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On Windows, you can change the presence of ads in Explorer to suit yourself also.


But advertising/"telemetry" preferences seem to accidentally get reset every few forced upgrades.


Which advertising preferences in Windows have you seen with this?


The earlier post is correct -- as time passes Microsoft changes the advertising configuration within Windows. For example, the presence of advertising within File Explorer is a new development. Earlier, harangues about Edge being a superior browser when one launches any other browser (or tries to change the default system browser) suddenly made its appearance and is now a fact of life.

It was once possible to disable advertising about OneDrive, but Microsoft has reconfigured things so that's no longer possible without deep hacking (no user-level configuration options). There's an "Uninstall" option attached to the OneDrive client's listing in the Start menu, but if you choose the option, instead of uninstalling the OneDrive client, the system opens the Control Panel Programs & Features applet, where OneDrive is nowhere listed.

As time passes the advertising is becoming more aggressive and less controllable. On February 14th a commercial announcement related to Valentine's Day appeared, but I wasn't able to track it to its source. Just one example -- Microsoft is jealous of Google and they're becoming an imitation.

The deep issue here is that corporations have to decide how to most efficiently grow their companies. Do they pay attention to customers, or stockholders? At some point in the past (I think it was during the Reagan years) corporations turned their backs on customers and made stockholders the focus of their attention. And from a corporate perspective, it was a good choice, because customers are fickle and unpredictable, but stockholders only care about quarterly earnings reports -- no earnings and they walk.


Changing the look of window borders vs having ads and telemetry baked into my OS and being opt out by default are a bit different.

Also, there's plenty of distros that look great out of the box.


"You can turn off ads" is clearly much, much different from "you can change the appearance". Are you serious?


Yeah, I'm serious. Two "much"es in from of "different". They seem more similar than different to me in this context. We're talking about changing operating systems based on the preferences of the user.




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