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

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.

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)

To get pedantic for a second. The title of this post is "Microsoft gives..." as if this was an altruistic act that Microsoft decided to do for some people, when the article states they did it to comply with a law.

A much better title would have been "EU Forces Microsoft to Give Users More Control:" It returns the credit to the people who deserve the credit and clarifies that it wasn't something Microsoft did willingly.

In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it's newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. But only in some countries! It's pathetic.

Funny what happens when you have a government that actually gives a shit.

But I thought Edge was so crucial for the system to function it can't be removed? That's what MS told me at least, and I definitely trust them

Europeans have the Freedom to Uninstall SPYWARE? LoL COMMIES here in America we have TRUE FREEDOM of being FORCE FED SPYWARE with NO Other options!

Please let them also remove all the XBox nonsense. The other day my laptop from work that runs Windows 11 Pro gave a big ass prompt if I didn't want to try XBox Game Pass with the new Doom game. It's basically an ad for games on a Pro machine, ridiculous.

I love being in EU

Oh look, with the threat of a big enough fine, you can uninstall those things.

Or at least hide the front ends for them.

And local (offline) accounts when?

The best control: uninstall Windows.

🇪🇺the🇪🇺land🇪🇺of🇪🇺the🇪🇺free🇪🇺

The home of the brave, and the land of the free.

Imagine living somewhere where those in charge have even there smallest bit of spine.

🐧

Microsoft: "Suck it, Americans"

Perhaps sometime in the future, more people will try Linux and see how good it is. My recommendation based on my own experience:

Want stable, just working. Robust workhorse: Try Debian

Want newest, nicest, good for gaming (need a tiny bit of tinkering if you run Nvidia): Try Fedora

Want easy to install, but a bit older and slower, but requires no tinkering: Try PopOS

Don't like settings, tweaks and fuzz: choose Gnome desktop 😊

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.

Huh, well ill continue living without all that shit on Linux Mint.

So being able to uninstall apps on your computer is news?

For those curious, if you can get a European Windows product key, you can install the "N" version of Windows. Be warned, it only works with certain product keys....

The standard Windows installer should give the option of "Windows 10" or "Windows 10 N" (or similar). The N version is basically bloatware free out of the box....

The regular version has a bunch of promos pre-installed, like candy crush, and other things that most people couldn't give a shit about....

Recently I've been playing a "fun" game with my work laptop where I'll remove copilot, and a few days later it will appear again. Weeee. In that case, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a policy in place to enable copilot on my works systems.... I'm sure someone who works here, probably higher up the food chain than me, wants it enabled, and the ham fisted policy maker can't create a policy just for those who want it, so everyone gets it because the bosses son Shane decided that he wants to see how much of his work can get done by AI so he can do even less while on the clock.

Too little too late? Some European businesses have already made the change to open source. Shit should be free to anyone doing business with it anyway.

IF YOU'RE NOT IN THE EU, you can use O&O ShutUp to help you turn off the more intrusive aspects of Windows with ease.

So.. they’re doing exactly what apple was forced to do.

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.

Wanted to play a game on my kid's computer that had windows 11 N or some shit. Couldn't play because it needed the "media pack", which in its turn installs everything N stands for. Clown world.

Am i missing something? If i had edge, store and bing forced down my throat my win11 install wouldve been long gone, but imo thst stuff was already removable before?

Linux Gives Every User More Control: Uninstall Anything, and Say Goodbye to Microsoft

NICE

Make it world wide!

dont be fooled. stop supporting the enshittification now or be left behind. Bill Gates and the other american terrorists have caused enough harm.

you are in control once you stop using anything from american corpos.

stop supporting the enshittification!

how do i europe

So I could have a usable machine at work? Good. I am forced to upgrade from win7 to win11 in the lab, and current win11 crap did not appeal to me at all. And it has WSL, so at least it can actually be used for work.

I uninstalled edge from my MS PC could no longer use the standard Minecraft launcher due to missing dependencies

Can they replace the file explorer?

i know you can replace explorer through the registry but I don’t know about uninstalling it

THATS RIGHT MICROSOFT

Get fucked Microshit!