Submitted 3 weeks ago by Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/06/02/updates-to-windows-for-the-digital-markets-act/
Since this sublemmy doesn’t ave any requirement for the title to be the same as the source, can we actually have a correct title: “Microsoft abides to laws in EU and does <…>”.
The title makes it appear as if it’s out of charity and goodness of their corporate heart. (Lie)
The title makes it appear as if it’s out of charity and goodness of their corporate heart
Only to someone that has been living under a rock for the last decade. Everyone else is able to deduct from the “to European users” in the title that the EU forced their hand
Correct. You’re right, without context (or as you put it - living under a rock) one comes to the wrong conclusion.
To get pedantic for a second. The title of this post is “Microsoft gives…” as if this was an altruistic act that Microsoft decided to do for some people, when the article states they did it to comply with a law.
A much better title would have been “EU Forces Microsoft to Give Users More Control:” It returns the credit to the people who deserve the credit and clarifies that it wasn’t something Microsoft did willingly.
Not pedantic. The specificity, imo, is extremely important here, and the poor phrasing really bothered me, too.
In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it’s newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. It’s pathetic.
Tbh everything listed is how 10 LTSC came by default for all users.
Funny what happens when you have a government that actually gives a shit.
Thats what happens when you get unionised.
(because the EU is a type of Union)
I just wish they also didn’t constantly try to force backdoors into everything…
I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with this concept…
European governments and the EU definitely don’t care about us, their citizens, but most do see the threat coming from USA these days, thankfully
But I thought Edge was so crucial for the system to function it can’t be removed? That’s what MS told me at least, and I definitely trust them
No that’s internet explorer. They “removed” it, but really it’s just hidden in a way so you can’t run it directly.
Windows 11 does not allow Edge to be removed. There may be some roundabout ways to do it, but the system actively puts up a LOT of roadblocks. It’s extremely trashy.
I just found out the other day that items pinned to the taskbar are in %AppData%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar. 🤦♂️
Microsoft is a sad parody of itself.
Europeans have the Freedom to Uninstall SPYWARE? LoL COMMIES here in America we have TRUE FREEDOM of being FORCE FED SPYWARE with NO Other options!
the other option is a faster, more privacy focused, free, open source operating system.
I made the switch a little over a year ago, I know not everybody can/wants to - but major distros are honestly polished enough these days that I haven’t looked back, I should have switched to Linux years ago.
Not everyone will agree, but I think Ubuntu + installing apps through Flatpak is a winning option.
Linux gives all global users more control: Uninstall Windows, say goodbye to Microsoft
Now switch package managers and run all your drives on different obscure file systems! Make every login cycle through plasma gnome an unhinged custom DE and raw terminal where a camera with sign language recognition is the only valid input!
Sounds like half of the process your average Windows debloater goes through every time they update?
You’re doing something wrong, maybe ask someone knowledgeable for help with your system. It doesn’t happen to other people.
Sure, that’s average 5th year apprenticeship GNU/Wizard territory…there are adequate distros for people who open the “updates available” alert once every year or so. Ease them in. Fuck…
As a wise lion who was a Jesus allegory once said:
Do not cite the old magics to me, witch. I was there when it was written.
Now…I’m not old enough to ACTUALLY have been there when it was written… you’re still being a dick.
I would love to, but we stiill use Windows specific software (and sometimes even Dos specific software!) but we already do that through a VM. The other issue is the extensions we have for Microsoft Office just won’t work on the Linux alternatives and even then Libreoffice isn’t good enough for half the staff in my accounting firm because it lacks certain features for now.
Most companies who work in browser based software + email can easily switch to Linux and they would barely notice it.
even then Libreoffice isn’t good enough for half the staff in my accounting firm because it lacks certain features for now.
The worst part is where some functionality breaks in a document bigger than a holiday card. I mean formulae vanishing.
I think OOO around year 2009 was very stable and without such annoying bugs. But I haven’t tested it there TBH.
Seriously, feature parity is a dead end. If there were a cross-platform office suite that would at least support the absolutely necessary things with a format not much more complex than org-mode, big documents (300 pages without degrading performance) and UTF-8, it would be fine. I think. That format can even be XML-based, just … why would you have vanishing objects in a document past their certain number? Do they have an unsigned byte counter somewhere?
I would love to, but we stiill use Windows specific software
If I had 1 cent every time I read that… and I pulled those cents together… and then paid software developers to build that missing software for other OSes like Linux… then we’d gradually see less of those comments.
