Some people are saying this is good, but Microsoft recently changed my default search engine to bing "In case it was accidentally changed or changed by another program". I have zero faith they won't abuse this, they are becoming ever increasingly pushy about using edge and switching to bing.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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It doesn’t seem like your computer, does it? It’s like you’re a user in their enterprise.
BS like this has made it impossible to maintain a consistent experience for my parents who aren't super tech savvy. It's so frustrating helping them over the phone for hours only to realise that windows just on a whim changed major settings without any user interactions. Changed theirs OS to Debian now. Much better.
Seriously. Windows has become garbage enough that 20 years ago Linux is the better OS. Even though 20 years ago windows (well, let's say 15) was better than modern Linux is.
I use Kagi, and so far, it seems to casually switch it back with that message about once a month.
Yeah that's why you can't give your computer to Fucking m$
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Luckily I've changed my default OS to Linux
Lol .... you can bypass the Windows restriction by deleting the System32 folder
Microsoft hates this one simple trick
Classic
Instructions unclea---
This is the way
Posts like these reveal how many reads the article.
This is a good thing done by Microsoft. They make sure that 3rd party software can't change the default browser without the user knowing.
They will get prompted with the choice screen showing all installed browsers. And when they make their choice, even Edge wouldn't be able to prey people into clicking a button that makes it the default instead.
Posts like this reveal how many people believe every word a megacorp PR dept announces
It's literally to comply with the EU. Microsoft doesn't do this to be nice.
No, somebody speculated it's to comply with the EU. The rest of us are speculating that it's to push up their market share.
Hahahahahaha, right, right. Hahahaha
And I did read the article. No, this is MS continually pushing users into Edge.
"Kolbicz believes this change may be to comply with Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA)" (emphasis mine).
"BleepingComputer contacted Microsoft about the lockdown of these Registry keys in March, but they said they had nothing to share at this time."
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Lin...ux?
Yep, I just switched yesterday.
Literally switched two days ago. Trying mint for now
PopOS uses the same core stuff as mint and is good at graphics drivers, does em automatically.
If you want to keep your computer, yeah.
Might be rough, but, like... Windows7 isnt supported anymore.
Okay so KDE was okay 5-10 years ago. Ultimately crawled back to Windoze. What's in vogue in 2024?
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I’m not sure that a protection against changing the default browser with third party programs (maybe without the user knowing) via the registry is the evil thing being depicted here.
The way I read this article is that this is a move for compliance with the new digital markets act and I’m not seeing the maliciousness.
Willing to be wrong, I haven’t used Windows regularly for like 20 years.
That's one take, except even the article notes that's a weak argument.
Incomprehensibly stupid, because all they have to do is ask the user to confirm. Forcing through their own default instead of asking is malicious.
At least not in the EU, there Windows should even allow you to uninstall EDGE. MS in the EU is way different, less restrictive and more private than MS US.
Maybe it's because websites should ask user before enabling cookies?
MS US not only use cookies, it logs even your keystrokes and mouse movements, apart to pass your data to Towerdata and Facebook. Cookies are not the problem if yo use uBO, Cookie Autodelete or similar.
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Presumably one can still set default in settings. I'm not giving up Firefox yet.
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I've said it before and I'll say it again - Windows isn't ready for the desktop. Just use Linux.
I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.
It doesn't use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that's been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.
It also doesn't use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.
Because it doesn't use Linux, Wayland, or X11, you are limited in the desktop environment that you can use. There's really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.
Instead, there's a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to ship Unity as it's default desktop environment with Ubuntu.
And confusingly, they've named that window manager Windows as well!
That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.
It also doesn't ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.
There's also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.
And sure, if you're a nerd who's into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.
But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he'll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.
I'm sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.
But.
Windows on the desktop just isn't ready for your average, everyday Linux user.
@ajsadauskas @Naich @ardi60 And if you thought that was confusing, the same company also makes a “Windows Subsystem for Linux” but appears to have got the name backwards — it’s not FOR Linux, at all!
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Shocking. Never expected this behavior from such a helpful and heart warming company like Micro~.sft /s
Does that mean Teams will finally stop opening links in Edge when that's not my default browser?
(only tangentially related) what does 'driver' mean in windows lingo? I thought it was hardware-related stuff but I'm probably wrong.
It's pretty much a program running in OS kernel space to handle specific function calls which need low level system access. Most hardware needs custom drivers to work because they need to interact with those low level OS components, so that's why they're mostly associated with hardware.
A lot of antiviruses use custom drivers to intercept and inspect program behavior to look for viruses, etc
Is this why Windows has started opening all my chromium apps in edge? They fuck up constantly and it's really making me want to ditch windows.
If I understood Jack audio as well as I understand Voicemeeter, and if I could get my damn push to talk button working properly in Solaar I'd be done by now.
If anyone has a solution to the edge thing please help.
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