I used to use Windows Backup with One Drive years ago but it just really pissed me off, especially with how My Documents is handled.
There was that time I discovered several GB of screenshots had been automatically saved to My Pictures from some setting they snuck into the printscreen screen grab tool and then that of course those were automatically uploaded to the cloud. After disabling the option it would sometimes reenable itself.
And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun. Ubisoft were terrible for this, after playing a game I'd notice a bunch of cache files they dumped into My Docs being uploaded. I mean putting save games and config files inside my docs is annoying enough, random cache files is just taking the piss.
Also windows backup would mess up my desktop between systems on occasion which was also very fun!
I disabled most of the shit but it was still annoying on occasion. Then a year or two ago I solved the problem by just using Linux for 90% of things, Mint at first but now Fedora, and grudgingly booting back into Windows for the other 10% of my needs.
I've been a Mac & Linux user since about 2007 or so, and I had no idea what Windows had become. Then a couple weeks ago I caved and built my son a Windows gaming PC. Egads, Windows is annoying! Even more so than I remember! I'm amazed that people actually put up with it for their daily driver. Right on schedule, my son came to me yesterday evening and asked what he should do about the backup warning. It didn't give any option other than enabling backup or telling it to remind later. WTF.
Not to say that MacOS isn't occasionally very annoying as well. It is. But as a tool it's also much more useful than vanilla Windows, which helps a little.
My Mac tells me 5+ times per day that it's unable to backup something or another because I'm not logged into the Apple cloud or whatever it's called. And there's not obvious way to make it stop.
If you don't want to receive notifications from iCloud, go into Notifications in the System Settings and uncheck the box next to iCloud in the list of what is allowed to send notifications.
How do you do you block One Drive on Windows from nagging you constantly?
I don't run into that, but I do have an iCloud account and I'm logged into it, which probably helps. I'm logged into my Microsoft account on Windows, too, but it is still pushy.
The only, as per personal exp, way to properly setup a Win11 machine these days is strictly via LTSC release and WinUtil from Chris Titus + local account - clean and no "feature" updates for almost 10 yrs. Add to that Chocolatey for package management that takes away the "every piece of software adds it's own autoupdater crap"-pain and the OS is suddenly very capable for almost all computing needs.
It's worth mentioning that 10 also has LTSC variants, the IoT LTSC version in particular will be supported with security updates until 2032 if I recall.
Is buying the Enterprise version another method? I heard someone suggest that, but without any explanation other than it allowed you to use Windows without a Microsoft account. Is there something that makes it unsuitable for gaming?
We're a niche, but at this point most people I see around are spending the majority of their time in unix/linux through whatever layer feels right for them, be it the Darwin system or WSL2 or straight docker/container. The overall maintenance being linuxy is par for the course.
Good timing to plug this other article on the top page, Exactly om that paradox:
On their own devices, lots of non-power users probably just accept whatever Windows suggests. Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.
Techie users might just find tweaks online that allows disabling dark patterns on their devices.
I don't know how people who care but aren't techie enough to install workarounds (or to tell good ones from bad ones) deal.
> Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.
Generally if the company is deploying Windows they are using OneDrive, although the exact configuration will vary.
Windows has always been designed with corporate customers in mind. That's true more than ever today, the whole Azure ecosystem is very lucrative for them. Personal Windows users have always been an afterthought, but starting around Windows 10 they became less important than their own data. Which Microsoft has been getting away with brazenly claiming as its own.
People dont care about their operating system. Most Mac users never learn Mac and most Windows users never learn windows. They use their computers for emails, some presentations and occasional gaming. They dont want to learn different kinds of software. Which is fine. For most people its just a power tool they never read the manual for. They dont even know what other tools there are so they dont know that life could be better, by not using windows.
I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
Even Linux allows such basic customization.
If Apple allowed this type of user-friendly customisation on MacOS, I suspect a lot of Windows users will migrate to Mac.
I have extreme doubts that there is any meaningful number of windows users holding out on trying macos based on such a thing.
The users are much more simple than this. Most have never even tried Mac. If they want to, they will just buy one the next time they need a computer and accept the new experience as being the new norm.
> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
Classic Mac OS was released first, with well-considered, consistent design standards. Windows arrived almost 2 years later, and in the interest of not looking it like copied Macs, Microsoft essentially flipped the positions of everything, including window controls, toolbars, desktop icon placement, and button order. (Yes, both copied Bell Labs).
Windows has no standards, so maybe they could provide that kind of option instead.
> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
> Even Linux allows such basic customization.
Does Windows allow such customization? I think that's the relevant comparison. Both macOS and Windows are trying to be "user-friendly," which more and more means "take what we tell you and like it." I personally am a techie and like the Unix way of exposing everything that one can imagine to customization, but I do know that I'm often lost when I want to learn a new piece of customization-minded software and have to decide how to, and whether to, twiddle lots of knobs before even getting into just using it. I think that there's definitely a reasonable place for an OS that spends its time getting those settings right so that the user doesn't have to worry about them.
(Whether any particular setting is right or wrong is, of course, going to depend on the user. I'm a Mac user, there are some defaults I've always hated, and others that I think used to be good but are moving in the wrong direction. But, so far, I stick with it at least in part because there are lots of other things it gets right, and it doesn't feel fundamentally hostile to me in the way that Windows does.)
> I'm amazed people actually put up with it for their daily driver
Bit of an overreaction, the majority of the world is on Windows (I use both as my daily). I'm sure as a Mac user you remember the days around 2007 where there were a lot of compatibility issues on Mac, it has come along way.
Your annoyance with Windows is likely due to what I see a lot of which is simply that the operation system works and does things differently, which requires you to do things in a way you might not be familiar with. We use operating systems almost instinctively once we're familiar, jumping to another OS is going to rock your boat.
I used all three every day for years. Until I dropped Mac because I got sick of apple's opinionated design. Linux with KDE of course because gnome is even worse than Apple.
That kinda solved the only big issue I had switching OSes constantly, the copy paste shortcuts. Apple is command-c/v and if you constantly switch you never get used to it.
Yeah, would not recommend. From my experience tweaking three OSes to be similar enough to be able to form muscle memory for efficient use is not trivial.
Unless you spend 99% of time in terminal, then it can be done, but in that case OS doesn’t matter. That is what I personally ended up doing.
I didn't really have any issues except for the control-C/V problem. I still use Linux and windows intermingled (windows for work and gaming and Linux for everything else)
I've faced many fewer hiccups on CachyOS/Arch in the past few months than on Windows. In the first month of owning this hardware, I had an unexplained BSOD that actually bricked my whole Win11 install. And this is pretty recent/funky 2-in-1 hardware, not an old ThinkPad I've cherry-picked for good Linux support. This is an important moment for free software; the big platforms are finally cinching down on users hard enough that we have a shot at convincing regular people to join us. Please don't blow it with vague complaints.
Yep, I dual boot Linux Mint & Windows 11 and only bother with the latter when I need MS Teams, or some other proprietary software that tends to be more reliable on Windows. In terms of performance and user experience Mint wins easily.
I only rarely need to use Microsoft Office or Paint.NET and a Windows VM on Linux has solved the problem entirely for me. I don't know if videoconferencing would work as well, but I'd really recommend giving it a try! I've already gone without a proper Windows install for almost 2 years.
Since MS is making the office UX web based, I'd suggest people try just loading 365 in a browser like edge (It's generally flawless for MS products). Especially apps like Teams.
Once you realize that the dedicated app is basically just a browser shell, using a real browser becomes somewhat of a no brainer.
Edge even supports PWAs on linux which can give you the "app" experience without the app.
But the browser versions of Office products royally suck. I still actively use the 'open in app' option over the default action of opening a document / spreadsheet in a browser window. I wholly disagree with It's generally flawless for MS products
The Office-in-browser experience is laggy and slow and long-learnt familiarities are gone.
Additional old-man whinge: Outlook keeps wanting to open in a browser window now. I have enough things open in a browser that are difficult enough to manage that I don't need Outlook getting lost in that forest as well. It's convenient having a separate Taskbar icon that will definitely open my Calendar or Email.
When everything's a browser tab, what's the point of the taskbar?
When everything's a browser tab then the browser is the Operating System.
Every day I'm forced to use Microsoft at work, I'm increasingly glad I ditched it at home.
I don't know how it is today, but about 3 years ago I worked in a shop that used MS Teams. I was sneaky enough to get myself a Kubuntu install when everybody else was on Windows, but I had no problems using Teams on Kubuntu back then.
The Open Source ecosystem is a bit weird in that your system can be as reliable or not as you want, depending on what projects you follow. It really truly is a mixed bag in the sense that you can actually have a solid setup if you are happy with it being boring.
I’m not sure what the good kind of boring is, if we could define it, it might be tautologically true that that’s the thing people want.
> Look at how popular Ubuntu VMs are with research chemists.
Are they? I actually have no idea.
> And successful chemists tend to be highly technical.
But not necessarily in any IT sense. STEM skills are very specific.
Sorry, it looks like I’m just being petulant and saying “I’m not sure” about your every sentence, haha, that wasn’t my intent but it is what I ended up doing I guess.
> The Open Source ecosystem is a bit weird in that your system can be as reliable or not as you want
I'm going to dig into this a little. This feels like shifting responsibility onto the user when things don't go well. E.g. comparing the platonic ideal of Linux when analyzing practical options. I make lots of mistakes in all aspects of my life. I know historically, and projecting into the future that I will get into trouble with Linux, so I don't daily-drive it. Yes, there are always ways to fix things when a system gets in a bad state, but there is a time and effort cost to this.
Saying it's my fault for breaking it doesn't help restore the system. e.g. "Should have used the LTS release", "Should have only installed software from the package manager", "Shouldn't have used sudo", "Shouldn't have edited a system file without knowing what you're doing". If I was doing those things, it probably seemed like the best of available options, e.g. the only way to make a certain piece of hardware or software work.
I think it is an accurate description of the situation. I agree that responsibility is accumulating at the user’s feet in an unfortunate manner.
But somebody must be responsible for making your computer work, who should it be?
The companies that sell operating systems don’t seem to be fulfilling the obligation to make a bug free and user-friendly OS. The Open Source community never really had accepting that responsibility as a “business model” because they aren’t businesses.
But that's how it works with every other tool you own? Nobody is complaining about the pencil manufacturer when you choose to draw an image, which you later don't like. Same with using software to modify the state of the hard disk, which you don't like later.
In Windows or Darwin you are not responsible, because you can't tell the computer what you want to do, but in a free OS, you can and do order what the computer is doing and that's why you also need to deal with the consequences.
I agree! My thought is this: The mechanical pencil is drawing that image because there are a combination of settings on it don't work well for a given use case. When adjusting the settings, I get poor results, or something breaks. The schematics are available and parts are available for the repair, but the job still takes a while, and I don't know how to do it. My friend has fixed something like it before, but his pencil's controls were different, and some of the tools are no longer available for the way he did it. I would prefer if the pencil worked out of the box, because I'm an artist; not a pencil engineer.
I instead buy a pencil from a different brand. It doesn't come in the color I want, but it's good enough, and lets me focus on the drawing. The pencil engineers and enthusiasts keep telling me the customizable mechanical pencil is much better. They love it, have learned its intricacies, and take pride in this.
MacOS and Windows might break[1] less often than Linux, but when it does I stand less of a chance of fixing it. Linux is usually more fiddly, but if does something I don't want its usually only a few minutes to find the config file or a plugin for the Desktop Environment to alter the behavior.
[1]: "Break" here meaning "behaves in a way I don't want"
He's saying its not very good if thats the case. Which is not the case. I am satisfied with GNU+Linux. It doesn't work against me. It would be great if there were FOSS alternatives to the remaining proprietary software on my computers. Making it sound like linux is almost just as bad, does sound weird. Also nothing about what's actually that bad about "linux".
I’m giving the Asus Proart P16 a try, if I was trying for maximum battery life I’d probably avoid the discrete gpu (e.g. a zenbook or similar). I am not a full time road warrior so battery life is important, but not absolutely critical. There may be some options out with better battery life, but I haven’t been focused on this metric too closely.
I just don’t want to be sidetracked by overly aggressive and pushy decisions by my OS vendor anymore. I’ve been happy with the stability of my Debian/Ubuntu systems for getting work done. I have been using apple laptops for 10+ years, and I still like their build quality, but I don’t like the direction macOS (or Windows) is heading.
Do you think it looks like a toy just because of how it looks, or because of how it works?
Spotlight got a major update in macOS 26 where it can now perform actions. I can open spotlight and type "run <enter> <some terminal command or script>" and get the output right there, selecting it will put the resulting text into my current window.
16:16 up 23:27, 1 user, load averages: 1.72 1.78 1.90
There is my uptime posted in HN with only Spotlight and my hands never leaving the keyboard.
Spotlight is also context aware... Say I run across some text in another language:
Spiegami come funziona questo coso.
I can highlight, invoke spotlight, type translate, it will recognize I want to translate the selected text, translate it inside of Spotlight, and if arrow down and press enter, it will paste the translated text over the original text, if editable, or copy it to the clipboard. There is also a built-in clipboard history.
I'm not a fan of all the UI choices that have been made, but those will get ironed out over time. Meanwhile, I get some more powerful out of the box features without needing to resort to 3rd party apps.
My 2c. I agree with the parent and article: OneDrive can be a major problem with Windows. They push it on you, your personal documents can be moved to OneDrive without your permission etc. Confusing and user-hostile design.
Linux has its own idiosyncrasies, which may or may not make it worth. E.g. ABI diaspora, installing things can be inconsistent and high-effort, the cycle of copy+pasting CLI commands and system file edits from old forum posts or these days LLMs to fix something, treating your PC like a multi-user system that has an admin by default, etc. My general experience is that installation and things work smoothly with the built-in or package-managed software, but gradually degrade as you start installing software and drivers.
> treating your PC like a multi-user system that has an admin by default, etc.
I think I have the opposite orientation: In the past when family and friends needed help to install/rescue their machine (on Windows versions that supported it) I always ensured there was a separate "Manager" admin login and then made their main account "limited", albeit with UAC popups.
If nothing else, it made repeat visits much easier.
It is very serious. I love the way Catalina and Mojave looks; dark mode or light mode, it just screams "professional" at the top of it's lungs.
Big Sur is, somehow, the exact opposite. Corners are rounded off as if they could hurt someone, and margins are padded more than a cell in solitary confinement. Space is wasted everywhere. It's Fischer-Price design philosophy and I'm hardly the only one to point it out.
It's also weird because Microsoft has some excuse for wasting screen real estate - Windows is used on touchscreen devices and has to at least adapt to them. But Apple stubbornly refuses to put touchscreens on laptops, at which point what excuse do you have to not build good information density?
Agree on all points. Tahoe ruined macOS for me. Not only does it waste screen real estate, but it’s not performant at all and my M4 pro is no slouch.
Just feels like I’m using an iPad now.
Here’s a fun exercise. Look at how huge the window borders are to achieve that insane corner radius. The cursor changes to the resize arrow at the corner before it even touches the window, the bottom arrow is a good 4-5px away from the window lol.
I think that "serious" is not the right word here. But rather, saying "it's like a toy" is not constructive. When someone says "it looks like a toy" that tells me nothing about what they don't like about it. Saying "I don't like the rounded corners and wasted space" is something concrete you can have a discussion about, so it's better to use that kind of phrasing.
Toy design isn't objectively bad. Windows XP has many colorful, misshapen buttons and they're amazing for the vision-impaired, same goes for Apple's Aqua UI. Fischer-Price design language is arguably why the iPhone is so popular, when you deploy it with intent the results can be spectacular.
What is the intent of dumbing-down the Mac design language? iOS superfans already have devices to use, the Mac has to compete in the professional segment of the market, not the casual one. The only motivation I can see is to enforce solidarity with VisionOS, which by most accounts seems to be a professional flop too. An ecosystem shouldn't aim for superficial similarity across devices, each experience should enforce their unique strengths/weaknesses in the UI and then network their state to each-other in the background. Apple used to know this.
Sure, that's a reasonable technical criticism. Wasted screen space is, in my opinion, an issue in modern interface design trends. Good design uses space in a thoughtful manner. The designers of macOS clearly don't agree with us, but we can have a reasonable technical discussion about that. We can consult the data. We can consult the users.
> It's Fischer-Price design philosophy
You're mixing the two again. Fisher-Price was not consulted in the design of modern macOS interfaces, and complaining about not liking the design language cheapens all your actual points. No real discussion can be had around this taste garbage. You're rage baiting.
It doesn't seem like a toy to me. Therefore, it is not objective but is just your subjective opinion. Which is fine, but don't overstate your opinions as being objective when they aren't.
It enables in non-consensual manners, break apps and games(because paths change and APIs work differently), clings onto your files even if you tried to save them from the OneDrive folder, and throws a tantrum and irreversibly delete your files if you dare unlink the PC and disable it.
I don't know why they commit to especially the last part. To me, it feels like that is why Microsoft's Windows efforts are getting a lot of negative press lately; there must be lots of writers and media individuals who had lost data to that exact behavior who are now perpetually biased against them for that reason.
