Possibly the most despised feature of Windows 10 is advertisements. They show up in your apps list, lock screen, and even the Start Menu. Sadly, Microsoft plans to double the amount of Promoted Apps that you’ll find hiding in the Start Menu when the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is released this summer.
To be fair, this supposedly only applies to fresh installs of Windows 10 (though that is unconfirmed), but it just feels so dirty. Apple is already stuffing iOS full of ads and unremovable ads disguised as applications, and now Microsoft is making Windows 10 worse too. This is a horrible trend.
Honestly, let them cash in on Windows 10. It’ll drive users to Linux. Desktop Linux is very strong now and all it needs is to have users find it.
Windows 10 is actually quite good. I use it for convenience on my work PC but at home I use Linux exclusively. I briefly upgraded my Windows partition on my home laptop because I needed to run join.me for work purposes but other than that I never log in to that partition.
Linux is rock solid. The only problems I’ve had have been self inflicted (e.g. trying to run experimental graphics drivers) and these days I don’t even need to do that kind of tinkering.
Cinnamon is great. Gnome 3 is great. Not tried KDE5 but it looks great. XFCE I sometimes use too, it’s decent. Then there’s all the new desktops coming up such as Elementary OS’s (I forget the name, waiting for their Loki release to try it out) as well as that thing Ubuntu are pushing.
There’s an exciting world of simple, stable and fully featured FREE desktops out there with FREE office software, FREE productivity software, and FREE OF ADs. It just needs more poeple to know about it.
They’re working on catching up with Windows in that respect. The Enlightenment devs just announced support for gracefully recovering from compositor crashes for the upcoming E21 release:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=E-Wayland-Sessio…
…something that Thom complained about Windows 7 kicking X11’s ass on back in 2009:
http://www.osnews.com/story/21999/Editorial_X_Could_Learn_a_Lot_fro…
I can count the number of hard resets I’ve done on Linux on one hand.
The main problem is running out of memory. It does not handle that well in my experience. Other than that, once set up, stuff just works and keeps working until the hardware fails or you do something bad to it.
That’s what I mean by ‘rock solid’. I never said perfect. Nothing is perfect. Windows 10 is the first acceptable experience I’ve had with Windows, but the bar is so low that people accept its nonsense. They accept unscheduled updates that make you wait unexpectedly. Ever been to a meeting to demo software and turned on your computer to see “updates in progress” and embarrassed? That’s what Windows does in a small business environment. Stuff crashes. Stuff slows. Stuff goes wrong and you are left poking a black box and hoping to prod the right bit. Yet people accept that because Windows is everywhere.
Edited 2016-05-17 11:49 UTC
Agreed, but in some aspects desktop Linux is no better. Why did this minor update kill my X server? Or this update to Pulseaudio render my audio nonfunctional?
Ten years ago, Linux was an open and easy system to deal with. With Pulseaudio, Dbus, and the rest it’s developing into just as much of a “black box” as Windows, unfortunately.
Generally speaking I agree, but I wouldn’t want to ever have to deal with X server modeline settings again…
Yeah, right there with you. That said, dealing with Pulseaudio can be almost as incomprehensible when it goes ass up.
I know this did happen to me once – I can remember if it was with Dapper (Ubuntu 6.06) or Edgy Ubuntu 6.10
Linux is nowhere near as black box as Windows. It has flaws, but it’s still open source and I can actually decide what happens on my machine. When I’m using Windows I feel like I’m a blind passenger.
Edited 2016-05-18 08:29 UTC
UEFI and all that coming mandatory security crap (TPM 2.0 and currently SecureBoot), made Tux less accessible to me and a lot of lowend users ..
I bet someone somewhere is going to unleash malware hell upon the desktop users and make sure Windows 10 is the only safe haven ..
A bit off-topic in current Linux thread
, but count of hard resets for my Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 10 is just zero. I didn’t count hardware failures of course, so were excluded few old or experimental driver issues. My workplace PC needs logged off maybe twice a year, for few really critical updates – I would say that Windows stability looks pretty good for me.
