The company is seemingly contemplating on whether to add a new “Recommended” button on the Taskbar. Interestingly, it is unfinished at the moment, or perhaps Microsoft is just not sure if it should proceed with this button at all.
↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Currently working on a comfortable button layout for Linux on my Legion Go. The more reprogrammable buttons on a device that can be mapped to custom user functions, the better.
It’s not a keyboard button, it’s a software/task bar/start menu button.
And this is getting ridiculous, for a piece of software that people are PAYING FOR. It’s one thing for Google/FB/etc, which aren’t charging consumers, they gotta make money somehow (even if we now don’t like how far they’ve gone to do it). But they’re now trying to make Ad money off of something people are paying for, directly or indirectly.
This sounds like a new icon on the taskbar, rather than a new physical button like the “Copilot” button they are soon to mandate for new keyboards. The wording in the original article could have been better; “button” implies a physical button you can touch, and “icon” would be a better word for what is actually being discussed.
I’m with you though, I love having a few extra buttons I can configure on my Logitech MX Keys keyboard.
I’d suck Nadella’s cock to have access to the Windows app and hardware ecosystem, especially now that Apple won’t sell you any kind of computer with a discrete GPU. Did I make myself perfectly clear? So, a useless button on the keyboard is not that bad in comparison.
Dear Canonical and Valve, make the Desktop Linux app and hardware ecosystem worth my time and I will consider switching. And yes, I am talking about Wine and Proton too, most games on ProtonDB aren’t “Platinum”.
On the Apple side, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro was a farce of such epic proportions that it makes you think how everyone involved kept a straight face during WWDC when they unveiled it. It gets beaten in the GPU department by a well-speced 5-year old Intel Mac Pro, and they tried to distract from that fact by pretending it was all about non-GPU PCI-E expansion cards, as if a Mac Studio with a thunderbolt PCI-E enclosure can’t do that already.
[quote]most games on ProtonDB aren’t “Platinum”.[/quote]
That’s not, mostly, directly Steams fault. Complain to the game companies, get them to use Vulkan/OpenGL more, and use cross-platform tools that support Linux well. Hell, even if they target “Steam Linux”, that’s close enough to generic Linux I’ll take it.
Drizzt321,
100% this. The blame lies with the companies making non-portable software.
From a financial perspective, why should they spend time on this? They want to target Windows and Macs, and since MacOS uses its own Metal thing instead of Vulkan (and has deprecated even OpenGL), the Vulkan code is basically the Windows code. There is no financial incentive to write portable Vulkan.
And yes, I know MoltenVK is a thing, but performance on Macs is better when using Metal, so that’s what companies use.
It’s Valve that wants their devices to have a viable app ecosystem, they should provide a full win32/win64 implementation.
kurkosdr,
As a developer myself, I don’t feel ashamed to call out the stupidity of companies and developers not using portable APIs & toolkits. Most of the time you don’t even have to go out of your way to be portable since most popular toolkits and game engines, both commercial and open source, are already multi-platform capable.
Just because you’re currently using platform X doesn’t make it a wise business decision to set yourself up to have fewer options in the future. You may have sights are on windows today, and that’s fair enough, but it is stupid to vendor lock your software using APIs that rule out macos, linux, chrome books, and mobile devices in the future, these are all growing relative to windows. I know many businesses just want to standardize on a single platform, and windows has been that traditional platform, but even so I would suggest that even they would benefit from standardizing on portable frameworks so that they don’t vendor lock themselves. Another trend we’re seeing is many businesses replacing windows applications with web applications.
Let’s be honest, microsoft have been loosing ground on public interest for years. Remember when people were literally lining up across the country to get their hands on windows releases? This brand loyalty is mostly a distant memory, and the contrast today couldn’t be more stark: shoulders shrugging with elements of annoyance and disgust especially in the periods following windows 7. Even prominent youtube technology reviewers like JayzTwoCents are covering more topics like how revert unpopular microsoft changes.
It not just 3rd parties who need to face this new reality of falling windows interest, microsoft themselves are facing this reality too. They’re struggling to keep windows relevant. Even carrots like making windows upgrades free wasn’t enough, they’re turning to sticks and planned obsolescence to keep their grip on customers. So I would argue that while there was a time when a windows only strategy made business sense, the time for developers to exclusively align their ship sails with windows has…um…sailed.