I think it's the curse of windows being attached to a tech company, and a tech company seems to want to keep pursuing cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utility. Over the years lots of little extra non-essential functionality has crept into windows to where you could almost compare it with a lightweight linux distro, or that it's hard to draw the line where the OS ends, and then you're getting into territory where everyone relies upon a different subset of what's available which MS has been increasingly able to use to justify adding more 'essential' features for modern computing.
> cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utilit
You can't re-sell a boring utility every one/two/three years.
Nobody wants it - not the top management (bonuses for the revenue growth), nor the middle management (bonuses for the succesful new projects), nor the guys who implements the things (reconginition for the new projects).
Or talking simpler - KPI. And there is no 'we improved the stability for 0.0000002% of clients' indicator along with 'customers are happy with the thing we sold them in 2017'.
And don't forget what it was some fruit company what even wasn't in the corporate which made it fashionable to have a 'totes new and refreshing experience (along with a hefty price tag)' every year or two.
It's interesting how ChromeOS respects your choices more than Windows here.
There is a setting to disable Google Drive and it just works. It won't auto-enable, no popups or nags or anything. Even Google Docs/Workspace falls back to a trimmed down offline version.
On the other hand, Android keeps nagging me about enabling backups in Google Photos. I'm always one accidental click of the huge "Okay!" button in an unexpected popup away from having my data being uploaded to Google.
I've solved this long ago by disabling the app. Sadly, that means I can't view videos in the gallery, but I believe it's a fair compromise. I'd recommend taking a look at open source alternatives like Lavender Photos [1] or Fossify Gallery [2]
The PMs can't start out being aggressive, though, that comes after dominating the market, right? ChromeOS and Google Drive are generally good products which are probably so as to get penetration and stickiness.
Perhaps Gmail is a better example to see the incumbent acting as it wishes, enabling and disabling features without worry about the end user's POV.
After setting up an Android phone for someone recently, I think it's stuffed with dark patterns. The amount of times that OS was pushing me to enable or opt-out from syncing different things to their cloud and generally sabotage the privacy via various settings was staggering.
Windows is certainly on the same path but I'm not sure how far ahead or behind they are in the competition to screw their users over with these dark patterns. They only have to trick you once.
I just bought my first windows 11 computer. Why are my personal folders like pictures and documents under a OneDrive folder? This is insane. Going to see how Ubuntu runs on it and hopefully never look back.
In Win10/Win11, you can move your user folders to another partition or folder path.
Right-click on them in Explorer, go to Properties, click on Location tab, and type/select the new path for them, click Move... then that folder and its contents will be moved to new locate.
I've movier following to D: partition as root-level folders:
Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches, Videos.
I stopped using these long ago because every other app you install puts something there so it becomes a landfill automatically.
Just create an additional partition and put all your non-OS files there. This is a classic idea people have been using since the DOS days, still working great.
The list of mind-boggling design decisions MS has made at this point is so long at this point that I don't blame people any more for saying 'MS bad'. Just pointing at the start menu search and Everything tells you everything you need to know, and more or less sets the tone you can expect from MS decision making.
Maybe, but not by default. But games as a rule don't give you the option to change this, so you're stuck with that one game and that one program using My Documents as a dumping ground without your consent, and now My Documents is no longer really your folder any more, at which point people make a folder on their desktop or whereever else called My Documents But For Real This Time or whatever.
> And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun.
I hate this problem with all OSes. We have folders that started out being places for users to put things like Pictures, Documents & home, but over time they get filled with crap from software and it's difficult to find your own files. We should have had a "program-files" subfolder or something by default in all these places to separate things that applications put there vs. things that you put there.
We do! On Windows, it's (user profile)\AppData. And to be fair, most software does use that. But there are always bad citizens that don't care and clutter up the user's documents folder.
That's nice, I think Linux/XDG has some standards around this too, but they too are not enforced - and many people have no idea these standards even exist unless the OS warns or enforces these things. I think there might also be some gap between "these files are only internally needed by this software" vs. "these files are created by this software, but may be good to show them to the user". It's nice the OSes are making efforts to do that though!
Speaking for myself, but I would my game saves and config in the cloud if I were using OneDrive.
That is however a separate issue from whether those files should be in the hidden appdata or in the visible my documents.
Hope the PM in charge with the scammy copy designed to trick people into turning this on is happy with the boost in free users falling for it.
My dad turned it on not knowing what it meant and it completely messed up his workflows and now I have to figure out how to safely disable it and move his files back.
I will remember Microsoft causing this problem for him every time I think of or get asked if someone should use a Microsoft product or service.
This work is 10x more effort than it sounds too due to how severely mistakes are penalised (i.e. unrecoverable files), necessitating extreme caution.
When uploading 10k photos from macOS to Google Cloud using the Google Cloud macOS app, it said syncing had completed about 2 hours earlier than my back-of-the-envelope calculations predicted. "Great", I thought, but was still a bit suspicious, so just in case, before deleting the local copy, I closed the Google Drive app and reopened it, and it immediately started syncing - there were 2k photos/videos to go (!!). That's how insanely easily it could be to lose precious memories due to a tiniest bug in cloud software.
Surgical precision and extreme thoroughness are the only ways to approach these seemingly simple operations of moving files from one computer to another.
Honestly, the Google Drive for Desktop app was extremely reliable when Google was managing the files.
Then when macOS provided native support for cloud filesystems, it migrated to that. And it's been a complete mess. Uploads often don't get triggered until you restart the system, exactly what you're describing.
I'm pretty sure they're Apple macOS bugs, not Google ones. Because those kinds of bugs are constant across everything iCloud and Mac, but I don't generally see them on Google-only stuff.
> when macOS provided native support for cloud filesystems
When was that? I haven't regularly used a Mac in a good four years. At the time I had the Google Drive app with a business subscription, and I don't think there was any other option. It was terrible, to the point I completely gave up on it. Just like the other poster says, it would say, "I'm all synced up", but only half my files would be synced. I'd need to restart it to get syncing again. When I would try to get a large amount of files from the cloud to local storage, it would randomly crap out.
Basically, it would stall very often, and this was on wired gigabit ethernet, not some spotty mobile connection from a phone via wifi in a crowded cafe.
I've been using the Google Drive for Desktop file streaming version since it launched in 2017 (file streaming, not exactly sync), I think it was originally called Google DriveFS, and never had any problems until they switched to Apple's File Provider.
There's a different Drive app that only did sync, I think that's what you're talking about. It's much older. Then they got merged into the current one.
Doing shady stuff to juice KPIs seems like standard operating procedure at Microsoft. My favorite example of this is a few years after Windows Phone came out (when it was already clear it was going to be a failure), Microsoft announced they would be paying developers $100 per app (up to 20 apps) for ANYTHING submitted to the Windows Phone store. Clearly some executive was being graded on "number of apps in the store". As expected, this resulted in Windows Phone having a wide and varied selection of apps as long as all you needed was Chuck Norris jokes, fart apps, soundboards, whack-a-mole, Simon, etc.
It seems that after the 90s/00s MS hate, there was a period where MS was seen as the good guys, and "this isn't the same MS" etc. Seems to be turning around again.
I never got the "this isn't the same Microsoft" talk. Usually used to shut down anyone's complaints about bad or deceptive behaviour.
Not the same Microsoft, so this time must be a mistake!
Except they were still claiming to love Linux whilst paying off government officials to hurt adoption amongst other deceptive behaviour.
They're not so hostile to Linux anymore because their business no longer depends do much on selling OSes but services.
However they still want you to use windows because it makes it easier to sell their services. Windows has become a marketing vehicle which is why it now demands we create a Microsoft account and constantly pushes things like OneDrive as the article alludes to.
I don't think they were ever any more benign. It was always a pretty hardcore business. First software then services (and now they're hell-bent on becoming the biggest AI player, not very successfully so because they're really only a reseller of watered-down OpenAI services)
A family friend upgraded to Windows 11 and had it helpfully turned on personal files being OneDrive enabled. It ate up her free space and suddenly she couldn't receive or reply to email anymore. She was nearly 80 and had no idea why until she had randomly asked me to help her with something on her computer.
Yeah, the tech sector's understanding of the notion of consent is so unique and twisted.
It makes sense now that the industry has the reputation that it has w.r.t misconduct/harrassment and how it's generally seen as being filled with creeps. Just keep asking until the user slips up or gets tired of the endless prompts/manual work required.
One is the many many years old renaming trouble, renaming a file in Windows Explorer inside the OneDrive sometimes select all while I am alread typing extension to the end of the file name, clearing everything with the following keystroke, either resulting in something stupid saved on Enter if I do not realise what is happening (and being mad not remembering what the original name was), or just have to cancel and restart the renaming. Very frequent and annoying.
But a ... lets call it funny, so a funny trouble I recently discovered is that file name completely fine with Wndows is incompatible with OneDrive, OneDriva mandates me to "change the filename! change it!" (with different words but the same tone). What the f! Microsoft is not compatible with itself? : D What a clusterfuck. It is fairly new, I believe there are spaces in fron of the file name that is generated with some software I am trying, I don't care that much, nonessential, but very comedic. I have too much difficulty with using Windows to care with all the trouble and spend any time on those, I work around those, I increasingly give no f. (my work mandates Windows, ah!)
I also seen some sort of message box when a certain software tried to automatically open a newly created file in OneDrive, something like this: "The file http://sharepoint.blablabl/bla/bla/newly_created_file.ext" cannot be found. Whaaaat?! I work with a desktiop only software, it does not even care about internet connection. Saving the file to an ordinary folder works great, opens automatically. Sounds like at some point querying the full path of the file produces an internet address? Again, I give no sht to this crp that much to go ino and investigate and diagnose this hundredths of bug, just to have fruitless conversation a very understanding and very useless support guy or a forum audience suggesting how should I wrap my life around the stupidity of Windows.
HN seems to think PMs have a lot more power at Microsoft or large corps than they actually do. I assure you, a bunch of this stuff just comes top down because some VP's million dollar bonus rides on it.
The mandate to implement these kind of pop-ups doesn't come from above.
The mandate to identify ways to increase profit comes from above, and it is the PMs (through marketing/research/developers) that come up with ways to satisfy these requirements.
And failure to meet these requirements means a bad review and a chance of being laid off.
[0] for the most part because nothing - not even macOS where Apple controls the entire stack from CPU up to the OS - is without problems. Though i'm doing weird stuff with my PC - on my laptop i just threw it in ~3 years ago and it has been working without issues since then
- Microsoft Office, mainly PowerPoint, Excel and Word for creating and interacting with other companies' docs. Libre/OpenOffice mangled them/were missing features I depend on
- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.) last time I tried to switch, and rabbit holes that I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)
That said, I would love to switch back. I loved rofi [0] last time, for example.
Can anyone speak to the above? What's the status of running Windows apps like Adobe, Resolve, Office, for instance? Or AutoHotkey or equivalent?
About AutoHotKey, you can do similar stuff as long as you are using X11 as there are various utilities for it, such as xdotool[0]. There is even an AutoHotKey-for-Linux project[1] (it also needs X11 - the author did try to port it to Wayland but gave up). For Wayland there are some alternatives like ydotool[2] (actually AFAIK since ydotool uses some daemon to inject events it works with anything, not just Wayland, but on the other hand it only provides a basic tiny subset of xdotool's commands) but the core protocol isn't particularly friendly to such automation.
I suspect the problem they were indicating with “AutoHotKey scripts, lots of them” is that they just have a lot of scripts they’d need to convert. I get it—even switching to a new WM or distro can be a real pain.
Things that used to be prohibitive are made much easier with AI these days. Especially tasks like this that do something fairly small and isolated and are easy to test.
> Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.)
I'm running Ubuntu on a laptop with a 3070m. I don't have any issues like this. I did have issues related to using an external monitor but they all seemed to resolve when I switched from Gnome Wayland to Gnome X11.
Fair. Second PC to play around from time to time is probably the best in this case. But I fully understand, unless as a hobby, that infesting a lot of time makes little sense.
I don't use it as much nowadays but https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora (kde desktop + automatic updates + baked in nvidia drivers) got me an as painless as possible nvidia experience (on a laptop I got my nvidia gpu to power down while idle which had been a huge time sink trying to figure out how to do on my own). Didn't notice any screen tearing personally, but that's probably something that depends on what applications / workflows one has.
In terms of office compatibility OnlyOffice iirc has the best compatibility. Easy to install via flatpak (I really enjoy this move in desktop linux because now I can easily remove network access from apps / set the permissions I want).
The only thing that seems unsurmountable is probably Adobe, not sure how much of a dealbreaker that is.
Linux for me is all about customization and control, particularly of hardware, which you'd usually do for optimization (performance, workflow, latency, stability), which is fun if you care about optimization and efficiency, but for "good enough/I'm used to it/I'm a satisfied paying customer" I suppose there's no reason to investigate or risk. The market has poured loads of capital into satisfying PC multimedia use-case.
I'd suspect there's probably versions of all those that have been made to function basically through WINE.
If your curious, it's very easy to use it as a hypervisor, and pull out what you can, though IOMMU/SR-IOV might be tricky.
Alternatively, checking if Blender/GIMP service your use cases wouldn't even require switching...
AutoHotKey has been solved a lot of different ways, for sure.
But yeah, granular detailed control over your hardware is still the primary use-case for Linux, so if you view bad defaults, annoying install procedures, occasional show stopping bugs a hindrance rather than an opportunity, maybe it's not a strong candidate.
I hear that. I enjoy that kind of tinkering; I just have too much on my plate with my business to go as deep into it as I used to. But I'm still interested in Linux, if only because it's a much-needed third option. I've been on and off it as a daily driver over the years.
I'm guessing others here who are primarily on Windows can relate to this. We've been disappointed with what Apple and Microsoft are doing, and we want, not necessarily more customization of our OS, just less interference.
It's very similar to Bazzite, which you listed, but not gamer focused. You get an easy install, auto updates (without reboots), and a bulletproof, immutable OS that is nearly impossible to break.
You can have a negative opinion of DHH, but why not provide some context as to why your dislike of him would cause you to think this Linux distro is a bad option? I don’t know anything about the distro.
An open source developer (the creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy Linux) made a political comment someone didn't like. Now there is a concerted effort by a small group of terminally online histrionics to ruin his life and get all his projects cancelled. The comment was apparently made on his personal blog and not in any official capacity.
It should be noted that this specific framing ("it's just a disagreement," "someone didn't like it," "it's nothing big") is used by the people that, instead, like the "comment." It's an extremely common pattern. So is one of the words he uses later, "histrionics."
The comment in question is an ethnonationalist blog post. Not a comment somewhere, but an actual goddamn essay. But you don't have to take my word on it, you can read it yourself:
You should also click through his archive for more, because this isn't really new for him, it's just taking it to a new low.
> by a small group of terminally online histrionics
Again, witness the minimization of the actual thing he said and the redirection to the critics. Why? It's the argument pattern they've adopted.
The term that the parent post would be looking for it actually "social shaming." You see, shame used to be an effective tool against bigotry. Not wanting to associate with bigots isn't histrionics. On the contrary, being OK with bigotry is bad, and wrong!
I'm one of the immigrant groups people don't seem to like very much these days, but even I recognize some degree of ethnonationalism or desire to restrict immigration is NOT bigotry. I can empathize how jarring it must be to begin to feel like a minority in your own country - even if they aren't minorities nationally, they may be in local urban pockets. Unfettered immigration IS causing problems in many places, is often supported by businesses looking for cheap labor and it's absolutely reasonable to be opposed to it.
Moreover, the false equivalence you're drawing between opposition to immigration and bigotry is part of what let the problem fester in the first place. I think people should be allowed to oppose immigration without being called racist, its not the same thing. The open bigotry and racism by the right in many countries is partly a reaction to this false equivalence. They saw immigration in some cases as causing social disorder, as a tool to suppress wages, as causing increased crime etc. and they were forcefed a message of "all immigration is good and any opposition is racist" to reasonable objections. No one is obligated to accept every person who wants to come in.
This is false. I do not, in fact, have an opinion one way or the other about his blog post. I don't care at all what the man has to say about politics. But I still disapprove of people trying to drag his politics into the thread, and start flame wars, every time the man comes up.
Despite the fact that it mostly runs in powershell, it still has a better UX then the majority of Microsoft apps. (Except for the confusion about their only GUI pop-up window, you put a check mark next to the built-in apps you want removed, which was led me to reread the instructions to make sure I had it right the first time I used it).
It has both built-in sane default for people who just want to debloat Windows 10/11, along with a "custom" option which takes less than 60 seconds to get through but gives you all the customizability you need.
(No connection with the author except mad respect.)
TBH if i decide to change OS again, i'll probably go with Gentoo because AFAIK it provides means to have custom patches for packages and i'd like to do things like, e.g., add some stuff in the file dialog for Gtk3. Though i'm not sure this is something most people would care about, so i didn't mention it (also i only have a vague idea that this is possible, i haven't actually tried it in practice).
