Microsoft 'improves' Windows 11 by bringing ads to the Start menu in the US

By Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson for BetaNews, 13 April 2024
Link, Archive

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In a move which is likely to be greeted with a hostile reception, Microsoft is continuing its obsession with injecting advertising into Windows. The company is using Windows Insiders signed up for Beta Channel to test the controversial addition of ads in the Windows 11 Start menu.

For now, this is a trial which is limited to beta testers in the US, but even if the most negative feedback is forthcoming, it is hard to imagine that Microsoft will back down and not roll out Start menu ads to all Windows 11 users.

It is difficult to see the addition of advertising in the Start menu in anything other than a negative light, but if we are to draw a modicum of positivity from it, it at least shows that Microsoft is not only obsessed with pumping AI-powered components into Windows 11.

The company, predictably enough, does not refer to advertisements for apps being added to the Start menu as advertising. Rather, it prefers to refer to this "improvement" as a way of bringing app " recommendations" to users. But be under no illusion: this is advertising.

Microsoft writes about the arrival of Start menu ads in the release notes for Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3495

Building on top of recent improvements like grouping recently installed apps and showing your frequently used apps, we are now trying out recommendations to help you discover great apps from the Microsoft Store under Recommended on the Start menu. This will appear only for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel in the U.S. and will not apply to commercial devices (devices managed by organizations). This can be turned off by going to Settings > Personalization > Start and turning off the toggle for "Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more". As a reminder, we regularly try out new experiences and concepts that may never get released with Windows Insiders to get feedback. Should you see this experience on the Start menu, let us know what you think. We are beginning to roll this out to a small set of Insiders in the Beta Channel at first.

The move should not come as a complete surprise as Microsoft has history here, having done very much the same in Windows 10.

While it is possible to disable the display of app recommendations (by, as Microsoft points out in the release notes which are not read by many people, visiting Settings > Personalization > Start > Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more) this doesn't feel like something users should have to do.

 

[Lone MacReady II]

I am gonna enjoy learning Linux coding. Getting really tired of discovering forced Kikeware bloat apps installed onto my PC over the night Microshaft.

And of course it was all slapped together by troons and jeets

I cannot say this loud enough. You have no idea how badly every college in the Kike State has been mandated to get Whites and Asians out of coding - and replacing them with Pajeets. "We need to have them now goyim, they do all our tech work!" is the long term plan.

Iudea Delenda Est.

 

[Dysnomia]

Not defending it, but you can always turn this shit off. Anyone running default settings on Windows deserves to be raped by ads.

This "feature" is for normies who need to contact customer service to change their wallpaper. Microsoft has got to know that everyone else immediately changes the default settings.

 

[Pixy]

As much as I hate Microsoft the people that post leftistmeme.jpg tier textwalls about how akshully taking an hour to do something on Linux that takes ten seconds on Windows is totally awesome and a positive feature are cringe.

There's a reason they have a monopoly and that reason is their competition if you can even call it that is incredibly autistic.

That "ten seconds on Windows" has now bloated out to nearly an hour.

Want to change your date and time? Windows 7 let's you do that by right-clicking the task bar whilst 10 forces you to trudge through 2-3 submenus. The same applies for quite a bit of features that once made linux seem more tedious a decade ago.

 

[Overly Serious]

Love Windows.
Love me Powershell.
Hate Microsoft.

Simple as.

 

[Peaches the Wonder Cat]

And of course it was all slapped together by troons and jeets

Microshit literally requires DEI as part of employee performance reviews:

https://fortune.com/2023/11/08/microsoft-diversity-performance-reviews-inclusion-managers/

 

[Absolutego]

Thank God for autistic eastern Europeans and their debloated Windows 10 LTSC isos.

 

[Honored guest]

Not defending it, but you can always turn this shit off. Anyone running default settings on Windows deserves to be raped by ads.

Out of curiousity does anyone have a good video or post on what settings to change and turn off for win10 and win11?

 

[the rat]

That "ten seconds on Windows" has now bloated out to nearly an hour.

Want to change your date and time? Windows 7 let's you do that by right-clicking the task bar whilst 10 forces you to trudge through 2-3 submenus. The same applies for quite a bit of features that once made linux seem more tedious a decade ago.

Very hard and takes too long.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

Windows is fast becoming the ghetto OS. It's really too bad there aren't real alternatives, you either have to have at least some tech expertise to run a Linux distro effectively or you can go to the Warsaw ghetto that is Apple OS.

