The tips, ads, and recommendations you see will be more generic and may be less relevant to you.
And this is treated as a bad thing?!
The number of ads you see won’t change, but they may be less relevant to you.
Send only info about your device, its settings and capabilities, and whether it is performing properly.
In other words, even after turning off all the settings, your data still gets collected.
The rest of the installation process wasn’t fun either. It was worded in this weird, condescending tone, like “Let’s get everything set up for you”, and “Let Cortana help you get things done!”.
Thank goodness for FLOSS and GNU/Linux.
Yea, it’s really shitty.
Enterprise folks don’t have this problem because they use the WAIK (or whatever it’s called now) to customize the installer.
Anyone can use it, and from what I’ve read, the Win10 generation of the kit is much easier to use than previous versions (which were pretty bad).
But yea, this stuff is awful.
Checkout things like WinDebloat, Privatezilla, Winaero Tweaker, and LoveWindowsAgain. There’s some overlap between them (as they were built for different purposes), but they all pretty much kill telemetry at the service or installed level (as in remove the components providing telemetry).
Yea, it’s BS you have to do this. And screw MS for this crap.
I think the pro version doesn’t have most of this too. I’ve never seen an ad in w10 and 11
They don’t show explicit banner ads or anything, but every now and then there will be links to “recommended software” in your start menu’s app drawer or the notification thing in the bottom right (not the taskbar, that foldable drawer thing).
You can disable those as well, but not by default.
Candy crush is what they put as “recommended software” if I remember correctly.
If linux had all these settings on installation everyone would be saying that it’s to hard for normies to install
Yeah sadly as a gamer I HAVE to put up with Windows. But Next time I build a machine I’m definitely dedicating a whole drive to a linux OS because fuck Windows and their petty marketing shit.
Personally I treat my windows pc as a gaming console. I play games on it and nothing else. Then it becomes a non issue: so what if they track my gaming activity?
I made the jump back last fall. I’ve ran into one game so far I couldn’t play and that was just because of it’s anticheat software (the game was “hell let loose”). Check out Pop!_os. The GPU drivers are preinstalled in the kernel and just work. For both Nvidia and AMD. Steams proton and lutris/wine have made everything easy to play. Never going back to windows now.
You should get a Steam Deck, I want one as it seems pretty awesome. It runs Linux and you can sail the seven seas like crazy on there, yk?
Honestly, I haven’t played games in a while but in the future, when I feel like gaming again, the Steam Deck will likely be my thing.
Have to? Been playing on Linux for years, haven’t had many issues so far.
There are unfortunately still too many games that my friends and I play that won’t work on Linux. In my own situation, I’d be alienating myself from my friends from switching over even though I really want to. Not to mention I built my PC with a Nvida card which all I hear is that it either works perfectly for you, or you better buy an AMD card so there are still some valid reasons for people not to switch. Once windows 11 is forced upon me is when I’ll cut my losses though. Glad to hear that it’s a good enough experience for you though!
I have to agree. I used to play Rainbow 6 with my friends. I enjoyed it, because I was addicted to gaming and they were the only friends I had. After I switched to Linux, I couldn’t play R6 online, which led to them… well… not being friends with me anymore. I’m glad I got out, because if the only thing keeping them being friends with me were the all-nighters of Rainbow, there was no friendship to speak of (I knew these people offline, not just online). After this I eventually stopped gaming completely, not because of a few very minor compatibility issues, but because I realised how much time I was wasting gaming.
So essentially, not only did Linux help me get back control of my computing, but it also completely eradicated my gaming addiction and helped realise what functioning relationships look like, since I even started socialising more. An absolute bargain!
The year is 2050
Booting up Windows84
Hello, your NSA overseer is Mr. X
It appears that you have committed 147 thought crimes this week…your accounts shall be ghosted for the time being.
As soon as you start running a pihole on your home network it makes really stop and think and want to eradicate all unnecessary data tracking. Windows was so chatty. Science only knows how much of a consumer profile they create and sell on you for just wanting to use a computer.
