I'm Jim and I'm Alan and here are again. Windows 11 has made the clean Windows install
an oxymoron.
You know, it kind of has been for a while, even as far back as the earlier versions of
Windows 10. Honestly, even going all the way back to Windows XP, I remember games getting
bundled in. I actually quit a job once because I got blamed for Windows XP having games
bundled in and those games existing on people's computers when nobody had asked me to strip all
those out of the installations, but it's gotten a lot worse. Even with Windows 10, you get the
Microsoft Store stuff. When you do a, quote, clean, unquote installation, you still have to,
you know, make it through rounds of Windows notifications and, you know, begs for this and that
and the other and, oh, please use our browser and fighting you if you want to install a different
browser and, you know, all this nonsense. But I will, I will say there are some really nice
new features in Windows 11, mostly the ones that make you have to use Windows less. We have
Windows subsystem for Linux improvements. But this article is not kidding. Microsoft really is
continuing to ramp it up worse and worse. And yeah, it is starting to feel like a brand new
Windows installation from an ISO direct from Microsoft. It is starting to feel a lot like getting,
you know, a Dell in spron from the mid 2000s hand to you. I remember hearing complaints from some
customers is like, we did a fresh install of like the business version of Windows 10 here.
And when we open the start menu, there's an ad for Candy Crush. What the actual hell?
Again, this goes back to Windows 10, the Candy Crush stuff. And the worst part was,
you can remove the Candy Crush and then it just reinstalls itself behind your back.
Now, it's not technically a reinstallation because what really happens is it installs itself the
first time you click on the pre-populated shortcut that makes it look as though it's already installed.
But regardless, the point is you can remove those links. But if you do a couple of days later,
they're right back again. Yeah. And even my media center machine, I've had a new shortcut for
Microsoft Edge to get added to the desktop. And then I delete it. Some time later, it's back again.
It's like, no, I never want that. Get it off my desktop.
Now, I will say, you know, taking up a devil's advocate role again. It's not like Microsoft
exists in a vacuum in this. Everybody has been getting worse about this kind of onboarding
crap lately. The first time you open a browser, any browser, welcome to your, you know, crap of
like five or six different like animated screens with transitions, trying to tell you how wonderful
that browser is, which I do not need. Do not want and do not appreciate even Firefox does it.
Now, if Firefox is credit to the extent you can call this credit, at least when you get sick of
Firefox is not onboarding nonsense after the first three screens, you can just click X on the
hold-down browser and reopen it and it won't start the process over again. It will just give you
the browser that you wanted in the first place. But I noticed recently on recent builds of
Microsoft Edge, they make the dialogue modal and full screen. You cannot change focus from it.
There is no way to close it. You just have to wave through this endless series of like,
what color background would you like in your browser? What wallpaper would you like on
empty screens in your browser? Would you like your browser to do this? Would you like to do the
other? We're great. Please don't install Chrome. That would suck for you, you know, just nonsense
to the point that, you know, again, in my last supposedly clean, when it's 11 installation,
I got through three or four screen and you know, I didn't go back off here and point out like,
this is not just an isolated gripe for me. Like, I install this stuff all the time. So like,
the first three or four screens of browser onboarding barely registered to me because at this point,
I'm kind of expecting it, but it's gotten to the point that even with that level of
acclimatization to the inshitification of the browser onboarding experience, the browser is still
all good at the point. I'm like, okay, enough of this. Like, I don't even want to just wait for
the slide transition to click the next until it's done, make it stop. And in that edge installation
that I was talking about before, I noticed they had made it go modal full screen, no close,
no anything. I ended up hitting control out delete to bring up task manager to kill the damn
thing and restart it. Just thanks. Well, I think even back to like Windows Server 2003, I remember
using it in a VM and we'd reset the VM to a fresh install between every class. And at every time
you open the browser, you had to click through a bunch of the things and be like, yes, I want to go
to a website that's not from Microsoft. And I understand that this is the internet and bad
things are going to happen to my computer. And like for these dialogues and allow, allow,
before you can get to any website every time it's like, has nobody at Microsoft had to use a
fresh install in a VM that's going to roll back and be a fresh install every day? Probably not.
