[LegitShady]

I recently installed windows 11 and explorerpatcher on a desktop and it doesn't feel like adware at all.

Aside from yet another revamp of the settings menus it feels more or less like windows. The gripes about the start bar and start menu are valid but fixable.

Only thing is closing down some widgits the first time that I never saw again and uninstalling a few applications.

[falcolas]

Counter data point: I maintain a windows 11 PC for gaming, and there are ads everywhere. Most of the ads point back to Microsoft products, but not all.

Launcher ads. Live desktop ads. News ads. Weather ads. Settings page ads. Game bar ads. Lock screen ads.

I turn them off as I run across them, but I can never seem to catch them all.

[orangepurple]

Remove 11 and install Windows 10 LTSC IOT edition until the equivalent for 11 drops.

Make Windows shut up for good with Tinywall (https://tinywall.pados.hu/) and whitelist applications as needed.

[andyjohnson0]

Is this Windows 11 Home?

I have a Windows 11 Pro machine and the only intrusive thing I've ever seen was the small weather box on the taskbar, which I immediately turned off. I've never seen any of the others you mention.

If its relevant I use Firedox and Kagi rather than Edge and Bing/Google.

[LegitShady]

I don't see any of that, on a plain old windows 11 home license. Not sure why the experience is so different.

If you have the ability to install explorerpatcher I'd recommend it.

[mostlysimilar]

Perhaps you're in an A/B test. Hardly surprising the experience isn't consistent from person to person.

[LegitShady]

mine is also a retail license rather than an oem included license, but I don't know if that matters.

[maxbaines]

Same for me.

[Wojtkie]

The fact you have to install a separate patcher from a third party company to fix all the glaring issues with windows is telling. Don't have to do that with a Mac. I use both at work and Mac is less cumbersome and easier to work with than Windows, hands down. Windows is a fractured user experience; they're trying too hard to shove the whole "tiles" thing from W8 into everything else and having ads baked into the OS is appalling. Mac doesn't do that out of the box and I don't need to install anything to make it an enjoyable user experience.

[LegitShady]

I installed the patcher to restore the windows 10 style start menu and start bar. Microsoft's decisions on the "new" UI for 11 were super dumb.

But after a month of running windows 11 with explorerpatcher for gaming, hobby programming, and music production (daw, vsts etc) everything is pretty flawless.

[revscat]

Most people will not install explorerpatcher. If it's installation is necessary to have a good experience with Win11, then most people will not have a good experience.

[LegitShady]

It’s not necessary to have a good experience - its purpose to restore the windows 10 style start bar.

[kemayo]

"Windows doesn't feel like adware if you run fairly-scary third-party tools on it first" probably isn't the best sell to non-techy people. (Which I figure is who we have to be talking about, since we're responding to a market-trends article.)

[LegitShady]

The third party tool is just to restore a windows 10 style start bar and start menu, not anything else.

[kemayo]

Ah, I assumed it must be related to adware, since it seemed strange to call it out in your description otherwise.

[wombat-man]

Windows being adware is such a meme now. Meanwhile macos and iOS push tv+, music and icloud storage all the time.

[HeckFeck]

Unlike the start menu, I've yet to see advertising when I open the Launchpad or Spotlight. Also, I can complete setup on my Mac without having to create an Apple ID, and if I opt out the system respects that and is quite usable.

Finally, I can easily put the dock (which W11 imitates, badly) on the left hand side of my screen if I wish. But I suppose Macs are less customisable?

[wombat-man]

Yeah that's true. I get nagged to backup stuff to iCloud or to sign up for apple music but windows has more stuff.

I do see the windows stuff as more upselling to other microsoft apps like onedrive which to me doesn't seem so different form the icloud integration. I use both an haven't noticed much in win11 though.

[crazygringo]

As a Mac and iOS user, I don't know what you're talking about.

I can't remember ever seeing anything about TV+ or Music, and the only time I'm told about iCloud storage is when my drive or backups are almost out of space, which makes sense.

There might be invitations to TV/Music when you install it or first use the OS or something (I can't remember), but there absolutely isn't anything "all the time".

[jeffbee]

> when my drive or backups are almost out of space, which makes sense.

