There’s an alternate timeline in which I actually give Bing and Edge a chance because Microsoft’s not flinging their feces at their users constantly the way they are now
It’s wild because Bing is generally quite good now, but I switched away from it recently because it kept trying to advertise edge…
Meanwhile edge tries to advertise “pay later” schemes and really gets in your face about bing…
So to be honest, I did use Bing for a good while, mostly for the rewards, and it wasn’t bad, but at some point I was using a Canadian IP with a VPN, and Microsoft stubbornly switched everything to Canadian currency and would no longer let me redeem my rewards with US dollars or within the US lol. Honestly, it’s one thing that nudged me to start thinking more about using a search engine that’s not as problematic as Google or Bing.
Until about maybe six months ago, Edge was great (please ignore the massive amount of data it sends to MS) as a browser. The user experience was top notch.
Some product owner with shit for brains was hired and started cramming Bing and AI nonsense into every corner.
MS needs to ease up, fast.
The sad thing is that Edge is actually decent, and Bing is also not terrible… E.g. as an user there is absolutely no reason to use Chrome instead, but Microsoft managed to make it seem so annoying with shit like this.
E.g. as an user there is absolutely no reason to use Chrome instead
What do you mean instead? Edge is a Chromium rebrand
I’ve actually found Bing to be way better than Google for a while now. It’s not even close, idk what Google did to their search engine but it’s pretty frustrating. It’s all ads and irrelevant links.
Really love being free of Windows and this bullshit.
Yup, the only Microsoft product I use at home is GitHub, my home computer is Linux, and my work computer is macOS, so I just don’t see this BS.
@InternetUser2012 @const_void Haven’t had Windows installed since like 2005. Did I miss something?
Yeah, it’s been a breeze since I moved into Apple ecosystem. Nothing really being shoved down your throat feels nice.
So you change from the payed system that advertises but at least still have the option to use other things to the free os/over priced device that doesn’t need to advertise since the only option is to use their shit? Really an improvement…
Outlook the other day insisted it was better opening links in Edge instead of my default browser… Yeah, I shut THAT down…
I encountered this at work today. I just assumed I couldn’t turn it off. Will def be looking for that setting tomorrow.
Stop trying to make Bing happen. IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!
I like that it exists. I don’t use it, nor do I plan to, but I like Google having more competition.
I personally use DuckDuckGo, another Google competitor.
Anyone else notice the search (in windows 10 at least) suddenly being fucking useless? Used to be able to just type “disk man” and it defaulted to the disk management control panel, now it’s defaulting to a Bing search (in edge of course even though Firefox is default browser) for the phrase… Tried it on like 4 computers and only one was even offering the control panel as an option and it wasn’t the first one. Same thing with “default apps”…
Really glad I made the jump to Linux when I did, everytime I have to do something out of the usual user use case in windows at work I find myself more and more frustrated and jaded with windows.
Confirming this on (my sister’s installation of) Windows 11. Not even restore point would give me a result (switching to en-US at least found Reset my PC but still creating a restore point is nowhere to be found unless you know where to go from previous versions of Windows).
I actually installed Mint before going through the Windows OOBE. However, the laptop is so new that the touchpad, touchscreen and fingerprint sensor don’t work in kernels <6.5, and the Wi-Fi card in kernels below 6.0. Most distros ship with kernel 5.x and none have LTS versions with 6.5 (which only became stable this week). I am not nearly skilled enough to go with a non-mainstream or unstable distro. My sister will need Windows so I configured GRUB to boot that by default with 0.2 s hidden timeout and now I can’t boot to Linux at all. I’ll be reinstalling it anyway in a few months.
That being said, Windows is also terrible. You can’t configure the fingers to only scroll and the active stylus to only draw in a note-taking program, the touchpad’s horizontal scrolling is reversed while the vertical is not, the handwriting recognition has not improved since my grandpa’s 2004 Windows Mobile PDA, there is a shitton of telemetry, and uninstalling Edge caused the fingerprint reader to stop working somehow. Without asking, it encrypted my storage with BitLocker (which I cannot configure because it’s not the Pro edition) and I had to enter two 48-digit codes to unlock the D: and E: partitions on each boot (thankfully I removed that). I would welcome encryption if it unlocked on Windows login and didn’t completely lock non-Microsoft account users on the same device from the storage partition. NumLock stays lit in Sleep mode or when the display is closed. Also the manufacturer CaReS aBoUt pRiVaCy and therefore included a camera cover but has a fucking persistent app that “monitors the system” and shows extended warranty popup ads, but is required to limit the battery charging voltage.
And the internal PSU makes a maddening coil whine all the time but the company just said “manufacturing is difficult and we screwed up, just use headphones lol”. It could be fixed by some soft glue, foam or rubber around the inductors but I think I would lose the warranty over this.
I’ve had issues in the past where the local full text search index was broken and no apps or settings ever came up, so it only offered Bing searches for shit like “control panel”.
There’s a way to clear it and force it to rebuild, but I’m not so sure this is the same problem that you’re describing since you’re seeing it on multiple computers at the same time.