 

[ZazietheBeast]

All the more reason to go back to Windows XP.

 

[TheRaptorJesus]

I've been using start11 forever but they went and did a scum move and made a v2 and stopped updating v1.

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

Microsoft doesn't want you to know this, but Win 10 is free. I have 458 copies of Win 10 on various hard drives.

 

[PunkinMan]

if win 10 gets btfo im using linux from now on lol.

 

[#lurker]

Out of curiousity does anyone have a good video or post on what settings to change and turn off for win10 and win11?

I always run O&O Shutup10++ on fresh installs. Disables most of the telemetry and other garbage. Just don't tick every box, some are useful.

 

[Slav Power]

This is news? I believe those start menu ads were a thing back in 10. Of course, you've only seen them if you were a nigger that didn't debloat their PC. You can get Win11 to a good state by just running WinUtil, it's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.

Still on 10 here, can you replace the start menu with something like Classic Shell in 11?

Open-Shell is a currently maintained fork of Classic Shell, works with the Win11 taskbar by default. Though personally I'd recommend switching to something like PowerToys Run or Keypirinha, much faster and more useful than any of the start menus.

Just install Ubuntu at this point. Windows hasn't been good since 7.

Just because Ubuntu doesn't suffer from the issues of Windows 11 doesn't mean it's good. In fact it's really shit, you're installing the Linux counterpart of Windows 11. If you want true FOSS freedom, install Debian and work your way from there. But guess what, that takes effort. So does debloating Windows. Linux is not a magical solution because all modern desktop OS' suck dick.

>be woman
>apple tv watcher
>complain about being marketed to
Windows 11 is for ladies. Windows 10 was the last one with sharp edges and masculine rigor, now its all round and soft and advertisements for thc-laced bath salts (delicious, btw).

You know what's funny? When Windows 10 came out, people bitched and moaned about how evil it is and how Windows 7 was better. Same thing with Vista and XP. Now it repeats with 11 and 10. It's really retarded that people keep repeating this cycle again and can't see that it happens with every major Windows release.

If you run W11 without debloating and removing the telemetry I’ll just assume you love taking it in the ass.

B-but you need to debloat it and you don't need to debloat Loonix. Yes you have to deal with issues with drivers and other shit that you don't experience on Windows, but it's FOSS, it's your fault, it's a small price to pay for becoming free and yadda yadda.

Debloating Win11 is still a less time consuming way to have a cromulent desktop OS despite what the Linux cultists want people to believe. You either get your OS to stop having weird issues you have to manually solve or you'll forever remain a fringe minority that'll cope with server market share and the little bump you've got thanks to Valve making a special distro for a special piece of hardware.

As much as I hate Microsoft the people that post leftistmeme.jpg tier textwalls about how akshully taking an hour to do something on Linux that takes ten seconds on Windows is totally awesome and a positive feature are cringe.

There's a reason they have a monopoly and that reason is their competition if you can even call it that is incredibly autistic.

You don't start this topic here. You'll get yelled down for being a Bill Gates shill and the usual suspects will give you mean stickers, because they refuse to accept the reality that Linux desktop is still a massive piece of shit, and will stay a massive piece of shit, and will blame everyone but the Linux community for that state.

There is a reason why FOSS is so infested with troons, the mentality is the same.

 

[EvenShadierPineapple]

Windows is fast becoming the ghetto OS. It's really too bad there aren't real alternatives, you either have to have at least some tech expertise to run a Linux distro effectively or you can go to the Warsaw ghetto that is Apple OS.

It kind of depends what you want out of it. I've recently tried Nobara and it's a pretty straight forward install, not that different from windows. It's gaming focused distro with prepatched kernel and preinstalled shit you need. All the games i tried that were certified to work on steam deck worked just fine, didn't really notice any performance penalties in stuff like Elden Ring. Obviously you could just use any linux distro and patch the kernel yourself, but it's nice and convenient when someone bundles all the various fixes and performance enhancers and does it for you.

Right now it's not THAT bad yet, but i wouldn't put it past microsoft to start forcing people to upgrade to 11, or conveniently axe the ability to turn off ads.

