Can they replace the file explorer?
i know you can replace explorer through the registry but I don’t know about uninstalling it
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
I will even uninstall Windows
How about no?
how do i europe
Imagine living somewhere where those in charge have even there smallest bit of spine.
mmm, that was nice. can i have another?
Uninstalling the store would be the biggest feature. A lot of telemetry is tied to it. I tried some of the “debloaters” out there, but the windows Installation breaks after a couple of months (I assume when ms pushes a new major update).
Oh look, with the threat of a big enough fine, you can uninstall those things.
Or at least hide the front ends for them.
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 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
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.
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?
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!
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
americancorporations 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.
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 be 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.
They’re moving faster than any other government regulatory body.
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’m morbidly eager to see how they’ll handle the Win 10 EoL (yeah, yeah, it ain’t dyin’, just not getting updated, same thing to me tbh) in October. I bet it’ll be a shitshow.
No more security patches. That should be dead to you if you don’t want to host thousands of parasitic bots & malwares
I’m convinced the whole “your computer will instantly turn into a botnet that cripples children’s hospitals the moment you disable Windows Update” thing is part of Microsoft’s internet propaganda.
Like there are sysadmins for pretty big industries that schedule updates, sometimes once a month or even less frequently. Why aren’t they worried about all the 0-day remote code execution exploits that supposedly exist every single day?
<sigh> I used to be one of those sysadmins, and the short answer is appropriate risk management, better network controls a locked down OS and immediate action to push out the patches for serious issues.
I quite frankly detest M$ but keeping your pc patched isn’t propaganda.
If you know enough to manage the risk (including proper network firewalls and good internet hygiene) then sure, keep going for a while. Zero days aren’t daily, they’re a handful per year.
On the other hand if you have no clue about ITSec then you genuinely need to upgrade asap because you’re metaphorically running around with your genitals exposed.
Your comment leads me to suggest you probably dont have the skills to do an appropriate risk assessment.
But you do you. I’m not your Dad
NICE
And local (offline) accounts when?
Still using it that way.
Hoops to jump through on fresh install but still possible afaik.
🐧
The only correct answer. Also too little too late for MS. Suck up a little bit of inconvenience to gain back your life with 🐧
So… they’re doing exactly what apple was forced to do.
Since this sublemmy doesn’t have any requirement for the title to be the same as the source, can we actually have a correct title: “Microsoft abides to laws in EU and does <…>”, or even better “Microsoft is forced under EU law to <…>”.
The title makes it appear as if it’s out of charity and goodness of their corporate heart. (Fabrication)
I mean they kind of are? It’s not like M$ couldn’t just pay the fines and keep things as is.
Microsoft is also after those juicy administrative contracts, and right now, with US-skepticism sky-rocketing everywhere in Europe, they are terrified that the EU might mandate that administrations have to use (or, at least, have to use more in the coming years) European-made software.
Loosing those EU contracts wouldn’t just be lost money at a time where Microsoft is pumping more and more money into AI with not a single cent of profit on the horizon, it’s also leaving the door open for a competitor to gain worldwide legitimacy and challenge their monopoly in business software.
And that is worst case scenario for them. That’s why every tech giant has been pourring billions into trying to capture the chinese market. Because where they did not succeed, another brand started taking their place.
How would you feel if, in the coming years, a good chunk of the EU administration were to switch to Nextcloud? If, following that move, ISPs started providing those same services to end user? If more and more people switched from MS Office to other office suites that ACTUALLY follow standards and are interoperable? Would one’s reasons for staying with the MS Ecosystem in general crumble?
And if you think that’s not possible, remeber where Yahoo was, and where they are now. In the recent Google trial, there were internal memos showing that Google was actually concerned about DuckDuckGo, and had to prepare a strategy to ripost just in case. DDG has 0.3% percent marketshare.
All giants have clay legs, it’s just a matter of making them bend the knee :)
No its not, the object of a corp in this modern era we live in is to milk as much money out of the customer without caring about them. The EU laws are the only thing protecting their customers from microsofts greed. microsoft IS being forced to do this and thats a GOOD thing.
The only mechanism of “enforcement” that the EU is levying is fees/fines. M$ can absorb a large amount of fees/fines pretty readily if it means complete market capture.
There is no “force” here when it’s just the “cost of doing business”.
The EU isn’t raiding M$'s headquarters and capturing board members/C-suites. There is no “force”.
I don’t think you understand the fact that the DMA allows fines of up to 20% of a company’s global total turnover for repeated infractions.
Global, as in worldwide. Turnover, as in not profits, but revenue.
For chronic cases, non monetary fines can be applied, including divestiture of parts of the corporation operating in the european union.
No, microsoft can’t just absorb the fines, because the DMA was formulated from the beginning with the specific goal of making it impossible to just absorb the fines.
I don’t think you understand the fact that the DMA allows fines of up to 20% of a company’s global total turnover for repeated infractions.
And how many times has that happened?
None? Great, we’re on the same page now.
because no company has dared to ignore it yet. Those high fines are for repeated infractions, As in if you just pay the fine but don’t change the behaviour your fine goes up.
https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/first-fines-issued-eu-digital-markets-act
Yes… it’s only been 1.1 months since they’ve first issued fines under the DMA… What a long and litigated history! Definitely shows what you claim it does over it *checks notes* 2 issued fines ever.
Funny part is, DMA has been law since MAY 2023. So in 2 years… it issued 2 fines ever… less than 2 months ago.
But right! NO COMPANY EVER DARES IGNORE IT!
LMFAO. Right.
https://www.theverge.com/news/627522/apple-meta-eu-dma-antitrust-fines
The Financial Times reported in January that the EU was planning to soften its regulatory practices around Big Tech following an increase in pressure from the US, with the new EU Commission that took office in December reportedly being more focused on enforcing compliance than issuing hefty fines.
Weird… Doesn’t sound like the commission even wants to issue fines at all!
And you’re suggesting what, that msft tests the waters to risk a fine of potentially 25 billions (10% of 2024 revenue) rather than letting EU users uninstall stuff. I mean I’d love for them to try and get smacked by a huge fine, but they’re not that stupid. And the fact that they have no intention of testing the waters means that the DMA is working. The goal of the DMA is not fining corporations, it’s to force them to behave. And it’s working.
No, I don’t think we are on the same page
Seriously. Correct title is “EU gives EU users more control”
The title makes it appear as if it’s out of charity and goodness of their corporate heart
Only to someone that has been living under a rock for the last decade. Everyone else is able to deduct from the “to European users” in the title that the EU forced their hand
Windows users are a revenue stream, not customers. M$ views it’s users as a sort of raw material that can be processed with dark patterns for ads and subscriptions. And like everything else, Americans are treated with the most disrespect and coercion.
