When that "Get Office" thing first popped-up, I was sure my PC was infected with malware and came to the brink of formatting my hard drive.
Later came the random console pop-up from the automatic WSL updates [1] and then I did panic enough to actually format all the things but that's another story.
You might want to review the scheduled tasks. My system had "OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration" set to run every hour. It only pops up for an instant, but it would grab input focus and thus do bad things to my blood pressure.
Active Desktop was always optional, wasn't it? And was it really used for advertising by default? I thought it was mostly arbitrary browser windows that you could attach to the desktop.
It's both. Having ads on some apps doesn't make it not an OS anymore. I won't deny it's an advertising platform, just like android or ios or television or radio or the internet. And while it's equally annoying on all those media/systems, it doesn't lessen their or usefulness
There are ads in the Windows UI. I've been an iOS user for 9 years and can't recall seeing an ad in the OS. So it does not seem "just like" iOS, at all.
I'm not sure I would consider paint at the forefront of bloat, given that the base OS runs in the tens of gigs. I wouldn't be surprised if the default background image is larger than mspaint.exe. To say nothing of the store apps they auto install for you.
> Pinball had to be removed for this sort of reason.
What? No. It was removed because it was a 32bit application written by a 3rd party and there was a hard to fix bug on 64bit windows that made it unplayable, so they dropped it.
From Raymond Chen's answer to this question in the first comment to the same blog post:
> That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.)
I was under the impression pinball was removed because it was basically unsupportable and too had too much low level hacky graphics code to port across changes in the graphics subsystems. A shame though, it was a fun game.
6.36 MB, that's how much space takes MS Paint. In era when web pages sizes are no longer counted in kilo- but megabytes is this really a meaningful size reduction? Because it's definitely a meaningful feature loss.
It definitely does, however, feel like the end of a era.