I would imagine that most of the people at Microsoft are still just using Microsoft provided
images for internal use that are, you know, set up and ready to go, ready to work.
I don't know how many people at all in Microsoft see what an install process actually looks like
judging from the state of those install procedures. And you have to be fair, it's one of those things
like you can make a business perspective that it just doesn't make sense to waste much effort
on install procedures because normal customers will either never see them in the case of operating
system installations or, you know, only seem like once every several years on a browser.
So in a sense, we're really whining saying, why can't the world be set up more for, you know,
us the professionals rather than for those filthy end users? But honestly, I can't imagine end
users really want that or love that either. They may not have to deal with it as often as we do.
But it's not pleasant for anybody. It's not useful for anybody. It's forced unskippable ads.
You know, it's no different than firing up paramount so that I can watch Star Trek's
Change New Worlds and having it bombard me with unskippable trailers for the animated one below
decks that I've already watched all of which it should know because I watched all of them on paramount.
But I still have to watch these unskippable trailers for the thing that I've already watched every
last bit of and there hasn't been anything new for months. It really does say a lot about the state
of this advanced advertising technology. They keep saying, you know, all these ads are like super
targeted. It's like you have all this information that maybe I'd prefer you didn't even have,
but you have it all and you can't use it to your advantage or mine. Like come on.
Just advertise me a show at this point. Like if there's gotta be an unskippable, you know, trailer,
make it for anything on your network that I haven't watched yet. Even if it's not something I would
like, just change it up and make it something that I haven't seen. Maybe that'll be interesting.
But it doesn't either of us any good to make me watch trailers for something that I've seen
every last episode of and there's nothing new for. And you know it. It's your stuff I watched
on your service that you're hitting me with that on. You're watching Star Trek. You must want more
Star Trek. It's like when Amazon makes you it's like you bought a bread maker. You must be starting
a collection of bread makers. To be honest, the reason that particular one angered me so much and
has stuck with me and I'm ranting about it now and we're supposed to be talking about Microsoft
is that when the first time it hit me with that below dex trailer when I was queuing up a
strange new world's episode, I got super excited because I thought that meant the new season of
below dex had started. Yes, I would have loved to have gone and watched that. Nope. Not even close.
Just felt like hitting me with that unskippable promo for something that was, you know, a year old.
We did get the crossover episode though, so you know, but anyway, it's not just the installation,
though, is it? It's the first usage here. It's the experience that users get when they first turn
a laptop on. If they don't have a professional like myself that they paid a deal with all this
crap for them and just hand them a working device, yes, the users absolutely see this.
I had the misfortune of experiencing Windows 11 home from scratch and oh man, everyone knows this,
but you have to connect it to the internet. You have to create a Microsoft account.
Obviously, you can get around this with Roofness and stuff if you're not you're doing
creating an ISO, but this was just a fresh install on a laptop and it was just horrible.
It just made me really, really, really appreciate Linux and even macOS, which is it's not ideal.