Ads on W10 – when I see them then I’ll fight them, so far no one has popped up. Classic shell with apps disabled may help of course
Trust me, I’m well aware of those. Just because I don’t run Windows myself doesn’t mean the same can be said for everyone I work with or am related to.
I switched to Linux in 2004 (quitting gaming cold-turkey in the process) because I got fed up with Windows XP.
Now, I’m the guy who ripped out the GTK+ APT update notifier and replaced it with a DIY GUI because some genius thought ripping out the dconf key to turn off daily “Reboot to update your kernel” nags would actually modify the behaviour of people who already knew enough to find it.
http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2014/08/08/hacking-together-a-qui…
Yes. People tolerate absurd things like this:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3053711
“High CPU use by taskhost.exe when Windows 8.1 user name contains ‘user’ ”
WTF!
I can’t count the number of hard resets I’ve had on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1… Because it’s zero.
And that’s on my gaming machine.
Linux isn’t close enough to mainstream to be a viable alternative for a lot of people. The big AAA games they want are seldom available, office packages are 95-98% compatible but that 2-5% is absolutely infuriating when you have to deal with it. Ubuntu, arguably the most consumer-orientated distro, has caused me so much hassle with updates breaking things that I’ve abandoned it and will never install it again. And the diversity of desktops etc. means that there’s no real standard, so using someone else’s machine becomes clunky.
The computer-savvy types who might be happy with the limitations of Linux (myself included) might ditch Windows 10 in its favour, but we’re in a very tiny minority compared to the typical Windows user.
I agree that Windows 10 has a lot of rought edges, but saying that linux is rock solid is just bullshit. For example, optimus technology from Nvidia is not experimental, yet the support on linux leaves a lot to desire. Linux is great and all, but it’s not silver bullet, neither is windows.
Citation please? Because we have been hearing “year of the Linux desktop” for the past 20 years and the last stats I saw? Show desktop Linux is just as flatline now as it was when Windows 8 was released, just as it was flatline when Vista was released, just as it was flatline when WinME was released.
I’m sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news, and I’m sure all the FOSSies will bury this comment for not drinking the koolaid but truth is truth and the simple fact is without being able to run Windows programs, I mean a good 80%+ of Windows programs, not just MS Office and the handful of others than WINE runs consistently well? The public just isn’t gonna care because they have too much time and money invested in their Windows programs to switch.
From the gamer with his piles of triple A titles to the grandma who loves that collage software that came with her camera, from the millions of businesses running on Outlook and Quickbooks to the artists running their Photoshop and Corel Draw your OS is simply worthless to them because it simply cannot run the software they bought a PC for.
Don’t even get me started on the sorry state of consumer software in Linux, where the best you can hope for is some really bad ersatz copy of what was running on windows a decade ago with less features like comparing Gimp to Photoshop or GNUCash to Quickbooks, or the fact that in 2016 you still can’t just walk into a store and buy a device and be assured it’ll work because you have to fricking research like its the SATs and even then might be boned as the hardware lists are ALL horribly out of date, but without being able to run the software that users worldwide have paid millions of dollars to use? You honestly might as well be offering to replace their PC with a potato.
I’m sorry but the “year of the Linux desktop” is simply never gonna happen, the ones that have invested in software will stay with windows (which is why MSFT’s number one competition in desktop OSes is its own older versions) and the ones that can get by with just a browser? They are gonna go with Google’s proprietary OS. You really have nothing to offer them over the big three except your definition of “freedom” which they obviously don’t care about or they wouldn’t be using what they are using now, would they?
Still haven’t seen any ads in iOS yet, and last I checked, the built-in apps won’t open unless I activate them. A far cry, in my opinion, from what I see in Windows 10 and from what Microsoft clearly wants to do. Windows 10 has more ads in it by default than Android, which should tell us something since Google is the advertising company. If an ad company has sense not to pull this, one would think Microsoft would have taken the hint.
Me neither. Where are those ads?
The useless apps that Apple ships with the phone that can’t be removed are annoying though.
I haven’t seen a single advertisement built into iOS in, what, 8 years? Apple promoting some new service or change to a service is not an ad, it’s a promo for the very company and products you are already using. that’s not an ad. Neither is an upgrade message showing you new features.