This only makes sense to iCloud users. I've never intentionally put anything in iCloud and I get a constant parade of alerts about it being full. On macOS it doesn't matter where you click on the alert widget, it takes you to the page where you can pay for iCloud regardless. It is very spammy.

[crazygringo]

Yes, phone backups are automatically (or opt-in?) made to iCloud's free storage tier. This is a feature, not a bug, since phones are easily lost/stolen and your average consumer will be happy they didn't lose all their photos and messages. If your free-tier backup space is full, then you need to manage your backups to disable/delete them or reduce your backup size -- those alerts are there for a good reason.

Also, the Mac notification has a prominent "Close" button and doesn't even mention iCloud until you click through to see available options:

https://nektony.com/mac-startup-disk-full

https://macpaw.com/how-to/startup-disk-full-on-mac-os-x

[wombat-man]

Yeah I guess it is less bad.

Whenever I hit the play button it's like 50/50 if Spotify will continue or if apple will open up the music app inviting me to sign up for music.

I did get pestered about joining icloud pretty regularly in the past but haven't seen those in a bit. I prefer onedrive and Google photos since it works on my non apple machines too.

[revscat]

Echoing the sibling comment, I also have never seen this. I have gotten marketing emails from Apple regarding their bundle package for their services, but after unsubscribing to that I have never seen anything further. I certainly have never seen anything in the OS proper, for any device that I own.

[alwillis]

Once you've either subscribed or not to an Apple service, you don't get random popups about it. They offered Fitness+ free for 3-months because I bought a new device; I didn't subscribe and never heard about it again.

That's not my experience with Windows, where I get random popups in the UI of the operating system about different offers. Not cool.

[nortonham]

I don't have ads being pushed to me about apples products as I type this from my M1 macbook air. Apple is far from perfect, but in this specific case they are much better than microsoft.

[manuelabeledo]

Windows has third party product ads in the start menu.

It is not even comparable.

[pxc]

As someone who is accustomed to free software operating systems, macOS is much closer to Windows than it is to what I'm used to.

Just the other day, my M1 Mac at work slowed to such a crawl that mouse movement badly lagged due to runaway 'triald' (ML learning on user inputs) and Siri processes. They relaunched every time I killed them, and they were running even though Siri was explicitly disabled. Turns out there's no way to actually disable Siri without disabling SIP, which I cannot do on my work computer.

So on macOS I'm still plagued with cloud-connected crap I cannot control (or sometimes even expect) that at worst can make my computer completely unusable.

Is it different from Windows bullshit in interesting ways worth talking about? Definitely. Can the two things be compared? Definitely!

[mcphage]

I'm pretty sure this discussion is about showing ads in the OS.

[pxc]

It's about comparability of the two operating systems with respect to similarity to 'adware' which is characterized by

  - nagging
  - online accounts
  - tracking user behavior
  - 'free' cloud services (the user is the product, blah blah blah)
  - having an adversarial relationship with your own tools; having to go to extraordinary lengths to disable user-hostile behavior

which are all very much implicated in products like Siri and in being unable to actually disable it.

When you think seriously about what adware is like and what actually makes it so odious, it's clear that parts of macOS are characterized by many of the same traits and behaviors, even though Apple isn't selling third-party ads in macOS the way Microsoft is doing with Windows.

[revscat]

Siri can be disabled via the “Siri” panel in System Settings.

[maleldil]

> Meanwhile macos and iOS push tv+, music and icloud storage all the time

I've never seen an ad for tv+, music or icloud on macOS.

[wombat-man]

It's not that heavy handed but if I hit the play button on my headphones/keyboard there's a pretty good chance it opens up the apple music app instead of just playing the open spotify app. Since I'm not a music member, front and center it wants me to sign up.

I definitely remember seeing a tv+ signup with I first got my M2. After setting up the device.

If you're not signed into icloud, well you still have all the apps that want you to sign in. Same goes with the tv app.

I use the music app on iOS with mp3s and 3 of the 4 main app tabs are screens trying to sign me up for apple music.

[pxc]

If you feel the need to 'debloat' your OS or 'patch' it to remove ad-ridden UI components like live tiles or whatever, it's probably adware.

[LegitShady]

The patching is just to restore the windows 10 style start menu/bar at the bottom. Not debloating.

[kspyy]

I think the average user doesn't know or want to go out of their way for third party software to make the operating system actually usable