I log in with my personal Microsoft account on one profile. I use a local account for a work profile that also has a MS365 account added to it (to avoid being joined to the domain). I have a second MS account for a side project. I have a second local account for a second job that uses Google Workspace.

I use Windows over Linux because it’s more convenient. Although that’s only because I’m forced into Office for work. I could probably switch to Linux for 80% of my stuff. I have a Linux install for development, but rebooting to do a quick task is a pain.

I think the government needs to break up big tech. The anti-consumer behavior they’re engaged in because they have no competition is crazy. IT costs for small businesses have skyrocketed in the last decade. Everything is a subscription and costs 3-10x what it used to.

Well, shit me.

I've not used Windows since 8 came out. However, I would have loved to have had that workflow for a multiple desktop type thing.

Why didn't I think of that 20 years ago?

(for a long time, windows has internally supported multiple desktops, but it's not quite the same)

I install most applications in my home XDG directory if possible. It helps me have pure separation between work and home life. If I'm on my personal user, I do not have access to work tools, etc.

Plus you get nice features like different color window borders for applications running in different profiles, properly permissioned inter-profile RPC, virtualized networking ('personal' gets networking from clearnet 'sys-firewall', 'work' gets networking from 'work-vpn', 'project1' gets networking over Tor from 'sys-whonix', etc.), and much, much more.

Just because a trap closes slowly doesn't mean it isn't a trap.

I'm of the exact opposite persuasion. RDP'ing into a computer with your Microsoft account is easier, along with file and folder permissions across network shares and other account related things.

I used to have to manage an AD domain to have the same set of accounts across all my various Windows machines. Now that I can sign in with my Windows account, its the same account across all my machines. Permissions are easier on network shares, its the same account. Friends that come over and want to use my machines can log in with their own account. Sharing files with them is then just granting access to their Microsoft account. Its pretty much entirely replaced the desire to run AD at home, which IMO makes things loads easier.

As for your password being out of sync, I've only experienced an out of sync password in cases where the device could not have an internet connection. Once the device was able to get an internet connection, it prompted for me to refresh the current device credentials (lock and log back in), and it then authenticated against the cloud Microsoft account. In the 10 years and ~30 different machines used I've yet to experience a single real frustration of the online account and local account getting out of sync for more than a single password change when literally in the wilderness. In which case, it was just the last password I used to log in to the machine, and then updated when it got network connectivity again.

Only if you use the same account on both computers. What means the GP will have to use his work account on his personal computer just to jump into another machine.

Because their colleague wants to let them drive?

Because my sister wants some help installing a program?

There are so many situations where using a computer doesn't involve strict security protocols and heirarchies. Sometimes MS gets a little too caught up in their corporate environments.

And then all your hypotheticals speak to issues which don't involve RDP, at all, which I think shows where this disconnect is. RDP is not about sharing a currently active desktop session between two or more users, so all the hypotheticals you shared aren't the use case for RDP. RDP will transfer that console session to the new RDP connection. So say Alice is signed in to her computer locally, and then wants to ask Bob for some help. She shares the hostname for her computer, and tells Bob their login (a terrible idea regardless of it being a local or Microsoft account). Bob fires up RDP, connects using Alice's account, and now Alice's machine gets disconnected from that desktop session and is sitting at the login screen while Bob now has Alice's desktop session.

This doesn't matter if its a Microsoft account or a local account, this is just how the RDP protocol works on Windows. If you're wanting to have a screen share with the built-in Windows tools, the tool for that was Remote Assistance or Quick Assistant. The usefulness of that tool doesn't change whether using local accounts, domain accounts, or Microsoft accounts. Or just use a different tool altogether, of which there are many.

So, the OP is either having problems using a cloud user RDPing into a domain, or connecting his computer into the work's domain and using the same user all the way.

Here is where it gets complicated, what you say is true for personal accounts and Hybrid Azure AD accounts, but it becomes super difficult with pure Azure AD accounts.

