Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu.
Luckily you can disable these ads, or “recommendations” as Microsoft calls them. If you’ve installed the latest KB5036980 update then head into Settings > Personalization > Start and turn off the toggle for “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more.” While KB5036980 is optional right now, Microsoft will push this to all Windows 11 machines in the coming weeks.
Microsoft’s move to enable ads in the Windows 11 Start menu follows similar promotional spots in the Windows 10 lock screen and Start menu. Microsoft also started testing ads inside the File Explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment and saying the test was “not intended to be published externally.” Hopefully that experiment remains very much an experiment.
If I see your company or app advertised on windows 11, you can be sure I will be actively avoiding said company/ App. Even if I need the services advertised, I will be looking for an alternative just because.
I have the same policy for pop up ads.
No candy crush for this guy!
Or 1Password, apparently
I’m not sure these ads are even paid for by the developers of the apps that show up. It looks like this is an ad for the Microsoft Store in general, as Microsoft gets a percentage of any sales.
They also may be included if you pay for your app to be on the homepage of the Microsoft store
Yeah if your app has in app purchases or requires payment it probably can show up here. Probably in the contract you sign to put your app in the Microsoft store
Don’t disagree with the sentiment but I didn’t think companies had this much leeway in how their ads were displayed.
They can pick which type of ads they buy which this certainly will be its own premium category
The only place this will be active is on the computers of home users who don’t know how or don’t care to deactivate it. The computers of the common clay of IT usage. You know. Morons.
And to tie that meme in with an older one: A fool and his money are soon parted.
How did the default attitude toward the user get so hostile? The amount of toggles you need to set just to have a smooth experience with minimal tracking is insane. The people in here defending it by the fact it can be disabled are missing the point: we shouldn’t have to deal with it in the first place.
You shouldn’t. I haven’t. Microsoft is a plague and a choice.
You’re not wrong, but there’s a larger issue here: the fact that there’s an alternative does not make what Microsoft is doing okay. This shit ought to be prohibited by consumer protection law.
Yeah it’s not just Microsoft. Fucking ads in my doorbell app, Google TV, etc.
Putting ads in a product you paid for should be illegal.
TBH I am fully expecting a world where, in the next 10-15 years, some company will make a car that plays unskippable audio ads every X number of miles/km which can be disabled for $9.99/month.
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Before you can place this emergency call, here’s a word from our sponsors at Nord VPN.
I hate it as much as the next guy, but I certainly don’t see why it should be illegal (and disclaimer — Debian on all my personal machines, macOS for work).
Should it be illegal for books to have a list of similar material from the author/publisher? Should food staples not be able to list recipes on the back?
I completely agree that pulling the rug out from under the customer should be illegal (i.e., effectively changing the terms of service for an already-purchased product), but having a shitty product shouldn’t be illegal IMHO.
It really goes like this:
I buy product. Product has no ads, and works really well.
After updates, my device starts showing ads and works worse than it had before.
I bought the device. It is my device. I should be able to do what I want with my device, that I spent my money on, the way I like it. If that means I don’t want your shitty ads, then I should be able to avoid or opt out of those by default.
From your thought:
You buy cookbook. Cookbook has what you need already, which is why you purchased it.
The one you purchased it from comes and “updates” your book by scribbling in ads for it’s other recipe books, and they did it really sloppily to boot.
Now, when you are looking for a specific recipe that you knew was in the book before, instead it is an ad for their other recipe book in place of where the recipe you were looking for was.
Sure, you can still find your recipe somewhere in the book, but as you flip through the books pages you see more and more and more ads for their other recipe books, and oh, now they are also showing you ads from some of their sponsors.
You paid for the book. It is rightfully yours to do with it as you please.
The recipe book company already got your money, yet they are insistent you buy more from them, and have even gone as far as defacing your book.
You should be upset.
Hardcopy images in a book are a bit different from the typical proprietary software doing who knows what on your personal computer. Not saying ads should be illegal but I would argue for software freedom where you can remove ads from any software running on your computer - like you can rip pages out of any of your books.
The choice is hard to make when Microsoft’s garbage has been shoved down your throat for decades, it’s the default pretty much everywhere and the only viable alternative, for 99% of the population, is Apple.
