Microsoft has started the rollout of Digital Markets Act changes in its Windows 10 and 11 operating systems for users from the European Economic Area.
These changes are only applicable to users in the EEA. For those outside the region, Windows will continue to function as it is!
The changes to Windows for DMA-compliance include:
You can now uninstall Edge and Bing web search using the built-in settings. Earlier, the option was greyed out.
Third-party web search application developers can now utilize the Windows search box in the taskbar using the instructions provided by Microsoft and choose any web browser to show results from the web.
Microsoft will no longer sign-in users to Edge, Bing, and Microsoft Start services during the initial Windows setup experience.
Data collected about the functioning of non-Microsoft apps, primarily bug detection and its effects on the OS, from Windows PCs will not be used for competitive purposes.
Microsoft, from now on, will need explicit user consent before combining data from the OS and other sources. It will also deliver new consent screens where required.
About 20 years ago, Microsoft was found guilty and convicted, because they forced their browser on their users, driving out competitors by abusing their de facto monopoly on PC operating systems. These days, they are doing the exact same thing again, just on an even broader base. I don't even understand how this verdict took so long.
It makes perfect sense once you understand that regulators have only cared about stock prices for the last 40 years. The EU coming down on giant corporations is a new development
The fucking sad thing is, when they did it 20 years ago Internet Explorer became the gold standard. Now they are pushing super hard, annoying users, killing competition and they have a tiny market share. They aren't getting anywhere, just being assholes because they don't know how not to be.
The behaviour required of you when you have a monopoly is different when you don’t.
These days IE isn’t a monopoly. Chrome is. So Microsoft is allowed more leeway to nudge its users.
This isn’t a verdict. There’s been no court case. This is Microsoft complying with EU regulation, which is very recent. Microsoft has responded to it quite quickly.
Is you regional settings set to a European country?
(by the way, life pro tip, setting your region to a European country solves a ton of issues people have with Windows, most complaints I see I never had a problem with even though I live in Canada, my settings are set to UK)
This ought to happen everywhere. Either I'm the admin on my machine or I'm not. If it's not, I'm not sure how much longer I'll tolerate a Windows machine.
As noted above, some functionality is only available in the EEA. Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during device setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA. Once chosen in device setup, the region used for DMA compliance can only be changed by resetting the PC.
I'd worry about how that might effect other things. Windows isn't the only thing that changes its behavior based on region. What other software would be looking at that specific region setting?
The Internet Explorer system stuff is still there, the difference is that when it launches as a normal browser, it automatically opens Edge instead of IE. (iirc)
It is, specifically MS Edge WebView. For example new MS Teams and new Outlook client are using WebView. Widgets are using it as well as do many other things.
This uninstall will most likely still keep Edge present, it will just be somehow hidden / not as easily accessible.
The cookie regulation was a different directive. Also, GDPR does not require or recommend website pop-ups, and many websites are actually using them illegally. If websites want to mess up their website because of a bad interpretation of the GDPR, that's their own fault.
So where are the people saying edge couldn’t be uninstalled because it’s a core part of the system that other element depended upon. I swear I have seen this answer on every reddit post about uninstalling edge, yet Microsoft show its absolutely possible (although only in Europe, because dependencies don’t work the same in Europe 😂).
That's what they said about Internet Explorer right up until the moment where Microsoft wanted everyone to switch to Edge. Not only could you suddenly uninstall it, but it even started uninstalling itself!
Kinda yeah. WebView2 is edge (chromium) based and definitely is not uninstalled by uninstalling edge. But it won't have the browser chrome or the MS Account association (for now, we all know it's possible for ms to make things worse 💀)
A lot of apps do use Edge as an embedded control to display web content. (Back before Edge was a thing, they would do the same thing with Internet Explorer.) Doing this is the path of the least resistance to whoever is developing these pieces of shit, since they can (up until now) expect Edge to be present on the user's system without having to cart around their own copy of a web browser and keep it updated in perpetuity with all the potential security holes not doing so could bring, yadda yadda yadda. Uninstalling Edge will indeed cause those particular programs to break.
There is now also the "Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime Environment" (via) which may or may not be able to run on its own even if the regular user-facing version of Edge is uninstalled -- I have no idea, and I haven't tried.
I stick around with Windows due to shitty DRM and VR compatibility. It's been a couple years since I last tried Linux, so maybe it's gotten better. I should probably try it again.
Seriously, it took the EU to force Microsoft not to grey out "uninstall Edge". Still there are non-billionaire people who want to eliminate government regulations, it boggles my mind. I mean, besides brainwashed business school bros.
I personally don't, but for users in a corporate environment, it's not that simple. I had to leave my organization for a service contract to escape the toxic shithole that was corporate IT with a Microsoft bias.
