When your start menu (or whatever the hell it's called now) serves you ads you know you can give up on that OS and that the vendor does not care about the user.
Yup. What the hell are these people thinking? That an operating system is a shopping mall?...
... and they're probably right anyway. Computing went mainstream, people who need tools and not toys are niche now, and mass market doesn't cater to niches.
It's more proper to say that there are a lot of people who "need" a different sort of toolset. It's not about "toys"; it's about the machine as an information device for a life outside of the machine. As much as any of us like to complain about things like intrusive "peronalized" search everywhere and targeted ads and so forth, there's a reason why such things sell (until people are told what needs to be involved in making it work).
Honestly, most people are fine with the magic until they realize how much surveillance the magician does. I have no idea how they think it's supposed to work, but then most folks don't know how any part of their computer works.
And worse is that the only reason I have windows in the first place is to play games. I don't need to do anything else on it, but I have to have it in my life because big game companies will not make games for linux. Hell, I'm so excited for Oculus Rift, but at this point they have even dropped Mac support (understandably, they don't have the graphics power), so if I want to experience VR currently, I'm completely limited to windows, not even playing indie and valve games on linux.
Which is fine by me - I consciously choose to boot into my gaming PC and start up Steam. My gaming friends are a small fraction of my friends. And spending habits are pretty easy as well - basically whenever there is a major Steam sale. And you are still able to play a lot of games offline.
My point with the above is that the risks are far less than with a general purpose operating system. How can I ever trust Windows as a platform for running the Tor Browser on? How could I trust any closed system?
Windows 8.1 with Bing (come on, who thought that's a good name for an OS?) has tiles that are ads for aps and games in various stores. No searching needed, these ads are baked in and served when you click start button. (Or whatever that's called now.)
There was some bad update that asked you to confirm what you wanted to open certain file types when you had already set the default, but I've never seen the telemetry tracking options change, and I've double-checked the settings a few time to verify that they haven't changed.
Ubuntu is great. "Hmm, I wonder if Brasero is installed. b-r-a- Oh! I hadn't even considered wearing a bra before. I shall click through and buy one right now."
Generally: no. By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps, but that's as far as it goes.
The live tiles for stores can show pictures of products. You can elect to remove them if you don't like them.
Live tiles are one of the most powerful and useful features of the windows start menu. Like any feature, it's conceivable they could be misused. Unlike notifications, the user has complete, simple, and quick control over offending input.
You're missing out. Win10 is very good to developers these days.
> By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps, but that's as far as it goes
Yeah, those are ads. It's like when the homescreen of my Kindle that I paid more for to get without "Special Offers" started showing books I may be interested in buying based on my reading history. Also known as ads.
It's insulting. I'm sure over their entire customer base it comes out as a positive feature for them, though. People more likely to click through to the store when they see a game name or screenshot they recognize, while only alienating a few.
At least, as you said, they offer an explicit and easy way to disable them, unlike Amazon at the time, who then took years to add an option to disable those.
Which, by the way, is all I'm asking for on the telemetry front as well. Opt-in by default all you want. Bury the setting three panels deep (don't reset it at your whim, though). I'll feel insulted and slightly dirtied, but I'll disable it and move on, active Windows customer that I am.
That's very misleading. The option is called "Suggestions" and it's on by default. I'm convinced they called it that because if they called it "Ads", everyone would turn it off.
> By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps
That is far from only problem. Here is a screenshot of a Win10 start menu, out of the box, at default settings. Count the ads:
Well one can hope that they evaluate the pictures your looking at in the photo app and use that to insure the ads shown in the start menu provide value and joy to the user.</snark>
