Windows 10 ads

stickadtroja

what is happening? first saw it in the start field, "suggested apps", and ive read that the explorer has it aswell. have i missed something,is this not a product that costs $199?
i wonder whats has happened, is this a new level of greed, or have we gotten to accepting as consumers?

because of this, now im going to check linux out. anyone here using that for 3d, drawing and game development? any special distro that is preferable for that purpose?

Bek

I saw an article about that. Apparently not everyone has it (yet), perhaps they're testing the waters to see how many are pissed off enough to jump ship. I hate ads but I'm currently on win8, so no issues yet.

I've experimented with linux (and I know some others here have as well) but the bottom line is you will probably miss out on some things, and others will not work fully or work as well as they do on windows. Drivers may be more problematic. The ultimate solution is to run windows in a VM with gpu passthrough, but that takes more hardware ($), planning, and effort to setup and maintain. Though, if that's not an option, the software options are fairly good (driver's permitting...). You can natively run:

Modo
Blender
Substance Painter & Designer
UE4, I think?
Unity 5 (apparently)
Krita
Steam
..and possibly other stuff I don't use/know about.

Zbrush and other CPU based stuff (xNormal) should run fine in a regular VM w/ windows.

My advice if you're thinking of checking linux out; pick a fairly standard* distro that appeals to you (so you can find help easily if you need it) and make it a weekend project to try it out; find a blank HDD, disconnect your other drives, install it and play around. If you don't have a blank HDD you could just try a live version running from a disk/usb, or partition a drive with free space (backup first!). Install some stuff you use and see how well it works. Give your pipeline a test run; maybe you've had to cut out some programs and now want to bake in blender instead of xNormal since that doesn't work natively — see how that goes.

You'll probably spend a bit of time googling for equivalents of your windows programs, how to install things, and seeing what steam games are supported. And googling how to change/fix things that aren't working for you. Fun fun fun.

*You might also find that certain software you use only technically supports (ie. is tested using) a certain distro; that might influence your decision. Also, distros will usually come in various editions that use different Desktop Environments; so if you find yourself really liking one, make a note of it as you might want to use it elsewhere.

kaptainkernals

Where are you seeing the ads? Is it in the section on the right inside the start menu?

I unpinned all of the apps from that section of the start menu, and collapsed that area so that i didn't get ads - because I know that is the section that originally had ads since the beginning.

JedTheKrampus

Mudbox is supposed to run on Linux but it's not straightforward to install on anything but RHEL/CentOS and I've had performance problems with it. Sculpting is really Linux's weak point right now but it's pretty easy and straightforward to set up a VM that Zbrush will perform well in. I've had pretty good results even with a regular old Virtualbox VM. I think that for native sculpting 3D Coat is your best bet, or Blender for smaller projects.

Other programs that run on Linux: 3D Coat, Mari, Mightybake (although who knows for how long it will still run since it seems a bit unmaintained), Maya (although this probably has a similar problem to Mudbox of being tough to install on non-RHEL distros), technically XSI although I wouldn't recommend it, Houdini, PureRef, UV Layout, DaVinci Resolve, Fusion, Nuke, and GIMP of course. I haven't tried all of these because ain't nobody got time for that. But most of them should work fine.

I think my favorite part of running Linux is that the Wacom drivers are completely stable. They never seem to have the problem that Windows drivers have of the tablet being undetected sometimes, requiring a restart of the service or a reboot.

AtticusMars

kaptainkernals said:

Where are you seeing the ads? Is it in the section on the right inside the start menu?

I unpinned all of the apps from that section of the start menu, and collapsed that area so that i didn't get ads - because I know that is the section that originally had ads since the beginning.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/microsoft-put-gross-ads-in-windows-explorer-and-i-dont-have-the-energy-to-be-angry/

kaptainkernals

Oh wow, ok, that is new, and wtf. For a piece of software that you've payed for, thats not cool.

Eric Chadwick

You could set up a block on your router for the particular IP they're using for the ads. I did this for Skype, works great to prevent the Skype home page from serving me a bunch of crap.

stickadtroja

thanks for the linux answers, ill try it out!

Joao Sapiro

wow , im glad im still on 7 , i wanted to switch to win10 end of the year but this made me rethink that...

JedTheKrampus

If you need help setting up a VM for Zbrush feel free to ask. I really wish we got native Zbrush for Linux at some point. It almost works well in Wine, too.

stickadtroja

oh i thought VM whas Wine, but its not? what is a VM? virtual machine right?

JedTheKrampus

Yes, virtual machine. Wine isn't a VM; rather, it implements Windows system calls with their Unix equivalents, and it doesn't implement every part of Windows perfectly, so it doesn't always work. You can almost run Zbrush in Wine but the problem I had with it was that sometimes parts of strokes would be drawn with full pressure sensitivity.

But, since Zbrush doesn't depend on the GPU for any computations at all, you can run it in a Windows VM with about 97% of the performance you'd have natively (if you tune the VM's performance right) and it will work fine without having to mess with PCI passthrough or anything. You just have to pass through your USB tablet to the VM, make sure that you enabled VT-X or AMD-V, make sure that you enabled enough threads and RAM in the VM configuration, and you should be good to go for Zbrush and xNormal, if you wish to use them.