Also with pure Azure AD accounts you have to add each users permissions manually to each machine they need to login to since Azure AD groups don't sync down to each machine.(Correct me if I am wrong here, it could have changed since I last did a pure Azure AD install 3-4 years ago)

I haven't tried but I think these days you can actually authenticate RDP with a security key associated with the account.

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/report-an-issue/windo...

In general, animations don't seem like a "power user" feature at all. Animations hint at new users ("hey, where did that window go when I minimized it") but aren't useful once you understand the abstraction.

Look at tools, for example. Tools for power users do not have fewer cues and affordances than tools for neophytes. They have more, because they have more features, more power, and using them can be more dangerous. You can also see it that way: a newbie using a feature once a day will be wrong (and needing to be nudged to the right direction) once a day. A power user who is wrong 1 times every 100 they use a feature will still be wrong more often than the newbie if they use it more than 100 times a day.

Also, this:

> We’ve turned off the animation when switching Desktops using the keyboard shortcuts as it was leading to flashes and hangs

is fucking ridiculous. If your compositor is so bad you can’t animate desktop switching without “flashes and hangs”, it means you have some serious work to do on your display subsystem. Fix your OS already!

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/08/05/announc...

On the first case animations aren't important, but on the second they are essential.

Cool…

Files on demand is a way to make people dependent and the low quota is to get them onto a subscription.

So yeah, Microsoft basically saves all your documents to the cloud, even after trying very hard to disable that possibility.

Windows 11 is the proverbial straw for my camel. It's hostile and aggressive, and I don't need to fight with my computer.

AD with roaming profiles was a nightmare if for some reasons the workstation couldnt connect to the server when they logged on, somehow users managed to create multiple roaming profiles which jammed up the network when their massive ms exchange/outlook files 5Gb+ size early 00's downloaded for "offline" working.

And with the windows 10 accounts where its nigh on impossible to get onedrive to stop copying your files. If when setting a new computer, you dont create a ms account when you configure your first user, its easier to get rid of onedrive, but if you have or create a ms account which is used to add a user when setting up a new computer to log into windows, then onedrive just keeps coming back like a virus. Absolute pain in the backside.

I'm at the stage of looking at Linux now but not ubuntu because even ubuntu phones home with meta data and that had been reported some years ago in the press, there just isnt any privacy from these devices anymore. I dont even own a mobile phone now its got that bad with being tracked. I've gone from early adopter to last person on the adoption curve line.

These people dont understand privacy and the security services/law enforcement are loving all this surveillance, they have never had it so easy before, being able to place virtually every individual in a country at the push of a button.

The whole user-experience feels more like an active war against an hostile actor constantly trying to take over your machine.

I tripped over this when I first started using Windows 10. It felt so unbelievably frustrating to be locked out of a local system because I couldn't remember my MS account password anymore.

As a reward for that, I discovered MS was indexing the contents of all my hard-drives, could suddenly look at my local hard drives just by logging into my MS account from any other device.

Even tho I went out of my way to disable as much of the home-phone functionality as possible; Just takes one auto-update to default a lot of these settings without ever informing the user about it.

I switched my laptop over to PopOS a while back and have really been enjoying that, although I miss not having the Office desktop apps available. I also purchased a OneDrive sync app for Linux which works very well.

Edit: I should clarify that I don't mean to contradict you. Just thought it would be an interesting perspective to read about.

I have not tried it yet but was thinking I could need it one day; what particularly stinks about it?

If it weren't for specific .Net framework parts and my hate/love relationship with Visual Studio I would have probably moved on from Windows a long time ago

Oh well. Minecraft and an Xbox 360 are my remaining use cases for my Microsoft account. I've long left that ecosystem. I do miss my windows phone though.

Nope, Windows Pro is targeted to businesses.

I agree that this will be a frustration point some power users don't need and while make some relegate Windows to a VM. Many power users have already done this and I don't see them changing direction based on this news.