 

[The Lawgiver]

It's too bad governments are so closely tied with corporations and Big Tech these days. Micro$oft got reamed for way less back in the day for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

Reminder Bonzi Buddy fucking perished and was classified as "spyware" for doing literally the same thing that companies now do with this personalized ad shit. Somehow it's much worse than Bonzi cause they keep shoving more ads in everywhere.

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

I miss Bonzi.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Windows 11 removed the ability to permanently mute specific applications, so they already guaranteed I will never, ever use that shit.

I long for the days when software upgrades added new features instead of arbitrarily removing old ones and making the remaining ones worse.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

How is playing games on Ubuntu? I'm an old man now so I don't play many. My kids play Rokcet League from time to time, I might fuck around with some Blizzard games every now and then. Any reason not to switch?

I can't speak to Ubuntu specifically but as a Linux Gamer for going on four years now (i use arch btw), you can expect anything on Steam to run flawlessly out of the box as on Windows. it's not true for every title, but it's consistent enough to the point where games that require any kind of effort to get working are an exception. ProtonDB has user reports on playability for both desktop Linux and the Steam Deck, so you can see if anybody's having issues with your favorite games. if any tweaks are needed, some nerd has almost always already figured it out and posted it there.

running things outside of Steam requires a little more elbow grease. wine is not that difficult to figure out (in the general case) and frontends like Lutris make it almost as smooth as Steam. shitty storefronts that are just glorified embedded web pages like EGS and the BNet launcher can be futzy under wine but they work. I've played WoW Retail, WoW Classic, the Diablo 2 remake, Diablo 3, and Diablo 4 on Linux without any issues. the only games you're likely to be unable to run are anything that uses korean rootkit anti-cheat shit like Genshin or Valorant. Linux does not let user space applications arbitrarily spy on kernel space, so the best anti-cheat can do is spy on the wine kernel (this is how Helldivers 2 works) which is a compromise a lot of those companies are not willing to make. so don't expect those games to ever have compatibility with Linux.

As much as I hate Microsoft the people that post leftistmeme.jpg tier textwalls about how akshully taking an hour to do something on Linux that takes ten seconds on Windows is totally awesome and a positive feature are cringe.

There's a reason they have a monopoly and that reason is their competition if you can even call it that is incredibly autistic.

lol, that's an extremely dated stereotype at this point. my experience with Linux has generally been way smoother than Windows. it's true that some things have obtuse solutions that require research, and not everything works out of the box. but as a long-time Windows computer tech, I appreciate that Linux troubleshooting mostly boils down to finding and editing the right config file whereas Windows has everything blocked off and baked into shitty applets and often just straight up won't cooperate if it doesn't want to. not to mention various quality-of-life features Linux users take for granted that don't exist at all on Windows, such as the package repository infrastructure, or the ability to install multiple kernel versions in case an update breaks something, or not installing unwanted software without your permission, to name a few. the reason Windows has a monopoly is because Microsoft has spent decades using money and industry influence to build an impenetrable hegemony to the point where normies literally just don't know that alternatives exist. it has little to do with usability, as evidenced by the fact that there's an entire sector of business built to service "ah my windows machine did a thing I don't understand!"

Just because Ubuntu doesn't suffer from the issues of Windows 11 doesn't mean it's good. In fact it's really shit, you're installing the Linux counterpart of Windows 11. If you want true FOSS freedom, install Debian and work your way from there. But guess what, that takes effort. So does debloating Windows. Linux is not a magical solution because all modern desktop OS' suck dick.

IMO Arch is the way to go these days, especially if you're a Gamer. the Steam Deck's OS is Arch-based. if you want to start barebones and build your own OS (I recommend all Linux users learn to do this at some point), Arch is one of the best and most minimalist options available. if you want a fully-featured Windows-style OS out of the box, Manjaro (the KDE version) is one of the better options as well.

You don't start this topic here. You'll get yelled down for being a Bill Gates shill and the usual suspects will give you mean stickers, because they refuse to accept the reality that Linux desktop is still a massive piece of shit, and will stay a massive piece of shit, and will blame everyone but the Linux community for that state.

There is a reason why FOSS is so infested with troons, the mentality is the same.

lol, I don't get why people get so mad about this. if you want to stay on Windows and use third-party tools to weed out all the cringe, that's your prerogative. both Windows and Linux have their problems, big and small, that stem from difficult-to-solve cultural and design problems. it's just the nature of any collective human endeavor. I personally think Linux' problems are far less cringe than Windows', but that's a matter of personal taste and perspective.