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Not sure it’s possible anymore though or what an alternative might be now.
I will occasionally log into my personal Microsoft account when accessing a Microsoft website when I am on Lunch to work on some personal projects.
At work last week, I was upgraded to Office 365 and as a result I started downloading the latest versions and trying it out in various ways. One of these was upgrading my old OneNote into the latest version (2013 -> 365)
Saturday morning, I booted up my own different PC at home and notice in the "Recommended" section on the Windows 11 start menu "Work 365". This is the name of the OneNote I created at work when I upgraded the document. I do not even have Office on my own PC. Hovering over it would show that it was located in my Works One Drive folder.
I must have been logged into my personal account on OneNote and it somehow meta-data? links it between the work and personal accounts.
I am now in process of removing all traces of my personal account from Windows on my work laptop as the very last thing I want to happen is to see personal files appearing in the Recommended section of my works laptop!
I had my young son with me at the time so I didn't investigate it further. What would have I seen if I clicked the More > button in the Start Menu - would there have been more leakage? Have I logged into my work account on my personal PC at some point? Why did it only show the OneNote file but not any others? What happened if I actually clicked it and tried to open it? Did I simply make a mistake when using multiple accounts in one OS?
There are numerous questions I am asking myself that I don't have an answer for yet.
As far as I can see, I have removed all traces of my personal account off my work laptop now but I am hoping (not sure this is the correct wording in this context) that I can see still the file in my Recommended Section when I get home.
I really would like to know exactly how it can happen.
I can’t, in theory, access my work’s OneDrive from my personal machines, due to a required SSO on top of Microsoft’s, and a VPN requirement. But somehow there are some of my personal files in my work’s OneDrive.
I don’t know how this happened. I can’t log into our VPN as it’s machine-locked (it checks before allowing you on) and therefore OneDrive is supposed to stop me accessing it.
I keep getting emails from Microsoft about an Azure Enterprise agreement that they have decided I have power over, along with a group of people from a random company that I’m not related to in any way. Someone did a typo and included me by accident? Not likely as I have an email address that’s difficult to accidentally use via typo.
Microsoft are taking people’s responses to the group as authorised instructions as to what to do with their enterprise agreement. I’ve responded several times and said I am not related but they keep emailing about it. I know a lot about that company’s people, structure and agreements with Microsoft now!
I'm not even sure it's possible, I've tried multiple approaches but gave up after almost having to do a clean install.
Now I have to deal with an accountname that contains multiple characters that make WSL interactions with the windows paths a game of Russian roulette with shell quoting bullets.
That expends to MS Office subscriptions as well. I once bought one through (stupid, I know) GoDaddy as an extension to my domain mail service. It never worked, not once. I still paid for it, so. The user account didn't even exist on MS's end. Only way to get rid of it was to cancel the credit card behind it. MS stopped bothering me after two months of unpaid subscriptions...
Really? For me, when I install Windows with a Microsoft account, it makes my username just something like "nyusz" rather than "nyuszika7h".
So being the least bad tech company isn't too convincing.
I never forgave M$ for IE6 though, so I’m biased. A new generation is being lulled into thing they’re the good guys.
- Google search
- Google maps
- YouTube
- FB Messenger/WhatsApp
- Oculus
- FB Marketplace
I have reported them but Facebook won't do anything about them.
Almost had me asking hn if we were abusing throwaway accounts.
All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.
Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.
The whole OS market is pretty rough right now.
It's like this since it became clear smartphones were going to become the bigger market, so around 2012 or so.
Investment into desktop everything went down: OSes, apps, games, etc.
Heck, you can see this even for Open Source desktop stuff. There was a flurry of releases of cross platform Open Source software around 2009 or so: KDE4, better support for GTK on Windows, etc. All of that has slowed down or frozen in time.
Mobile has sucked all the money and hype from desktop development.
This is my feeling over the past few years. No OS is in a great spot. But I have hopes for Linux being better supported with Valve using it on the Steam Deck. (Not the highest hopes, but more hope than I used to have)
Windows 10 is stable for me too though I was hit with the eTPM stutter bug (I use my Windows box exclusively for gaming, in particular VR which I didn't feel like figuring out in proton). But the windows dark patterns are surely there and I hate them. But as it's only my gaming machine I can deal with it.
And Mac... Well I moved away from it because Apple is locking down too much and I've come to hate opinionated software. Still they seem to be doing nice things with M1..
I've also played FFXIV and Path of Exile extensively in Linux.
The only thing left is Adobe products which is honestly a matter of time. Just really takes hammering out some market share until Adobe relents.
A lot of the best kernel, driver, and gui shell improvements have only really hit their stride in the past 24 months.
Things are coming together rapidly.
Could you elaborate on that?
I've been using desktop Linux almost exclusively for the past 24 years (ouch!), and recent years seem pretty average to me. Things work great, most of the time, like always.