It’s as if the isolation was the business model, proprietary software insuring that alternatives do not exist because users do not bother to get together and unstuck themselves from glowingly dangerous (security wise but probably even financially dependencies.
Hopefully initiatives like NLNet are precisely trying to alleviate such challenges. Until them compatibility layers like Proton are showing the way with arguably some of the most complex and demanding in terms of performance software, namely games.
I’d love to at work, but I’m using some win-only software with a f-ed up licence manager that I cannot stuff into a VM.
Please let them also remove all the XBox nonsense. The other day my laptop from work that runs Windows 11 Pro gave a big ass prompt if I didn’t want to try XBox Game Pass with the new Doom game. It’s basically an ad for games on a Pro machine, ridiculous.
You know what is truly ridiculous? It’s when I installed Windows N (the version without all that bullshit), but each time I launched a game, it complained that some Xbox app was missing. When I finally said, ‘Fuck it, let’s install that crap,’ I learned that it isn’t even possible to install on that Windows edition. Yet they would still show me the error about the missing app nonetheless. Every. Single. Time.
You can already do that:
Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxApp" | Remove-AppxPackage Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxIdentityProvider" | Remove-AppxPackage -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxSpeechToTextOverlay" | Remove-AppxPackage Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxGameOverlay" | Remove-AppxPackage Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay" | Remove-AppxPackage Get-AppxPackage "Microsoft.Xbox.TCUI" | Remove-AppxPackage Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\GameBar" -Name "AutoGameModeEnabled" -Type DWord -Value 0 Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\System\GameConfigStore" -Name "GameDVR_Enabled" -Type DWord -Value 0 If (!(Test-Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GameDVR")) { New-Item -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GameDVR" | Out-Null } Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GameDVR" -Name "AllowGameDVR" -Type DWord -Value 0
You’re welcome
That’s a ridiculous step by step guide. Let me see if I can simplify.
Step 1: plugin your ventoy flash drive with Linux distro
Every time I see PowerShell syntax, I have this dissonance where I feel like it should be better than Unix shells, its command are surely more descriptive, still… It disgusts me for some reason. Too long, maybe?
Check out the debloat script. It can’t get rid of everything (like Edge) but it makes a HUGE difference.
Thanks for the suggestion. It’s my laptop from work, I have zero say in what software it runs, I don’t even have admin rights on it. None of my personal stuff runs Windows. But it might help other people on their own machines.
I love being in EU
Oh look, with the threat of a big enough fine, you can uninstall those things.
Or at least hide the front ends for them.
The best control: uninstall Windows.
And local accounts when?
Still using it that way.
🇪🇺the🇪🇺land🇪🇺of🇪🇺the🇪🇺free🇪🇺
The home of the brave, and the land of the free.
Imagine living somewhere where those in charge have even there smallest bit of spine.
mmm, that was nice. can i have another?
This is why when u pirate windows u always pirate the European version. Not that I condone pirating windows that would be immoral and wrong.
uses Linux to pirate Windows
deletes the iso because it sucks
just because I could!
I need windows for my cad program so I just run it in a vm
Pirating windows and adobe is never wrong.
Pirating Windows is wrong, but the lesser evil compared to buying Windows. Ideally, you shouldn’t do either
Windows 11 is freely available through official channels and only disables some personalization GUIs if you don’t activate. But you can still customize things without the GUI. There may be other gotchas to force you to pay up, but piracy isn’t even necessary.
By piracy I mean modifying some registry keys to trick the free version into thinking its activated
Microsoft is grudgingly forced to give…*
Microsoft: “Suck it, Americans”
🐧
And again; repeat after me: install Linux already, just get it over with
Perhaps sometime in the future, more people will try Linux and see how good it is. My recommendation based on my own experience:
Want stable, just working. Robust workhorse: Try Debian Want newest, nicest, good for gaming (need a tiny bit of tinkering if you run Nvidia): Try Fedora Want easy to install, but a bit older and slower, but requires no tinkering: Try PopOS
Don’t like settings, tweaks and fuzz: choose Gnome desktop 😊
I’m morbidly eager to see how they’ll handle the Win 10 EoL (yeah, yeah, it ain’t dyin’, just not getting updated, same thing to me tbh) in October. I bet it’ll be a shitshow.
Huh, well ill continue living without all that shit on Linux Mint.
So being able to uninstall apps on your computer is news?
