Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by eutropia on Friday November 16, 2018 @12:52PM (#18470452)

I had to spend several days manually ripping out huge chunks of Win10 to get something resembling the usability of XP. That included removing all of the updating utilities, hosts-file blocking of microsoft servers, removal of most of the preinstalled apps, as well as disabling and deleting all of the scheduled tasks which try to re-install and re-enable those settings.

All this trouble so I can play modern PC games... Next system upgrade cycle I think I'll be moving to linux.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by closetohome on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:01PM (#18470519)

1998: I'd never connect a Windows box directly to the Internet. Hackers might break my computer.

2018: I'd never connect a Windows box directly to the Internet. Microsoft might break my computer.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by Spivak on Friday November 16, 2018 @07:02PM (#18472964)

Oh man I get just a glimpse of what the Windows team has to deal with when applying patches it's absolutely insane. Never in my life have I had to worry that yum update was going to trash my system.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by chii on Friday November 16, 2018 @07:23PM (#18473048)

But when it does, it rm -rf /

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by antisthenes on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:54PM (#18471001)

Microsoft figured out it's easier to employ all the hackers rather than fight them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by nepeckman on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:28PM (#18470760)

Steam support for linux is really going places. I mostly play indie games and older games (so nothing too resource intensive) and Steam's custom wine distribution has been handling them really well. I think I might wipe my windows partition in the next month or so.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by Karunamon on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:17PM (#18471199)

I keep hoping I'll run into someone that's played around with that. If you're at the point where you can use their software and expect a random game to work more often than not, that's a massive leap forward for Linux on the desktop!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by milesvp on Friday November 16, 2018 @03:10PM (#18471609)

I've been playing doom 2016 using steam's wine offering, proton I think it's called. There currently aren't a lot of games the steam client beta supports, but it at least was painless to install and run. Hopefully they'll continue to support wine going forward, and start working with publishers to get more big budget games working.

Blizzard has officially stated they won't boot you (permanently, apparently there are occasional false positives) for using other wine offerings. I've been tempted to try to install Overwatch using Lutris as well (productivity be damned!).

I'm lucky in that I tend to prefer indie games, which are more likely to support steamos, but I'm certainly feeling optimistic about gaming on linux. I've found that I need to boot into my win7 partition less and less in the last year for games reasons.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by justinclift on Friday November 16, 2018 @04:27PM (#18472117)

Skyrim is working well too. Crysis (first in the series) doesn't load though. :(

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by twalla on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:48PM (#18471440)

i recommend https://boxstarter.org/ and something like https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 for dealing with installing win10

source: configured windows10 manually once, decided i'd like to never experience that particular circle of hell again

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by ohithereyou on Friday November 16, 2018 @03:34PM (#18471747)

I hadn't heard of Boxstarter before. Thank you for introducing me to this.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by tonyedgecombe on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:25PM (#18471274)

hosts-file blocking of microsoft servers

I don't think that works, I'm pretty sure the networking stack bypasses the hosts file for Microsoft sites because it's a potential vulnerability.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by eutropia on Friday November 16, 2018 @04:14PM (#18472020)

So that's why I had so many extra things to firewall in glasswire!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by joombaga on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:58PM (#18471514)

Why do you believe that?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by autoexec on Friday November 16, 2018 @03:49PM (#18471843)

He's right. it started back with XP https://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/431032/30/0/threaded

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by ams6110 on Friday November 16, 2018 @03:36PM (#18471755)

Malware could overwrite the hosts file

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by tracker1 on Friday November 16, 2018 @05:34PM (#18472505)

Other than using classic shell, I pretty much like the W10 toolbar. The harder learning curve is I still have many years of searching for X, when the UX is now in Y for a given setting. It's arguably in a better place now, just hard to re-learn.

As to linux gaming, a lot of effort has been made with Steam, another walled garden, but a nicer one. I just wish some of the UI/UX in linux would solidify a bit. I've been running elementary with some tweaks on my spare, but still not enough for my main desktop.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by ZeikJT on Wednesday November 28, 2018 @09:10PM (#18557505)

Valve did put Proton (their wine layer) on GitHub. Some stuff is making it outside the walls :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by marmaduke on Friday November 16, 2018 @04:23PM (#18472090)

There’s a reddit sub dedicated to powershell scripts which automate this. The name escapes me but the hope does not

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by jstankewicz on Friday November 16, 2018 @05:35PM (#18472508)

This one, perhaps? https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by binomialxenon on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:49PM (#18470955)

If you're going to keep a Windows box around at all, it sounds like LTSB would probably work better than vanilla W10.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by yellowapple on Friday November 16, 2018 @03:01PM (#18471535)

The bad news is that LTSB is only available for enterprise customers.

The good news is that if Microsoft refuses to let me buy it as an individual, then I have no moral/ethical qualms with not buying it per se.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by beamatronic on Friday November 16, 2018 @02:42PM (#18471404)

Is it any better if you get the Enterprise version?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by tjalfi on Friday November 16, 2018 @03:02PM (#18471538)

My employer uses Windows Enterprise and it also had Candy Crush and other crapware preinstalled. IIRC one of my coworkers wrote a script to remove the bundled applications.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by vt240 on Friday November 16, 2018 @04:32PM (#18472141)

Employer was supposed to be using Windows deployment tools to create custom enterprise images... But I'm stuck in the same boat. The maintenance overhead is too much for a small business. I am very upset that the default enterprise image is full of crap-ware, and the only alternative was LTSB with no support for Edge or Windows Store.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by ohithereyou on Friday November 16, 2018 @03:36PM (#18471754)

How are these machines HIPAA compliant when your OS vendor can push random software to them?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by Spivak on Friday November 16, 2018 @07:11PM (#18473001)

Vendors aren't considered threats under HIPPA which, tbf, is pretty rational because if you don't trust the entity that wrote the software or made your hardware you've got much bigger problems.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by acct1771 on Friday November 16, 2018 @08:44PM (#18473405)

So what you're saying is we've got much bigger problems.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by ohithereyou on Saturday November 17, 2018 @12:41PM (#18476480)

Microsoft's behavior here and Canonical's behavior shipping search tied into Amazon tracking show that this is not a pretty rational stance.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by namibj on Friday November 16, 2018 @10:00PM (#18473668)

I trust the system I bought to not be evil as far as anything remotely everyday goes. I don't teudt their softwsre/updates.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 by acct1771 on Friday November 16, 2018 @08:44PM (#18473402)

HIPAA

[ Parent | on HN ]