Technology

Only if you absolutely need Win11 features. There's very little at work that I actually need a Windows computer for, I'd do way better with a Linux desktop.

Office 365 is fine for some people, but all I need is a plaintext editor, SSH capabilities, and a couple HTTPS communications utilities. LibreOffice would be fine for the few documents I need to share, most of the rest is a git wiki.

Or you can just set it up like if you were living in Europe...

To be fair, you can use just a couple open source tools like ExplorerPatcher and Open-Shell to vastly improve the UX.

I'd actually say it's easier to get a modern environment in Windows 11 as it natively has a tabbed file manager and terminal.

I say this as someone who has to use Windows, versus wanting to use Windows.

EDIT: Settings > Personalization > Start and turn off the toggle for “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more.”

Don't even have to dig into the arcane realm of the Group Policy or the Registry. It's incredibly straightforward.

Original comment: I would be surprised if this isn't easily toggleable through the Settings menu, Group Policy, or Registry keys.

Microsoft isn't going to pull this shit on their Business and Government customers without an easy way to disable it. 99% of the time those same options can be used on Pro installs through having the same Group Policy options. Maybe 80% of the time you can also just find what the Group Policy option changes in the registry and then apply it to Home installs as well, but I find that Pro license is worth the slight price difference (or slight effort to spoof your license for free).

With most of these sorts of articles, they're more interested in clicks than putting any effort into guiding people to the solution.

To be crystal clear, it is bullshit that Microsoft keeps pulling this shit. I've just also never encountered them doing anything like this without leaving a workaround or way to disable it.

I finally deleted Windows 10 on Sunday. Ubuntu too. Now Debian is my only OS. I realized that every time I log into my Windows partition, it's got a trillion updates to install because it'd been weeks since I last logged in. So why bother?

If I really need it for something again, I'll just virtualize.

wonder how they decide what ads to put there

Me too. I figure the answer will be incredibly invasive user behavior tracking, since lately that seems to always be what we learn has been happening, when we finally learn about it.

What does it mean, Michael?

For Enterprise/Education you can disable the 'recommended' section entirely via group policy. Doesn't work for Pro/Home versions though, from what I remember.

All of them https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/april-23-2024-kb5036980-os-builds-22621-3527-and-22631-3527-preview-5a0d6c49-e42e-4eb4-8541-33a7139281ed

Unless they've anticipated this and blocked it like they do with OneDrive. Which they do to frustrate you into buying more storage you don't need to fix the problems they've created intentionally..

I've used a start menu alternative since I switched to 11. I get the hate for the os but it's all just been a non issue for me.

So far, the toggle is built in:

Either way, these recommendations can be disabled by going into the Windows 11 Settings app, so you can avoid them. However, app recommendations are tied to other content in this section, so you'll miss out on some features by turning it off.

Not sure what else will be "missed". But, my guess is they will be "missed" in the same way that one misses a case of chlamydia.