Additionally… Smart TV’s are the absolute worst too.
Amazon Kindle, too. If there’s a pihole, it freaks out and starts retrying the mothership in a loop until it drains the damned battery. Airplane Mode quiets this, but I hate how aggressive these devices have become.
What happens if you redirect all traffic to a sinkhole, rather than to 127.0.0.1? Do the devices still freak out when they talk to a web server which returns a 404? Just morbidly curious…
One of the many reasons I always run privacy.sexy every time I need to install windows (on both bare metal and inside a VM).
privacy.sexy
I second this, I use it all the time.
I use O&O ShutUp10++ (oosu10) to do the same thing. Makes Windows feel like Windows, instead of an ad machine.
Whenever people complain about ads I have NO idea what they’re talking about.
Edge will say it’s “maintained by your organization”, which seemed spooky, but that’s just a side-effect from having some privacy.
And the link to OOSU10, in case anyone wants it: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Edge will say it’s “maintained by your organization”, which seemed spooky, but that’s just a side-effect from having some privacy.
Ooooooh, so that’s why I started seeing that shit. I thought I had a virus, lmao. Cheers.
I shall yoink that, thank you very much.
Absolutely disgusting! Literally the only reason why I still use Windows is the fact many games I play have anti-cheat spyware that doesn’t work on Linux.
Yet another reason I stay away from any game that has online multiplayer PVP teams based setting. I trust anti-cheat as much as I trust that random file you find on [Insert Sketchy Website Link].
I love the “Let’s finish setting up your device” popup that prevents me from using my VMs regularly.
Like some condescending peddler trying to slam-dunk your agreement as a foregone conclusion.
Come on, buddy, let’s do those remaining tasks, let’s have Microsoft scan your face, tell Microsoft about your phone, let’s go and install those Microsoft apps missing from your phone, and your laptop, too, and then we go buy that Office subscription and have you store your important files on Microsoft’s servers and we really need to get around to switching to Microsoft’s web browser now.
And the only option you get is “Yes” or “Remind me later.”
If you turn it off (and it needs to be turned off in two places), it’ll be back on as soon as Microsoft publishes the tiniest update to any of its unwanted services. Harrghrrr! (artery popping noises)
Turn off “Offer Tips and Tricks to finish setting up this device” ( At least for me that was permanent. Otherwise you might use something like O&O shut up 10, also the setting is per user )
ShutUp10 is the GOAT.
Yes, I do that on all my VMs about every 3-5 weeks when it turns itself on again.
Not to mention being forced to create a MS account if you’re online.
With win10 you should be able to click the small text to get a local account but yeah I think with newer win11 installers you have to be off the internet for a local account. And then when you do log in with your MS account to save your license (important when using a Win7 OEM key to license win10) it would convert your profile to online, and then you had to “do steps” to put it back to local. Annoying af
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@TheImpressiveX i found looking glass recently and will definetly try it out, but as I understand this kvm method needs a second GPU for passthrough to Linux.
Wait until you get to the screen that asks you if you want to share your data with their 300 friends.
(we will share your data regardless of your choice :/ )
Its nice to be asked tho lol
First time?
You can use Win10Privacy to bodily castrate nearly all built-in spyware and telemetry.
Downside is that it’s a damn powerful program, with few guardrails, so if you don’t have good knowledge of Windows internals you run a non-trivial risk of accidentally lobotomizing an important feature of your install by enabling the wrong setting. I mean, all settings can be easily reversed, but you gotta know which specific one did the nerfing in order to undo the oopsie.
For example, even the midrange firewall settings are mostly safe, except… a single one of them completely kills Microsoft Office Click-To-Run. It won’t install, and it won’t launch even if you installed it before you applied Win10Privacy. So if Microsoft Office is an essential (Access or Excel absolutely needed, for example), be careful.
There is also privacy.sexy. they have a bunch of scripts to do just about everything you want to increase windows privacy. They have a GUI that will help you customize the scripts and you can roll back if you want.
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