Governments have been way too lenient and passive towards Microsoft for far too long
the only viable alternative, for 99% of the population, is Apple
This is largely because Windows and MacOS come preinstalled and that’s how the vast majority of people interact with operating systems. If you had to choose your OS, I’m sure there’d be more choice in the market. Not necessarily Linux, but just more choice in general.
That’s pretty much my point, 99% of computers sold are sold with Windows on it and the leftover percent is 99% Apple and maybe 1% Linux.
And that’s mostly because no one did anything when Microsoft licensed their crap to big OEM.If any given computer sold was Linux (or any other free OS to be fair) by default and Windows as a paid option, it would change the market massively I believe. It would take time obviously but I’m convinced it would work in the long run.
You don’t choose your childhood education. Microsoft and Apple offer schools deals to create adults dependent on it - after all they’ll be using it in work too.
so?
Pretty simple. Stock go brrrr.
This is a direct result of our Wall Street economy. Wall Street demands that each corporation’s stock price shall increase every quarter. No matter what. If that means the customer is unhappy or that a corporation must consume itself from within. Doesn’t matter.
It got here because it’s super profitable, and that’s all the C-suite cares about, and they’re the ones calling the shots at the end of the day.
I also think that engineering ethics has, in general, been strongly de-emphasized, and true holistic ownership of technical products is now usually held by business and finance types instead of engineers, with all the negative consequences that that entails.
You know, I get if they want to do this to Home editions, but why in the world would they do this to all editions? At the very least, this should never apply to domain-joined computers.
Money
Seems short sighted to annoy the people who pay you the most money already.
Profits now are all that matter. The future is a problem for after dividends and bonuses get paid out.
But they could be paying the most money even more.
how soon do you think ms gets hit with a lawsuit because a malicious ad infected BlackRock or Deloitte or some shit
I’m getting extremely close to making a tiny partition for windows (so I can play gamepass) and then using a Linux distro for my day to day. Are there still issues with Nvidia drivers on Linux? Its been a long time since I’ve run Linux.
PopOS handles nvidia drivers perfectly.
I recently installed Nobara with Nvidia on my three year old alienware desktop because of Windows 11 turning to advertising shit. Nobara is finicky enough that I might jump over to PopOS. Lots of shearing and frame skips in video, let alone in gaming. I don’t have this issue on my other laptop with PopOS on it.
Sounds like you’re not using the proprietary binary blob.
I’ve used both Linux Mint and Manjaro, and my Nvidia card has done fine in both. I switched to Mint from Windows because it was easier and faster to set up under Mint (Windows was missing a bunch of drivers and the OEM’s site didn’t have updated ones). The only configuration I had to do was select the proprietary driver (and Mint has a nice little GUI for that). If you’re on the fence, I highly recommend trying Mint.
Seconded. Mint is the best distro for anyone who wants to get started with Linux with the least amount of hassle. Installation is a breeze and it just works.
Thirded. I set Mint as the default boot, then have a copy of windows available as an alternative OS option when required.
I installed Mint last night as a dual-boot and had a few issues, the boot loader would not load into Windows Boot Manager and when I manually selected Windows Boot Manager in UEFI Windows booted but hard locked until it reindexed the drive I partitioned for Linux.
The Mint OS works fine, to be clear. My issue with the dual boot is mostly getting Windows to play nice.
Dual boot is definitely more tricky to get going. I just set up a Windows partition again to play a game that uses Easy Anti Cheat, and it took some time to have everything working happily.
I have not tried it, but I’ve heard good things about bazzite as a good steam deck clone that has a strong community committed to Nvidia support.
Worth looking into at least!
steam deck clone
No way Jose. If anything their approach is inspired by Fedora Atomic, which is the cornerstone of Bazzite.
Other than that, yes, a very very solid approach for daily usage for casual gamers.
Oh it’s my time to shine! I just installed bazzite onto my ROG Ally yesterday.
It is pretty fantastic so far. Not perfect but very good.
Also, it doubles as a pretty OK developer machine because it comes with buildutils, unlike the steam deck. I was able to get my Nix dotfiles set up on it and do a little Rust work to try it out.
Bazzite is a neat concept, and I run it too. Still haven’t gotten VR to work properly, though (Quest 2)
I made it through two whole top level comments before getting to a switch to Linux comment.
It was my turn this week!