I've been using Gentoo as my primary OS since 2007, along with gnome2 (now mate) as the desktop environment with the ancient compiz for fancy effects like wobbling windows and a desktop cube. Updates come pretty quickly. It's so nice having rolling releases, dist upgrades for other distros make me nervous and I've lost time to them -- and occasionally other software that certain distros decided to throw you into a curses terminal UI for configuration (or just mysteriously break and fail to install the package if you were using the desktop GUI). The custom patches thing is really nice and fairly straightforward. When you install a package its tarball gets saved in /var/cache/distfiles/ so you can just extract your package with the right version to a temp dir to work on. If you want to patch the package foo/bar you create a diff file /etc/portage/patches/foo/bar/patch-name (git format-patch can help, you just take the diff --git parts) and it gets auto-applied next time you build the package (or if it can't apply the diff, fails and tells you). I don't use this as often as I could, I only have a few patches at the moment (https://github.com/Jach/patches -- there's been a couple minor updates I should push), but it's pretty convenient to fix minor annoyances, take tiny fixes from upstream until they're fully released, or add custom features/text where you want.
With overlays to get packages outside of the core distro tree, a lot of software is just available, and even when it's not, you usually have the build tools or can easily install them so building whatever else from source isn't an obstacle. (I do sometimes have to use debian/ubuntu/mint (mint is on my travel laptop that I only use when traveling) and it still gets me sometimes having to make sure build-essential and various -dev packages are installed to do anything.) One downside is that your glibc will likely be newer than a lot of other systems out there, so that creates obstacles to shipping binaries around. You can also create your own packages in an overlay fairly easily as well, or keep some old ones around that have lost their maintainers and get removed from the tree.
There's also a somewhat annoying 'license' system (adding license names you accept to a configuration file) but with it the tooling can automatically fetch certain things for downloading (e.g. nvidia driver blobs) that some companies want people to get manually so they can harvest your data/force you to accept some EULA. I'm now remembering that 16 or 17 years ago, the last time I tried Fedora, I was testing it out by plugging in a flash drive (yay it auto mounted) but it failed to play an MP3 file and suggested I pay someone money to install codecs. It's left a sour impression on Fedora ever since, not to mention my lingering question why anyone would want a Red Hat derivative outside of a locked down office (and even then at my old BigCo job we devs got to use Ubuntu).
For casual use I still think Mint is probably the best distro at the moment. I tend to recommend the mate desktop environment since it's what I like and am used to but it's a poor distro if you can't easily install any DE of choice on it.
I used both Fedora and Ubuntu for years and couldn't point to the _better_ distribution.
Maybe one thing I had with Fedora: I had to trail one major distribution behind, because going for the most recent releases always ended up hurting me.
But that's just for work. I don't think I can move my gaming to Linux yet
With Ubuntu I kept running into bugs which had already been fixed upstream, or which were caused either by Debian's or Ubuntu's patches. And even filing regular bug reports was basically impossible: the Ubuntu packagers will almost certainly ignore it, the Debian packagers aren't interested in bugs happening in mutated versions of outdated packages in their unstable repo, and the upstream maintainers aren't interested in bug reports for weirdly-patched old releases.
After several attempts at getting bugs fixed (sometimes even sending complete patches) and getting no response for years I gave up on Ubuntu and switched to Fedora. Their policy is to ship the freshest upstream releases possible, with as few patches as possible. This means I can just directly file my bug reports at the upstream vendor, and a fix will usually land on my system fairly quickly.
I do notice that I am slowly using more and more Flatpak desktop apps: why bother with the middleman when you can trivially get the latest release directly from the upstream vendor?
I've been using the latest Fedora full-time for over two years without issue, and have been doing nearly all my gaming on it as well. The only gaming that doesn't work are games that deliberately use anti-cheat that doesn't support anything but Windows (typically the games run great in single player or offline, but multiplayer refuses to work). Of my Steam catalog, over 90% just works, and a large amount of that now has native Linux support thanks to the Steam Deck.
What particular issues were you experiencing?
As a counter anecdote, on my Windows installation I routinely run into "WTF" moments, such as BitLocker randomly deciding I need to enter recovery codes, the constant nagware that is OneDrive and friends, plus when I search for the same binary exe I've launched a dozen times Windows still displays "web results" first - fooling me just about every time.
The only reason I use Windows is for playing some old games (primarily Age of Empires II: DE) that only work well on Windows. In the AoE2 case, I also need CaptureAge that only works on Windows.
The point is that even though I have 95% de-Microsoftized my life for the past 2 decades, I still need to run Windows for a few specific flows, and I run into the same issues as the article author here.
This stuff is increasingly normalized across platforms.
I'd say "vote with your wallet", but when all the tech platforms are doing it, there's not much choice. PCs / laptops are probably the last hold out: Just switch to Linux (but be careful which distro you pick) or MacOS (for now).
The political pendulum is going to swing far left in the US given the disasters that are playing out in DC. Hopefully this sort of crap will be banned when that happens.
IMHO Linux Mint keeps being the strongest option to recommend when the intention is a clean transition with the least amount of fiddling. It just works, it is reliable, and it doesn't play games with changes of basic technologies that can only cause confusion (e.g. none of the Ubuntu shenanigans like their confusing desktop or their non-Debian packaging)
I can't agree about the "it just works" part. About a year ago I build a new PC, and I tried installing Mint on it. I ran into two issues that I was never able to resolve:
1. The WiFi just would not work; I couldn't see any networks.
2. I have 2 monitors, and one monitor would display 80% of one screen, and 20% of the other. I suspect that it was because the monitors had different refresh rates and resolutions.
I then tried installing Windows, and everything did just work.
I wouldn't recommend Mint. Better use something with recent KDE Plasma and recent kernel and Mesa for best Wayland experience.
Especially speaking of playing games, I periodically see newcomer Linux gamers hitting problems due to Mint being outdated and not having good Wayland support. Especially for any kind of recent hardware.
Fedora makes major upgrades pretty easy - you can even do it via the GUI Software Center, then reboot.
Personally I'm using Kinoite[1], an "immutable" version of Fedora that has an immutable base image, which makes it nearly impossible to break things during updates (even major upgrades).
You probably used Nvidia and some outdated distro with a bad DE on top. Not something you should be using. Using X11 is DOA anyway, so you can figure out what was wrong in your case and use better options.
No, AMD. I had issues on the latest Debian, released this summer, with KDE. X11 works perfectly fine. I would be happy with wayland too, if it worked. And in fact I use it on my other device.
The Steam main window did not open, although Steam itself did load in the background. I could work around this by disabling smooth scrolling on web view and some other GPU-related option (I forgot exactly).
But then there was a strange glitch on every single game (both native and Proton-based). Periodically (e.g. every ~10 seconds on some 3D games, on every screen reload on some other) the screen turned black for about 2 seconds.
Then I remembered that I had some issue when I first installed Debian 12 two years, though I forgot which issues exactly, and that I solved them by switching from Wayland to X11.
What DE? And that's with all the latest components as above? I wouldn't use Debian stable for gaming purposes, since it falls behind very quickly. Debian testing / unstable is a better idea, and even then you'd want to install latest amdgpu firmware manually potentially.
Linux Mint is terrible. Horribly outdated software, how are they still on X11? Both their DEs are forks which introduces problems...
Like, in regular Gnome/KDE land, you have Wayland which is a huge improvement over X11, HDR works, fractional scaling works... None of that works on Mint.
Not sure why you are downvoted, what you said is true. Mint has some WIP to support Wayland in Cinnamon, but it's way behind other DEs and I wouldn't recommend using it.
Wong wording may be, but the point of the post is correct. Mint just lags behind with Wayland support and in being up to date for handling recent hardware especially.
The former is Mint's specific problem, while the latter is a general problem of all long period release distros that don't take care of updating Linux kernel, Mesa and etc. to actual recent releases.
It's almost like monopolies aren't good for the consumer. We need some real power for enforcing the Sherman act. Too many companies have been able to buy all their competitors
Yeah but that sweet sweet ABI, we just gotta have that stable ABI, bum ba dum.
Remember that ABI when you're pulling out your hair over whatever MS's latest snafu is. The PC isn't about personal computing, no ,no, its about desperation. Its about using the fulcrum of ABI stability to see how much someone can accept wedged down their throat, because yeah, well, don't wanna loose that ABI.
Remember that ABI, 'next time 'Error: Something Happened.'
Unfortunately, anti-trust doctrine in the US has gone from "too little competition in a market is inherently bad" to "any % of market share is OK as long as it doesn't result in consumer prices getting too high too fast." We've really lost the plot of why anti-trust regulation was passed in the first place.
> We've really lost the plot of why anti-trust regulation was passed in the first place.
I don't personally have any knowledge of the answer to this question but, hundreds of people had to vote for it and they rarely all have the same things in mind when they do.
It's better to focus on what legislation does and says rather than what it was meant to do.
When Apple forces users to use an online account to access their local Mac, and disables their OS unless they turn on iCloud on their Mac -- then you can claim equivalence between them.
I literally just got my first Mac computer a few months ago. I tried to set it up as a local account with no online account. I could not.
Maybe it is possible and I just missed it. But either they don't allow it, or they have enough dark pattern bullshit to trick me, either way, it's the same as windows to me.
Unless the way VMs install a distro is somehow fundamentally different from a new computer, then it's literally two clicks when installing Sonoma to use a local account when prompted (Setup Later and then click Skip). I just tested this.
I'm pretty sure there was some keyboard shortcut to skip apple id login/creation during initial setup - not sure if that's still possible nowadays but I did used it once on my mbp few years ago
the fact that you have to have an apple account to do all kinds of basic developer tasks (installing Xcode / Xcode command line tools, which are needed for lots of stuff last time I checked (a few years ago?)) is evidence that they suck also. But not nearly as bad as Microsoft who are actively scum from the moment you first turn the computer on.
"I need a free developer account to download Xcode" is certainly more user friendly than "I have to pay a subscription fee or pay up front to use Visual Studio".
I can claim equivalence between them whenever I want. If both OSes adopt and enforce my biggest pet peeves, then no amount of eye candy or freebie features will fix my workflow.
Gatekeeping and second opinions don't really move the needle on where I stand with either company.
Showing up in a thread you haven’t even participated in and saying “I’ve already made my choice, quit giving me second opinions” is comically self-centered.
I’ll concur with Apple being way more aggressive about this as well. icloud and if you try to use music on you iPhone with your collection of music Apple Music is always being pitched. Though the windows default start menu is something to behold these days (or widget panel..). I deleted Apple Maps from my phone because I never used it, but nothing would free up the 10 gigs of data it was storing…. Sigh.
Linux is good enough to be a daily driver for most things these days.
New phone came with no standalone music player only YouTube Music. But fair play to them you can click "local files only" at first launch and it keeps out of your way.
My Android tablet keeps bugging me about updates and what not. Wish I could install my preferred flavor of Linux on it, but it seems infeasible at this moment.
Agreed about switching to Linux. I don't agree on macOS though. Apple is nasty in its own way and has a ton of anti-user patterns no one should be dealing with. If you want to decide for yourself and not things being decided for you because "we know better than you what you really need", just use Linux.
Apple had a go at doing this with iCloud, but clearly there was enough consumer pushback (a friend lost all their files after cancelling iCloud, thinking it was a backup service, not realising it deleted the original copies on their machine) that they stopped the enshittification there.
Reminder that Apple's revenue from ads is in the billions and climbing at an accelerating pace. The enshittification comes for all. They don't need to be good, they just need to be better than Microsoft.
macOS is absolutely awful about iCloud nag. If you try and use a Mac without an iCloud account, you'll get neverending popups and notifications begging you to go online. It's nearly as bad as Windows.
Neither GNOME nor KDE get anywhere near as bad. It's really only these commercial "holier than thou" operating systems that think they know best.
I haven't experienced this but I see you're the second comment pointing that out. I've been using macbooks for work for a long time and never once used iCloud nor do I remember seeing a confusing prompt. But I also rarely upgrade my machine.
With Windows, a regular seemingly normal update appeared almost as if I was upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and it prompted me to do the backup to OneDrive. I accepted it because I was worried the update to Windows 11 would get screwed up. After the update completed it was just a normal update after all and there was no need for me to accept that onedrive backup!
iCloud nags appear in the Settings app and Notifications menu. When you are signed out, Apple will assault you with notifications (that you must disabled with a script) until you log in: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250786208?sortBy=rank
I've got my fair share of horror-stories with both OSes, I switched between dailying Mojave and Windows 10 for a big portion of my life. Nothing will ever top updating to Catalina, booting up Ableton Live and seeing all my paid plugins go from "working fine" to "completely unsupported" in the span of an update.
During pandemic I started playing with smart home stuff and since I'm already within apple playgrounds I've got homepod mini since they stripped ipads from hub feature. After configuring the speaker I had apple music ad for about 3 months at the top of settings where ios software update notifications appears.
Its everywhere. You get nagged constantly for Apple music on your iphone too. My dystopian prediction is that in the near future, corporations will just garnish your wages so they don't have to do this.
In my opinion, “Maybe Later” buttons are actually useful if implemented for the user's benefit. For example, maybe I do want to hear about OneDrive but I don't have time now. It's a reasonable middle ground between Yes and No.
But the problem is that modern tech companies are using it as a dark pattern to completely eliminate the No option. Sadly, I think this just might need to be regulated out. I don't see any reason why there shouldn' be a regulation that a “Maybe Later” button can't appear in a prompt as the only alternative to Yes, there needs to be a No/Never option as well.
Exactly. I wouldn't mind having three options: "Yes", "Maybe Later", and "No". It's the missing third option that sucks.
Like in Android: Do you want to back up your photos to the cloud? "Yes" or "Maybe later" which means being asked every week. Also, the checkbox is selected by default, and if you close the dialog by accidentally clicking outside of it (maybe because you were already going to click on something else, and the dialog opened in the last millisecond) that by Google standards counts as consent.
Of course, turning on the backup of photos in clouds only requires a single click (or misclick), but turning it off requires following a long tutorial very carefully...
Besides serving as a dark pattern, it also relieves devs from having ti store and check a user preference. You know, mutable state is bad, including user preferences. ;)
Instead of Windows Backup (which relies on M$ OneDrive), you can enable (in Control panel settings) and use Windows File History.
File History is a backup feature in Windows that automatically saves copies of your files from specific folders, like Documents and Pictures, to an external drive or network location. It allows you to restore previous versions of your files if they are lost or damaged.
To enable File History in Windows, connect an external drive or network location, then go to Settings > Update & Security > Backup, and select "Add a drive" to choose your backup location. Finally, turn on File History to start backing up your files automatically.
I've used this for a few months and it ended up taking too much space and was quite fragile in my experience.
Even with this and OneDrive enabled, I managed to lose years of family photos when trying to free up space thinking "oh I've got this backed up" and then thinking the same when freeing up space when deleting my backup. I wish Windows could be less confusing...
Windows File History doesn’t eliminate the need for an actual backup of important files, but it’s a convenient feature to be able to quickly inspect or restore random files you changed or deleted recently-ish (roughly a year for me). It’s best to point it to a separate drive/partition and configure it to fill that one up and have it delete the oldest files whenever it needs more free space.
wbadmin is the GOAT. Multi version snapshots of the drives, which you can easily mount as they are vhdx
Sadly some of the potential is gimped (point in time restore of individual files) but in a pinch you can grab an eval copy of Server and run it in Hyper-V, attach the backup drive to that, and do it that way
I am pointing out that existing Windows feature (File History) exists as alternative to Windows Backup (which requires Microsoft OneDrive, which is free only upto 5GB of cloud storage).
You are the one missing the point by suggesting off-the-shelf backup solutions.
For corporate users, getting off-the-self solution as alternatives (even if it's open-source) software may not be easy (corporates typically have strict controls on what software they allow for users, and usually they contractually need to reveal to customers if they are using open-source software), but they can use File History for free, by setting it to back it up to a network path/drive if their IT admins permit.
Where I work we start using OneDrive for backup, even on macOS. It hijacks your Documents folders, as well as a few others. I suspect most people don't even realize they're using OneDrive.
I've had to tell dozens of people to move their git repos to folders that aren't managed by OneDrive. I've seen where someone will change branches and OneDrive will start pulling files back down from the old branch. It's quite the mess.
Since no one mentioned how to actually dismiss the notification forever:
OneDrive is treated as a normal app that is installed by default, you can actually just uninstall it through Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel.
Nuts. Is this still true? I just setup a Win11 Pro machine for a very non-technical person. Uninstalled OneDrive, hoping to minimize future pain when 90% of the needs are just a web browser and storing camera pictures.
I have absolutely seen them reinstall components like that, force their AV back on, force Windows Update back on, etc. It's probably actually good imo for the users I've seen, but admittedly "computer says no" is infuriating if you're sure of what you want.
Try using Group Policy to disable it. I think Applocker is on Win 11 Pro now - if it is, you can block the execution of whatever programs and DLLs you want. I've used that to block Windows Update.
Yeah for myself Pro licensing and domain is the way to go so I can configure Windows similar to my work network at home. But for people who have Home licenses I just set the registry keys. Windows Home doesn't have a UI to set policy, but it does obey it if the keys are there.