Not OP but okay, I'll bite: What exactly do you prefer about being locked into the MS ecosystem as opposed to being allowed to choose, including the choice to keep that very ecosystem?
Neither are these laws voted by EU, rather EC and are applied to all the EEA and even countries currently in the process of accession as they are required by the agreement to keep aligning their laws with EU ones until they reach membership.
Been on graphene for a few months now. Aside from a few apps that are over-reliant on the Google ecosystem, it's works fine. Would recommend. Battery is also a lot better with all the tracking and such removed.
GrapheneOS user here, compared to my stock android pixel it's night and day, no sense of my phone spying on me.
I use almost entirely FOSS on the graphene one, I now do most of my daily phone activities on the graphene, and use the stock primarily for work (I refuse to taint the graphene phone just so I can do my job).
The installation was extremely simplistic compared to other custom android versions I've run. It was literally: plug in phone, click button, phone restarted itself, clicked another button, done.
More like LineageOS because Graphene is only available on very specific, hyper-expensive devices. Or just expensive if you want one that is already out of support.
It is. And I personally commend Google for this - they are pretty much the last manufacturer to truly give your the freedom, without crippling the device to hell and back. Sony and Samsung cripple the cameras when you unlock the boot loader, nearly all Chinese manufacturers don't even give you the choice, Xiaomi has a "wait list".
Say what you want about Google - they still aren't as terrible as others.
how about fucking autopilot too instead of having to find a registry to disable it.
Edit: I'm dumb and don't know what I was even being mad at. I should have said copilot, that’s what I actually meant. I didn’t realize autopilot was a thing.
What do you mean. Autopilot is an enterprise feature. If you bypass Autopilot you are either circumventing your organization's policy or you bought a computer that was not removed from org properly.
Meh, I purged windows from my systems last month. I will never be forced to (re)install Edge, use the garbage search, or link my pc to a gd Microsoft account again. I've had enough of Microsofts bullshit.
Luckily you don't need Window$. You can install Edge on your Linux distro of choice! Will it then show warnings telling you Edge is the bestest browser when you use it to search for another browser? Who knows, why not try it and find out???
Please someone use Edge on Linux, Micro$oft is now a friend of Linux
One drive is the one that really ruffles my feathers.
It turns itself back on randomly, which wouldn’t be too much of a problem except for that it fucking remaps the desktop.. a file that was previously located at C:\user\desktop\ is now at C:\user\One Drive\desktop…
Note the space in the path, they didn’t even have the decency to use an underscore… \one_drive\… even though it’s one of their own rules in powershell scripting.
For those of us using powershell to automate stuff this remapping is a nightmare and should be illegal.
Too bad I am in the US and will just have to continue to get support calls from time to time when a users desktop gets remapped behind the scenes.
Maybe there is a way using powershell and windows scheduled tasks to check to see if one drive turned itself back on, then auto turn it off and remap the desktop back to normal.
The absurdity of having windows check to see if windows screwed itself up, then if so have it fix itself is just laughable.
OneDrive redirection is hilariously bad. Official Microsoft documentation recommends against using it. Imagine having that little faith in your own product.
Stops working as intended when your desktop no longer resides at that path.
Also, I have the same functions running on multiple machines with different names so I have to dynamically resolve the path and piece it together using strings.
What pisses me off even more is if you start saving too much stuff in your documents/desktop etc you start getting emails from microsoft that your drive is full and you have to purchase more storage (because your harddrive is likely much bigger then your free drive account).
So I know quite a few elderly people who think they now need to pay money to unlock more memory on their computer to save more stuff.
Sounds like a weird behavior, are you using Microsoft account for sign-in? Maybe that somehow triggers enabling sync back. Switch to local account if you do not want any benefits MS account gives.
I have like 10 machines at 5 different locations. In order to share my 365 subscription across multiple machines, I have to have them signed into a Microsoft account. I need excel and ms access working on all my machines.
It’s happen twice since I implemented windows 11, both times after major windows updates.
Not too much trouble to re disable one drive and switch everything back to normal but it breaks a bunch of stuff for me when it happens.
If you really don't like it, there's a bunch of tutorials online to uninstall it without needing Microsoft's approval. I've removed it a long time ago without any issues.
Oh, I don't care about Windows that much to bother googling things like that.
It lives in a VM so I can run CAD software like LayOut which I use very infrequently.
I've also got a windows partition lying around that gets booted into once per year incase I go to a LAN party, but Steam / Proton has really come a long way so I can probably drop that soon
After being a Debian and Ubuntu user for many years, im fairly satisfied with win 11. Once you get rid of all that bloatware and enhance some privacy settings. Q
Lmao windows is a messy POS. It limits your capabilities and removes your freedoms to the point the eu needs to force them to allow the shitty browser that's included to be removed.