So what are you talking about Thom? Seems like your false equivalents continue.
Apple built an ad-serving platform for iOS to compete with google and microsoft, but all of those ads are buried in free games. They are not in productivity or paid apps, and they are not in OS-supplied apps.
Your love of Android conflicts with your hatred of advertising. Sorry it’s true. It’s like if MS bought Apple. It’s over. Android is an advertising platform disguised as an OS. It’s over.
And even Android’s default apps don’t have ads in them (not counting 3rd party bloat like Samsung here) which, to me, says a lot about how desperate Microsoft have become. More ads, on top of supposedly cutting off the “free” upgrade to 10 at around the same time? They must have some potent weeds out in Redmond.
ezraz,
The only times I’ve seen ads on android is inside of downloaded apps. So are you saying that android and ios are equally bad with regards to advertising, or are you trying to imply one is worse?
I don’t know if this comes through, but I despise them all quite equally
Edited 2016-05-17 16:07 UTC
Apple putting a 10 second slide in an installer telling you that iCloud works differently now is not an Advertisement. In any way. It is filler space on an installer and every company has done things like that. That’s the extent of any ad i’ve ever seen from apple in my products.
So your comparison to those anti-virus companies that constantly spam people is really not correct. Apple runs TV ads, sure, but within their apps and their OS almost nothing ever comes in the form of an advertisement. They just use regular dialogs or sometimes slated graphics to inform users of some major disturbance.
As far as apps that can’t be deleted, that’s true on iOS. First thing you do when you first learn iOS is take 1 minute to make a folder named AppleCrap and put those apps in there. You never have to do it again, you never see them again, because it just keeps working, never gets reset, and even when you buy new devices you bring your whole profile with you and don’t see much in the way of these apps. This is a non-problem.
Recurring Apple Music ads. Unremovable Apple Watch ads. Ads to install Apple applications. Ads for iCloud. Fullscreen ads to buy the new iPhone.
Interestingly enough, I’ve replied with this list numerous times in the comments. You guys are a little forgetful, perhaps.
Or we’ve simply never seen them. I’ve yet to see an ad for anything save Apple Music, and that was because I activated that tab. Funny that I would see it when I tap on it, eh?
Yes, you reply with this list… but where are they?
I’ve only seen Apple Music ads. Apple Watch/IPhone ads? Where???
In his nightmares perhaps?
I’ve used MacOS and iOS (and Windows) nearly 18 hours a day for the last 20 years. I’ve never seen any of the apple ads you have.
Again — a slate during an install from that developer is not an advertisement. Not even close, by my definition.
Apple Music ads – It’s ad-supported audio streaming, just like the competition, just like radio. You don’t hear ads on Spotify or Pandora? Also, you deserve what you get renting 10% music files like that. If streaming will survive at all they will need to insert 5-10 more ads an hour.
Unremovable Apple Watch ads — where? I’ve never seen one.
Ads to install apple applications — where? I only see it when I’m installing some other apple application.
Ads for iCloud — where? I only see it when upgrading the OS and a major change to iCloud has occurred.
Fullscreen ads to buy the new iPhone — again — where?
Your list is impressive but unless you can show me where those ads are, where they are spawned, and it’s not a slate during the install of an upgrade (which isn’t an ad, it’s a slate from the developer of the app you are installing/updating),
your list is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
Interestingly, if you do “rent 10% like that”, you don’t get any ads. It’s only when you use the free radio service that you do. Pandora’s a bit different as to their model and probably more sustainable, but same deal. Pay and don’t get ads, or don’t pay and deal with them. Personally, I pay. I suspect you’re right though: the streaming business really can’t survive as is. More ads though will likely kill it anyway. I guess we’ll just have to see. Anyway, that’s a bit off topic for the discussion. The “ad” Thom refers to is what you get when you tap on an Apple Music icon and you don’t have a subscription. I don’t call it an ad in this case, because I deliberately brought it up. I’d have never seen it if I’d not touched that icon. The rest of his list? Never seen them. Not even once.
