"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.

Here's another pernicious thing about Windows 11

I just came across this gem from Joel Hruska at ExtremeTech, and had to share it:

I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

Preach, Brother!

His reasons cover the entire gamut, beginning with the fact that Windows 11's new online and account requirements literally make it harder to him to do his job, and progressing to the fairly fundamental point that his PC is not, in fact, the internet:

To me, my PC and “the internet” are two entirely different things. I connect to the latter to download files, read news, and watch content, but it is not the totality of my personal computer. Using an online account to log into my personal PC breaches the distinction between the two. Weird as it is — because I’m willing to admit this is a personal oddity — I find that distinction matters to me. It actually matters a lot. I don’t want my local Windows account to be synonymous with an online login.

But that's not the biggest reason why Hruska is digging in his heels about this. No, the biggest reason, the real deal breaker, is simply that Microsoft keep trying to force the issue.

My problem with Microsoft and non-local accounts is this: Since the introduction of Windows 10, Microsoft has pulled every dirty trick in the book. It has obfuscated the ability to create a local account by hiding it in unclear language. It has deployed installers that hid the option to create a local account unless you were offline when you ran setup. It has deployed “Get Windows 10” tools that were so aggressive, they acted more like malware than a product built by a Fortune 500 company.

"Android apps, forced Microsoft accounts, telemetry, oh my!"

Given how curmudgeonly my immediate reaction was to this week's Windows 11 announcement, I was beginning to wonder if I'm just being far too cynical about all of this. Nobody else was making that much noise about the six-year-old telemetry and data collection that was bundled into Windows 10 (and later back-ported to Windows 7). The biggest substantive criticism of W11 seemed to revolve around its hardware requirements (especially TPM 2.0); the next-biggest criticism was about the removal of the ability to reposition the taskbar from the bottom of the screen to the one of sides.

Apparently, though, other people just needed a little time to catch up; por ejemplo, Jez Corden, at Windows Central:

In our heavily connected, heavily surveilled world, anxiety about government and big tech overreach is at a fever pitch. And Microsoft has increasingly fallen on the wrong side of this argument.

At the Windows 11 event yesterday, Microsoft had an opportunity to meet some of these concerns, founded or not. Yet, it chose not to. [...]

In Microsoft's Windows 11 blog post, the word "privacy" doesn't appear once in the copy, which doesn't exactly bode well for its messaging. Windows 11 will force users to use a Microsoft Account in its free Home Edition, which already speaks of a business model where your data is the monetization engine. Even if you're using the world's best VPN, it's not exactly going to protect your data from going directly to Microsoft if you're signed in. [...]

Microsoft is also enlisting another doubted tech giant, Amazon, to bring Android apps to Windows 11. Amazon is under heavy scrutiny already for the way it treats its workers among other things, but combining this with Android adds another layer of concern. Android is oft-painted as an insecure, privacy-apathetic platform. True or not, the prospect of an Amazon-fronted Android subsystem in Windows 11 compounds data fears.

Microsoft just revealed their next version of Windows, and I have more questions than answers

So, it's official: contrary to what they'd said previously, Windows 10 will not be the last version of Windows that Microsoft releases. Windows 11 is definitely coming, it's definitely called Windows 11, and today we got a look at some of its sexier features.

First, the good ...

Windows 10 is very pretty. A lot of people, myself included, hated the flat, designed-for-touchscreens Windows 8, and while Windows 10 restored the start menu, it didn't fix the ugly look of the thing. Windows 11 was very clearly designed to mimic the much, much prettier Aero Glass UI of Windows Vista and Windows 7, and it's a huge improvement.

Gone, too, is the ugly "live tile" blue void that takes up space next to W10's start menu. Live tiles still exist, but Microsoft has renamed them to Widgets, and banished them to their own sub-menu; those who are interested can call up the Widget menu using the button on the task bar, and ignore it otherwise.

Windows Updates have apparently been improved as well, with smaller updates loading in the background, rather than shoving themselves to the fore and preventing users from doing anything else while the updates happen. They've also finally found a way to get some Android apps into the Windows Store, too, although it's the much, much smaller subset of Android apps that Amazon have on their app store.

... which brings us to the less-than-good ...