IMO this is also something that the US should shut down hard for a very different reason: every time anyone complains about a vendor, usually Chinese, misusing American data, the US is implicitly making a comparison to American vendors, which are supposedly better. But here’s MS being every bit as bad, if not worse.

Foreign countries can, and should, stop using MS over this. Things like NDAA look pretty dumb in light of this behavior. The US’s technological dominance is somewhat at risk due to this crap.

Man. I have felt this way a whole lot lately.

I think some people see Linux users and genuinely can't fathom how or why they'd want to go through all of the trouble choosing to use Linux and doing real work on it. A lot of us look back just as puzzled, because when I switched to a Linux desktop for the first time in around 2004, it was definitely a choice, but it hasn't felt like a "choice" for a very long time.

Then installing apps, even with WingetUI it's far easier on Linux than trying to find and install apps on Windows... God help me, I hope Microsoft have learnt how to actually do window management this time to make all their crap worthwhile.

Since then I run Windows 10 + WSL and life is good.

Win10 support ends next year and I am at a complete loss at what to do.

Linux desktop never worked, never will, the incentives are not there. It's only free if you don't value your time. As I wrote before , your choices are Ubuntu where an OS upgrade shatters your entire system so throughly it takes days to get back to a working system or you can go with Arch where Bluetooth/multifunction device/etc might break every so often. But at least most of the system remains standing. And if you need to connect to some funny enterprise wifi or VPN, the IT department of the client will have Mac and Windows support but Linux? X Windows doesn't get new features, Wayland is not ready, and the package manager landscape is just getting worse https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/616/9...

Windows 11 is hot garbage. No other way to put it.

Send help.

I have a dual-boot mid-tower running EndeavourOS (Arch Linux flavor) and the non-IoT version of Win 10 LTSC (support ends in 2027) with strict group policies around disabling of telemetry that's been humming along for several years now.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

You can now pick up a MacBook Air at Walmart for $700. Considering the inflation we’ve had, that’s actually reasonable. It will do the Unixy stuff well. My Mac is of this same class and I’m happy with it.

That said, I just want to make it abundantly clear: I can barely even tolerate the macOS desktop for a fraction of my day. I hesitate to rant about every single thing that pisses me off about it, I think it's wasted time: the direction macOS is going in is not compatible with me and my computing needs and I don't think anyone has to worry about it. The point is, macOS is not the solution for everyone. I don't think I could have a stronger distaste for Apple and their philosophy if I tried, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

(This opinion is, unfortunately, up to date. I am currently using macOS in some capacity, regrettably.)

But I use my MBP without a mouse because the synergy between the OS and hardware is so nice. Window and desktop management in particular.

I do not think there's anything like it in the Mac world.

Untangling synced Docs and Desktop folders between multiple Macs, and trying to revert to something akin to a default and reconcile what is in various folders, not pleasant.

> Desktop & Documents Folders: Keep your Desktop & Documents Folder in sync with iCloud and access them from other devices and iCloud.com

But easily has issues reconciling files on different devices, and then, if you turn it off, things get messy and need a lot of moving things around.

Instead of begging for help, why not be that help for someone else?

They would literally rather suffer with the kind of impressive surveillance and advertising that Microsoft heaps on them rather than change themselves and the tools they can/could use for the better.

It's the epitome of learned helplessness.

I have a friend from HS who had no interest in computers beyond using them as appliances until he asked me how to extend the life of a shitty laptop that he owned and I suggested that he install Linux on it.

This was about 20s ago now and between now and then he's become a distrohopping person who is quite knowledgeable in hardware with no impetus from me beyond the initial push.

I look at what rural farmers can do when push comes to shove in all kinds of domains and I wonder why not with the general public and computers.

If we had a Cuban embargo type scenario where westerners couldn't get modern hardware and the operating systems that run on it they'd figure out how to.make.die with the cheapest and most reliable software/hardware combo.

People don't grow to learn new skills because they aren't pressed to by circumstance not because they can't.

- Accept inability to use monitor color profiles (this is still WIP)

- Accept inability to use full-screen sharing (very likely to be broken, in theory fixable, in practice its unclear how to fix the portal mess)

- Forked libinput because it behaved unacceptable with my touchpad, and the original developers don't want to add the configuration options to fix this. (Well kind of - custom acceleration profiles may be available in later versions)

- Spent some time adding all the "use wayland" cli flags to everything electron based. In theory, ~/.config/thing-flags.conf is supposed to work, in practice it doesn't, so I have a bunch of wayland replacement clis for everything (wcode, wobsidian, etc)

- Spent some time looking up tool replacements (i3wm -> sway, dmenu -> rofi, xclip -> wl-copy, xprop -> ... its complicated etc)

Benefit: for the first time ever my Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen3 laptop (4K screen) outperforms my Android phone in graphics rendering performance and responsiveness, even just using the Intel card. Using it feels gloriously good. This includes the OEM Windows install as a comparison point, which is doing significantly worse, even with nvidia card enabled.