(This is a must-have to turn off web browser antifeatures as well, you can't block extension install from the browser settings for any browser but you can by policy.)
I've started using Tiny11 on all my setups, then running DeBloat afterwards. This removes every piece of crapware* and none of them seem to try to reinstall on update (so far, fingers crossed).
I use Brave browser (a Chromium fork) on my old Win10 PC, and it is fast and stable even with tons of tabs/site open. One can disable its unnecessary features (VPN, Brave Rewards, etc).
Please note that Brave browser in mobile these days gives problems for some websites like Reddit.com, etc. Same sites open fine with Edge (another Chromium fork) and Firefox (Gecko engine).
I hate Chrome & Edge and their nasty of creating multiple instances and auto-starting and running in background even when I am not using the browser.
If I recall right, Chrome uses to have an nasty memory leakage issue so it will keep chugging for more memory even if not in active use.
Firefox uses to be sluggish, but it is better these days, and its extensions/plugins support (especially on Android!) is necessary to block ads & trackers (via uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger extension) is highly useful and necessary.
Back when I was using Windows, I had enabled this feature too (before I knew much about privacy) and when I finally decided to get rid of it, I remember consistently failing to disable OneDrive. I would log out, uninstall the app and then try to move my Desktop folder out of "OneDrive" in my home directory and next boot I'd have 2 folders again (with the "OneDrive" one being used, of course). I ended up reinstalling for another reason, but that finally fixed the problem.
I deleted everything from my OneDrive today and got especially mad that the Android app shows a download icon in folder details yet it's disabled. There's absolutely no way to get your files through there. Had to log in on the web just to get a ZIP of everything (it's surprising that's still possible). As soon as I move off Outlook I'm out of this ecosystem.
I think OneDrive has an "oops I accidentally rm-rf /" window for deletions. Anyway OneDrive used to drive me nuts until somehow it all just clicked in some sort of "aha!" zen mode so I haven't had much trouble with in a long time. The biggest issue is often large changes will time out without error and you have to kick it in the pants a few times.
Sorry if it wasn't clear in the original post, I meant I consciously deleted everything after getting sick and tired of the terrible UX.
It's not like I was storing anything meaningful there anyway, I hadn't logged in for a year and I don't regret doing so. I also got an email for deleting many files, which I happily ignored.
No I think you were clear, I was more responding that what you are describing sounds like when OneDrive gets stuck with a sync task that hasn't completed and doesn't know how to force to happen.
Last time I tried to restore a file from a customer's onedrive it just failed with a variety of 500 errors or just blank pages. The reason I was trying to restore it was because windows had moved all of their files into onedrive without their informed consent and (at least) this one was no longer accessible.
onedrive is not a backup: like all automatic sync systems it is a liability. It may be useful but it is still a liability.
It's the same with Apple OS updates. I hardly ever want to update my Apple devices. The odds that such an update will actually improve my UX are indistinguishable from zero nowadays, and the odds that it will break something that I rely on are very nearly 1. (And yes, I get that I'm not getting security updates. That's a risk that I'm wiling to take in order to have an otherwise stable system.) And yet, I cannot get my Apple devices to stop nagging me.
I really want to see a tweak to the California and EU privacy rules that requires opting in to data collection / sharing to be at least as hard as opting out.
For the first 5 years, the processes would be swapped, and set in stone. So, you'd need to call a number, sit on hold and be disconnected a few times to get a mailing address. Then you'd buy some stamps and an envelope if you want to submit a "Please sell my personal information" form. Grocery stores would charge you more if you used a loyalty card, and so on.
Of course, a better approach would make the collection, sale, querying, possession of, and engaging in transactions involving consumer marketing databases illegal. (All those protections are needed since Google redefined "sell personal information" to not include any of their revenue streams.)
Windows 10 was indeed offered free worldwide to users already using older licenced versions of Windows.
Microsoft even touted Windows 10 as last version of Windows.
But it was typical bait-and-switch gambit by Micro$oft, and support for Windows 10 is ending in Oct 2025 (rejecting the pleas from thousands of companies worldwide to extend its Win10 support for longer while), because M$ thinks everyone will migrate to Windows 11 (not free).
However, many Win10 users will remain on Win10 for years (just as they had stuck around with Win7/Win8 for years), and many will migrate to Linux or MacOS instead.
Microsoft will out find the hard way that people can be as stubborn as it can be.
W10 is actually still the majority of windows versions. You can get 1 year extended support by switching to an online admin login & syncing to ONeDrive or buying it (with $ or MS points - whatever that is) and businesses can by 3 x1 year of escalating priced support. Support for win10 ends on Tuesday (oct 14)!
I know all this because my desktop that can easily run triple-A video games isn't good enough (secure boot) to be upgraded, so I'm supposed to buy a MS surface and use it as a boat anchor I guess...
Yeah you can run Windows 11 on most Windows 10 machines, but in exchange for "better security" you get a bloated interface that just bogs down your perfectly fine computer. Windows as a platform has so many security holes that I think the chances of getting pwned by a very specific Windows 10-only exploit are realistically zero.
> because M$ thinks everyone will migrate to Windows 11 (not free).
Pretty sure upgrade to Windows 11 is free for Windows 10 licenses, too. If you need a new computer, sure, most people have a license tied to their computer, and they'll need a new license for that.
I recently was forced to get Windows 11 because my new build's motherboard only supported UEFI and there was some incompatibility with my 10 year old Windows 10 boot disk. Windows 11 is an abomination; I paid $200 for a Pro license and I still get ads. My kids will be learning computing on Linux.
It's pretty horrible. When I use Windows, my foremost reaction is "how can they expect me to put up with this?" before walking away in disgust. I get offended, and I'm a sysadmin professionally.
Then I remember, in a moment of Eldritch revelation, my mom daily-drives this OS. My siblings and cousins probably use it at work. Billions of people around the world chafe through these lockscreen ads, "live tile" updates, OneDrive nags, Windows + G Xbox Game Bar (whatever the fuck that is), Cortana... it's baffling. The same thing runs through my head looking at recent macOS screenshots. Are geriatrics really expected to put up with all this theatrical nonsense? Is this subscription service racket really more attractive than trying to compete as a normal desktop?
Been using Linux for six years now. I cannot remember a single time I've truly missed Windows or macOS.
"Are geriatrics really expected to put up with all this theatrical nonsense"
reminds of circa 2000 watching all the new Internet users struggling with the multiple/cascade pop-ups on websites. That's what's so odious about the situation now: The OS bears the same relationship to the user as those spammy websites.
speaking of "geriatrics" I wonder if the youth are actually responsible for a lot of this, unintentionally. this constant line between corporations and my device reminds me mainly of the smartphone experience. And, I'm told, modern videogames. Older folks like me tend to thnk of their desktop OS as inviolate--too many decades when a program phoning home on its own without my permission meant virus or other grave problem. Maybe people who grow up with smartphones don't have this boundary. Msft would know this.
This is the worst part of modern computing: Companies trying to get you to do things (or trick you into doing them, or worst: forcing you to do them as a condition of using the product). What ever happened to the user being in charge and deciding what to do with his computer? These dark patterns are getting so tiring. Companies need to butt out and offer features, not coerce people into using them.
At this point, the OS is mostly on autopilot for home users, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing - Google defaults to saving everything in a cloud, and the experience of Google Drive is pretty similar.
The corporate user and the power user are expected to use group policy to control their OneDrive, and they do. You can also sort-of force turn it and other components off with their App Locker system.
The home user probably should just allow it? If you want to plant a flag in the ground and say, no, the computer is mine and it shall obey, I can't argue on that ground except to say indifference among consumers outnumbers you. We accept less than total control in phones, cars, refrigerators...
I do a fair bit of pro bono help with small businesses and older people and the expectation that your computer should just save your stuff is pretty strong. Perhaps it was trained it by non-free software, but I think MS product managers are correct in betting people want Windows to be batteries included when it comes to saving peoples stuff.
Again, the power user has control, you just have to exercise it.
The OTA car updates, the OS's doing stuff we don't want, the ads on phones and websites, buying something on a new website knowing you're immediately put on an email list that you'll immediately unsubscribe from...
It's tough being a user.
Imagine being a non-tech savvy one who just has to wade through all that and doesn't know how to block it.
I wonder if most complaints are about pre-installed OEM Windows Home (the one with Candy Crush and 10s of other crap, including from a vendor) and bundled crappy cut-off OneDrive? I have Windows Pro and Office 365 Family option (5 accounts, full Office and 1TB OneDrive each). Most user-hidden Windows settings are in Group Policy Editor, or registry still works. OneDrive proper has toggles for every folder (Desktop, Documents, Puctures) discussed in the post.
After I lost 8 months of photos with a phone ~10 years ago, being sure it was all backed to Google Photos, I would rather trust Microsoft, than risk losing data, and now backup to both clouds. The paid Office+OneDrive is great value.
It just works. Yes, defaults are annoying, but could be changed. I recently enabled a blocked-by-default outgoing firewall, and I have much more questions to JetBrains Rider trying to ignore my system DNS setting and so to bypass Pi-Hole multiple times per minute, than to Microsoft.
That is probably the case, but Windows has always been schizophrenic when it comes to settings - there's the UI, the control panel, the second new control panel, the cli, group policy, the registry...
Frame it as "it's 2025 and this is my first look at Windows", it's pretty bad, and it sucks because if they installed on a Home SKU, we end up having to tell them to reinstall to get control.
Microsoft is notoriously bad with naming. In this case likely intentionally. The SKUs: Home = Crap, Pro = OKish Windows, Enterprise = Pro. But people who do not care about lack of RDP server, Hyper-V, BitLocker do not care about the rest, probably. Then confusion araises from "first look at Windows" by pro users.
These dark patterns are the zeitgeist really, for many years now. And they work very well, because of the combinations of vendor lock-in, product bundling, and companies getting better and better at PR.
Usually there is an easy workaround. For example with One Drive shenanigans, you just need to save the files outside of Documents, Pictures etc, and that's it. I got fed up many years ago and moved to Linux, because I like my fights with Linux better. With Microsoft (and most other corporations), it's their way, or the highway. And it always have been.
I asked ChatGPT to write a Windows GUI C program that looks for a running instance of the onedrive EXE at regular intervals and terminates it while keeping a running log of the attempts in a scrolling window. It took a few iterations to get what I wanted and it was simple to compile with GCC.
You can use a Powershell to see if onedrive.exe is running and kill it with the -force option to do something similar ( ps * onedrive * | kill -force ) with no spaces between the asterisks and the word onedrive, but that turned out to be a little heavier to have running continuously than I wanted.
If you use a process like this, you absolutely need to run it at intervals because the onedrive exe seems to execute at regular intervals.
Hopefully everyone uses an Enterprise SKU of Windows so you can just control it with Group Policy.
On Enterprise, you can use its built-in App Locker features to block the execution of any Windows component. I've used it to block Windows Update completely at home after it filled my drive to the last byte and I was sick of my gaming box disobeying.
This will wreck havoc on your battery life, consider instead replacing onedrive.exe with a dummy executable and then using NTFS ACLs to deny "TrustedInstaller" permission to modify it
It baffles me how many people on HN cannot operate with a simple deny-all firewall. The windows version and updates I install are the only updates installed. The files I back up are the only files that back up. Nothing can connect to the internet. Not Windows Update, Not google chrome update, Not onedrive, Nor any virus or malware program.
Reliance on the internet is the problem. No windows version including windows 11 REQUIRES the internet to operate. Install your OS from disk. Activate by phone(or don't bother...). Install seasoned updates from catalog. If the program wont specify the ports and servers it uses, DON'T USE IT AND DONT WRITE CODE FOR IT.
I do not believe it is reasonable to use an OS where you need to do hostage negotiation on a daily basis. If you need to go this far, what will you do when an MS update adds a bypass for the firewall you’re using?
> I do not believe it is reasonable to use an OS where you need to do hostage negotiation on a daily basis.
So much this. It's not that technically minded people can't figure out how to florb the nerfwedge. It's that it shouldn't be needed to begin with, and you have to know about it to begin with (which usually happens by getting burned by not doing it, either with one's own machine, or a friend's or family member's machine).
Eh, lots of us use Little Snitch or the equivalent. But I confess that seems like victim blaming to me. Users shouldn’t be expected to watch their freaking OS vendor like a hawk. That’s the one vendor you kind of have to trust: if they’re lying to you about what they’re doing, all bets are off.
This to me sounds like “I check my tire pressure every 8 miles because I don’t want them to explode catastrophically like they do for other people. Everyone should be doing this!” No. No, everyone should not have to do this.
I admit to being in the category OP speaks of; i.e. would love control over what programs can access over the internet, but haven't the slightest clue how to set it up and manage it day to day.
> It baffles me how many people on HN cannot operate with a simple deny-all firewall
What is the barrier IYO, is it that awareness (or technical knowledge) just isn't there, or that installing isn't the issue but doing day to day work with a restrictive firewall becomes an inconvenience?
Maybe just don't use Windows and dont write code for it... and especially don't give them $200 for the Pro version, because that is nothing but a signal that you're willing to keep letting him fuck you while you write them a check.
OneDrive has a pretty annoying interaction with Microsoft Office-PDF exports (not print to PDF).
If you export a PDF to a OneDrive folder, Office (especially Word) will instead create this file onto OneDrive itself (not local).
Its a 50/50 chance that your local OneDrive will sync it properly especially if you're in a fast workflow (e.g., preparing for a meeting soon with minor amendments) or you wait for several minutes for it to sync or you logon to OneDrive web to get manually download the file.
You pretty much have to export to a non-OneDrive synced folder for PDF export to work on local reliably.
OP doesn’t say why they are against free cloud backup, and it doesn’t matter, but (like everything else in Windows) there’s a registry setting you could change to disable the notification. I think it is
Oh so Linux is hard because you have to sometimes use the command line. Then people suggest registry hacks to make Windows work properly. Then Microsoft will just flip your registry setting back anyways. Stockholm syndrome is crazy.
Author here. I'm not against against free cloud back up. I was a Ubuntu One user before it shutdown. The problem isn't even that you can disable it via the registry.
The problem is that looking at the presented options, you can basically choose "Yes" or "OK".
I just want to rant a bit about Microsoft right now.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft decided to auto-update my mom's computer to Windows 11, and delightfully the computer no longer booted. Even after a litany of different boot keystrokes and automatic repairs and attempted recoveries, it would not boot. I think it has something to do with the utter incompetence of the Windows automatic update process not correctly updating keys to satisfy UEFI but I am not sure.
Of course my parents being my parents, there were tons of precious documents that were not backed up anywhere else, so we needed to get them off before doing anything nuclear. After awhile, I was able to talk my dad through flashing an Ubuntu image and I was able to get a live USB going (because as far as I am aware there isn't a legitimate way to do a live USB with Windows), and from there he read me a tmate URL and I was able to mount the drive and rsync all the data to my server.
With many, many failed attempts at trying to convince them to install Linux Mint, I eventually walked them through flashing a USB drive with Windows 11, and we were able to nuke the drive and install Windows 11, which seems to be working, so I guess all's well that ends well, but not really. Key point here, before anyone says anything, the laptop is a bit old but it seems to be able to run Windows 11 just fine, it's just the automatic update that broke it.
You might be saying "live and let live, if they're happy with Windows then stop trying to force them to use Linux", and to that I would say "it's not just about them". When something breaks on their computer, it's expected that I am the one who fixes it. Microsoft, a for-profit trillion-dollar corporation, is so utterly bad at their main job that they actively broke my mother's computer with an automatic update that she couldn't easily opt out of for an operating system she didn't want, and if she didn't have a son who was a software engineer she would have been forced to buy a new computer. For all I know, another Windows 11 auto update will come in two weeks and break the computer, and I will be stuck going through this nonsense yet again, because I love my parents and I want to help them out.
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, especially if you work on the automatic update or the Windows 11 team, I'm afraid that I have to say that I actively dislike you. You've cost me many days of effort because ultimately I think you are extremely bad at your jobs and you should consider doing literally anything else.
On a tangent, one thing I wonder about for the future is all the people doing bypasses on the CPU requirements will at some point in the future be left high and dry. There's already been one win11 update where they started to need the popcnt extension that started showing up in CPUs after roughly 2008, raising the hard requirement from anything that's x64 although still below the official reqs. The scenario I wonder about is how many well meaning upgrades have been done to keep people on a supported version of windows, but MS can either update so the hard requirement matches official and leaves a lot unbootable, or detect it's actually unsupported and at that point refuse to update (I guess at that point you need another campaign such as "end of win11 25h2" to raise awareness of service pack levels subdividing the major OS version) while MS can point to "well, we never supported them anyway" as though that fixes the problem.
I'm struggling to think of a way out that doesn't involve forcefully educating users or MS needing to maintain a low requirements/long term support branch of windows forever
In my case, I was able to install a vanilla Windows 11 ISO with a flash drive, downloaded directly from Microsoft, so it's not like I was bypassing any CPU checks. All I had to do was muck about a bit in the BIOS/EFI to tell it to boot from the flash drive.