Unless you're talking about gaming. I'm not a gamer (or i wouldn't be such a long time Linux user) but I hear there's enormous progress on that front.
If Linux based gaming continues on the current trajectory, I could imagine a world in which a great chunk of the consumer market switches from Windows to Linux.
Apparently it's not great at WiFi but I don't use that on my main driver (NUC).
On Linux I use docker a lot, and while FreeBSD has its excellent jails, it doesn't have the whole ecosystem around them. So that's why I use Linux on the server side more.
I assume by
> using a window manager for ever
I've used WindowMaker as a Window manager for decades. Only recently did I decide to switch to Mate because I wanted a taskbar at the bottom with useful things like applets to show and switch Wifi/network, volume control and often-used icons/launchers.
TBH, if I could get things like tint2 and yabar working with the mate applets, I'd probably switch back to WindowMaker in a heartbeat.
I don't run Linux anymore (not natively, for everyday use, in any case) -- like most people in this thread I also think the desktop is a shitshow these days but it's a particularly bad shitshow in Linux, and I was using Linux in 2003 so I know what a shitshow looks like. But when I do still need to touch a Linux machine, WindowMaker is still my WM of choice. It's really good.
Pnmixer for Pulseaudio, NM-applet/connman...
I never use the Windows box for anything else. No files, no coding, no internet browsing, no music, etc. No cameras, microphones, bluetooth adapters, etc. are installed. I turn that thing on every few weeks or so.
This has worked well, and is a compromise with which I can live. Try it, it's blissful!
Testing Windows stuff on an M1 Mac with Parallels doesn't work very well today (I have hope that we'll get there soon). Windows VMs work a lot better on my Ubuntu desktop, but a lot of our dev tools have mostly macOS users, so getting them to work with Ubuntu takes a bit of massaging at times. macOS is hard / unsupported to virtualize, so I basically have to use macOS when developing macOS software.
If we could run macOS as a VM, I'd choose Ubuntu / Pop!_OS for most things.
Eg https://kb.parallels.com/en/125105 and https://osxdaily.com/2021/07/15/how-install-macos-virtualbox...
Ctrl+d, like in emacs
> no home
Ctrl+a. Also: Ctrl+e for end-of-line. Like in emacs. Also Ctrl+fbpn.
Works best with CapsLock->Control, which is a native GUI option, not something you have to install/CLI for (linux) or something you have to registry hack (windows). I really miss these on Windows and Linux, though not enough to fight the native layout. It's a rougher fight than you might imagine, though.
> Login screeen does not remember the language
It does for me, but more importantly: it shows it. Windows likes to swap the keyboard layout out from under me and doesn't show it. Mix with a 3-strikes-you're-locked-out policy at work, and it turns into pain.
> animations come back after every update
Yeah, that's fair.
> Muscle memory
That's not.
> I feel like mac os is in contempt of me
I feel like windows is actively malicious towards me and linux desktop doesn't care enough about me to do even minimum viable bugfixing. It's definitely a "pick your poison" situation.
I use xmonad in Ubuntu and I haven't dragged a window on my personal laptop in years. Not only was that option missing on MacOS, the underlying OS abstractions actually made it impractical to build the last time I checked; windows were owned by the application, there was no language to move another application's windows except asking the application to move its own, and doing that required the application to be frontmost. So tiling was a context-switch morass and a bad UX.
However, it appears the Accessibility Manager may since have grown enough feature hooks to support what I want, and https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst may do the job. I'll have to test it the next time I have my hands on a MacBook of some flavor.
My experience is that the only apps that use actual Ctrl on macOS are GTK apps, like Inkscape, and terminal apps (because Ctrl-C should be quite different from activating the menu item corresponding to the Cmd-C shortcut). Unfortunately, if you use non-native apps, you're going to get a non-native experience.
I recently got a windows pc just for gaming, and god DAMN it's annoying. Even worse than Vista. Nothing is consistent anymore and everything is always trying to grab my attention for irrelevant shit. What the hell happened :/
However, it's ironic that the author has now given up on Windows, for the problems the script attempts to solve.
As a long time Windows and Linux user who recently got a MacBook Pro, I find the UI incredibly weird and confusing compared to what I'm used to.
The hardware is however more than good enough that I'm willing to put up with MacOS until I get used to it.
As someone who grew up with MS-DOS, Windows used to be really good until Microsoft started getting desperate and started shoving crapware down your throat... ads for Office, preinstalled Teams that starts up by itself, Skype, stupid Defender scans, nonstop UAC warnings, won't let you use a password instead of a PIN... all these dumb, user-hostile decisions. Zero respect for their users.
Apple has a bit of that now (iCloud logins, OS level notifications, bundled apps) but not quite as bad.
If Linux had Adobe Suite and MS Office I'd probably switch in a heartbeat. Need those to collaborate with other non-devs in the office.