There's a lot of bullshit you have to go through, but most of it you can just next next or close,
whereas there was just no getting away from this. I could not use the computer until I had gone
through creating an account and then creating a backup email address and phone number and all this
shit and oh man, Windows home has always been an example of market exploitation. It costs
Microsoft more money to have to support a home version and a pro version. It is in no way a
savings. It costs more, but they do it so they can nail people with less money to spend with a
product with a bunch of crap ripped out. Again, we've talked about this in earlier episodes of the
show. It's ripping the cushions out of the couch. There is no consumer-friendly reason to say,
well, you got Windows home, so you can't have local accounts and you can't join a domain and you
can't run remote desktop services on your machine. You can use the RDP client, but you can't have
anybody else RDP in. Just for shits and giggles, you can't have MMC. You wanted access to all the
tools in MMC that might be really helpful for demowaring your system maybe. Now screw you,
you got home. There's a reason I have never and will never buy the home version of a Windows
operating system. It's a really pushing it when they start including like trial offers and
oh, here, have a hundred gigabytes of one drive and oh, here, for one dollar, you can have a PC
game pass and just pushing all this crap. I was like, you're supposed to be my operating system,
not just a method to shove ads into my face. It gets even worse if you actually open up the
Microsoft store. Holy crap, like the editor recommended games and stuff, littering that thing,
and it's just the absolute worst shitware that you would get angry about discovering on an Android
phone ever. And it's not just on the store, like it's recommended stuff. I actually went off
on a big rant about that and you know, a Windows 11 preview when I was working for R's because I
went into the Microsoft store because Microsoft had been talking about how improved it was. So
despite having long since decided that was a hive of scum and villainy, I wanted no part of
since I was reviewing it for R's Technica, I went into the store and you know, I promptly found
all these horrible recommended games with like daily energy that you know, you can pay money to
get more energy to be able to play the stupid game or just again, if you've played mobile games,
any mobile games, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Think of the absolute worst of them
that you uninstalled in a heartbeat once you saw what it was really like. Yeah, that comes to
recommend it on the Windows store. Well, it gets even worse than this. We were going to talk about
this anyway. And then I saw today a piece on the verge by Tom Warren. Microsoft is using malware
like pop-ups to get people to ditch Google. Yeah, Tom over there at the verge has absolutely had
enough of Microsoft's shit. I'm here for it. He ripped him a new one and it's well deserved
and you love to see it. So what's happening is, you know, Microsoft keeps hijacking
searches for a Chrome that are made on Bing because remember again, you know, you got a brand new
Windows computer. The only browser on it is Edge. Edge's default search engine is Bing. So it's
a pretty natural and normal workflow here to get your brand new Windows installation and open up
Edge and just write in the address bar, you know, type in Chrome or Chrome download or Chrome MSI
or whatever and hit enter and you expect to get, you know, return. It's a download page for Chrome.
And instead, Microsoft's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. They've done several different things.
Sometimes you get like a full page Bing result that appears to be like AI talking to you about
how great Edge is. But it's not actually AI. It's a canned thing. It just looks like some chat GPT
thing. And then the thing at the top that Tom was complaining about, there's an executable
that actually gets dropped into a temp directory in Windows that makes a pop-up not in the browser,
not in the notification center, just a pop-up dialog like on your desktop spawned by this single
executable that got dumped into Windows, exhorting you to, you know, see how awesome Bing and Edge are.
And people kept thinking it was malware because, I mean, that's a straight up malware technique.
Let me drop a random executable in an obscure temp directory somewhere under your C-conference
Windows and go from there and make something that looks like a notification, but isn't via the
notification center and so on. And it's exhorting you to earn Microsoft reward points every time you
search. I can't wait. I absolutely cannot wait for Microsoft coin. You know, it's coming.
Bing coin. Yeah. Bing coin. Reminds me of even back in the Windows XP days. Our little joke was,
Internet Explorer is the best browser for downloading a better browser. Yeah. So here's
another thing that really pissed me off in Tom's report. And clearly he was not that happy about
it either, but I feel like he could have specifically explored this one a little further.
When he reached out to Microsoft, he got a response from Caitlin Rulston, director of communications.
We are aware of these reports. Again, this is about the rogue executable that shows up into your
Windows directory. Microsoft director of communications responds. We are aware of these reports and
have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this
unintended behavior. What the hell do you mean unintended? Y'all put it there. It's doing what you
wrote it to do. There's no. Oh, oh, we didn't realize that we accidentally dropped an executable in
your Windows directory. What? Yeah, it makes a note. Windows isn't freeware. It requires a license
that almost every consumer ultimately pays for. That would be in the form of the price of the laptop
if it's a Windows OEM or a product key if you bought and built your own PC. You know,
Microsoft should respect the fact that people already pay for Windows and don't want ads
shut down their threats. Windows is an important productivity tool for many people and shouldn't be
treated like a cheap streaming box loaded with ads. There's a reason why other operating systems
have switched to being free so that they can just constantly force you to get new versions.