You forget so quickly. You even commented.
http://www.osnews.com/story/29003/Apple_pushes_iPhone_6s_pop-up_ads…
Edited 2016-05-18 14:56 UTC
Thom Holwerda,
I wonder, is it possible ezraz might not see the ads because he already subscribes to the services being advertised?
Nope. I don’t subscribe and I don’t see them. I think Thom’s determined to label everything done by anyone but Google as an ad or something. For the record: an ad is advertising a service. An app asking me whether I want to use a feature is not an ad.
What I am getting fed up with in iOS land is the apps that beg you to please rate them every f*cking time they update. That’s as bad, in some ways worse, than ads.
Right, because I never call out Google for being pure shit.
http://www.osnews.com/story/29165/The_time_that_Tony_Fadell_sold_me…
http://www.osnews.com/story/29217/The_explosion_of_lock_screen_adwa…
http://www.osnews.com/story/29200/Only_7_5_percent_of_Android_phone…
http://www.osnews.com/story/29174/Ars_HTC_10_review_HTC_builds_the_…
http://www.osnews.com/story/28995/Pixel_C_reviews_Android_on_tablet…
http://www.osnews.com/story/29194/What_happened_to_Google_maps_
http://www.osnews.com/story/29058/Google_s_UK_tax_deal_is_a_joke_at…
http://www.osnews.com/story/28870/Google_lets_companies_target_ads_…
http://www.osnews.com/story/28827/_Google_will_comply_with_censorsh…
Stop these nonsensical “OMG HE IS SO PRO GOOGLE OMG OMG” bullshit. It’s getting tiresome, and makes you look like an idiot.
I don’t think you are pro google per say, I think you clearly relish apple failing because it matches your core narrative set in the 90’s that their closed corporate ways and stylistic marketing methods amount to the wrong way to run a technology company.
Android as linux for everyone was an idea you fell in love with and can’t shake loose. That’s cool, I wanted to see the hippy free software thing succeed as well. I think it did. But Android as google is long past being free open source goodness.
Every other OS that comes out you love. That’s why you are you and I personally love this site. I’ve been coming here since BeOS, I ran BeOS as my main OS for nearly a full year! Lots of text documents made that year. Since then OS X with a Windows install on Parallels with remote desktop on each has been all I’ve ever needed, personally.
Apple is treated like your slow little brother, just kind of there and trying their best, but according to you really not worth the attention he gets just because he can dance better than you.
you’ve never admitted apple has any engineering chops, and you’ve never seemed to believe they really knew what they were doing, or were trying to make money in a proper, legal, way by controlling their product and customer experience.
just my 2 cents. this is like our religion, ya know, so let’s co-exist 🙂
darknexus,
Maybe one of you can post a picture then so that non-users like me can understand better? Because in my head every time you describe it, it still sounds like something similar to what AVG antivirus does: asking to enable a feature/service I don’t want over and over and over… It got very annoying quick.
It’s not so bad if it asks once and then goes away forever, but if it keeps poping up after being told “no”, then it’s putting their interests in front of user experience, which I’m against.
Yes it was a false equivalent then, as it is now.
I can’t argue with the reasoning “ADS ARE BAD (except when they’re Apple ads because then they are completely okay because reasons)”.
And the sad part is the vast majority will simply not care about the ads just as they don’t care about windows 10 spying on them as they put all their dirty laundry on FB for the world to see, make themselves look like jackasses on sites like Reddit, and tweet about every bad taco fart like they are a fricking Kardashian.
Lets be honest ladies and gentlemen and accept a big bite of some nasty truth, which is those of us that aren’t self absorbed narcissists are in the minority and our numbers are shrinking by the day. These users have not a single shit to give about companies putting ads in their devices, nor about them collecting everything short of a stool sample when they use the thing, because they are simply too self absorbed to care. Hell I’ve had folks argue all this spying and targeted ads are a GOOD thing because “they will only show me things I want to see and products I want to buy” in other words “me me me me mee”.