At this point I’m thinking of deleting my Windows partition altogether.
The only annoying bug/problem that I have actually, it's that Dolphin could have a erratic behavior if I had mounted a SMB folder via an VPN and I end the VPN before un-mounting the SMB folder.
All?
My experience is that 90% work fine, 9% have weirdness, (for instance, voices in Skyrim are out of sync with mouth movements) and 1% of them have game breaking bugs.
Any time it happens to me, it's usually low resources because of something. Most often some chrome tab (or 3) that are going crazy. I also discovered that one of the apps that I thought was using hardware acceleration actually wasn't. The CPU usage made it pretty clear that the CPU was doing a ton of work.
Only game that hasn't worked with Proton is Oneshot and its kina understandable considering the games context... It did have a linux version that mostly works out of the box though!
Could be a GPU thermal issue, happens to me with old games that have no FPS limit, then the GPU does so much work that it hangs for some reason(Nvidia GT970), I am not sure if is my GPU broken/dusty, the driver bugged or Xorg, Windows users only see a game crash not a full system crash.
So mine last Windows was XP.
I'm not sure how that sort of behaviour isn't a clear violation of all kinds of privacy laws in 2022.
I guess we need higher fines to get the message across.
That's been the case for 4 years now, none of these fines have occurred. The total amount of fines across all companies over those 4 years is barely above 1Bn.
> The limiting factor at the moment seems to be a lack of resources for the regulators that are responsible for enforcing privacy rules
Not just resources but also willingness. I have the feeling that nobody actually wants to enforce this and campaigning for doing so is a politically-risky move, as not only does your campaign rely on the same companies that would be fined, but those companies now control the majority of humanity's social fabric and can trivially restrict even organic sharing of information/links about your campaign.
Worse: in the UK, there's been news about actually weakening the GDPR, based on the Culture Secretary being stupid (or having financial incentives for doing so) and actually believing the tech industry's vilification of the GDPR. Hint: if an industry making a huge chunk of its profit based on non-consensual data collection complains about data protection laws, it means the laws are actually working as designed. Most likely, this insanity will also go ahead, if it didn't already.
The largest fines so far have been approaching 9 figures, far more than the "couple of million" in the comment I replied to above.
That's not pocket change even for a multinational and of course there has to be reasonable due process before handing out that kind of penalty. If anything I'd say the fact that several eight-figure penalties have already been handed down is reassuring.
I have the feeling that nobody actually wants to enforce this
I'm genuinely curious about how you formed that impression. Here in the UK our data protection regulators have been fairly consistent in their public views on these issues under multiple Information Commissioners now and have handed down some significant penalties, so I don't really buy the conspiracy theories about corruption and so on.
Worse: in the UK, there's been news about actually weakening the GDPR, based on the Culture Secretary being stupid (or having financial incentives for doing so) and actually believing the tech industry's vilification of the GDPR.
As someone who is both a strong proponent of privacy safeguards and involved in running businesses that actually have to comply with the GDPR, I have very mixed feelings about this.
On one hand I don't like the idea of weakening important privacy protections and I have no faith whatsoever in the competence of the current government here to understand the technical or social implications of these policies.
On the other hand I also don't think much of the GDPR as written. It's full of ambiguity and it is unnecessarily difficult for a good actor to comply with it, particularly smaller organisations that don't have dedicated staff to deal with this kind of admin and also don't have any interest in doing things with personal data that most of us here probably wouldn't like. People like to focus on a tiny number of points that we'd probably agree are positive steps or at least well-intentioned, but the GDPR is roughly a hundred pages long and that's before you include supporting materials like official guidance on interpretation from all the different regulators. There are a lot of small and a few big problems in the rest of those pages once you look past the headlines. Not coincidentally those areas also tend to leave loopholes that some bad actors are relying on to escape the trap.
I have multiple experiences dealing with the UK one, spending unreasonable amounts of time raising complaints for obvious breaches of the GDPR with no outcome. I've summarized my experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662905
Not to mention, this high-profile incident which they are themselves proud enough to announce on their own website: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl... - so you've got a company whose entire business is to manage people's personal data and is large enough to have the resources to understand & comply with the regulation, and you caught them red-handed misusing data that people outright had no choice in giving up (I don't know any bank that allows opting out of CRA reporting even if you never actually intend to take out credit) for a purpose that's definitely not in the data subjects' best interests, and the outcome is a letter?
What message do you think the above sends? To me it sends that breaching the GDPR absolutely does pay and you should absolutely do it at least once because even getting caught brazenly breaching it (considering the size & resources of said companies, number of people impacted and the fact people had literally no choice) will lead to just politely being asked to stop with no monetary penalty nor having to compensate the affected users.
The response to every legal argument is "yes, you do" as long as you have enough money. Lo and behold, Microsoft is swimming in it.
In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account.
Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit..
It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.