So you’re saying we should do better?
I’ve had the rare issue with my 4070ti that probably wouldn’t have been a problem with AMD, but most things run great. Using endeavorOS
Not really. With the super easy, friendly distros it basically just goes.
I switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon a while ago expecting to just fool around a bit but mostly boot back into windows to do stuff. I’ve now found that the ONLY thing I need to go back to windows for is when I’m forced by dumb policies to use an MSOffice product, which fortunately doesn’t happen to often (and no, LibreOffice is absolutely not a sub for MS Office. The spreadsheet app is worse than google docs, and I’d rather work in typst than have to deal with the libreoffice writer – especially as soon as I need to display an equation/figure/table of contents. Of course, I’d rather work in typst than deal with MSWord too…)
That said, I don’t really play games anymore. Games may still require frequent windows visits. But… I’ve been looking forward to a complete edition of horizon forbidden west and all accounts say it’s linux compatibility is near perfect, so maybe things aren’t so bad these days on the gaming front.
Well I changed my nvidia settings from on demand to a lower value and rebooted Mint a few weeks ago. Then there was no display at all and several hours/days of searching led me to reinstall Linux again and I did not have good backups. There was probably an answer there, but my frustration with Linux is real!!! I still refuse to use anything else and flop between manjaro and mint. I think having proper system backups and a live USB ready to go is helpful…I’m much more defensive running Linux because I keep getting shitty surprises, but I still feel better about it over using windows.
If you like arch based, may I suggest you try Garuda?
It’s a gaming distro, which I don’t know if you care about, but it’s very stable, should work with NVidia and has many quality of life features.
I did the same for the few game I can’t run. Nobara installed working drivers in 1 click. My GPU runs a bit more than it should on the desktop but the last driver update made a big difference.
Im planning on switching the Window install back to 10 since 11 is too shit.
I switched to Pop OS a year ago and the Nvidia drivers are fine. There are definitely some things that are a pain in the ass. My fingerprint scanner won’t work even though it is in the list of ones that work in fprintd and I don’t feel like going through the process of submitting a ticket and troubleshoot it. Getting some games to run properly in WINE can also be a pain. Overall though, I’m fine with it.
But a tiny partition will not do for Windows.
Tried the same thing, but ended up running into issues with Linux constantly and needed to use Windows more than I wanted, so just ended up back on Windows 10. Once all the shit is disabled it’s perfectly fine. Linux is getting there, but still only really good for general web browsing/office suites (unless you wanna play around in the command line for ages).
It’s frustrating that the answer to any of the questions/issues I have are generally reams of commands and walls of text that I only partially understand. If I find answers at all now that all discourse is being sectioned in to walled gardens like Discord. 😬
Windows sucks. I wish I could put Linux on my work computer.
I brought an acer leptop a couple of years back and acer made it nearly impossible to install any other os then windows onto it
Because of Intel RST? I just had to deal with that but was able to get a dual boot of mint on my acer.
edit For those who come across this who has the same issue as I did. Video: https://youtu.be/sGJL62ZYRTU?t=77 Text: Boot to your BIOS. Get to the MAIN tab and hit CTRL+S to show hidden bios option. Disable Intel RST. Exit and Save. Re attempt to install Mint.
Let me preface that with I’m a bloody linux and every releated noob and it’s been like 5 years so my memory is a little fuzzy: I never figured out why Ubuntu didn’t run but it just didn’t, after i got mint working i realized that there are no drivers and a leptop with out touchpad/wifi isn’t why I needed it in the first place…
It was an aspite 3 a315-41g. I quickly googled to refresh my memory and I read something about that, I can’t recall if I tried it out though. I needed to changed a few settings so maybe I tried.
Ah, I have the aspire a315-56. Mint was pretty painless for me after the RST issue. I didn’t have to worry about wifi/bluetooth/touchpad drivers at all. Right out of the box its been smooth (for linux) for me.
Interesting what distro did you use?
How long until Mom gets malware from them?
This is what i fear. How much curation and monitoring will be done on the ads, or this will be another vector for malicious application
How long until we get to the default “I don’t get paid to ask questions” mentality of ad services.
I assumed it was “just” for apps in the Microsoft store. So they shouldn’t get viruses, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t getting software that is garbage.
