Hi all! Been a windows users seems like forever … But now I’m really getting tired of all the ‘marketing’ that MS does on my laptop … constant and regular pop-ups trying to subscribe to additional MS software services, games, Edge/Co-pilot marketing ‘rubbish’ … makes me consider whether MS is being a pimp and push me into being a ‘user’ … this really annoys me … that they are tracking my ‘use’ of my pvt laptop and ‘marketing’ to me …
What’s the situation with Macbooks?
would love to get user feedback …
TIA!
ps. gone down that road of OSF/Linux, etc … Gave up due to some compatibility issues and came bacck to MS & Office … Dont use Google or any other cloud storage … as a rule, i do not store my stuff on cloud … an external disk and windows robocopy works well for my backups / new machine migration / DR situation
Been an Apple user since the Apple ][e. On occasion Apple can be an irritating by prompting some of their products. For example if you buy an iPhone you will get offered a 3 month free trial of Apple Music and they remind you about this for a while.
But with the Mac, I can’t recall ever seeing any Apple ads.
To be honest I use my iPad a lot more than my iMac these days.
If Linux didn’t work for you due to “app compatibility”, why do you think macOS will work for you? Sure some MS apps are ported to macOS, but they are far from perfect, besides you wrote that you don’t use cloud so I guess Office 365 is no go anyway. I guess you should be able to run desktop office just fine on Linux with Wine, but I don’t have any copy to try. I would rather encourage you to spend a few days giving LibreOffice a chance, unless you really need to share working on MS files on daily basis, then it’s rather a bad idea - stick to MS Office.
PS. regarding privacy, if you wish to be de-connected from clouds and telemetry, Windows 11 might still be better than current macOS. Apple slurps tons of information from your devices into the cloud
Only took me a couple of days to remove any MS stuff when I had my W11 laptop restaged (disk had completely died) recently. It’s really not that big a deal. To start off with, uninstall MS Edge (obviously, only after you’ve used to download another browser, Brave being my first choice at the moment).
I am a bit surprised to read this. I run windows (by now 11, I’ve also been windows user since they started) on my laptop. I never get pop-ups, ads or demands to subscribe to MS software stuff.
I can only imagine that the problem is within MS products you use?
I surf on firefox, use thunderbird and open office. That might make the difference.
Don’t use google either and have the same rule as you not to store on clouds.
I suggest you first give up on office, outlook and Edge and see if you find peace. As you’re willing to even change to Apple that shouldn’t be a big step.
I changed my PC to lynux, I enjoy it but have the problem that some things I can’t do anymore, due to compatibility problems (of course I could but I’d have to spend some money). So having both systems in the house is good for me.
Oh and I run ghostery (free version) on the windows laptop, it’s always very busy. Whether it fights off MS as well I don’t know.
one of my biggest challenge has been to find the email front end (like outlook) that can read outlook pst files - i need to be able to access my outlook archived emails.
based on my last experience, libre office did not include the ‘outlook equivalent’ .. google search recommended thunderbird …
i need to be able to open, edit, save ms-office (including PP) docs natively … and oulook e-mails and calendar …
archives can be one off converted. For example the outlook archives can be imported to prtotonmail (I just use proton, but don’t want to say it’s the best choice or the only way) How to Import PST to ProtonMail Without Outlook?
there’s also a proton blog entry on this topic, most likely better
Bottom line, you do realize that all your emails live in the cloud? The Outlook archive is just your local copy.
I still have ms-office docs from waaaay back and work with them no problem on open office. The only thing it does is when I store the latest, it asks whether to keep in in doc or store in odt. I usually leave them in doc … (or excel) which is why there still here.
Don’t know about PP (power point?) as I don’t use that.
i use pop4/imap, download email from smtp@my_isp and have it deleted from smtp@my_isp ‘regularly’ … it’s the nature of email/newsgroups/etc to go from client-server-client … with some storage in the middle … i imagine that’s some transient storage time limit enforced by SMTP and storage policies … cant be helped …
in today’s days … who knows if AI is automatically scanning email traffic and ‘profiling’, not just govt security agencies across the world …
that’s why I use encrypted email, though yeah, sending out plain email to the outside world, and receiving them, still exposes your communication. With proton you can send out encrypted email, the recipient will receive a plain email with a web link to open the encrypted email securely, so nothing can be scanned along the way
regarding cloud, free mail servers, etc, I don’t really trust that you can actually delete anything, the delete command will most likely only hide it from you but leave in the cloud for AI harvesting and ad profiling
I doupt that very much. Updates are part of the basic windows. I remember you couldn’t avoid them if you wanted . Well you could but you had to make a few complicated moves within the system.
I’ve tried several of the ‘open’, i.e. free, Office solutions in recent years, including WPS, LibreOffice and currently using Softmaker. I like this latter one because it retains some office features I’ve been using since DOS versions, like the Shift-F3 to convert a whole block of text between upper & lower cased and capitalised initial letter, and recently that its Search and Replace function allows special characters, unlike the other two mentioned, so when I’ve copied a song’s lyrics, for example, and want to remove loads of blank lines, I can do a global replace ^p^p with a single ^p
Sure, the interfaces all vary a little as well, but then they’ve changed a lot over the many different versions of Word over the years as well.
I know that compatibility of finished documents with MS products was sometimes an issue many years ago, but the mutiple savable formats should resolve that, e.g. .doc vs .docx etc.
Funny, but the windows system updates are just a minor thing. The biggest annoyance is the obsession on security, windows will slurp your apps and documents to the cloud to do analysis on them and even delete them without your consent if it pleases so. This could be fine for some, but for me it doesn’t match the definition of Operating System (it’s operating system with mass control)
. Well you could but you had to make a few complicated moves within the system.