For those curious, if you can get a European Windows product key, you can install the “N” version of Windows. Be warned, it only works with certain product keys…
The standard Windows installer should give the option of “Windows 10” or “Windows 10 N” (or similar). The N version is basically bloatware free out of the box…
The regular version has a bunch of promos pre-installed, like candy crush, and other things that most people couldn’t give a shit about…
Recently I’ve been playing a “fun” game with my work laptop where I’ll remove copilot, and a few days later it will appear again. Weeee. In that case, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a policy in place to enable copilot on my works systems… I’m sure someone who works here, probably higher up the food chain than me, wants it enabled, and the ham fisted policy maker can’t create a policy just for those who want it, so everyone gets it because the bosses son Shane decided that he wants to see how much of his work can get done by AI so he can do even less while on the clock.
Too little too late? Some European businesses have already made the change to open source. Shit should be free to anyone doing business with it anyway.
If you’re in the US, you can use O&O ShutUp to help you turn off the more intrusive aspects of Windows with ease.
Wanted to play a game on my kid’s computer that had windows 11 N or some shit. Couldn’t play because it needed the “media pack”, which in its turn installs everything N stands for. Clown world.
Windows users are a revenue stream, not customers. M$ views it’s users as a sort of raw material that can be processed with dark patterns for ads and subscriptions. And like everything else, Americans are treated with the most disrespect and coercion.
Enkrod@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Gotta LOVE the EU, they’re working at a glacial pace but sooner or later (most likely later) it changes the landscape for the better.
If only enshittification would happen slow enough for the EU to catch up to.
hansolo@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I reeeeally wish they would just embrace and find open source software as a public good and get it over with. The equally glacial pace of adoption of OSS to avoid vendor lock in with MS is not exactly giving the OSS world the boost it deserves.
Enkrod@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Yeah, well the DMA wasn’t going to cost most EU politicians much of their good ol’ corporate lobbying monies. But switching the EU off of Micro$oft would definitely not only lose those funds, but also introduce way more vigorous counter-lobbying.
One pro of the EU’s glacial pace is that they frog-boil the shareholders, meaning most counter-lobbying activities are relatively tame.
But damn, do I wish they would just give the finger to all those ~american~ corporations and start a 4-year transition to OSS.
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
The EU is pumping a lot of money into FLOSS, often not even for administrative use (like, say, lemmy gets EU funding), but at far as adoption rate in administration is concerned well the Commission is one of the worst offenders. As in municipalities realising they can’t fully switch to LibreOffice because they need to apply for EU funds and the commission only accepts .docx. Parliament happily spending money on something and the executive getting around to getting its shit together are two different things.
OTOH it’s not all about Microsoft and the like, a lot of administrative software is special-purpose, written by private companies according to specs, paid for by public money. Making that kind of thing open source is a no-brainer. It’s also a way better use of money to improve and customise some open source ERP than to go to SAP and get a customised solution there.
And a lot of that has to do with lacking competency in administration – outside of police, specifically IT forensics, it’s usually quite dire. States have no issues figuring out whether a blueprint makes sense when they’re issuing building permits, road and railroad engineering, of course they can do that, but IT? Nope. Bring in the private consultants and private consultants are basically the marketing arm of big software companies.
thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 3 weeks ago
Schleswig Holstein (sp?) are doing so, ditto Openhagen and Aarhaus (DK) and I believe France are looking into it
Yondoza@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I agree it feels very slow, but identifying the correct action and then building consensus around that action takes time. Once consensus is built it is very stable though. That is supposed to be the biggest benefit of democracy; stability built through coalition.
DaddleDew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I have a copy of Windows 10 LTSC that I have installed on a virtual machine just in case I need the one last program that I use that I cannot get to work on Linux.
Lately I upgraded my machine and had to reinstall everything. As I was installing Windows on my VM, it started demanding that I create an account and wouldn’t let me proceed without one, asked be to associate third party accounts to my OS and was generally being extremely intrusive and forceful in ways I didn’t remember it being before, like opening Edge and forcing me to click through an introduction that I didn’t want without giving me the option to close it. I then realized that I had forgotten to disable network access to my VM and that Windows had downloaded updates during the install.
I immediately destroyed that VM and started over again, this time without allowing it to connect to internet. Suddenly the experience was far better.
The moment I had let Windows connect to the internet it had thoroughly enshittified itself. It let me appreciate how badly Microsoft has enshittified Windows 10 over the years ever since its release. We are far away from the Windows 7 days.
Goretantath@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Ltsc or ltsc iot? Only the IOT lasts long enough and is debloated.
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I wish Microsoft would just let me buy a copy of Windows 11 Ultimate and be done with it. No restrictions, no bloat, privacy, just an exchange of money for a product.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
They’re moving faster than any other government regulatory body.
rockerface@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I wish we could join soon, but that’s also happening at the glacial pace