Targeting metal makes less sense than vulkan though because vulkan has access to a significantly larger market share…including macos. Studios that implement their games around apple’s metal API and their ARM chips unified memory will find it very difficult to port their software to discrete GPUs on other platforms. This may please apple, but for developers it’s kind of the worst of two worlds: 1) titles become vendor locked without spending more money to break away 2) sales are limited by a niche market. I the relative sparsity of macos metal games is a reflection of this. I’m not saying developers should be against supporting macos, but that it just makes a lot more sense to do so with a multi-platform engine that is neither vendor locked nor limited to a niche market.
They code for the Windows app ecosystem, why should they do that? I wish they did, but they have no reason to, especially now that Apple deprecated OpenGL in favor of their own proprietary API (Metal).
kurkosdr,
Linux/wine/proton have been getting better but I still don’t really recommend linux if the primary goal is to run windows software. If you need to run arbitrary windows applications, go with windows. But it does seem like large swaths of windows users are becoming more irate with microsoft and this has been generating a lot more interest in alternatives. This is good, but we need to be clear that change is difficult especially if you require your existing software to work. Sometimes it does work flawlessly, but as a rule compatibility is not high enough that it is safe to assume it.
In theory, ReactOS would be nearly ideal for these users…except for it being a perpetual beta. Microsoft knows that most of their users will remain on windows even though they are flustered by the ads, tracking, unwanted changes and so on. Still, microsoft are so aggressive with their BS that a subset of their users are motivated to change. They look at macos and linux as the main windows competitors. To the public Apple’s brand is the sexier of the two, but it’s a hefty premium for hardware that is often much less serviceable/upgradable and actually I’d say that gaming support may actually be stronger on linux than mac desktop. Also, with linux, you realistically may not have to buy any new hardware. This is both a pro and a con, because not everyone is up for Installing/administrating their own OS, which is what you’ll be doing if you don’t buy a linux computer from a supported vendor.
Apple painted themselves into a technological corner there. They encouraged mac application developers to implement software around apple’s shared memory/unified memory architecture. These applications assume that the CPU and GPU use the same memory space, which can have some perks. However the assumption is broken by discrete GPUs that have their own dedicated memory. This is why the new ARM macs cannot support discrete GPUs under their application model. Apple marketing tryed to convince customers that their iGPU performed as well as discrete ones, but it was never true. For apple to support discrete GPUs now would require them to reneg on the unified memory model they sold developers on. These devs may feel that they spent their resources targeting macos specific GPU model only for apple to deprecate their work and go back to the previous GPU memory model used by x86 macs. If I were a macos developer, I would avoid apple specific APIs and use a multi-platform wrapper to do the legwork.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
This is like going to the gasoline station to refill and suddenly you have a screen start shouting advertisements at you while you pump.
For some people it’s completely normal.
For me it’s gross.
Yes I agree, but oddly not all users will agree, or perhaps not even the majority of users will agree.
I’ve noticed a trend in younger users, also creeping into some older users as well, to be on the points earning apps endlessly differentiated from gaming. Bandwidth and data has become so cheap I suppose it enables such behaviour, mindless clicks. They would probably welcome such a button if it delivered the filtering they want in specifically finding more deals to click away on like a maniac.
I can’t think of a worse hell, but they seem to almost treat it like a form of mindless entertainment that earns.
Your observation immediately brings to mind the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits”.
Yeah, this is a thing. A gross, annoying thing. Fortunately they’re currently few and far between here. So far.
Introvertgeek,
Where is “here”?
Over here in NY it seems like all the new pumps have them. Of course the gas stations are going to take the ad money. Unfortunately it’s not just on screen either, they’re very loud and cause a great deal of noise pollution.
I wish there were a better way for markets to reward companies for not advertising.
I’m currently in the process of looking for a new job (in the tech industry) and logged into LinkedIn for the first time in years to update my profile. The ads and the raw invasiveness with which Microsoft wants to mine your data and push ads to you was a big shock to me… until I decided to take my current free time to “upgrade” my Windows development system from 10 to 11. Windows 10 was bad enough when it came to pushing things on you, but Windows 11 is on a stunning new level of awful. The number of times I’ve rebooted and new, random things would be installed, new services being pushed, etc. truly made be realize that Microsoft is fully an ad company now. Linux (Debian in my case) still has plenty of issues, a few of which really are showstoppers for some people, it seems like the only viable platform that isn’t actively user-hostile.