Lets face it, we’re the dinosaurs and our replacements? Will happily embrace 1984 if it stroked their massive egos and made them feel like they were on reality TV, hell they’d probably pay good money for it.
ezraz,
Hmm, you must be responding to this post?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?628856
If you want my opinion: I’m strongly against owners seceding device control to the manufacturers, this is a major problem for me. It’s more than just removing icons, but…everything. Of the big three mobile platforms, android seems to be the least guilty, IMHO. I concede many people don’t care about control, and that is their prerogative.
Edited 2016-05-17 21:15 UTC
I have had an iPhone since the 3GS and three generations of the iPad – never seen an ad. I have had a Mac since sometime in the late 1980s right up until now – currently running El Capitan – never seen an ad on any Mac.
Where are people seeing ads?
They mean apps for services you can’t un-install like the iWatch app.
Edited 2016-05-17 22:30 UTC
Those aren’t ads.
Edit your hosts file, either on your PC or on your router, to block the domain(s) used to send the ads. I did this on my router a number of years ago to block XBox 360 dashboard ads. It worked great and to date I have to see an ad on either my XBox One or my Win 10 PC Microsoft must have a limited number of domains they use for OS ad serving.
Shh, or they’ll get more.
They do get more, the server IP addresses change as does the DNS records. They are completely aware people (and unscrupulous ISPs) can and will redirect these hosts to other servers or localhost and provably change these servers as needed. Changing them will just prompt 10 to redirect to other ad servers. It’s not just Windows 10, different MS services have different ad servers they contact. Skype has its own servers, the Xbox systems have their own, 10 has its own set, all of them easily changed. People not wanting ads in their system (and yes I’ve seen them in the lock screen though they are very unobtrusive -for now- watch for “Like what you see…?” it’s an ad) are playing whac-a-mole. It’s a losing game.
As a staunch Windows XP holdout with a small stash of unused Windows 7 install discs, I’m feeling pretty smug right about now.
I freakin’ told you so!
Lol. That felt good.
I believe that Ads embedded in your OS is very wrong. I believe that the pricing scheme for MS Windows is very wrong. I do believe that if Ads are the answer to pricing, it should be disclosed to teh consumer. ANd provide a pricing tier for a no-ads version vs. an Ad supported version. The price difference shouldn’t be far apart.
But it was a free upgrade! And your old OS is no longer supported! Your computer may be at risk!
Lol.
Guys,
Microsoft is following the pack and transitioning to the advertisement revenue model. Personally, I’d rather pay for an OS, but it’s hard to beat the perception of free.
And there is no greater evidence of this fact than the sale of their advertising business to AOL!
Wait. What?
Other than that not being what actually happened, you’re totally right.
Well,then, what happened?
Because, that’s what it sounds like
http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/06/29/aol-takes-over-majority-of-micr…
http://fortune.com/2015/06/29/aol-is-taking-over-microsofts-ad-sale…
http://adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/aol-to-absorb-microsofts-di…
AOL is taking over the selling of ads over certain (Microsoft mainly) properties on certain markets. Basically MS is outsourcing part of their salesforce to AOL, in exchange of AOL switching over to bing as their search engine among other things.
Microsoft still expects to get a nice revenue stream from ads delivered through their platforms, they just wont be doing a lot of the selling of those ads themselves.
Edited 2016-05-18 19:50 UTC
Sigh….can we PLEASE put this myth to bed already? First of all after July 29th Windows 10 will be a minimum of $110 so you’re PAYING for the ads and guess what? If you took the “free” copy of Windows 10 you paid for it!
MSFT did NOT give anybody a copy of anything, they merely traded you a license for a license because they took away your license for windows 7/8/8.1 in return for giving you a license for Windows 10…and giving you an ad infected OS for one that was ad free to boot.
I’m sorry I can’t remember your name but giving credit where credit is due someone here a few months back said it better than I ever could when they said “its like going to the bank and getting a dollar exchanged for four quarters, the exchange is free, the quarters are not” and that is all we have here…MSFT didn’t give you or anybody else anything, in fact unlike every other release since Vista they didn’t even give you a discount on the OS as a copy of Windows 7/8/8.1 is actually selling for MORE most places than a copy of windows 10 is.