Replacing Xorg is an absolutely impossible task, with a long tail of broken things left in Wayland's wake. But I think it might finally be getting to the point where its worth it

So they unbox the computers every day, and they have to wait an hour or more, a team of 10 people, for windows update to finish and start the match. Windows update could not be cancelled by the user anyway.

I thought, if he doesn't trust software from other people, maybe he could carry with him an OS in a flash drive the size of a gum. Also, linux was not traditionally great for games, but a chess game can be supported even on a live boot.

[1] Kramnik vs Jospem chess match.

What trouble? Try to install Fedora and Win 11 and tell us which is faster and simpler.

Someone in Microsoft should look into who is making these decisions, why these decisions are are being made, and why they are being received so negatively. Then they need to address them.

Even though I'm not much of a fan of Microsoft products, I get the impression that they have some excellent developers making excellent products that end up being undermined by business decisions. These are decisions that will probably end up undermining the business itself. We don't live in the 1990's anymore. Microsoft has plenty of competitors who are nibbling away at their edges.

>>Welcome to hell.

Have you read the Windows privacy policy any time in the last decade?

They don't need to change anything.

This MBAs job is to get as many copilot dailyvusers as possible and to do that they need your files in their data orbit.

Remember when dropbox had to tell everone their openai integration wad opt in.

Youre a few MBAs ahead, todays MBA just needs daily copilot users and thats onlyvfeasible with the cloud.

You're not unhinged, there's been a fundamental change in internet culture and the early 2000s free internet people are considered loony now. Ive been laughed out of Discord groups(it's what the under 30s use these days instead of chats and forums, and is itself problematic) for talking about these things.

It turns out even the 2000s web 2.0 itself can have an Eternal September, who'd of thought?

I've been accused of holding "far right" views, or at best an overly paranoid nut, for some of my opinions on software and internet freedom, for promoting E2E encryption, and lamenting the loss of public forums to private, hidden from search, discord/Facebook groups, etc.

To be honest, it's difficult to sit by and watch the enshittification of everything tech while seeing the younger crowd be totally OK with it, and in a lot of cases even defend it.

Unfortunately, this problem somehow happened again on my current Windows installation. Maybe I forgot to remove OneDrive this time, or it was automatically reinstalled during some update.

[3] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/onedrive/how-to-disab... [6] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do...

No one can or should trust non-free software. Period.

Found ways to change it. Have no idea if I should. It's currently working and afaik OneDrive isn't slurping any data from it. There's no data to slurp other than savegames anyways.

But it still left a bad taste. I think my laptop is well supported by the major distros. I already know my favorite games work on Linux thanks to my Steam Deck. Having a strong urge to just abandon Windows for good.

Remember the thread from the other day in which someone asked how many video encoders Facebook should release before we forgive them for all the crap throughout the years?

I wake up all the time and find my windows laptop stuck at the boot screen because I’m not using the on-brand power supply. My lid is shut, but windows ignores that, and it installs updates anyway.

And then it asks you every time to sign in/up for MS bullshit. And the decline button is becoming harder to find.

> You're low on disk space. Storage Sense is freeing up space on your PC to help it run its best. Synced files that haven't been used recently will become cloud-only.

All of my family and friends get tricked by tactics like this. None of my family wants to use OneDrive or the cloud storage from Google / Apple for photos, etc., but their data always ends up synced to these nasty services.

How is it not considered predatory? Fine them a gazillion dollars and make the CEOs smash rocks with a children's hammer for the rest of their lives.

Edit: And how is that a "backup"? They're moving my files to their servers eventually. That's not a backup. That's theft.

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

The system is part of the problem not part of the solution.

Go re-write your own stack from the ground up to somehow end up with perfect social constructs, meanwhile I'll take advantage of the imperfect tools that can actually accomplish something today in the real world and not fall for the bs that I should scrap the 'good' because it's not 'perfect'.

You did nothing, and now it's all gone!

Luckily, google gives you the option to get all your data. So I asked for a download using Google Takeout, and as you might guess it's well hidden and makes it really hard to use - the backups can take days to be ready and I couldn't download the 150gb result in the first 5 tries, so I had to start all over (that's just random plain evil, as I didn't download 10mb even in those poor tries). But once I got it I felt safer. At least I would be able to access my mail in such an event.

Also, it's a really sobering experience. I went through the rabbi hole of checking every file and folder there. I wondered, what youtube video did I watch on 7.8.2014 at 3am?

This left me feeling empty realizing they kept every fart I did in the last 20 years. I know it's like this and everybody does that, but skimming through the data made it real. Like you know texting and driving is dangerous but when you see someone loses his life to this shit.. It's different.