Fuiosg

Haven't run into that, though when I installed I thoroughly turned off all that telemetry crap. I'd look into ways of disabling it before switching to a new OS, that's a pretty big leap.

AtticusMars

Fuiosg said:

Haven't run into that, though when I installed I thoroughly turned off all that telemetry crap. I'd look into ways of disabling it before switching to a new OS, that's a pretty big leap.

You can't turn it all off, you can only set data collection to "minimum"; and it is really anyones guess what that includes.

Fuiosg

I don't care what they collect, I just don't want to be annoyed by what they are collecting. The more you have turned off the less they bother you with stupid notifications and recommendations.

AtticusMars

My point is that you can't "turn off all that crap"

Reducing telemetry settings doesn't prevent advertisements. Some ads for Microsoft products can be turned off in the start menu and notifications settings but that has nothing to do with telemetry.

stickadtroja

so my linux experience was of to a bumpy start. tried zorin, but had trouble installing, and then got random errors that doesnt do anything. havent really done anything with it, but it gave me a bad impression. thinking about trying mint instead, seems popular.

regarding switching os, its been on my mind way before annoying ads. the lack of control is the biggest one. one example, i never use the standard shortcut folders in the explorer. but theres no way of custimizing them, changing them into more useful ones. small thing but it bothers me.

regarding linux what distro does you guys use?  any recomendations?

cptSwing

Ubuntu seems to be the go-to linux distro in my neck of the woods, though I'm not a fan of it's side-bar setup. It can likely be changed, though.

AtticusMars

I've never even heard of Zorin, I'd really suggest Linux Mint if you're new coming from Windows.

Ubuntu is fine but the official distro from canonical uses the Unity desktop environment which I absolutely hate with a passion.

JedTheKrampus

I'm using Manjaro right now, but if my hardware were older I'd probably use Debian stable. Mint isn't a bad choice for your first distro but I think Ubuntu's slightly better overall.

You are probably going to run into problems here and there with any distro. Do your best Googling and they should almost all be solvable. The problems that I have with Windows can't be solved.

AtticusMars

I tried Manjaro and wasn't a fan of the ungodly amount of bloat it came preinstalled with

JedTheKrampus

UE4 completely dwarfs any Linux distro to such an extent that any amount of bloat is nearly unnoticeable, IMO.

Bek

AtticusMars said:

Fuiosg said:

Haven't run into that, though when I installed I thoroughly turned off all that telemetry crap. I'd look into ways of disabling it before switching to a new OS, that's a pretty big leap.

You can't turn it all off, you can only set data collection to "minimum"; and it is really anyones guess what that includes.

Technically you can turn it all off via the group policy editor, but that's neither convenient nor trustworthy. Like "click here and we'll stop collecting your data, we PROMISE. For reals this time." It just seems shady. Then again the hardware-level backdoors you have no control over (Intel ME) make your privacy difficult to guarantee. Funnily enough when I installed win10 it seemed like for the first time, Windows took more screwing around to get setup than linux, just because of the added nonsense (telemetry, cortana, app-store) I had to disable or remove. The direction windows is going is concerning, so it's good to explore other options.

stickadtroja said:

regarding linux what distro does you guys use?  any recomendations?

I also used Manjaro (XFCE) most recently, and I'd recommend it. It worked very well. I particularly liked how easy it was to switch between GPU drivers and kernels, plus the rolling-release seems like a great time saver in the long run. Manjaro comes in various DE's, so since you mention wanting to customise things that you can't in windows (One thing I was glad I could easily customise was file browser colours), check out the various DE's and see if any jump out at you. There are more community-maintained spins here as well. i3 looks quite interesting; I wonder if that would work nicely with modo and floating panels...

RN

If you're having trouble with Win10 isn't it easier to downgrade to Win 8.1 64 than go to a whole different OS?

Bek

Yep. That's what I did (I'm still dependent on some windows only things). But it's worthwhile to try linux, imo. All it costs is the time/effort/motivation spent to give it a go.

Even if it doesn't work out now, if down the road win 11 / 12 / etc continue down a path you do not like, you'll have a better idea of what the pros/cons to switching to linux are.

igi

I use win8.1 too. I also installed classic shell to get back regular start menu instead of annoying as hell metro screen. 

kaptainkernals

Some info on the explorer ads, and how to turn them off:

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2017/03/10/windows-10-is-bringing-shitty-ads-to-file-explorer-heres-how-to-turn-them-off/#.tnw_2veTeeSQ#.tnw_IzG0Wby7#.tnw_N5eTOGen

Chimp

I'd go back to 8.1 if it wasn't such a hassle, i didn't even want to be on 10.1 but they nagged me for ages with increasingly obnoxious popups before eventually deciding to upgrade my OS without my permission or presence. They also changed my password and user account information without telling me so I couldnt initially log in before I realised they merged me with an xbox account i linked once to use an app on the store. This is just another annoyance.

Got OSX as an option but apple are just as shitty, and Linux for me isn't an option either so 8.1 if i can get back there at some point.

CreativeSheep

I use Windows10 from desktop to mobile, I love it.  
If you don't know your OS, how the heck do you learn other software; impossible. 

Dataday

Also been loving Win 10. Never saw an ad either. Its important to note that I do use the Ultimate Windows Tweaker to turn off a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to analytics within Windows.