1mo ago

Microsoft Gives European Union Users More Control: Uninstall Edge, Store, and Say Goodbye to Bing Prompts

blogs.windows.com Updates to Windows for the Digital Markets Act

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to compliance with the Digital Markets Act, we are making the following changes to Windows 10, Windows 11, and Microsoft apps in the European Economic Area (EEA). We’ll update this post as these changes a

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Gotta LOVE the EU, they're working at a glacial pace but sooner or later (most likely later) it changes the landscape for the better.
If only enshittification would happen slow enough for the EU to catch up to.
- I reeeeally wish they would just embrace and find open source software as a public good and get it over with. The equally glacial pace of adoption of OSS to avoid vendor lock in with MS is not exactly giving the OSS world the boost it deserves.
  
  Yeah, well the DMA wasn't going to cost most EU politicians much of their good ol' corporate lobbying monies. But switching the EU off of Micro$oft would definitely not only lose those funds, but also introduce way more vigorous counter-lobbying.
  One pro of the EU's glacial pace is that they frog-boil the shareholders, meaning most counter-lobbying activities are relatively tame.
  But damn, do I wish they would just give the finger to all those ~~american~~ corporations and start a 4-year transition to OSS.
  
  This is me being selfish I'm fully aware, but I don't want the EU to pull from those companies because it seems they're the only countries willing to fight for the good causes and if they aren't then the rest will suffer 10fold. At least in it's current state it slowly feeds back to everyone else, I'm concerned if they pull the plug it'll be full on anti-comsumer hellscape.
  
  The EU is pumping a lot of money into FLOSS, often not even for administrative use (like, say, lemmy gets EU funding), but at far as adoption rate in administration is concerned well the Commission is one of the worst offenders. As in municipalities realising they can't fully switch to LibreOffice because they need to apply for EU funds and the commission only accepts .docx. Parliament happily spending money on something and the executive getting around to getting its shit together are two different things.
  OTOH it's not all about Microsoft and the like, a lot of administrative software is special-purpose, written by private companies according to specs, paid for by public money. Making that kind of thing open source is a no-brainer. It's also a way better use of money to improve and customise some open source ERP than to go to SAP and get a customised solution there.
  And a lot of that has to do with lacking competency in administration -- outside of police, specifically IT forensics, it's usually quite dire. States have no issues figuring out whether a blueprint makes sense when they're issuing building permits, road and railroad engineering, of course they can do that, but IT? Nope. Bring in the private consultants and private consultants are basically the marketing arm of big software companies.
  
  I know what FOSS and OSS is, but what is FLOSS? Search gave me only dental hygiene results.
  
  Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
  The FSFE has an overview over the various terms but tldr FLOSS is the one that has the least amount of agitated neckbeards breathing down your neck because it a) includes both free software and open source and b) includes the "L" that clarifies that what's meant is free as in speech, not free as in beer.
  ...and I guess it's about software hygiene?
  
  Thank you for the explanation and link!
  
  Schleswig Holstein (sp?) are doing so, ditto Copenhagen and Aarhaus (DK) and I believe France are looking into it
  
  Yeah, but it's all piecemeal and small batches of workstations. There's no full national scale moves.
  
  It's an entire german state cutting off 800k p.a of MS revenue. That's not piecemeal is it ?
  
  1 out of 16 states. In 1 out of 27 countries.
  Where is Estonia or Finland or the Netherlands to set the bar higher?
- I agree it feels very slow, but identifying the correct action and then building consensus around that action takes time. Once consensus is built it is very stable though. That is supposed to be the biggest benefit of democracy; stability built through coalition.
- I have a copy of Windows 10 LTSC that I have installed on a virtual machine just in case I need the one last program that I use that I cannot get to work on Linux.
  Lately I upgraded my machine and had to reinstall everything. As I was installing Windows on my VM, it started demanding that I create an account and wouldn't let me proceed without one, asked me to associate third party accounts to my OS and was generally being extremely intrusive and forceful in ways I didn't remember it being before, like opening Edge and forcing me to click through an introduction that I didn't want without giving me the option to close it. I then realized that I had forgotten to disable network access to my VM and that Windows had downloaded updates during the install.
  I immediately destroyed that VM and started over again, this time without allowing it to connect to internet. Suddenly the experience was far better.
  The moment I had let Windows connect to the internet it had thoroughly enshittified itself. It let me appreciate how badly Microsoft has enshittified Windows 10 over the years ever since its release. We are far away from the Windows 7 days.
  
  Ltsc or ltsc iot? Only the IOT lasts long enough and is debloated.
  
  It's some sketchy pre-cracked Jack Sparrow edition I torrented to run exclusively offline in a VM and will never let it connect to the internet because I don't trust it. I'm not too worried about getting security updates for it.
  I exclusively use it to run Autodesk Inventor for making 3D printable objects. Once the STL is created I just drag and drop it out of the VM into my Linux machine. It's the only communication with the outside world it will ever have.
  
  I wish Microsoft would just let me buy a copy of Windows 11 Ultimate and be done with it. No restrictions, no bloat, privacy, just an exchange of money for a product.
- They’re moving faster than any other government regulatory body.
- I wish we could join soon, but that's also happening at the glacial pace
- If the EU could borrow some texans, release them in the european parliament, and tell them "lobbyist" means homosexual in european (since apparently that's all they need to start shooting someone), the EU would work a lot faster

178 comments