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
For developers, the great addition has been WSL2.

But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.

>>bad_us+aP
Terminal app is another good thing, the clipboard manager that's built-in, snipping tool being built-in, Notepad having tabs, there's all sorts of other enhancements I can't recall. Not to mention Visual Studio is arguably one of the best IDE's I've ever used.

All the really nice bits of Windows 11 are lost to time because you don't notice them, but they all add up. The fact we're mainly worried about telemetry over anything else says it all.

>>gianca+T52
Terminal is cool, but it's just an app that's not even shipping with Windows. The best terminal app for macOS, iTerm2, isn't built by Apple. It says something about the Windows ecosystem that it took Microsoft to come up with Windows Terminal.

Visual Studio is a good IDE, but at least back in the day it needed ReSharper to have the smarts that Jetbrains IDEs usually have. And the fact that it only works on Windows is a dealbreaker for me, as many people want to develop on the same operating system that they target for deployment.

I can certainly buy into small improvements, such as Notepad having tabs. And I'm not the one that mentioned telemetry. But now that you've mentioned it, I'll say ... such marginal improvements aren't worth the creepy spyware, or the ads, or the useless breakage in UX.