People need to stop complaining about the ads and they need to start complaining about the existence of a Windows monetization team.

Kill that team now while the revenue is small and the shareholders won’t throw a giant hissy fit.

As long as that team exists, they’re going to be putting ads in shit. Cut the head off the snake.

I've recently made the switch over to LinuxMint and I was shocked. Installing a popular Linux Distro is EASIER than installing Windows 10/11 at this point. Seriously. The Linux installer is super noob friendly, very quick and straight to the point, it doesn't need you to create an online account and you don't need be wary of accidentally giving any corporation the rights to steal your data.

And all the software I use (Steam, Discord, Spotify, Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) were all downloadable from the GUI Installer and worked right away OUT OF THE BOX. No fiddling in any Terminal was required.

Seriously, it's easier than installing Windows at this point.

I'd be curious at the percentage of windows users actually using the store app.

As for the context of these ads, the store would kind of make more sense than within your settings landing page, start menu, search dialog, browser nagware, solitaire app etc.

Any recommendation I didn't ask for is an ad, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on.

I'm so done with companies claiming my house for their ads.

It's my house i decide what makes it in as i pay the rent and i bought these devices, so fuck off.

The last Windows 10 update automatically installed copilot without asking. Immediately deleted that shit

Install any popular Linux distro. They are all so much better than any proprietary OS. And if you are running relatively common hardware, everything will just work.

Windows really is the worst OS. You pay 150$ for the license when you buy a laptop with it pre-installed and then on top of that, they spy on you and also show you ads.

Linux is free, does not spy on you and does not show any ads.

When is ad an advertisement and not a recommendation?

Always? That's why it's called ad instead of recommendation

Is Microsoft so in debt that they need to sell ad space in every pixal of their products? What is going on.

Recommendations is just an euphemism marketing joke. Every serious journalist would call them what they are, ads.

I'm so happy that I will never have to deal with this on my home computers. At work we can at least disable it all via policies. But my god has Microsoft lost its way. What happened to making professional business products?

This is not gonna stop until the consumer puts their money where there mouths are and stops using Windows until Microsoft back peddles. Money is all a company understands so that is where you need to hit them if you want them to listen. But as a group the consumer has a very weak constitution when it comes to having to do something that is good for them in the long term but causes them short term inconvenience. A lot of parallels to the modern corporate world in that.

So anyway, welcome to computing 101, first you're going to create a new folder for your stuff. So let's do this, grab the mouse, and;

Right click->watch ad->New Folder

Mr Bob! The mouse bit me and now I can't stop the commercials!

As soon as they announced ads were gonna be in the start menu, i noped out of windows. I only use it for work which doesn't bother me because im not doing anything private on my work pc.

I switched to Fedora 40 with KDE and never looked back. My only real gripe is with making music. Getting the VSTs to work and setting up yabridge is kind of a headache that i still need to do 😮‍💨 aside from that, Linux has been my daily driver for quite a while now and im happy i switched even though im still learning.

I kind of expect ads in an app store, but I also don't use the ms app store.

i can't believe they wrote an entire article to whine about ads IN A STORE APP

I would say a “recommendation” is an ad when an accountant is involved instead of (or in addition to) a curator. Even if it’s Microsoft recommending Microsoft’s products, department budgets probably track that internally (though I’m sure the official accounting is done in a way that shifts profits to a tax haven).

The ads are in the app store. I don't really understand why that's a problem. Although I'm probably the only tool out there that actually likes Windows 11.

I have used Windows 10 for years and recently switched to Windows 11 and I don't think I've ever seen an ad in my day to day OS use. I don't do the registry edits or turn off the telemetry stuff, either. I don't know what I'm doing differently but I'm not seeing these ads that apparently infected Windows.