zlacker

>>pbrw+(OP)
Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data.

Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking.

It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies.

This infrastructure should be, largely, illegal. The technology to end any form of privacy is presently deployed only for ads, but should not be deployed anywhere at all.

>>mjburg+kc
> increasingly microsoft

Will the EU fix Windows by banning the insane amount of tracking they do? Would be nice. The OS is literally at its peak in terms of being great, but all the telemetry, forced accounts and Microsoft ads keep the meme alive that Windows is awful, when in fact, if you remove those three things I mentioned, you have an insanely reliable and polished OS, all my issues with Windows have always come from customizing the core OS, it just doesn't quite behave the same, I would eventually format due to issues, the moment I stopped tampering and tinkering, I've stopped reformatting Windows.

>>gianca+wL
The telemetry, ads and forced online accounts are the only major changes since Windows 7 that I can think of. What useful features has Microsoft added since then to make you consider it at its peak currently? I haven't been using it as heavily and I'm genuinely interested if there's something great I've missed.

>>alexvi+dN
It's lots and lots. Just around things like DPI scaling and multi monitor there is quite a bit. You might not notice because maybe when you ran Win7 you had one non HDR standard def. Then maybe you had two. But today you might have multiple monitors with different scaling, some being HDR and so on. And that mostly just works in the later versions of Win10/11 where as the features just weren't there in Win7. When you dragged a window between a screen with 100% scaling to one with 200% scaling in Win7, it became tiny. Or it became blurry. Now the OS sends the app the info that needs in order to resize and stay crisp as it switches screens.

Windows Defender while not being great, at least means you don't need to start off by installing a third party Antivirus. DirectX 12 also comes to mind.

>>alkona+Y41
How many of these are worth the cost of the telemetry?

>>phone8+5d1
Obviously none, but that’s the point — you cannot have one without the other in the rest of the world. The EU believes this to be wrong to the point of being illegal. Which is why EU versions of windows — the N SKUs — ship without it.

>>freeon+tr1
Are you sure that’s an official difference in N? Thought it was only some bundles like media player, Skype etc that were removed

>>alkona+xF1
There’s a separate OOBE where default browser, default media player, and so on must be selected (which was on US SKUs in 10 but removed in 11; it stays in N). One of the screens is asking about telemetry status, and the lowest option is “None”. There is no default selection.