A few weeks ago I ran out of screen on the A external monitor that my work-issued MacBook Air can run. So I switched to my five year old Windows desktop and plugged in another monitor. To like. Productivity through the roof. But that means I’m finally spending a lot of time on Windows 11, and my God, is that weird.
There are some things that Windows does very well compared to macOS and Linux. All the games are there, for one thing, and Windows runs on all sorts of hardware without much fiddling. You don’t have to spend at least a thousand dollars on a non-upgradable machine to use it. Plus, you usually don’t need to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line manually assembling the damn operating system.
But for each title like “Windows 11 Notepad finally gets a spell check feature,” there is a “Microsoft once again integrates pop-up ads in Google Chrome on Windows.” For each Windows Subsystem for Linuxwho governs, there is a “Microsoft begins testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu.” Microsoft seems determined to fill Windows 11 with “features” that distract your attention or try to convince or trick you into using a Microsoft product instead of what you were going to use. I’m 30 or 40 and I don’t need it.
I grew up with Windows 3.1, NT, and 95. I went to college on a Dell desktop. I worked for MaximumPC magazine for five years, for God’s sake. I have built dozens of PCs. I’m typing this on my primary home computer, a mini-ITX gaming rig that I lovingly assembled by hand in 2019. I continue to use Windows.
But in recent years, I spent more than 40 hours a week using the relatively leisurely macOS for work and my non-work hours spending as little time in front of a computer as possible. So even though I upgraded my desktop to Windows 11 about a year ago, I hadn’t spent much time on it. When I used my PC, it was mainly for home administration or (rarely) playing a game and, therefore, not interacting much with the operating system itself. I am a frog that came out of the pot; I just jumped in and got scalded.
I am a frog that came out of the pot; I just came back and got scalded
At one point, a button appeared next to my Start menu. Clicking on it or even hovering over it gets a third of my monitor covered with stuff I never asked for and doesn’t care about. An avalanche of news. Stock prices. Weather. (This one is useful, but I can get it from many places.) There is also now a button in system tray For Co-pilotmy daily AI companion, now present on Microsoft products in inverse proportion to its utility.
The Start menu has been mostly garbage since Windows 8, but it is now almost completely useless in its default state. Half are pinned apps that I didn’t pin or even install. And I don’t blame the OEM. I’m the OEM and didn’t put them here.
Somewhere in the latest versions, Windows seems to have forgotten how to index files on my computer. So if I try to view a program, file, or setting the usual way – by pressing Windows and starting to type – it mostly shows me results from the web, which are useless because it uses Bing to find them.
Microsoft did something Really remarkable with the supporting documents as well. This information was integrated into the operating system. Now, if you are in the display settings window (for example) and you go to the support section and click “Multiple monitor setup”, Microsoft Edge opens – even if it is not your default browser – and displays the phrase “how to add multiple monitors to your Windows 11 PC site: microsoft.com“, and displays a page with only one result: an information box taken from the corresponding support page on the Microsoft websiteas well as a link to open the exact Settings screen you just came from.
It’s a) crazy and b) still a significant improvement over last time I tried this when a similar link returned no results. This is Microsoft corporate synergy at work. Why keep all those Windows users to yourself when, with a single click, you can make sure the Bing and Edge teams eat too?
Edge was a slightly improved version of Chrome. Now it’s full of sidebars and bloatware. (It’s probably still an improved version of Chrome.) It keeps asking to change my default search engine back to Bing (I won’t), and its default home screen is, yes, lots of garbage.
Why would one of the biggest tech companies in the world release such a… crazy operating system? Well, part of that is surely due to Over 30 years of building each new OS version on top of the old one. That doesn’t really explain why this sort of thing happens. used functioning properly seems to be replaced by new systems that don’t work, but something else might.
Windows is hugely successful. It makes money. He has more than 70 percent of the global desktop market. Edge, which is always a pretty decent browser, and Bing, which is a search engine, hold much smaller slices of their respective markets. Every Windows user that Microsoft can harass, harangueOr tip for switching to Edge Or Bing Or Co-pilot facing competition is great for Microsoft, so it makes sense, in a spreadsheet sort of way, to create as many synergy opportunities as possible.
It’s not just Windows, obviously. Every damn app wants your attention a million times a day. And many budget phones and Windows computers are full of preinstalled adware and bloatware that companies pay OEMs to put in them. The ritual banishment of bloatware is a time-honored tradition among Windows users.
But once upon a time, this garbage was separate from the operating system itself. Samsung’s version of Android is very heavy, but it’s Samsung’s version, not Android itself. There’s a reason why the phrase “a clean version of Android” is common among many phone reviewers and why Pixel phones are praised by reviewers at a much higher rate than they are purchased by customers.
Ars Technica already written a good practical guide for disable most of the crap included in Windows 11. And this isn’t my first rodeo. I can put out most of this waste. Most people will never bother with it, know how to do it, or realize it’s optional. They will just learn to ignore it, most of the time. Every once in a while, they might click on something, and then part of Microsoft gets some money.