The only ones that got a “free OS” from MSFT are those that took Windows 10 Insider Edition, AKA “the one where you give control of everything to MSFT” as even the meager privacy controls of Win 10 Home are disabled on that OS.
How come that you mention Apple in an article about Windows 10 and completely forget about Google? Other than promoting their own products, I haven’t seen any ads from Apple. And just because Google does not sell an OS with ads, it does not mean they don’t serve you ads big way or – even worse – sell your data to third parties.
Your trolling skills get worser ..
Some clear and in the open. Others not so.
:/
If I want to keep the small footprint of Home Edition, but get rid of adds [downstream to the browser], which are my options ?
[This is a student machine, should be at least one].
Maybe in the Anniversary Updates. The OEM copy should come with a Year of add-free. Now, on Anniversary, do you want a free Update or a paid [add free] one?
This doesn’t bother me that much. Windows 95/98 all came with a bunch of links to various online services – MSN, AOL, etc.
Millenium did too, I think. Not sure about the home versions of XP or later, but probably not, since at that point the Internet wasnt’ a new thing, and people didnt’ need help in discovery of online services.
This sort of looks more or less the same – a few links to Windows Store apps to aid in discovery of, well the Windows Store.
I mean, if they aren’t just injecting new shit into existing installs, the that’s perfectly fine. I already removed those things back when I installed 10 the first week it was available. They haven’t come back since.
Edited 2016-05-17 21:24 UTC
Updating should be as easy as replacing a FS image for another. If the new keep causing problems then should be able to use the old one [up to a year] until the kirks are ironed out.
Part of the paid work to Microsoft to be the ‘tailoring’ of the new image to the particularities of my set of hardware.
That would depend a lot on HAL excellence in engineering.
I’ve never seen those ads you talk about. All Win10 I have are upgrades from Win7/8.1 and I use Spybot Anti-Beacon on every Win10 PC I got.
“Apple is already stuffing iOS full of ads and unremovable ads disguised as applications”
I’m not seeing the iOS ads and if you want to check, I’m writing this on an iPad which I use a LOT every day. In fact, I use it almost as much as I use my work computer which is the despised Windows which I only use because they pay me plenty of money to use and support it … at work. They don’t have enough money to get me to use Windows at home.
If you don’t think I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been supporting all versions of MS OSs since DOS 1.x when I was using Lotus 1-2-3 1.x in 1983 for a billing spreadsheet that was much better than the ones we used on our HP 3000 mini Mainframe.
Kind of funny that they don’t want you creating any sub folders in SharePoint. It feels like I’m back to DOS 1.x except that you can search for things and you can have a lot more files than would fit on that 180 kb floppy.
My sentiments precisely. Well stated.
why a true open source (Free Software) system is preferable.
I’m very happy with Fedora (24 beta currently), running gnome-shell with a couple of extensions that fit my workflow perfectly. Plasma5/KDE5 is also a fairly good system.
The year of Desktop Linux may never come, but Linux on the desktop is without a question getting significantly better every year.
Here’s my list of gnome-shell extensions:
– Favorites Menu
– Frippery move clock
– Laine (for per-application volume control)
– No topleft hot corner
– Taskbar
– Topicons
With these anyone should be able to use gnome-shell right away.
Sadly the biggest downfall of Linux is its own developers as they will NEVER let the damned thing get stable, every time it gets really close to being rock solid? They get an itch in their pants and just crap all over the OS and then it takes a year or two for it to slowly claw its way back to where it was, if it even gets back to that point.
For examples see replacing KDE 3 for a pre-alpha quality build of KDE 4, replacing ALSA with Pulse that to this day is the most likely thing to break on upgrade, replacing Gnome 2 for Gnome Shell before it was ready, and now of course we have SystemD making messes all over the place and gobbling up functions with each release like its Pacman.
The sad part is if they wouldn’t have pissed away countless man hours constantly reinventing the wheel and just spent the last decade focusing on making what they had better in every way ala OSX? They would probably be so far ahead of everybody else the competition would look like Windows 95, but heaven forbid developers actually maintain and build on what came before instead of thinking they are the smartest person that ever drew breath and tossing out everything that came before and going back to square one…sigh.