The penguin is patient and will welcome you when you have the fish / time.

If you are unsure i’d personally would also advice you to start with a dual-boot setup, so you can always temporary switch back if you get frustrated with something (or are under pressure from outside forces to get something done) and dont know how yet.

Normally when you return later with a clear head you’ll likely be able to find a solution to your problem that doesnt require you to switch the OS.

Just a suggestion.

Have a nice day anyways!

You’d be surprised. Ubuntu is basically download it for free onto USB drive, plug in USB drive, start computer, choose to start Ubuntu from drive, try it out, if you like it click install, and you’re done.

Something less tedious than installing an operating system lol

Jeez. I remember 25 years ago when we reinstalled Windows every 6 months to a year or so as a matter of course. It was literally recommended to do so because of the buildup of cruft and garbage. These days, people can’t be bothered to download an iso and press a few “next” buttons.

Everything with a GUI runs POP_OS, because I like how much control I have over app windows via the keyboard. When I’m hyperfocused I like not having to take my hands off the keyboard. It has really good tiling too, but I think vanilla Gnome has mostly caught up in that department.

Things were a little bit different in the late 90s though. Windows had a 97% market share and a massive deal with pretty much every computer maker to only put Windows on their pre-built machines. They had a true monopoly in a way that doesn’t exist today.

They also made IE free and bundled with the OS when every other browser at the time you had to buy. On top of that, they made it so that windows would slow down and malfunction if you uninstalled IE, and made installing any other browser a complicated process.

Today you can freely and easily install pretty much any browser you want. Chrome has the hugely dominant share in the the desktop browser market now, despite Edge being bundled with Windows.

On top of that, Microsoft doesn’t have the massive stranglehold on OS market share that they used to. In the desktop space, MacOS is about 1 in 6 computers with Windows holding 71%, mostly in the enterprise sector.

And this doesn’t even factor in that the majority of web traffic is mobile now, where Windows doesn’t even have a presence anymore.

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Those days are long gone. Else we’d see Apple and Google getting in trouble for bundling their own apps for everything on their devices.

They were taken to court for bundling a previously paid product (a browser) into their OS for free.

Asking if you want to change your search engine is not the same thing.

Looking online in January they had a 74% share of desktops.

Linux is certainly dominating in the cloud but that doesn’t really make much difference here.

I think this sentiment come from the long history of Microsoft repeatedly breaking and then failing to address antitrust requests. At this point people just assume bas faith.

I remember maybe a decade ago how it seemed a big deal anytime they used their OS monopoly to fuck with 3rd parties alternatives. But yeah, I don’t think every popup and annoyance is a crime. There’s a fine line they walk to still push their first-party garbage.

It’s about it being annoying or not. Microsoft is in a market position where they can leverage their different departments to heavily upsell you on other services. They have an unfair advantage that shifts the entire market to their favor, thus making it hard for any competitor to keep up or even enter the market.

E.g. they use every service / product they have to integrate Bing, they artificially limit the use of their chat bot to Microsoft Edge, they show Bing advertisements when you visit their competitors sites, they allow you to use Teams for free under certain conditions (if you already bought other products), they use their foot in the door with Microsoft Office / Windows go upsell you on Azure, …, Game Pass, …

I can go on and on. Some of them aren’t necessarily bad on their own. Some are. It paints a pattern of what Microsoft used to be. They actively used their position to try and create market conditions that would break their competitors or make it at least hard for them to even compete. About 15 years ago a lot of folks believed Microsoft had changed and were playing fair (in certain bounds), they invested a lot into open source and were generally a more friendly company. What we are currently witnessing is them going back to their old ways of doing things. Slowly tying everything back together. Probably under the assumption that this time the governments are sleeping and not really regulating it anymore. A lot of that is happening in the somewhat non-regulated cloud market anyways.

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Using a dominant market position as leverage against competitors, is per definition Anti consumer and anti competitive.

Apart from that, they are basically hijacking a competitors product to show this, which I think if not already illegal, it absolutely should be.

I’m not even remotely a legal expert and I don’t know what type of popup that is but I think the anti-competitive piece is “could Google use the same technique to push the user to switch to google search on Edge or not?”.

If this was an ad from a web page OP had opened or from the game and if clicking “Yes” only directed the user to a site with instructions on how to switch default search engine on Chrome, then yes, obnoxious but probably fair. Google could strike a deal with the game developers to push their search engine to Edge users or buy an ad. Someone writing a new browser or search engine will probably have considerably less money than Google but could reasonably do something similar to try and gain market share.

On the other hand, if that popup comes from Windows itself and especially if clicking “Yes” directly changes Chrome’s settings, then this is Microsoft using their ubiquitous (on desktops) OS to nudge more users to switch a competitor’s browser to their own search engine. Google, or even less a new competitor. would probably not have the same type of OS-level access to switch the settings of a different browser.

Yeah absolute pisstake. I’ve moved to Proton Mail and forward any left to transfer emails and use the outlook lite app to manage it, it’s actually not that bad.

Highlight some text in your browser or an app

There was a time when I thought like you. I had no AV until Defender became a thing, and was fine. But these days I keep hearing about more and more exploits targeting your browser, or libraries in the OS that your image viewer might be using, etc etc.