things. Yesterday after releasing new Windows 11 builds in the Dev and Beta channels (two different builds, mind you), Insiders reported that their Start Menu and taskbar were crashing. As it turned out, it was caused by Windows 11 delivering ads, as was reported by Daniel Aleksandersen, who dug into the issue.

First of all, Microsoft did publish a fix [...] in order to bring your PC back from a crippling issue that was caused by Microsoft sending advertisements to it, you need to make a change to the registry.

Yes, that's right... in order to prevent Microsoft from pushing unwanted advertising through your PC operating system, you have to edit the registry, something which Microsoft typically advises against for all but advanced users.

This means that Microsoft have, once again, turned the Windows operating system into malware... or, more precisely, adware, but of a type which the user cannot remove (since it's the operating system), and which only advanced users can work around, by doing something which Microsoft recommend against when they're not recommending you do it.

It's at this point that I'd just like to remind anyone who's interested that Linux exists, and that it's much more user-friendly now than ever. Seriously, System76's Pop!_OS distro, with its very slick Cosmic UI, is what I'm using right now, and I haven't had to open the damn terminal since I installed it. Everything just works, while leaving me as much in-control of the system as I want to be, and my OS isn't doing anything untoward while my back is turned.

Sadly, Windows users cannot say the same.