A new Windows 11 update is rolling out this week.

Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu.

Luckily you can disable these ads, or “recommendations” as Microsoft calls them. If you’ve installed the latest KB5036980 update then head into Settings > Personalization > Start and turn off the toggle for “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more.” While KB5036980 is optional right now, Microsoft will push this to all Windows 11 machines in the coming weeks.

Microsoft’s move to enable ads in the Windows 11 Start menu follows similar promotional spots in the Windows 10 lock screen and Start menu. Microsoft also started testing ads inside the File Explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment and saying the test was “not intended to be published externally.” Hopefully that experiment remains very much an experiment.

  • @[email protected]English
    22•2 months ago

    Honestly they peaked at windows XP.

    I haven’t needed a upgrade and every time for the past 15 years, it’s been forced on me.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•2 months ago

        Yup. I feel like people saying XP was the peak is mostly nostalgia.

        You could make barely any UX changes to Win7 and people would still happily use it today. I don’t think the same is quite true for XP.

        To be fair, though, I also have nostalgia for XP. I’ve played a silly amount of Space Cadet Pinball on my steam deck lol

        • @[email protected]English
          2•2 months ago

          I wouldnt say I have nostalgia for XP itself, but I do look on it fondly, the same reason I look on 98 fondly.

          It was better than its previous OS. More stable, more usable, requiring less reformats to keep it snappy and healthy, etc.

          Which is one of the many reasons why 7 is the peak. Cause you didnt have to regularly reformat 7. It was just that good at managing itself, and its snappiness, that you never had to reformat/refresh the install cause it never got bogged down.

          edit You can download and run space cadet pinball on linux, I think i got mine off Discover (which probably is the same thing as every other distros app store/house/whatever)

        • @[email protected]English
          1•2 months ago

          The task manager in win 8 wouldn’t stay/come on top if there was a frozen program. This would make the new task manager unusable to kill the problem program. And then the half-assed solution of preemptively enabling always on top did not even work reliably. A pretty fundamental issue, which for me far outweighed whatever improvements that new task manager contained.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•2 months ago

            I never cared about task manager outside of the 5 seconds it took to kill the occasionally obstinate/frozen program, so as long as it did that much, I didnt care about the rest.

            Which sounds like 8 ruined even that.

      • @[email protected]English
        -1•2 months ago

        Windows 7 didn’t even have proper driver support, you had to manually install every one of them or your hardware just wouldn’t work.

    • @sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
      6•2 months ago

      Nah, I preferred Windows 2000. It was basically XP, but without the stupid taskbar design. I also liked 98 SE or whatever it was called, and 3.1 was pretty okay as well at the time.

    • arglebargleEnglish
      1•2 months ago

      XP was bad enough that I was determined to switch to Linux then. I think you have Rose colored glasses.

      2000 was windows Peak.