Is this in part because they spent so much money on the open AI stuff? Absolutely not.
This is not anything to do with some hardship that Microsoft is facing. This is literally just
the continued process of inshitification. We live in an era of robber barons. Now, our robber
barons are usually in the form of C corpse instead of, you know, like individual people with a name
or at least they hide behind the C corpse, but this is just like the robber baron area of,
you know, the industrial revolution. Any number of periods through history. We are in a period of
inshitification and everywhere is doing it. It is endemic to our corporate culture that you extract
more money whenever you can and the only reason something might be beyond the pale is if it
actually incurs a hard consequence. I don't mean just a consequence like people say they're upset
about it. I mean a real consequence. Not a fine of $100,000 to a billion dollar company,
like a fine that actually hurts or an executive doing jail time or an anti-trust suit that really
goes somewhere. Those are the only things anybody cares about anymore. Anything short of that,
whatever. And on that note, it's probably worth pointing out that if all this stuff sounds
unfamiliar to you, you're like, well, I haven't seen like a full page fake, you know, AI chat
GPT thing. And I've searched for Chrome one being, well, you should be aware that Microsoft
rolls these things out in small batches to find out just how angry people will get about it.
And you couldn't once and say, oh, well, that's responsible. So, you know, they're trying it out
in, you know, small batches to find out when they made a mistake rather than making everybody
experience that mistake. But you could also say that it's just more in shittification. It means
that you don't know what you're going to get. It means that your neighbor might have a wonderful
experience and you might have an absolute terrible one because your name came up in the hat
for the next way Microsoft is wondering, well, people tolerate this particular way of screwing
them over. Well, in particular, the fact that their goal is to search for and find exactly how close
to the red line they can get of what people will not tolerate. They get is, you know, how we can
push it. It's as close as possible that having we can keep inching up to it rather than just
seeing, you know, is this change good for people? It's, can we slowly chip away at the quality
until it's just all this shit? It's even worse than that, Alan. They don't have to chip away
slowly because since they can trial it in small batches, it's totally okay if they go over the
red line and lose some people because it was only just those few people and most of the rest of
the people who haven't encountered it will just be like, huh, that doesn't make me sense. I haven't
seen that and move on. So instead of having to very slowly chip away because if you go too far,
you might hurt yourself. Well, a customer here or there isn't going to make that big of a difference.
Let's see what we can get away with. Well, what I meant was they spent all this money on the
open AI stuff and they've integrated it into Bing. And now you've probably got management,
pressurizing middle management to get people to actually use Bing with the AI bullshit in it.
And they're just trying everything they possibly can to get people onto that. It's not some sinister
agenda. It's more just a case of people aren't that interested in the AI bullshit. Let's try and
get our numbers up on that. It is a sinister agenda, but it's a universally sinister agenda that
our entire society is experiencing. Like I said, it's not limited to Microsoft. It's not limited
to Microsoft and Google. It's not limited to add company name here. Like I said, even when you drill
all the way down to freaking Mozilla, a non-profit, you get a taste of it. Now, it's obviously nowhere
near as bad installing Firefox as dealing with what we're talking about with being an edge.
But the degree of increase in shittiness is pretty similar between Firefox over the last several
years and Microsoft over the last several years. It's just a trend in society. I said, I don't
know that just is the right word. It is an overall trend in society. It absolutely sucks. But
that's as close as I can get to your, there's no sinister agenda thing. Like it's more of a,
well, Microsoft is just part of our entirely shitty society. Hang on, did you just compare what
Microsoft is doing here with what Mozilla have done? Yes, I did. There are different places in
the spectrum. He's not saying they're equivalent. He's just comparing them. As part of patent
may be, but let me ask you a hypothetical, Joe, do you enjoy going through five or six steps
of Firefox's, oh, hey, it looks like you haven't used in the browser a while every few months.
Is that useful for you? No. Is it useful for your wife? No. Do you know anyone it's useful for?