Note:
- disable ads on moms notebook
Oh look another reason why I’ll be switching to Linux next time I have to upgrade my pc. Fml I’m going to have to learn what a package manager is ew
Fml I’m going to have to learn what a package manager is ew
Two minutes later
“Wait, you mean I get fast, convenient package delivery without being advertised to?”
The package manager was actually one of the simpler things about switching to Linux in my experience
Here i was thinking we were talking about men’s underwear
;) package managed
I feel angry when I have to hunt down the installer for an application under Windows, and then know I have to go find it again later to update it. I have no clue how I got by without a package manager on Windows. Though if they had one, you have to know it would be complete intrusive dogshit about 5 minutes into its existence.
You can use the official WinGet package manager for Windows pretty easily.
Shhhhh Windows bad! /s
I mean… Windows is bad in many respects, but that respect isn’t necessarily one of them.
As a former Windows user, Chocolatey is a great way to get used to a package manager through Windows. I used it to install stuff like hwinfo or wiztree.
Chocolatey’s saving grace is that it’s third party. IDK how well it’s maintained and expanded, it’s been some time since I used it and there wasn’t much on it when I did.
They have a database of packages on their site. This page also popped up with info on how packages are moderated and stuff too.
I’ve been using some Linux flavor for about 15 years. The biggest thing about switching (at least back then) was I knew how to configure Windows just to my liking. With Linux it was a lot more difficult because I had to google everything. Like “how do I change the wallpaper?” How do I get the login screen to appear on the correct monitor, etc. It was just frustrating because I knew how to do this in Windows, but I felt like a major noob again with Linux.
Yup same here. But I’ve compiled my own kernel already…copy pasting instructions. I’ve chrooted to a failed X computer from a USB Linux to then fix X and go back to a good computer. I mean there are levels of engagement and it just takes time to learn. But certainly android users are using a Linux-like system themselves not knowing anything about the levels below where all the action is. You can make Linux as dumb as windows 3.0…well maybe not as dumb. And you can make it as configurable as you want. I mean, you could even rewrite all modules and recompile them such that if a virus is hitting all other Ubuntus or mints, your system would be fine because it was different by a single letter or something as such.
use NixOS to get absolutely fucked.
I use NixOS btw
(don’t actually use NixOS as your first distro. It is really amazing and cool, but the learning curve will be so steep, it will kill you)
Out of all of things in Linux a package manager most of the time is there to save your sanity.
And the wind screams Linux
Everyone? This shit will be on my work computer???
When they rolled out the beta Microsoft said it wouldn’t be, but they could always change their mind with the general release. Excerpt from a previous Verge article about the beta rollout (https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/12/24128640/microsoft-windows-11-start-menu-ads-app-recommendations):
“This will appear only for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel in the US and will not apply to commercial devices (devices managed by organizations),” says Microsoft in a blog post.
Unfortunately, this article doesn’t actually quote Microsoft saying it’s rolling out to ALL machines. That bit in the article is from the author.
I’m not sure tbh, but this should be deactivateable by gpos. Work machines should not be affected if the IT staff is on to it.
I hope they are and the world will be forced to either make a law against it or goodbye windows because fu.
Imagine having to pay employees to watch ads that make microsoft money, what a fucking joke that would be.
I installed Linux Mint a few days ago. It’s been great so far.
I wanna like Linux but I play too many games with anti-cheats that just don’t work on Linux yet :(
Honestly the best solution is to find alternatives
If the audience stays on Windows then there is no incentive to support Linux
What do you like and don’t like about it so far? What system did you install it on?
Why does the OS have to recommend you apps?
In case you accidentally misplaced your brain in the trash, for example.
Don’t do computer tasks if you’re drunk?
As a software developer, I don’t understand the premise of your suggestion.
Just in case you didn’t have enough apps installed from the factory.
“All you have to do is set some flags in GPO policy editor and relogin the first time and every time there’s an update. Easy”
- some Windows fanboi probably
Fucking unhinged idiocracy. Capitalism is the cancer of humanity
For those who want to stay on windows and avoid this trash:
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
An open source start menu replacement. Been using it for 6 months seamlessly and it’s great
Good thing I switched to Linux 10 years ago. No regrets.
Sudoer for about 18 now. Full on Year of the Linux Desktop for about 5 years now.
