The average consumer either doesn’t go to the manufacturer site

Where does the average consumer get their computer then? Also I do know a few people using lubuntu instead of windows on their laptops.

But… DAE Windows bad!?

And those install links are ads. MS doesn’t put them there with out benefit. Otherwise they might offer links to Steam or LibreOffice.

Okay. Original person this whole thread spawned from. I think you all went down the rabbit hole of “what’s an advert” and lost the entire point of my comment which is lack of choice.

But before I address that choice thing let’s address the “Ads” of Linux as you would call it. The “Featured” apps in a lot of software managers for Linux are selections that come from folks who manage the distro wanting to ensure that people know that “Linux can do that stuff that Windows can”. The “Feature” is not there to promote Dropbox and pray get some money, it’s there to point out to people “we can do that here as well, just FYI.”

So you may feel that the featured in the software managers is “ad” but you can ask the folks who run the distro how they arrived at what’s there and pretty much every case it’s so they can show that the distro has some feature parity with what people are expecting. Now you do mention Firefox and they are indeed hawking their own product. Interestingly, Mozilla maintains a page about just this thing. And it’s come up time and time again in mailinglists. Distro builders absolutely have the option to disable this in their repo, but by default build, it’s allowed and default options is how a lot of distros choose build the package. And it’s this later part that leads me to the point of my original comment.

CHOICE. Long story short because I feel I’ve already made this comment pretty long. You don’t get choice in Windows. There’s not some magic build that you can use to do away with all that Candy Crush and what not and still be this side of the TOS for the OS. And for Linux there is choice. It’s less about ads and more about “do you get a say in any of this?” With pretty much every Linux distro, you always have the option to become a contributor in some manner. (As an aside) This is actually the friction that a lot folks talk about with how RedHat and the Fedora project have been doing things lately. They’re sort of removing this option for the general public to have a line of commentary into the project. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but even with the notions that they’re toying with, it’s been met with pretty strong reactions against what they’re doing. And lots of distros have pointed out, that they are going to be doing the opposite of what RedHat is doing going forward on that front. (but I digress)

But that all said, looking at Windows. You don’t get a say in the build process. There’s not an option for you to rebuild the software stack to your liking for distribution between your machines. There’s what the SKU offers and then there’s just finding some other OS. And yes, that’s not ignoring that enterprise Windows allows pretty much all of these things to not be a thing via group policy objects in the active directory, but it still sticks to the core aspect of only if your SKU offers that option and you need to use that SKU in accordance with the TOS for that SKU. Those are your options. That’s the thing and while I’m sure the debate about “what constitutes an ad or not” is a noble one to have, I think you all lost the entire point of my original comment to debate this point that’s not really a point that anyone was making to begin with. And also your view on that point of “what’s an ad” is poorly informed from the Linux distro makers perspective. There’s a need to point out to users coming from Windows or Mac and trying “Linux” for the first time that “we can do that too”. That’s distinctly different from Microsoft’s goal of letting you know that you too can sign up for OneDrive.

Have you ever gotten a windows update? (The sponsored bit came back regularly with most updates for me, I’ve barely used windows though.) Also by software managers I’m guessing you mean the ones with a GUI or do you install everything manually?

Truly atrocious smh

That’s not the notification tray, though? I mean bleh but you have to go searching for that, and it is somewhat relevant given that most users are logged into their MS account, and this is the accounts settings page… am I missing something?

Registry is just the settings panel in windows now

But the normal user can download random programs off the internet to do it for them

There’s two types of drivers shipped with OSes.

There’s generic drivers, for example any USB keyboard or mouse can use a generic driver. That’s usually developed by the OS developer, so for example Microsoft wrote a driver for this, there’s a driver in the Linux kernel, etc.

The other type are drivers for specific hardware. On Linux, sometimes this is written by contributors, while other times the manufacturer itself writes the drivers (eg Intel wrote a lot of the kernel drivers for their hardware like CPUs, network cards, etc). On Windows, these are almost always written by the device manufacturers.

The generic drivers are usually very solid but have limited features since they have to work for a large range of devices. It’s the manufacturer-written ones that tend to be buggy.

At first mostly smaller issues, but they started to pile up, with me not being able to find any solutions for them.
But then one of the updates in July killed grub, despite me always using the recommended commands after each update, causing me to lose access to the system. I was not skilled enough to recover it as all the guides didn’t really give me enough information for me to handle my encrypted setup, so I tried getting help from their forums, where I then got insulted, gaslighted and trolled by a few users, trying to put the blame on me for using grub instead of the default bootloader, completely ignoring the fact that grub very much was the default boot loader, to the point where a moderator ended up locking & hiding the thread, so that it wouldn’t leave a bad look on them, telling me I should probably create a new thread if I still need help. I decided this would be my last time with EOS.

No that does not happen with the ads. Those only appear during a fresh install and can be clicked away in a matter of seconds.

The only thing that happens with is sometimes Edge and recently the search bar once.

MS deserves hate sure, but not the unwarranted hate some of you have here in the comments.