No. What purpose does it serve? It doesn't. Someone thought it was a good idea. It tries to get you
hyped up about Firefox and Firefox's features and using all the things that are Firefox and how
wonderful Firefox is. Now granted, there's not a monetary mode of there because it is free, but it's
the same trend towards going, we don't care this inconveniences everybody and nobody likes it. We
have a thing that we want to do here and we get to make you sit through it. No, you say, I don't
agree. I don't think that that's the motivation. I think the motivation is that they genuinely think
that it's a good feature. Okay. Why are they dumber than you are? You realize that it's not a good
feature and that literally nobody you know is finds it useful. Why do you think that everybody at Mozilla
is more out of touch than you are? Because they're in a bubble. They don't know people. They don't
have wives. They don't have kids. They don't have friends. People are too polite to tell them it's done.
I'm more with Jim on this one. It's by getting people to use Firefox. That's how they sell their
pocket thing and their VPN thing and support Firefox. I understand why and I'm to some to be okay
with it. But it is for the same motivations that Microsoft does it. Firefox has more restraint
because they know it will be more backlash because of their target audience and because they're
trying to be the better people. But their motivation is still the same as Microsoft's to get more
eyeballs and more money. And I do not buy for one second that they have no idea that people don't
want it. Don't appreciate it and prefer not to have it. Not buying it. I just have this idea of
Mozilla developers just kind of living on the West Coast in their cafes. They mostly live in Europe.
I guess so. But the management or whatever. It's that sort of, you know, that San Francisco culture,
the Silicon Valley culture and they're just so used to huffing their own shit. You mean that
Silicon Valley tech pro culture of like we get to do whatever we want to do and we get to shape
the world? That one. No more than like I like to huff my own shit type of culture of like yeah,
Firefox is awesome and everything we do is awesome. And like I was just anyone who's criticizing us
is just a troll and like, you know, they just hate us or whatever. I think it's more that kind
of mentality rather than some sinister fucking plan. Sinister isn't a great adjective for it,
but we're still talking about deliberately putting in a feature that inconveniences the crap
out of people to no good use because it serves your own purpose. And no world are folks at Mozilla
saying, you know what people will really love about our browser? Walking through all this crap
every time they open it, every time it's installed or every few months when it says, you know,
oh, hey, there you are. I disagree. I think that somebody somewhere, Mozilla, thinks that people
want that. I think they're just misguided. I think the very old version of that feature was called
Firefox refresh and it just like disabled all your extensions and stuff to try to make Firefox
faster again. And it was just a little bar across the top that you could please like do you want to
basically start with a fresh profile instead of your old one? Yep. And it was optional.
You got to choose. Yeah. And then someone gets assigned to that feature and it just gets
feature creep and gets more and more in your face. But the feature creep was specifically for
find out why they weren't using Firefox. Remind them to keep using Firefox.
Salve them on the subscription to pocket. Yeah. Mozilla VPN full screen ads. I've never seen
the full screen ad for the VPN in my version. Well, it's not full screen, but like a new tab.
You update it and you instead of your homepage, I have it set to Google whatever.
You've got Google on one tab and then this other tab like what's this? Oh, it's an advert
for their VPN service. Oh, yes. I close this without ever even looking at them.
Yeah, that. The extra tab you always get. Again, pretty much any browser like
you keep using the word sinister and like you put a real point in an edge behind that. And I would
not call Mozilla a sinister organization by any means. So like I'm acknowledging that point
you're putting behind that. And I'm kind of brushing it off and saying, no, man, not like that.
But again, we're just we're talking about a culture of what we can get away with. Like what is
acceptable? Not what is right. Not what is good. Not what is the best thing for our users.
What's acceptable? And it's acceptable to force your users through six or seven screens to
crap every few months. Everybody has gotten used to it. So why not? I don't want to believe that
Mozilla is like that, man. I just don't want to believe that. But to some degree, they have to
make money to keep Firefox going. And there's some degree that I'm willing to put up with in order
because I use Firefox and want it to keep going. You want to believe that they're so
abjectly stupid that they can't figure that out for themselves and have never talked to another
human being. Yeah, that would be preferable. Because name the human that if you ask them,
do you like this? We'll say anything. But oh, no, I want to believe that people working from
Mozilla have good intentions on not just doing it wrong. Are there magically some different
class of people than software developers that work on a random Linux distro or any other project?