That's the Trojan Horse

https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

Step 1: "Why do I need to run Linux? I already have it in Windows"

Step 2: "Oh, and now this software runs better on WSL or requires WSL to work properly"

I almost wonder if this is by design. I genuinely had people look at me funny when I described relatively minor issues that eventually made me jump from Windows ( in my case I think it was dropping detailed descriptions from updates in Windows 7 ). I kept explaining that even the issues are not the actual issue. The issue is that I am unable to administer my machine as I see fit. I am not anti-tech, I tell people, but the tech has to work for me...

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

I don't think it can upload if you aren't logged in.

Have you tried installing Windows 11 without signing in to a Microsoft account? It's very difficult to do and the instructions online keep having to change as Microsoft makes it more and more difficult. What I'm finding now [0] involves using a hotkey to open command prompt at a certain part of the installation process and running a command to disable the internet before you proceed.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...

Don't connect to the internet, press 1 hotkey and enter 1 line of text ("OOBE\bypassnro").

While it's absolutely stupid that it needs to be done at all, it's not "very difficult".

If we want to be really pedantic, maybe I should have said "intentionally extremely obscure"—would that phrasing be satisfactory?

I've been a Linux user for decades through some dark days and some "hard" distros, and I would call that "very difficult". Part of the difficulty is knowing what you don't know, and that absolutely qualifies.

For a tech forum, I'm surprised at these responses. I have to Google shit all the time, including "can I do X in Y". I guess I'm the one out of touch, sorry.

I don't think anyone here is saying that they personally would have had difficulty installing Windows without a Microsoft account. I've done so myself.

What we're doing is empathizing with people who don't typically post on tech forums—people like my dad who install Windows on their own but don't regularly dig deep into the system internals. When I went through the process of installing Windows without setting up a Microsoft account I was appalled by how hard Microsoft is working to make sure that most people don't figure it out, and that was back in the days when all you had to do was not connect to Wi-Fi.

It's great that you'd be able to figure it out, but that's in spite of Microsoft's best efforts to hide the path.

I'm generally either at work or just done work when I'm on HN so I'm in "work mode". The next time I'm called on for family tech support on a Sunday, I'll think back to this thread and be in a better position to empathize with a non-techie view.

I don't need to disconnect from my network either. It just "work".

>While it's absolutely stupid that it needs to be done at all

You're not wrong, but your initial comment made it sound like it was just a matter of not stepping in a single pile of dog poo. What Microsoft presents users with instead is an entire sewer with a great big EXIT sign pointing straight through the sewage. If you're in the know you can mutter a secret incantation and a ladder will drop down, allowing you to climb up onto a rickety catwalk with lots of warning signs telling you that you're going the wrong way. If you're brave enough to ignore the warning signs then eventually you'll get to the other side without touching the crap.

Needless to say, most people follow the path that Microsoft designed for them and end up interacting with at least some of the crap.

Notice that linux is not safe from that trend as well: you have to learn tech stuff to operate it in any capacity.

So there's no free lunch in this world, that much is obvious. I don't see where 'typical person' can reasonably survive intact in this tech climate so I also see no reason to bring them up.

But yeah, I only use it for some horrible hardware that absolutely will not run on WINE and has proprietary drivers. The day my wife gives up crafts, will be a day of celebration.

Got it installed, added the family as users, tried to login to my young child's freshly minted account. Apart from taking forever, you then have to go through all the "let us copy all your data" and "we're going to advertise to you, so you may as well let us personalise the ads!" and so on ... and you have to do that for every member of the family ... it's an absolutely diabolical time suck.

And of course you can't, for goodness knows what reason, just point at the existing Win10 install to copy all the profiles and settings across.

It all sucks.

Won't work though if you're Already configured for wifi

I had to block the PC from accessing the Internet in my router settings to get the "I don't have an internet connection" button back.

Won't really help "regular" people since most off-the-shelf, i.e. Best Buy, computers come with Home but if you stick to business lines (ThinkPads, XPS, Latitude, Precision, EliteBook and ProBooks, etc.) you get Pro edition.

Well done to MS marketing I suppose.

Now if I try to reinstall OneDrive, it doesn't open when I try to launch it! I think it just gets trashed by all the changes I've made.

I guess I have to live with the OneDrive\Pictures and OneDrive\Documents folder forever, because they keep coming back when I delete them.

(I am somewhat loathe to reinstall Windows because just getting it installed on this laptop was a huge PITA in the first place, and it was extremely annoying getting all the ads & crap uninstalled)

e; actually wait, I may have been able to finish the job with the registry hack given here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do...

Bless you Rodrigo. Bless you

ee; this is another example of a phenomenon I see a LOT, which is that just complaining about something into the void is often a critical step to solving a problem.

I would recommend to only use Windows with a local account and without secure boot.