Part of the reason I like Linux, despite its occasional headaches, is how willing they are to keep supporting old computers. There are lots of distros that are lightweight while still being modern. Oh, and it won't automatically install an update and brick the computer, and even if I did I could use a modern filesystem that supports proper snapshots instead and recover, instead of something from 1993 that doesn't have any modern features.
I didn't hate Windows this much until a few weeks ago. I'm very annoyed.
Been there - I help a lot of older folks with their business computers.
The desire to make Windows an appliance falls flat when older PCs get on that auto-update treadmill.
For example, Windows now comes OEM with Bitlocker drive encryption enabled. Good in theory - when you toss/donate/sell your old PC, normies don't think about their personal lives and banking details being available, so that's good. However, they almost never get backups working right, and this cripples anyone from rescuing them from a drive failure in a critical PC that has their entire business books on it. This is not uncommon.
I think it's the unfortunate result of different PMs for different features strong-arming things on, but at different paces and maturity levels, and the result is Windows isn't safe to trust for the non-technical user.
My checklist these days when I end up assuming responsibility for someone: Drive encryption off, Passwords into a manager, Backups set, Updates disabled, Remote access installed.
The fact that it's 2025 and there's no legitimate way to run a live USB with Windows baffles me.
In the case of my mom's computer rescue, as far as I can tell, literally the only legal way to recover my mom's Windows NTFS drive contents was to use Linux. I had to use Linux to fix Microsoft's incompetence.
I am quite confident that my mom would mostly be fine with Linux Mint on this computer; 99% of what she does on the computer is use Chrome, which works fine on Linux. Hell, Edge works fine on Linux now if you want to stay in the Microsoft ecosystem. The only blocker now is that I am positive that she will not use a computer unless it can run Microsoft Office directly on the computer, and I have not been successful getting Office 2016 or Office 365 running on Linux with Wine or Proton in my attempts.
Maybe for Christmas I will buy my mom a Macbook or something. Then she'll be forced to move to something better.
Yeah, Proton and Wine seem perfect for gaming, but I have never seen someone get Office right. That might be an audience difference or perhaps MS deliberately frustrates that attempt.
You could try 11 IOT LTSC[1] which is super-stripped down like an appliance. Set a few GPOs, get her files synced, set remote access. You could even do something like DeepFreeze if she's prone to clicking on the wrong thing. Restricting her to running Chrome and Office with Applocker is a possibility for her safety - I have literally interrupted scammers "from Microsoft" on the phone with the elderly and naive.
I'm not sure my mom even does anything that the browser Office won't do; she uses Excel heavily but she's not using any advanced formulas or VBA or anything, and her use of Microsoft Word is generally using pretty basic formatting. Honestly I don't think that she does anything that can't easily be handled by Google Drive or OnlyOffice. That doesn't matter though; the web browser is a complete non-starter, and if it doesn't have the Microsoft Office branding she doesn't want to go for it.
This didn't used to bother me much, until Microsoft decided it would be best to brick her computer because the people who run Windows Update don't know what they're doing. The one job of Windows Update is to not break shit, and they've proven incapable of that. Whomever works on it should be embarrassed for working on one of the most consistently hated pieces of technology know to humanity.
I thought about using one of those appliance releases of Windows, but I also don't really want to LARP as a Windows Sysadmin, especially since I don't even have a Windows computer in my house. If I were to somehow convince her to use Linux, there would be "security via ignorance"; she doesn't know anything about how to use Linux so she wouldn't do much outside of the easy, relatively safe path, and if she did break it then it would be much easier for me to log in and fix it with tmate or Tailscale + SSH.
After the upgrade (which I even don't remember allowing), I had double UEFI entries. Cost me nearly a day to be able to boot windows (and it works only from the Linux boot menu)
If you confine Windows to a VM without Internet access it won't be able to exfiltrate your data or install unexpected new features. I find this to be a much better user experience.
It was really fun when the rearranged the directory structure to place all files under onedrive. I created a new directory outside, copy pasted everything, then deleted onedrive contents. Windows is all sorts of hell.
I just turn off notifications for OneDrive which ... works quite well so far. At least system notifications work as expected, and Microsoft has not (yet) allowed OneDrive to ignore system settings for now.
Why did we universally decide that this stuff is okay to do for businesses? Is it just because it's legal? Imagine if agreeing to things anywhere else in the real world worked the same way it does with Microsoft.
Hi there, would you like me to come in and talk about my religion and what types of nonbelievers deserve to be tortured for eternity? No? Okay, sounds good. I'll just plaster these signs and posters all over your property, so if you change your mind, you'll immediately know where to go. You'll only see them once a day, every time you exit your house! Also, for your own convenience, we'll be watching your front door, and every time you reenter your house we'll be nullifying your past response, so you'll just have to tell no to our faces again.
Hey, I really wanna do this thing with you, do you consent to it? You don't? You say you don't want to see me ever again? Okay, okay, chill out. But in case if you change your mind, I'll be asking you again every day of your life. It's for your own sake. Also, one day, I might see the smile on your face and just "assume" you'd definitely agree. But don't worry, that's just a minor, accidental, technical mishap! I'm committed to helping you and enriching your life. I care about you, don't you see.
My work decided OneDrive is how we'd do files. One of the worst parts is that it makes the recently changed files section of Explorer basically worthless.
I turn off every 'to cloud' option I can find on any device I have. Apple's iCloud is just as evil. I have turned that off so many times over the years it makes me angry. It is clear that these companies push 'cloud' in general as a dark pattern to lock you in and harvest your data and actions. Even if they don't train directly, the metadata of usage is all there and I find it hard to believe they don't harvest every bit they can. We need laws and protections that require cloud independence similar to the browser wars. If you have a 'cloud' offering baked into your OS then it must be a competitive market offering. You should also be able to easily migrate to different cloud offerings.
Don't want OneDrive. Don't want co-pilot. And I say that as someone who enjoys vibe coding because while the former two are push, the latter is pull. Pull is the remedy to enshittification. But good luck explaining that to someone whose job depends on that not being the case.
What makes this even worse is that MSFT doesn't just do it with their "free", subsidized or bundled versions. They also do it to users who are using the full paid versions of the OS and Office. I paid an extra hundred dollars to get Windows Pro pre-installed on my laptop and a key reason I did so was to avoid this crap. But they still have all the same upsells and dark patterns.
All Windows Pro gives me is the very complex enterprise policy manager with its thousands of options but all the upsell nags, user privacy and other "good for MSFT monetization" options are still defaulted on in Windows Pro. And these options are buried deep in separate tree nodes. It's the same dark pattern Facebook uses around privacy settings. Whenever they have to provide privacy options that allow opting out they adopt "malicious compliance" and over do it in as granular and complex a way as possible - with no "opt out of everything" macro option.
Now I know that I can change all the policy manager options in the registry editor too, and frankly, it's not really much more complex. A couple years ago I realized I make so many changes fixing a new Windows install to be livable and useful that I'd never remember them all. So every time I make a registry change to fix something, I store a registry script that'll make the edit automatically in dedicated folder on my server (it's easy to export a single registry key as a script). As of today there are over a hundred scripts there. I'm getting to the point where I'm probably going to switch to Linux soon. Which sucks because I used to really like Windows (with a few notable exceptions which can be addressed with fixes and helper apps). But the level of work required to keep Windows usable and useful has skyrocketed in recent years. Before I was just dealing with occasional random bugs, regressions and feature oversights by a generally well intentioned OS vendor. Now I'm fighting a rapidly escalating battle against a malicious opponent. It's so dumb because I'd actually pay $100/yr for a "Power Windows" version with no ads, upsells, agenda promotions, dark patterns and a full restoration of all the power user features they keep dropping from Windows 11 (like advanced taskbar functionality).
I hear where you're coming from. The corporate shops customize fleets with group policy and InTune, and it's a hassle to do the same one-off at home.
You might get traction with trying the IOT LTSC versions, which are often very stripped down. Used to be LTSB, then LTSC, but now on 11 I think you need to opt for IOT LTSC which is different than just LTSC.
IOT LTSC will have half the processes out of the box and less bullshit that you hate. It's possible apps that do OS checks will grump at you - Adobe Lightroom for example comes to mind, but it's an idea.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll put it on the list for when I'm next forced to reinstall. That's when I'll take a hard look at how well I can replicate the Windows experience (back when it was still good) on Linux.
There are few things that irritate me more than the gradual replacing of "Yes / No" with "Yes / Maybe later".
It's so disrespectful, infantilizing, and paternalistic.
But you see it everywhere now -- Microsoft, Apple, mainstream respected news and media sites constantly asking if you want to use their app instead of their site, or upgrade your plan.
And I don't understand why. It's hard to believe it increases conversion. But it does make people like me angry at the brand.
It isn't for me. I see people being converted just to stop the nagging, or just doing it on auto-pilot. It worries me, but it makes it pretty obvious why the corps aren't asking for proper consent. They don't care, they don't need to, and it's clearly working.
What I'm saying is, if they're going to nag you anyways, "yes/maybe later" doesn't obviously seem more likely to get people to click yes than "yes/no". In response to e.g. "Do you want to enable x right now?"
I believe nagging increases conversion. I'm just taking about the obnoxious "maybe later" wording.
Can we crowdfund someone going to the Microsoft campuses, heckling every employee nonstop on the grounds, and when security comes up, just tell them "maybe later"?
see what Neil Young has been saying about getting big corporations out of our lives. They skillfully buy out potential competitors and kill them to keep their monopolies.
What he has to say would have been a lot more believable before he sold half his back catalog to a hedge fund. Queue the McDonalds commericial that includes "keep me searching for an arch of gold"...
At this point, Windows has jumped the shark. It's clear Microsoft now see the future of their company as cloud services, with the desktop gateways just as an endpoint for that, and the progressive enshittification of the Microsoft ecosystem has reached the point at which it is no longer the sensible OS for the mainstream, but is now a gamified mess like pay-to-play gaming.
Fortunately for most of us, Linux and MacOS exist. But companies that have built their entire IT infrastructure on Windows really have no clear way out other than to follow Microsoft down the rabbit hole - which is, of course, the whole point of these recent changes.
I've been running mostly Linux (with some macOS) as a daily driver for the past 15 years and have seen more and more articles like this pop up on HN over time. I've felt for a while that Linux is more user-centric, but it seems like Windows 11 is a whole other level of user-hostile, to the point where even average users seem to be catching on. My own father managed to set up Linux on his computer without any prompting or help, and I didn't even suggest it to him. It's a dual-boot setup, but he boots into linux nearly every time and prefers it. It's starting to feel like a turning point.
I'm wondering if there's a market out there for helping regular computer users switch to linux?
> I'm wondering if there's a market out there for helping regular computer users switch to linux?
I'm more feeling like average users are just jumping straight to a phone (or maybe a tablet) as their main computing experience, and their PC are either pushed out of their life completely, as their other devices can do its job while being less hostile, or their PC is reduced to doing only the tasks which are either impossible or very-very inconvenient on a phone or tablet (PC games, long-form writing, content creation, Excel, et cetera).
Linux has some of these remaining niches nailed down pretty well, but still not well enough that the choice is obvious (Proton is really good, but kernel-anti-cheat is still a thing. Libreoffice is good for simple writing, but not for the Office power-user), and even then, this is really just the crumbs that are left after most users just exit the PC market as a whole, since they figured out the don't need one in the first place any more.
I deeply hate Microsoft, and most modern commercial software design, but OneDrive has consistently been the best app I've ever used for large file storage. Can anyone explain why they hate it so much? I have near instantaneous access to my documents on my computer and phone. I've been considering a move to Mint, but I like OneDrive so much I'm not sure that I want to lose it.
The web version is awful, absurdly cumbersome to navigate, difficult to search, confusingly structured, slow and just generally terrible.
The native version was forced onto people's Windows machines and automatically configured to sync people's local desktop and documents to Microsoft's servers without explicit consent, so some of the hate directed towards Onedrive might be an expressions of hate of Microsoft's abusive and deceptive behavior. But even if the Onedrive app itself is amazing (I don't know if it is), installing anything from such an untrustworthy company seems like a bad idea.
if you want to use onedrive ok thats a choice, if its impossible to store locally, and you have the sword of deletecles hanging over your head, thats not a choice, thats a consequence.
I can sympathize a little with Microsoft here. MS got totally angry and fed up with what was happening. I'm not sure how many people really understand how bad ransomware was getting. Microsoft just finally said enough is enough and started implementing counter-measures. Being more forceful about getting people to backup their files is one of them.
Yes, it's annoying, and many might say what's the big deal? People's harddrives used to die all the time and they would still lose data. Why suddenly because it's ransomware, is it a bigger deal? I think it just adds a moral dimension to it that wasn't as acute before.
MS took the risk to be a little bit of an asshole as a way to counter even bigger assholes.
That's only really acceptable if they can hold up their end of the deal and maintain absolute privacy and security for that data without trying to analyze it and apply Minority Report pre-crime to everything.
You're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower. Microsoft didn't do this to help or hurt users or ransomware. There's no deeper meaning behind the action past improving business metrics in order to meet goals and please management and shareholders. They're not thinking about good or evil when implementing this, even if the PR firms they hire might make it look that way.
So you can imagine my incredulity when a few days ago I received one email message telling me that if I don't take action urgently, my One Drive account is going to be deleted, maybe even my files in the cloud.
I will never trust OneDrive with any files after it silently deleted thousands of my files while syncing - I hit the hidden maximum number of files limit and then it permanently deleted the remaining files with no warning.
> "What if I just don't want OneDrive? Microsoft has embedded it so deep into Windows that there are no easy ways of getting rid of it."
This is not so, at least for the present. In current Windows releases, go to "Control Panel," then "Programs and Features", then select and uninstall OneDrive. If it's not installed, it cannot run.
Before you do this, make sure you have moved all your files from OneDrive to your local storage devices.
In the future, Microsoft will doubtless make OneDrive mandatory, along with requiring everyone to have a Microsoft account and watch their ads 24/7. But there's a remedy for that too -- install Linux. "Yet another European government is ditching Microsoft for Linux" : https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-german-state-schleswig-hol...
In Ubuntu I turn off motd ads, in Windows I turn off this stuff, it doesn't come back, I only remember it exists when I see the outrage journalism headlines. I don't see why more people don't just take the steps to remove annoyances.
You can plug your ears and close your eyes, but Microsoft is becoming increasingly adversarial to their customers.
It's clear they want to remove local accounts and tie everything to O365.
My mom (68 yo) recently got a Windows update that then prompted her to backup her stuff. I had disabled all this and used Win11 debloat previously. OneDrive only had 5gb of storage and prompted her to upgrade.
She thought she got hacked because it was asking for money. Then when I went to turn it off it warned me that I might suffer data loss disabling one drive. Which is a story that we have seen play out many times.
Sure enough I backed everything up to an external drive, and when I disabled OneDrive the files were totally gone.
I don't know if it is still true, but I noticed a difference in the behaviour of Home and Professional editions a number of years back. Home was definitely more agressive. Then there was a recent reinstall of Windows. The One Drive backup popup came up, but didn't give me an option to say no. It only allowed me to delay the decision by a week or a month.
I've often wondered if there is a way you can be malicious with this, a way of 'beating' them at their own game.
1: Make random files full of absolute garbage data
2: Upload 5GB of garbage data, delete (free limit capacity)
3: Repeat 1 and 2, forever, 24/7.
At 10mbps it would take 68.3 minutes, at 50mbps it would take 13.7 minutes to upload 5gb.
At 10mbps you could upload 5gb 7665 times, at 50mbps 38,325 times a year.
that works out to 38,325gb/10mbps and 191,625 GB at 50mbps per year
So yeah, if Microsoft wants to allow a user to upload 10's of thousands of completely worthless useless bytes of data and delete and reupload why not?
Anyone care to think how many hard drives you could destroy with the constant writing? And you could also automate downloads too, so they have to deal with reads.
Let's see how long they want your 'data' for then ey?
Consider it a digital form of 'fly tipping' and it's completely free, legal and they have begged you to do it!
On MacOS, you still get local user accounts and Apple's optional online features are still optional.
Microsoft is using all the levers at their disposal to force users to use online Microsoft accounts to log onto their local computer and even turn on formerly optional features like One Drive.
My assumption is that Microsoft is using their access to user data to build up everyone's advertising profile, and forcing you to be logged on through a Microsoft account makes sure that the data they collect is linked to a specific person.
Windows Recall is another example of a "feature" they wanted to force on users that can be used to fill out everyone's advertising profile.
It is not ok on iOS or macOS or even Android or whatever else. The feature to have some online storage with backup is fine, IMO, but what is not fine is the OS nagging you to use that feature. This thing must be opt-in and only if the user themselves initiate it.
Also it should not be locked to a single online storage provider but use some sort of standardized protocol (or at least some pluggable mechanism) to allow any online storage provider - including using self-hosted options - to work with it.
This is how you make something that works for your users instead of taking advantage of them.