Dear listeners, if any of you enjoy browser onboarding processes, please email and let us know.
If you don't enjoy it, you can write in if you want, but you don't need to. We get it. You don't
none of you do. We don't need that much. No, we don't need that much email. If somebody out there
is like, yeah, I look forward to that browser onboarding process. Maybe it'll show me a feature I
didn't know about. Yeah, I pay attention through all that. I'm like, okay, let me get through this.
I might get something good out of it. Write in and let us know. I would genuinely like to hear about
that. Okay, this episode is sponsored by people who support us with PayPal and Patreon.
Go to 2.5admins.com slash support for details of how you can support us too.
2.5admins is part of the Late Night Linux family, which means that for $10 a month on Patreon,
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Let's do some free consulting then, but first just a quick thank you to everyone who supports us
with PayPal and Patreon. We really do appreciate that. If you want to join us, people can go to 2.5admins.com
slash support. And if you want to send any questions for Jim and Alan or your feedback,
you can email show at 2.5admins.com. Jeremy says, I want to build an ours and only have it powered
on when I need to use it. It's a home setup so I can go and switch it on. Do hard drives or other
components with no power degrade faster compared to having them switch on. Short answer is yes.
Depending on the particular component you're concerned about, usually it's not so much a case
of degrading because the power is off. It's a case of the hardest time on every electric
component in a system is the power on moment. When you power on your system, you have to deal with
startup current going to anything with motors or coils, which can be your power supply itself,
mechanical hard drives, anything like that. One startup cycle is worth probably a hundred hours
of steady state operation, maybe more in terms of wear and tear. But that's not even the only
concern. You're talking about a NAS. Now, if you're talking about a NAS, usually you do mean
mechanical hard drives and mechanical hard drives are completely fine. Being left powered off for,
you know, very long intervals of time. SSDs, on the other hand, if you've got any of those in
there, will the charge in the individual cells in NAND flash does degrade over time? Now the
firmware in your SSD when your SSD is powered on knows how long it's been since the charge level
in that cell has been refreshed. And it will either refresh it or copy the data out to a different
cell in time to prevent it from degrading into unusability. But if you had that thing powered off
for a long time, well, the firmware is not powered on. It can't do its management. So you can lose
data that way. In some cases, you may begin losing data on a completely cold SSD in just the space of
a few months. Yeah, there's a reason why in the smart data on your hard drive, it will tell you
the number of times it's been powered on because that is one of the biggest factors for the health of
hard drive is the more times it's entered on, the closer it is to death. Yeah, the energy required
to get that motor spinning in the first place is way more than just keeping it spinning once it's
got that inertia. Yeah, now to be fair, we're not, we're not talking about this in terms of power
consumption. Well, no, but just the stress that comes with the, the big jolt of energy that,
that gets it moving. Yes, absolutely. That startup current is immense compared to steady state
operating current and it has a real toll on all the coils and everything that needs coils in
that device. Again, that includes your power supply. That includes any mechanical hard drives,
any mechanical optical drives, cooling fans. Yep. Every last bit of it, you may also have noticed
that you'll have a machine that is on 24 seven and the fans don't make any noise whatsoever.
And then, you know, the power goes off or you need to shut it down for some reason and leave
it off for a couple hours and you start it back up. And now you have that obnoxious fan rattles
you can't get rid of. There are a lot of ways that different components of your system
have a lot more difficulty in being powered off and back on again than they do in just staying
steady state operational. Right. Well, we better get out of here then. Remember, show at 2.5
admins.com. If you want to send in any questions or your feedback, you can find me at joarest.com
slash mustard on. You can find me at joarest dashes.net slash social. And I'm Ed Allen Jude.
We'll see you next week.