I work with Linux on a daily basis, both as a server OS and a desktop OS. Unpopular observation perhaps, but I've yet to find a distro which provides a more stable desktop experience than Windows 11 does for me. I do enough Linux troubleshooting during the day, after work I just want something that works.
I'm curious what distro you use. I put my partner on fedora, she's not very techy, and generally speaking she doesn't really have any issues doing the day to day stuff. The biggest pain point was switching to Firefox and getting its worse profile system to work, but that was not a necessary change just a choice.
How do you have an unstable desktop? What card and or programs are you using?
In 20 years of desktops I've had issues with Nvidia cards, yes, and currently my KDE has a weird rendering issue where a specific window of my editor can flicker like once or twice a day, which is fixed by clicking it.
KDE4 was a hot mess back in the day after initial release, but it seems they learned their lesson and 6 seems quite fine (upgrading to that soon myself)
I've mostly done fedora and Ubuntu desktops and honestly they're a breeze.
So what exactly is it that you're using that you have so many problems?
I'm assuming that just hopping on a VPN that exits in Europe is not enough to do this right? You probably have to do a fresh install and say that your location is in the EU?
I'd rather uninstall Chrome, TBH. If you need a Chromium browser, Edge is just better. And Bing is about as good as Google for most searches. Only a handful of things (like default maps) do I switch for. Which is honestly staggering because Bing used to be such shit in comparison. Google has really let itself go.
I used to feel this way, but the aggressiveness at switch Edge pushes every new feature - re-enabling after disabling, constant nags, etc - has really turned me off of it. It's become software I regularly have to argue with.
It doesn't help that out of the box, Edge feels like a browser that my grandmother would have maintained (with so many glued on hotbars/sidebars/shopping popups).
The point isn't so much in which browser you'll prefer to use at the end of the day (that's on you as a consumer to decide), but being able to decide which browser to have installed on your PC in the first place.
Edge is bloated as fuck, just opening it for the first time prompts you with a 3 step dialog you can’t close about how Microsoft value your privacy and which setting you should choose.
On a new Windows 11 install, I uninstalled OneDrive straight away and it was a mess. I couldn't get rid of the nagging that it was unable to back up my files as my storage was full when in office documents. I had to reinstall OneDrive but disconnecting it per instructions still didn't fix it. The only thing that made that message go away was deleting files in online OneDrive.
Well, I'll wait with it for now. Not too long ago, I installed Ubuntu on my spare laptop, but I don't really use it that often. And before I do switch, I'll probably go through everything I use and see what the Linux alternative is, unless of course it already works on it.
I'd say that everyone should use Linux but that is materially impossible for many folks. Microsoft should just make consumer friendly products instead of this bullshit.
I live in the US and my windows 11 doesn’t have any of them. It doesn’t even have the ability to log in with a Microsoft account. It’s so easy nowadays to install programs from GitHub that nuke all the bullshit.
Well it's good although only for EU, for the rest of the world still need to use Windows debloater script for doing same thing (or just install micro win 11 if you hate the hassle)
Well Windows 10 at least lets you create a local user account. you can't even install windows 11 without having a microsoft online account, because you need a Microsoft account to be able to create a local user.
Is it only Windows 11 that wasn't able to uninstall any of these? Because I've been able to (and have done so) uninstall them on windows 10 since always. Can even disable the telemetry stuff, but only if you have Pro and above since it requires using the group policy manager (which is kinda bullshit IMO; ain't no reason Home shouldn't have access to that).
I was surprised I was able to uninstall Media Player on Windows 11. I played a video file on my laptop and accidentally selected "always open with". Lo and behold Windows Media Player doesn't play HEVC encoded files (not sure if it was 264 or 265). I thought I would have to tinker with the default program settings but tried "add or remove programs" on a lark and it worked. I then opened the file with VLC as one normally does and life is back in balance.
Me: "I would like to uninstall Edge and use Firefox for everything!"
Netflix: "With Firefox I won't give you best quality even if you pay for it! Use Edge!"
So Edge stays my video streaming browser for now, but only that.
I am too old to sail the seas. Either I get it legally and convenient or I just stop watching and read a book instead. Not saying others shouldn't, I had my fair share of years out there, but it's not for me anymore.
Just stop using microsoft. Why would you sign into the cloud to use your local computer. Actually own your hardware with Linux or BSD. Do I own it or do they?
It takes like 2 minutes to make it so you don't need to use a microsoft account to log in to Windows. It's annoying that it has to be done but it can be done.
Edit: it works I can comment now! It's been months, not sure if an error from this or lemmy.. would hate to say lemmy.. hope I can switch accounts and comment now using the account I'd like to (at the moment)
Which one? There are several. I personally like Cinnamon for a Windows-like experience since I have to switch back and forth to windows for work. And Plasma quite attractive if looks matter more.