I’ve never enabled iCloud backups and it has never pestered me about it after the initial iPhone setup process (the modern version of which doesn't even pester me then since it copies the setting from my last iPhone). I backup locally to my mac, which admittedly they made require a password each time now, which is a bit annoying, but it’s not asking me to enable icloud backups regardless.
No, but I haven't seen Windows ask multiple times a day either. But iOS does try to get me to turn on iCloud every time the phone reboots and somewhat randomly without rebooting.
Frankly it's more of a fact than an occasionally seen odd double standard behavior at this point. It's literally not okay when Microsoft does it; iPhone users literally love this exact same feature. They should be working a lot harder on solving this mystery.
I used to use Windows Backup with One Drive years ago but it just really pissed me off, especially with how My Documents is handled.
There was that time I discovered several GB of screenshots had been automatically saved to My Pictures from some setting they snuck into the printscreen screen grab tool and then that of course those were automatically uploaded to the cloud. After disabling the option it would sometimes reenable itself.
And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun. Ubisoft were terrible for this, after playing a game I'd notice a bunch of cache files they dumped into My Docs being uploaded. I mean putting save games and config files inside my docs is annoying enough, random cache files is just taking the piss.
Also windows backup would mess up my desktop between systems on occasion which was also very fun!
I disabled most of the shit but it was still annoying on occasion. Then a year or two ago I solved the problem by just using Linux for 90% of things, Mint at first but now Fedora, and grudgingly booting back into Windows for the other 10% of my needs.
I've been a Mac & Linux user since about 2007 or so, and I had no idea what Windows had become. Then a couple weeks ago I caved and built my son a Windows gaming PC. Egads, Windows is annoying! Even more so than I remember! I'm amazed that people actually put up with it for their daily driver. Right on schedule, my son came to me yesterday evening and asked what he should do about the backup warning. It didn't give any option other than enabling backup or telling it to remind later. WTF.
Not to say that MacOS isn't occasionally very annoying as well. It is. But as a tool it's also much more useful than vanilla Windows, which helps a little.
My Mac tells me 5+ times per day that it's unable to backup something or another because I'm not logged into the Apple cloud or whatever it's called. And there's not obvious way to make it stop.
This is not unique to Windows.
If you don't want to receive notifications from iCloud, go into Notifications in the System Settings and uncheck the box next to iCloud in the list of what is allowed to send notifications.
How do you do you block One Drive on Windows from nagging you constantly?
True that was the other reason I moved off it. Linux and KDE have never bothered me about such matters <3
However macOS doesn't cram this party advertising, news headlines, shopping coupons and (for now) AI services down your throat.
I don't run into that, but I do have an iCloud account and I'm logged into it, which probably helps. I'm logged into my Microsoft account on Windows, too, but it is still pushy.
The only, as per personal exp, way to properly setup a Win11 machine these days is strictly via LTSC release and WinUtil from Chris Titus + local account - clean and no "feature" updates for almost 10 yrs. Add to that Chocolatey for package management that takes away the "every piece of software adds it's own autoupdater crap"-pain and the OS is suddenly very capable for almost all computing needs.
It's worth mentioning that 10 also has LTSC variants, the IoT LTSC version in particular will be supported with security updates until 2032 if I recall.
Is buying the Enterprise version another method? I heard someone suggest that, but without any explanation other than it allowed you to use Windows without a Microsoft account. Is there something that makes it unsuitable for gaming?
You cannot simply buy Enterprise edition. It is subscription-only. It comes with Enterprise subscription to M365.
It's funny to me to see that to achieve this Linux-like result you need to go through the Linux-like installation process.
We're a niche, but at this point most people I see around are spending the majority of their time in unix/linux through whatever layer feels right for them, be it the Darwin system or WSL2 or straight docker/container. The overall maintenance being linuxy is par for the course.
Good timing to plug this other article on the top page, Exactly om that paradox:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286
> Linux-like installation process
Maybe that of 20 years ago, it's very smooth these days if you use e.g. Debian.
Somehow, archinstall is more straightforward than even this.
On their own devices, lots of non-power users probably just accept whatever Windows suggests. Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.
Techie users might just find tweaks online that allows disabling dark patterns on their devices.
I don't know how people who care but aren't techie enough to install workarounds (or to tell good ones from bad ones) deal.
> Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.
Generally if the company is deploying Windows they are using OneDrive, although the exact configuration will vary.
Windows has always been designed with corporate customers in mind. That's true more than ever today, the whole Azure ecosystem is very lucrative for them. Personal Windows users have always been an afterthought, but starting around Windows 10 they became less important than their own data. Which Microsoft has been getting away with brazenly claiming as its own.
Yes though corporate OneDrive is very different from the consumer one. It's a lot less pushy.
Though it's very well possible to use another service as a corporate client. We did for many years.
Personally, I use ShutUp10!, and after running it once, it settles everything down and Windows is my preferred OS experience.
People dont care about their operating system. Most Mac users never learn Mac and most Windows users never learn windows. They use their computers for emails, some presentations and occasional gaming. They dont want to learn different kinds of software. Which is fine. For most people its just a power tool they never read the manual for. They dont even know what other tools there are so they dont know that life could be better, by not using windows.
> Most Mac users never learn Mac and most Windows users never learn windows.
Why bother when annual releases will change everything?
> For most people its just a power tool they never read the manual for.
What manual?
You should read the manual to how metaphors work
Exactly! The lesson that Microsoft doesn't want to learn.
I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
Even Linux allows such basic customization.
If Apple allowed this type of user-friendly customisation on MacOS, I suspect a lot of Windows users will migrate to Mac.
I have extreme doubts that there is any meaningful number of windows users holding out on trying macos based on such a thing.
The users are much more simple than this. Most have never even tried Mac. If they want to, they will just buy one the next time they need a computer and accept the new experience as being the new norm.
> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
Classic Mac OS was released first, with well-considered, consistent design standards. Windows arrived almost 2 years later, and in the interest of not looking it like copied Macs, Microsoft essentially flipped the positions of everything, including window controls, toolbars, desktop icon placement, and button order. (Yes, both copied Bell Labs).
Windows has no standards, so maybe they could provide that kind of option instead.
> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
> Even Linux allows such basic customization.
Does Windows allow such customization? I think that's the relevant comparison. Both macOS and Windows are trying to be "user-friendly," which more and more means "take what we tell you and like it." I personally am a techie and like the Unix way of exposing everything that one can imagine to customization, but I do know that I'm often lost when I want to learn a new piece of customization-minded software and have to decide how to, and whether to, twiddle lots of knobs before even getting into just using it. I think that there's definitely a reasonable place for an OS that spends its time getting those settings right so that the user doesn't have to worry about them.
(Whether any particular setting is right or wrong is, of course, going to depend on the user. I'm a Mac user, there are some defaults I've always hated, and others that I think used to be good but are moving in the wrong direction. But, so far, I stick with it at least in part because there are lots of other things it gets right, and it doesn't feel fundamentally hostile to me in the way that Windows does.)
I think you're using "annoying" here to describe what is in fact, flat-out inappropriate.
Bail and go Linux.
> I'm amazed people actually put up with it for their daily driver
Bit of an overreaction, the majority of the world is on Windows (I use both as my daily). I'm sure as a Mac user you remember the days around 2007 where there were a lot of compatibility issues on Mac, it has come along way.
Your annoyance with Windows is likely due to what I see a lot of which is simply that the operation system works and does things differently, which requires you to do things in a way you might not be familiar with. We use operating systems almost instinctively once we're familiar, jumping to another OS is going to rock your boat.
I used all three every day for years. Until I dropped Mac because I got sick of apple's opinionated design. Linux with KDE of course because gnome is even worse than Apple.
That kinda solved the only big issue I had switching OSes constantly, the copy paste shortcuts. Apple is command-c/v and if you constantly switch you never get used to it.
> I used all three every day for years.
Yeah, would not recommend. From my experience tweaking three OSes to be similar enough to be able to form muscle memory for efficient use is not trivial.
Unless you spend 99% of time in terminal, then it can be done, but in that case OS doesn’t matter. That is what I personally ended up doing.
I didn't really have any issues except for the control-C/V problem. I still use Linux and windows intermingled (windows for work and gaming and Linux for everything else)
I agree, nowadays Linux seems like the only reliable solution. Even macOS, with the latest "liquid glass" update, feels like a toy for kids.
I just wish the Affinity suite would be available for Linux too.
Having run Linux every day, I can say we’re in trouble if that is the reliable option :)
(Agree that Liquid Glass is miserable, though.)
I've faced many fewer hiccups on CachyOS/Arch in the past few months than on Windows. In the first month of owning this hardware, I had an unexplained BSOD that actually bricked my whole Win11 install. And this is pretty recent/funky 2-in-1 hardware, not an old ThinkPad I've cherry-picked for good Linux support. This is an important moment for free software; the big platforms are finally cinching down on users hard enough that we have a shot at convincing regular people to join us. Please don't blow it with vague complaints.
Yep, I dual boot Linux Mint & Windows 11 and only bother with the latter when I need MS Teams, or some other proprietary software that tends to be more reliable on Windows. In terms of performance and user experience Mint wins easily.
I only rarely need to use Microsoft Office or Paint.NET and a Windows VM on Linux has solved the problem entirely for me. I don't know if videoconferencing would work as well, but I'd really recommend giving it a try! I've already gone without a proper Windows install for almost 2 years.
Since MS is making the office UX web based, I'd suggest people try just loading 365 in a browser like edge (It's generally flawless for MS products). Especially apps like Teams.
Once you realize that the dedicated app is basically just a browser shell, using a real browser becomes somewhat of a no brainer.
Edge even supports PWAs on linux which can give you the "app" experience without the app.
But the browser versions of Office products royally suck. I still actively use the 'open in app' option over the default action of opening a document / spreadsheet in a browser window. I wholly disagree with It's generally flawless for MS products
The Office-in-browser experience is laggy and slow and long-learnt familiarities are gone.
Additional old-man whinge: Outlook keeps wanting to open in a browser window now. I have enough things open in a browser that are difficult enough to manage that I don't need Outlook getting lost in that forest as well. It's convenient having a separate Taskbar icon that will definitely open my Calendar or Email.
When everything's a browser tab, what's the point of the taskbar?
When everything's a browser tab then the browser is the Operating System.
Every day I'm forced to use Microsoft at work, I'm increasingly glad I ditched it at home.
I don't know how it is today, but about 3 years ago I worked in a shop that used MS Teams. I was sneaky enough to get myself a Kubuntu install when everybody else was on Windows, but I had no problems using Teams on Kubuntu back then.
The Teams Linux client was discontinued but it works well enough in a browser.
same experience here with Omarchy. it’s been (mostly) flawless. the only reason i keep windows around at this point is fortnite.
The Open Source ecosystem is a bit weird in that your system can be as reliable or not as you want, depending on what projects you follow. It really truly is a mixed bag in the sense that you can actually have a solid setup if you are happy with it being boring.
Incidentally, most people seem to want their computer to be the good kind of boring.
Especially non-tech people. Look at how popular Ubuntu VMs are with research chemists. And successful chemists tend to be highly technical.
I’m not sure what the good kind of boring is, if we could define it, it might be tautologically true that that’s the thing people want.
> Look at how popular Ubuntu VMs are with research chemists.
Are they? I actually have no idea.
> And successful chemists tend to be highly technical.
But not necessarily in any IT sense. STEM skills are very specific.
Sorry, it looks like I’m just being petulant and saying “I’m not sure” about your every sentence, haha, that wasn’t my intent but it is what I ended up doing I guess.
> The Open Source ecosystem is a bit weird in that your system can be as reliable or not as you want
I'm going to dig into this a little. This feels like shifting responsibility onto the user when things don't go well. E.g. comparing the platonic ideal of Linux when analyzing practical options. I make lots of mistakes in all aspects of my life. I know historically, and projecting into the future that I will get into trouble with Linux, so I don't daily-drive it. Yes, there are always ways to fix things when a system gets in a bad state, but there is a time and effort cost to this.
Saying it's my fault for breaking it doesn't help restore the system. e.g. "Should have used the LTS release", "Should have only installed software from the package manager", "Shouldn't have used sudo", "Shouldn't have edited a system file without knowing what you're doing". If I was doing those things, it probably seemed like the best of available options, e.g. the only way to make a certain piece of hardware or software work.
I think it is an accurate description of the situation. I agree that responsibility is accumulating at the user’s feet in an unfortunate manner.
But somebody must be responsible for making your computer work, who should it be?
The companies that sell operating systems don’t seem to be fulfilling the obligation to make a bug free and user-friendly OS. The Open Source community never really had accepting that responsibility as a “business model” because they aren’t businesses.
But that's how it works with every other tool you own? Nobody is complaining about the pencil manufacturer when you choose to draw an image, which you later don't like. Same with using software to modify the state of the hard disk, which you don't like later.
In Windows or Darwin you are not responsible, because you can't tell the computer what you want to do, but in a free OS, you can and do order what the computer is doing and that's why you also need to deal with the consequences.
I agree! My thought is this: The mechanical pencil is drawing that image because there are a combination of settings on it don't work well for a given use case. When adjusting the settings, I get poor results, or something breaks. The schematics are available and parts are available for the repair, but the job still takes a while, and I don't know how to do it. My friend has fixed something like it before, but his pencil's controls were different, and some of the tools are no longer available for the way he did it. I would prefer if the pencil worked out of the box, because I'm an artist; not a pencil engineer.
I instead buy a pencil from a different brand. It doesn't come in the color I want, but it's good enough, and lets me focus on the drawing. The pencil engineers and enthusiasts keep telling me the customizable mechanical pencil is much better. They love it, have learned its intricacies, and take pride in this.
A computer is a tool. Linux respects this, Apple and Windows try to monetize it. The tool user is responsible for choice and maintenance of the tool.
It really depends on your hardware/distro combo.
Buy a newly announced Windows laptop with a new CPU model. Try Ubuntu, you're day is about to suck.
MacOS and Windows might break[1] less often than Linux, but when it does I stand less of a chance of fixing it. Linux is usually more fiddly, but if does something I don't want its usually only a few minutes to find the config file or a plugin for the Desktop Environment to alter the behavior.
[1]: "Break" here meaning "behaves in a way I don't want"
Seriously, such remarks add nothing except exposing intended bias. In other words that's called a trolling.
Holding the opinion that Linux is currently the most reliable OS option is "trolling"?
He's saying its not very good if thats the case. Which is not the case. I am satisfied with GNU+Linux. It doesn't work against me. It would be great if there were FOSS alternatives to the remaining proprietary software on my computers. Making it sound like linux is almost just as bad, does sound weird. Also nothing about what's actually that bad about "linux".
I would call it a constructive contrarian claim, quite distinct from trolling.
Tahoe crippled my Intel 2019 MBP and cost me plenty of time and incurred a lot of frustration until I gave up and reformat the ssd.
I am switching to Linux for both my desktop and laptop from here on out.
Does a premium hardware solution exist that competes with MacBook on practical battery life?
I’m giving the Asus Proart P16 a try, if I was trying for maximum battery life I’d probably avoid the discrete gpu (e.g. a zenbook or similar). I am not a full time road warrior so battery life is important, but not absolutely critical. There may be some options out with better battery life, but I haven’t been focused on this metric too closely.
I just don’t want to be sidetracked by overly aggressive and pushy decisions by my OS vendor anymore. I’ve been happy with the stability of my Debian/Ubuntu systems for getting work done. I have been using apple laptops for 10+ years, and I still like their build quality, but I don’t like the direction macOS (or Windows) is heading.
Probably not quite, though recent laptops improved. But on a desktop setup it doesn’t matter anyway.
Do you think it looks like a toy just because of how it looks, or because of how it works?
Spotlight got a major update in macOS 26 where it can now perform actions. I can open spotlight and type "run <enter> <some terminal command or script>" and get the output right there, selecting it will put the resulting text into my current window.
There is my uptime posted in HN with only Spotlight and my hands never leaving the keyboard.Spotlight is also context aware... Say I run across some text in another language:
I can highlight, invoke spotlight, type translate, it will recognize I want to translate the selected text, translate it inside of Spotlight, and if arrow down and press enter, it will paste the translated text over the original text, if editable, or copy it to the clipboard. There is also a built-in clipboard history.I'm not a fan of all the UI choices that have been made, but those will get ironed out over time. Meanwhile, I get some more powerful out of the box features without needing to resort to 3rd party apps.
My 2c. I agree with the parent and article: OneDrive can be a major problem with Windows. They push it on you, your personal documents can be moved to OneDrive without your permission etc. Confusing and user-hostile design.
Linux has its own idiosyncrasies, which may or may not make it worth. E.g. ABI diaspora, installing things can be inconsistent and high-effort, the cycle of copy+pasting CLI commands and system file edits from old forum posts or these days LLMs to fix something, treating your PC like a multi-user system that has an admin by default, etc. My general experience is that installation and things work smoothly with the built-in or package-managed software, but gradually degrade as you start installing software and drivers.
> treating your PC like a multi-user system that has an admin by default, etc.
I think I have the opposite orientation: In the past when family and friends needed help to install/rescue their machine (on Windows versions that supported it) I always ensured there was a separate "Manager" admin login and then made their main account "limited", albeit with UAC popups.
If nothing else, it made repeat visits much easier.
Tahoe's saving grace is docker support which is superb now.
With Affinity (likely) switching to a subscription model, I wouldn't hold out hope they're avoiding enshitification.
> feels like a toy for kids.
I wish unserious complaining like this wasn't mixed with actual technical criticism of software.
It is very serious. I love the way Catalina and Mojave looks; dark mode or light mode, it just screams "professional" at the top of it's lungs.
Big Sur is, somehow, the exact opposite. Corners are rounded off as if they could hurt someone, and margins are padded more than a cell in solitary confinement. Space is wasted everywhere. It's Fischer-Price design philosophy and I'm hardly the only one to point it out.
In a side-by-side, so much screen real estate gets wasted that it's genuinely disgusting: https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/fin...
It's also weird because Microsoft has some excuse for wasting screen real estate - Windows is used on touchscreen devices and has to at least adapt to them. But Apple stubbornly refuses to put touchscreens on laptops, at which point what excuse do you have to not build good information density?
Agree on all points. Tahoe ruined macOS for me. Not only does it waste screen real estate, but it’s not performant at all and my M4 pro is no slouch.
Just feels like I’m using an iPad now.
Here’s a fun exercise. Look at how huge the window borders are to achieve that insane corner radius. The cursor changes to the resize arrow at the corner before it even touches the window, the bottom arrow is a good 4-5px away from the window lol.
I think that "serious" is not the right word here. But rather, saying "it's like a toy" is not constructive. When someone says "it looks like a toy" that tells me nothing about what they don't like about it. Saying "I don't like the rounded corners and wasted space" is something concrete you can have a discussion about, so it's better to use that kind of phrasing.
Toy design isn't objectively bad. Windows XP has many colorful, misshapen buttons and they're amazing for the vision-impaired, same goes for Apple's Aqua UI. Fischer-Price design language is arguably why the iPhone is so popular, when you deploy it with intent the results can be spectacular.
What is the intent of dumbing-down the Mac design language? iOS superfans already have devices to use, the Mac has to compete in the professional segment of the market, not the casual one. The only motivation I can see is to enforce solidarity with VisionOS, which by most accounts seems to be a professional flop too. An ecosystem shouldn't aim for superficial similarity across devices, each experience should enforce their unique strengths/weaknesses in the UI and then network their state to each-other in the background. Apple used to know this.
Touch and mouse interfaces simply are different. After over a decade of pretending otherwise there are now sufficiently many counter-examples.
> Space is wasted everywhere.
Sure, that's a reasonable technical criticism. Wasted screen space is, in my opinion, an issue in modern interface design trends. Good design uses space in a thoughtful manner. The designers of macOS clearly don't agree with us, but we can have a reasonable technical discussion about that. We can consult the data. We can consult the users.
> It's Fischer-Price design philosophy
You're mixing the two again. Fisher-Price was not consulted in the design of modern macOS interfaces, and complaining about not liking the design language cheapens all your actual points. No real discussion can be had around this taste garbage. You're rage baiting.
It objectively does feel like a toy with those rounded corners though. How do you know Fischer-Price wasn't consulted?
It doesn't seem like a toy to me. Therefore, it is not objective but is just your subjective opinion. Which is fine, but don't overstate your opinions as being objective when they aren't.
It enables in non-consensual manners, break apps and games(because paths change and APIs work differently), clings onto your files even if you tried to save them from the OneDrive folder, and throws a tantrum and irreversibly delete your files if you dare unlink the PC and disable it.
I don't know why they commit to especially the last part. To me, it feels like that is why Microsoft's Windows efforts are getting a lot of negative press lately; there must be lots of writers and media individuals who had lost data to that exact behavior who are now perpetually biased against them for that reason.
Just why?
I think it's the curse of windows being attached to a tech company, and a tech company seems to want to keep pursuing cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utility. Over the years lots of little extra non-essential functionality has crept into windows to where you could almost compare it with a lightweight linux distro, or that it's hard to draw the line where the OS ends, and then you're getting into territory where everyone relies upon a different subset of what's available which MS has been increasingly able to use to justify adding more 'essential' features for modern computing.
> cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utilit
You can't re-sell a boring utility every one/two/three years.
Nobody wants it - not the top management (bonuses for the revenue growth), nor the middle management (bonuses for the succesful new projects), nor the guys who implements the things (reconginition for the new projects).
Or talking simpler - KPI. And there is no 'we improved the stability for 0.0000002% of clients' indicator along with 'customers are happy with the thing we sold them in 2017'.
And don't forget what it was some fruit company what even wasn't in the corporate which made it fashionable to have a 'totes new and refreshing experience (along with a hefty price tag)' every year or two.
Stability, performance, security, all of this stuff doesn’t matter until it becomes a crisis, then it’s the most important thing in the world
don't know why they commit to especially the last part.
MS thinks it knows better than you. It thinks its owns your data. Remember that this has happened before (7 years ago!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139
It's interesting how ChromeOS respects your choices more than Windows here.
There is a setting to disable Google Drive and it just works. It won't auto-enable, no popups or nags or anything. Even Google Docs/Workspace falls back to a trimmed down offline version.
On the other hand, Android keeps nagging me about enabling backups in Google Photos. I'm always one accidental click of the huge "Okay!" button in an unexpected popup away from having my data being uploaded to Google.
I've solved this long ago by disabling the app. Sadly, that means I can't view videos in the gallery, but I believe it's a fair compromise. I'd recommend taking a look at open source alternatives like Lavender Photos [1] or Fossify Gallery [2]
[1]: https://github.com/kaii-lb/LavenderPhotos
[2]: https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Gallery
This was a genuinely baffling product decision. I couldn't continue using Photos due to this nagging dialog.
Google has another photo gallery app called just Gallery, that's what I'm now using.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
The PMs can't start out being aggressive, though, that comes after dominating the market, right? ChromeOS and Google Drive are generally good products which are probably so as to get penetration and stickiness.
Perhaps Gmail is a better example to see the incumbent acting as it wishes, enabling and disabling features without worry about the end user's POV.
After setting up an Android phone for someone recently, I think it's stuffed with dark patterns. The amount of times that OS was pushing me to enable or opt-out from syncing different things to their cloud and generally sabotage the privacy via various settings was staggering.
Windows is certainly on the same path but I'm not sure how far ahead or behind they are in the competition to screw their users over with these dark patterns. They only have to trick you once.
I just bought my first windows 11 computer. Why are my personal folders like pictures and documents under a OneDrive folder? This is insane. Going to see how Ubuntu runs on it and hopefully never look back.
In Win10/Win11, you can move your user folders to another partition or folder path.
Right-click on them in Explorer, go to Properties, click on Location tab, and type/select the new path for them, click Move... then that folder and its contents will be moved to new locate.
I've movier following to D: partition as root-level folders: Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches, Videos.
> you can move your user folders to another partition or folder path
The fact that the default is to auto-magically upload your personal data on to somebody else's box (sorry "the cloud") is fucking insane.
Such things should be opt-in, not opt-out; and certainly not nag-ware.
> especially with how My Documents is handled
I stopped using these long ago because every other app you install puts something there so it becomes a landfill automatically.
Just create an additional partition and put all your non-OS files there. This is a classic idea people have been using since the DOS days, still working great.
^this is good, legit feedback for why this product/feature isn't good. It's not just "MSFT BAD!". Thanks for sharing.
The list of mind-boggling design decisions MS has made at this point is so long at this point that I don't blame people any more for saying 'MS bad'. Just pointing at the start menu search and Everything tells you everything you need to know, and more or less sets the tone you can expect from MS decision making.
Config files should go elsewhere, but save files seem like the should definitely go in mydocs.
Maybe, but not by default. But games as a rule don't give you the option to change this, so you're stuck with that one game and that one program using My Documents as a dumping ground without your consent, and now My Documents is no longer really your folder any more, at which point people make a folder on their desktop or whereever else called My Documents But For Real This Time or whatever.
> And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun.
I hate this problem with all OSes. We have folders that started out being places for users to put things like Pictures, Documents & home, but over time they get filled with crap from software and it's difficult to find your own files. We should have had a "program-files" subfolder or something by default in all these places to separate things that applications put there vs. things that you put there.
We do! On Windows, it's (user profile)\AppData. And to be fair, most software does use that. But there are always bad citizens that don't care and clutter up the user's documents folder.
That's nice, I think Linux/XDG has some standards around this too, but they too are not enforced - and many people have no idea these standards even exist unless the OS warns or enforces these things. I think there might also be some gap between "these files are only internally needed by this software" vs. "these files are created by this software, but may be good to show them to the user". It's nice the OSes are making efforts to do that though!
Speaking for myself, but I would my game saves and config in the cloud if I were using OneDrive. That is however a separate issue from whether those files should be in the hidden appdata or in the visible my documents.
Hope the PM in charge with the scammy copy designed to trick people into turning this on is happy with the boost in free users falling for it.
My dad turned it on not knowing what it meant and it completely messed up his workflows and now I have to figure out how to safely disable it and move his files back.
I will remember Microsoft causing this problem for him every time I think of or get asked if someone should use a Microsoft product or service.
This work is 10x more effort than it sounds too due to how severely mistakes are penalised (i.e. unrecoverable files), necessitating extreme caution.
When uploading 10k photos from macOS to Google Cloud using the Google Cloud macOS app, it said syncing had completed about 2 hours earlier than my back-of-the-envelope calculations predicted. "Great", I thought, but was still a bit suspicious, so just in case, before deleting the local copy, I closed the Google Drive app and reopened it, and it immediately started syncing - there were 2k photos/videos to go (!!). That's how insanely easily it could be to lose precious memories due to a tiniest bug in cloud software.
Surgical precision and extreme thoroughness are the only ways to approach these seemingly simple operations of moving files from one computer to another.
I wish more software companies had a core value of “every user created bit is sacred.”
Storage is cheap enough that this attitude is possible.
But I guess keeping all of your designers aware of it across thousands of teams is too hard.
> every user created bit is sacred
They only care about the bits they can sell to advertisers. Actual user data is only a burden to them, and occasional data loss is not a big deal.
As usual, user are not making them paying the price for being badly treated. Software companies do this because they can get away with it, that's it.
Even on HN many people can't be arse to use Firefox, how could we expect anyone to avoid giants like Microsoft?
Sadly Firefox has been utter garbage for me the last few months, routinely hangs for me on 3 different machines across two different OSes.
Running out of options these days
Sounds like an extension acting up. Haven't noticed any issues on my devices.
Wow four downvotes and no replies for stating my literal experience with Firefox the last few months lmao. Never change HN
Honestly, the Google Drive for Desktop app was extremely reliable when Google was managing the files.
Then when macOS provided native support for cloud filesystems, it migrated to that. And it's been a complete mess. Uploads often don't get triggered until you restart the system, exactly what you're describing.
I'm pretty sure they're Apple macOS bugs, not Google ones. Because those kinds of bugs are constant across everything iCloud and Mac, but I don't generally see them on Google-only stuff.
> when macOS provided native support for cloud filesystems
When was that? I haven't regularly used a Mac in a good four years. At the time I had the Google Drive app with a business subscription, and I don't think there was any other option. It was terrible, to the point I completely gave up on it. Just like the other poster says, it would say, "I'm all synced up", but only half my files would be synced. I'd need to restart it to get syncing again. When I would try to get a large amount of files from the cloud to local storage, it would randomly crap out.
Basically, it would stall very often, and this was on wired gigabit ethernet, not some spotty mobile connection from a phone via wifi in a crowded cafe.
May 2022:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/13067413
Apple calls it File Provider.
I've been using the Google Drive for Desktop file streaming version since it launched in 2017 (file streaming, not exactly sync), I think it was originally called Google DriveFS, and never had any problems until they switched to Apple's File Provider.
There's a different Drive app that only did sync, I think that's what you're talking about. It's much older. Then they got merged into the current one.
How many people who owned iPods had their music collection deleted by iTunes? Apple software not caring about the user's bits doesn't seem new...
Doing shady stuff to juice KPIs seems like standard operating procedure at Microsoft. My favorite example of this is a few years after Windows Phone came out (when it was already clear it was going to be a failure), Microsoft announced they would be paying developers $100 per app (up to 20 apps) for ANYTHING submitted to the Windows Phone store. Clearly some executive was being graded on "number of apps in the store". As expected, this resulted in Windows Phone having a wide and varied selection of apps as long as all you needed was Chuck Norris jokes, fart apps, soundboards, whack-a-mole, Simon, etc.
Face the facts your dad isn't as important as KPIs tied to one drive and 365 subscription numbers, don't blame the PM for making Microsoft money lol
It's not even something you have to "fix" just pay and enjoy
It seems that after the 90s/00s MS hate, there was a period where MS was seen as the good guys, and "this isn't the same MS" etc. Seems to be turning around again.
I never got the "this isn't the same Microsoft" talk. Usually used to shut down anyone's complaints about bad or deceptive behaviour. Not the same Microsoft, so this time must be a mistake!
Except they were still claiming to love Linux whilst paying off government officials to hurt adoption amongst other deceptive behaviour.
> there was a period where MS was seen as the good guys
Some people are really naive.
There was a period when they were as hostile to Linux and non-Windows as a competitor would naturally be, but they were not hostile to users.
Try Windows 98/2K in a VM and see how peaceful the Windows experience used to be.
They're not so hostile to Linux anymore because their business no longer depends do much on selling OSes but services.
However they still want you to use windows because it makes it easier to sell their services. Windows has become a marketing vehicle which is why it now demands we create a Microsoft account and constantly pushes things like OneDrive as the article alludes to.
I don't think they were ever any more benign. It was always a pretty hardcore business. First software then services (and now they're hell-bent on becoming the biggest AI player, not very successfully so because they're really only a reseller of watered-down OpenAI services)
A family friend upgraded to Windows 11 and had it helpfully turned on personal files being OneDrive enabled. It ate up her free space and suddenly she couldn't receive or reply to email anymore. She was nearly 80 and had no idea why until she had randomly asked me to help her with something on her computer.
This is an instance of Microsoft being evil.
Yeah, the tech sector's understanding of the notion of consent is so unique and twisted. It makes sense now that the industry has the reputation that it has w.r.t misconduct/harrassment and how it's generally seen as being filled with creeps. Just keep asking until the user slips up or gets tired of the endless prompts/manual work required.
I wish they gave more attention to the many bugs.
One is the many many years old renaming trouble, renaming a file in Windows Explorer inside the OneDrive sometimes select all while I am alread typing extension to the end of the file name, clearing everything with the following keystroke, either resulting in something stupid saved on Enter if I do not realise what is happening (and being mad not remembering what the original name was), or just have to cancel and restart the renaming. Very frequent and annoying.
But a ... lets call it funny, so a funny trouble I recently discovered is that file name completely fine with Wndows is incompatible with OneDrive, OneDriva mandates me to "change the filename! change it!" (with different words but the same tone). What the f! Microsoft is not compatible with itself? : D What a clusterfuck. It is fairly new, I believe there are spaces in fron of the file name that is generated with some software I am trying, I don't care that much, nonessential, but very comedic. I have too much difficulty with using Windows to care with all the trouble and spend any time on those, I work around those, I increasingly give no f. (my work mandates Windows, ah!)
I also seen some sort of message box when a certain software tried to automatically open a newly created file in OneDrive, something like this: "The file http://sharepoint.blablabl/bla/bla/newly_created_file.ext" cannot be found. Whaaaat?! I work with a desktiop only software, it does not even care about internet connection. Saving the file to an ordinary folder works great, opens automatically. Sounds like at some point querying the full path of the file produces an internet address? Again, I give no sht to this crp that much to go ino and investigate and diagnose this hundredths of bug, just to have fruitless conversation a very understanding and very useless support guy or a forum audience suggesting how should I wrap my life around the stupidity of Windows.
> I wish they gave more attention to the many bugs.
We all wish that. But if you look at their responses, when people report bugs, tough times. They. Don't. Give. A. Shit.
HN seems to think PMs have a lot more power at Microsoft or large corps than they actually do. I assure you, a bunch of this stuff just comes top down because some VP's million dollar bonus rides on it.
The mandate to implement these kind of pop-ups doesn't come from above.
The mandate to identify ways to increase profit comes from above, and it is the PMs (through marketing/research/developers) that come up with ways to satisfy these requirements.
And failure to meet these requirements means a bad review and a chance of being laid off.
Bro I worked in the windows team. I’m telling you how it was.
Trust the HN crowd to know.
May i suggest some solutions? :-P
-> https://endof10.org/ (it has a map with people who can help install Linux)
-> https://www.opensuse.org/ (what i'm using on my PCs, works fine for the most part[0])
-> https://www.linuxmint.com/ (people seem to like this)
-> https://bazzite.gg/ (seems to be popular with gamers)
-> https://www.debian.org/ (almost everything is based on this :-P)
[0] for the most part because nothing - not even macOS where Apple controls the entire stack from CPU up to the OS - is without problems. Though i'm doing weird stuff with my PC - on my laptop i just threw it in ~3 years ago and it has been working without issues since then
My main reasons for using Windows right now are:
- Davinci Resolve
- Adobe suite
- AutoHotkey scripts, lots of them
- Microsoft Office, mainly PowerPoint, Excel and Word for creating and interacting with other companies' docs. Libre/OpenOffice mangled them/were missing features I depend on
- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.) last time I tried to switch, and rabbit holes that I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)
That said, I would love to switch back. I loved rofi [0] last time, for example.
Can anyone speak to the above? What's the status of running Windows apps like Adobe, Resolve, Office, for instance? Or AutoHotkey or equivalent?
0: https://github.com/davatorium/rofi
About AutoHotKey, you can do similar stuff as long as you are using X11 as there are various utilities for it, such as xdotool[0]. There is even an AutoHotKey-for-Linux project[1] (it also needs X11 - the author did try to port it to Wayland but gave up). For Wayland there are some alternatives like ydotool[2] (actually AFAIK since ydotool uses some daemon to inject events it works with anything, not just Wayland, but on the other hand it only provides a basic tiny subset of xdotool's commands) but the core protocol isn't particularly friendly to such automation.
[0] https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool
[1] https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11
[2] https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
I suspect the problem they were indicating with “AutoHotKey scripts, lots of them” is that they just have a lot of scripts they’d need to convert. I get it—even switching to a new WM or distro can be a real pain.
Well, they did mention "AHK or equivalent" so it sounds like converting them isn't out of the question.
Things that used to be prohibitive are made much easier with AI these days. Especially tasks like this that do something fairly small and isolated and are easy to test.
There is nothing like AHK. All mentioned tools are toys in comprison.
Agreed. AHK and Windows’ amenability to such things is an important reason why Windows is still my preferred GUI by far.
ydotool helps bridge the gap in wayland. xdotool replacements ate even more essential since wayland strips away most of the hooks into windows.
> Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.)
I'm running Ubuntu on a laptop with a 3070m. I don't have any issues like this. I did have issues related to using an external monitor but they all seemed to resolve when I switched from Gnome Wayland to Gnome X11.
Davinci Resolve has official support for Linux
Oh wow, thanks for this. I had filed it under "Windows and Mac only" in my head for some reason. Now I see that it was originally Linux only!?
Amazing that this free-to-download application supports Linux when Adobe doesn't. Or maybe not so amazing given their different approaches.
...and unofficial support for FreeBSD
https://github.com/NapoleonWils0n/davinci-resolve-freebsd-ja...
- Davinci Resolve
Has nativ support.
- Adobe suite
- Microsoft Office
https://www.winboat.app But beta.
- AutoHotkey scripts, lots of them
I'm afraid there is no easy way. https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card
Get AMD.
> I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)
Fair. Second PC to play around from time to time is probably the best in this case. But I fully understand, unless as a hobby, that infesting a lot of time makes little sense.
I don't use it as much nowadays but https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora (kde desktop + automatic updates + baked in nvidia drivers) got me an as painless as possible nvidia experience (on a laptop I got my nvidia gpu to power down while idle which had been a huge time sink trying to figure out how to do on my own). Didn't notice any screen tearing personally, but that's probably something that depends on what applications / workflows one has.
In terms of office compatibility OnlyOffice iirc has the best compatibility. Easy to install via flatpak (I really enjoy this move in desktop linux because now I can easily remove network access from apps / set the permissions I want).
The only thing that seems unsurmountable is probably Adobe, not sure how much of a dealbreaker that is.
Linux for me is all about customization and control, particularly of hardware, which you'd usually do for optimization (performance, workflow, latency, stability), which is fun if you care about optimization and efficiency, but for "good enough/I'm used to it/I'm a satisfied paying customer" I suppose there's no reason to investigate or risk. The market has poured loads of capital into satisfying PC multimedia use-case.
I'd suspect there's probably versions of all those that have been made to function basically through WINE.
If your curious, it's very easy to use it as a hypervisor, and pull out what you can, though IOMMU/SR-IOV might be tricky.
Alternatively, checking if Blender/GIMP service your use cases wouldn't even require switching...
AutoHotKey has been solved a lot of different ways, for sure.
But yeah, granular detailed control over your hardware is still the primary use-case for Linux, so if you view bad defaults, annoying install procedures, occasional show stopping bugs a hindrance rather than an opportunity, maybe it's not a strong candidate.
I hear that. I enjoy that kind of tinkering; I just have too much on my plate with my business to go as deep into it as I used to. But I'm still interested in Linux, if only because it's a much-needed third option. I've been on and off it as a daily driver over the years.
I'm guessing others here who are primarily on Windows can relate to this. We've been disappointed with what Apple and Microsoft are doing, and we want, not necessarily more customization of our OS, just less interference.
1. office.com
2. Google drive/docs/*
3. Hacky office on Linux work around - several found on github
Davinci Resolve seems to run faster on Linux.
I would vote for Bluefin: https://projectbluefin.io/
It's very similar to Bazzite, which you listed, but not gamer focused. You get an easy install, auto updates (without reboots), and a bulletproof, immutable OS that is nearly impossible to break.
If you want bling and tiling, Omarchy is the new hotness: https://omarchy.org/
Having half of the demo screenshot on the front page taken up by Grok is a bad sign. A very bad sign.
Omarchy “by dhh”? Nope, maybe not.
You can have a negative opinion of DHH, but why not provide some context as to why your dislike of him would cause you to think this Linux distro is a bad option? I don’t know anything about the distro.
Not wanting to use the works of / a project lead by someone that holds beliefs that are repulsive to you is a perfectly valid reason.
Out of the loop, why not?
An open source developer (the creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy Linux) made a political comment someone didn't like. Now there is a concerted effort by a small group of terminally online histrionics to ruin his life and get all his projects cancelled. The comment was apparently made on his personal blog and not in any official capacity.
As far as I know, this is the blog post that led to the backlash https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
> made a political comment someone didn't like
It should be noted that this specific framing ("it's just a disagreement," "someone didn't like it," "it's nothing big") is used by the people that, instead, like the "comment." It's an extremely common pattern. So is one of the words he uses later, "histrionics."
The comment in question is an ethnonationalist blog post. Not a comment somewhere, but an actual goddamn essay. But you don't have to take my word on it, you can read it yourself:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
You should also click through his archive for more, because this isn't really new for him, it's just taking it to a new low.
> by a small group of terminally online histrionics
Again, witness the minimization of the actual thing he said and the redirection to the critics. Why? It's the argument pattern they've adopted.
The term that the parent post would be looking for it actually "social shaming." You see, shame used to be an effective tool against bigotry. Not wanting to associate with bigots isn't histrionics. On the contrary, being OK with bigotry is bad, and wrong!
I'm one of the immigrant groups people don't seem to like very much these days, but even I recognize some degree of ethnonationalism or desire to restrict immigration is NOT bigotry. I can empathize how jarring it must be to begin to feel like a minority in your own country - even if they aren't minorities nationally, they may be in local urban pockets. Unfettered immigration IS causing problems in many places, is often supported by businesses looking for cheap labor and it's absolutely reasonable to be opposed to it.
Moreover, the false equivalence you're drawing between opposition to immigration and bigotry is part of what let the problem fester in the first place. I think people should be allowed to oppose immigration without being called racist, its not the same thing. The open bigotry and racism by the right in many countries is partly a reaction to this false equivalence. They saw immigration in some cases as causing social disorder, as a tool to suppress wages, as causing increased crime etc. and they were forcefed a message of "all immigration is good and any opposition is racist" to reasonable objections. No one is obligated to accept every person who wants to come in.
This is false. I do not, in fact, have an opinion one way or the other about his blog post. I don't care at all what the man has to say about politics. But I still disapprove of people trying to drag his politics into the thread, and start flame wars, every time the man comes up.
He expresses his opinions on his own blog. You are being extremely toxic in public.
Go read his recent blog post about England for the English and how cool he thinks Tommy Robinson is
In addition, and there are a few of these floating around but this is my devloater of choice, may I suggest https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat ?
Despite the fact that it mostly runs in powershell, it still has a better UX then the majority of Microsoft apps. (Except for the confusion about their only GUI pop-up window, you put a check mark next to the built-in apps you want removed, which was led me to reread the instructions to make sure I had it right the first time I used it).
It has both built-in sane default for people who just want to debloat Windows 10/11, along with a "custom" option which takes less than 60 seconds to get through but gives you all the customizability you need.
(No connection with the author except mad respect.)
—sent from my Linux desktop, but alas..
May I suggest you give fedora a go? It still feels like the most mature distro out there, but I can be biased
TBH if i decide to change OS again, i'll probably go with Gentoo because AFAIK it provides means to have custom patches for packages and i'd like to do things like, e.g., add some stuff in the file dialog for Gtk3. Though i'm not sure this is something most people would care about, so i didn't mention it (also i only have a vague idea that this is possible, i haven't actually tried it in practice).
I've been using Gentoo as my primary OS since 2007, along with gnome2 (now mate) as the desktop environment with the ancient compiz for fancy effects like wobbling windows and a desktop cube. Updates come pretty quickly. It's so nice having rolling releases, dist upgrades for other distros make me nervous and I've lost time to them -- and occasionally other software that certain distros decided to throw you into a curses terminal UI for configuration (or just mysteriously break and fail to install the package if you were using the desktop GUI). The custom patches thing is really nice and fairly straightforward. When you install a package its tarball gets saved in /var/cache/distfiles/ so you can just extract your package with the right version to a temp dir to work on. If you want to patch the package foo/bar you create a diff file /etc/portage/patches/foo/bar/patch-name (git format-patch can help, you just take the diff --git parts) and it gets auto-applied next time you build the package (or if it can't apply the diff, fails and tells you). I don't use this as often as I could, I only have a few patches at the moment (https://github.com/Jach/patches -- there's been a couple minor updates I should push), but it's pretty convenient to fix minor annoyances, take tiny fixes from upstream until they're fully released, or add custom features/text where you want.
With overlays to get packages outside of the core distro tree, a lot of software is just available, and even when it's not, you usually have the build tools or can easily install them so building whatever else from source isn't an obstacle. (I do sometimes have to use debian/ubuntu/mint (mint is on my travel laptop that I only use when traveling) and it still gets me sometimes having to make sure build-essential and various -dev packages are installed to do anything.) One downside is that your glibc will likely be newer than a lot of other systems out there, so that creates obstacles to shipping binaries around. You can also create your own packages in an overlay fairly easily as well, or keep some old ones around that have lost their maintainers and get removed from the tree.
There's also a somewhat annoying 'license' system (adding license names you accept to a configuration file) but with it the tooling can automatically fetch certain things for downloading (e.g. nvidia driver blobs) that some companies want people to get manually so they can harvest your data/force you to accept some EULA. I'm now remembering that 16 or 17 years ago, the last time I tried Fedora, I was testing it out by plugging in a flash drive (yay it auto mounted) but it failed to play an MP3 file and suggested I pay someone money to install codecs. It's left a sour impression on Fedora ever since, not to mention my lingering question why anyone would want a Red Hat derivative outside of a locked down office (and even then at my old BigCo job we devs got to use Ubuntu).
For casual use I still think Mint is probably the best distro at the moment. I tend to recommend the mate desktop environment since it's what I like and am used to but it's a poor distro if you can't easily install any DE of choice on it.
I used both Fedora and Ubuntu for years and couldn't point to the _better_ distribution.
Maybe one thing I had with Fedora: I had to trail one major distribution behind, because going for the most recent releases always ended up hurting me.
But that's just for work. I don't think I can move my gaming to Linux yet
Interestingly, I had the opposite experience.
With Ubuntu I kept running into bugs which had already been fixed upstream, or which were caused either by Debian's or Ubuntu's patches. And even filing regular bug reports was basically impossible: the Ubuntu packagers will almost certainly ignore it, the Debian packagers aren't interested in bugs happening in mutated versions of outdated packages in their unstable repo, and the upstream maintainers aren't interested in bug reports for weirdly-patched old releases.
After several attempts at getting bugs fixed (sometimes even sending complete patches) and getting no response for years I gave up on Ubuntu and switched to Fedora. Their policy is to ship the freshest upstream releases possible, with as few patches as possible. This means I can just directly file my bug reports at the upstream vendor, and a fix will usually land on my system fairly quickly.
I do notice that I am slowly using more and more Flatpak desktop apps: why bother with the middleman when you can trivially get the latest release directly from the upstream vendor?
I've been using the latest Fedora full-time for over two years without issue, and have been doing nearly all my gaming on it as well. The only gaming that doesn't work are games that deliberately use anti-cheat that doesn't support anything but Windows (typically the games run great in single player or offline, but multiplayer refuses to work). Of my Steam catalog, over 90% just works, and a large amount of that now has native Linux support thanks to the Steam Deck.
What particular issues were you experiencing?
As a counter anecdote, on my Windows installation I routinely run into "WTF" moments, such as BitLocker randomly deciding I need to enter recovery codes, the constant nagware that is OneDrive and friends, plus when I search for the same binary exe I've launched a dozen times Windows still displays "web results" first - fooling me just about every time.
Throwing out 5 different operating systems based on the same thing doesn't seem like a solution, but more of a "here are some other poisons to try".
The only reason I use Windows is for playing some old games (primarily Age of Empires II: DE) that only work well on Windows. In the AoE2 case, I also need CaptureAge that only works on Windows.
The point is that even though I have 95% de-Microsoftized my life for the past 2 decades, I still need to run Windows for a few specific flows, and I run into the same issues as the article author here.
AoE2 runs great on Linux[1]
[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/813780
CaptureAge does not, however.
I don’t use it myself, but this recently updated gist seems to have it working: https://gist.github.com/Kjir/dadb0a2bc1a71aa265cfdbecaf7569b...
I use Linux for almost all my machines, but I have too many games that can only run on windows.
The best solution is Windows IoT LTSC. It has none of this crap and you also don't have to deal with Linux's crap.
This stuff is increasingly normalized across platforms.
I'd say "vote with your wallet", but when all the tech platforms are doing it, there's not much choice. PCs / laptops are probably the last hold out: Just switch to Linux (but be careful which distro you pick) or MacOS (for now).
The political pendulum is going to swing far left in the US given the disasters that are playing out in DC. Hopefully this sort of crap will be banned when that happens.
IMHO Linux Mint keeps being the strongest option to recommend when the intention is a clean transition with the least amount of fiddling. It just works, it is reliable, and it doesn't play games with changes of basic technologies that can only cause confusion (e.g. none of the Ubuntu shenanigans like their confusing desktop or their non-Debian packaging)
I can't agree about the "it just works" part. About a year ago I build a new PC, and I tried installing Mint on it. I ran into two issues that I was never able to resolve:
1. The WiFi just would not work; I couldn't see any networks. 2. I have 2 monitors, and one monitor would display 80% of one screen, and 20% of the other. I suspect that it was because the monitors had different refresh rates and resolutions.
I then tried installing Windows, and everything did just work.
I like Mint. I just wanted something simple that looks like Win7 I can use for work, email, browsing, and it delivers.
Agreed. For people coming from Windows Linux Mint is the one I recommend. Simple, stable, minimal hassle.
I wouldn't recommend Mint. Better use something with recent KDE Plasma and recent kernel and Mesa for best Wayland experience.
Especially speaking of playing games, I periodically see newcomer Linux gamers hitting problems due to Mint being outdated and not having good Wayland support. Especially for any kind of recent hardware.
Any examples of “something with recent kde”? I have Ubuntu currently, wanted to switch to the Mint, now want to hear more opinions
I use mint's cinnamon UI on Ubuntu. It's by far my favorite desktop, but yeah Mint's main packages are too far out of date usually.
Fedora
How do you deal with the short lifespan until EOL? I've been using Rocky (and CentOS before that) simply to avoid dealing with EOL so often.
Fedora makes major upgrades pretty easy - you can even do it via the GUI Software Center, then reboot.
Personally I'm using Kinoite[1], an "immutable" version of Fedora that has an immutable base image, which makes it nearly impossible to break things during updates (even major upgrades).
[1] - https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
I'd say any rolling distro. Try Debian testing or unstable if you prefer Debian distros family (choose KDE during installation). Or try Arch.
KDE also started making its own Arch based distro now: https://kde.org/linux/
But it's one of those immutable flavors. I prefer something more flexible.
For me it's the exact opposite, I had problems with Steam games on Wayland and I switched back to X11.
You probably used Nvidia and some outdated distro with a bad DE on top. Not something you should be using. Using X11 is DOA anyway, so you can figure out what was wrong in your case and use better options.
No, AMD. I had issues on the latest Debian, released this summer, with KDE. X11 works perfectly fine. I would be happy with wayland too, if it worked. And in fact I use it on my other device.
What kind of issues though with what GPU? I'm using Debian testing, it all works fine with AMD and KDE Plasma Wayland session.
With AMD, always make sure to use latest kernel, Mesa and amdgpu firmware.
The Steam main window did not open, although Steam itself did load in the background. I could work around this by disabling smooth scrolling on web view and some other GPU-related option (I forgot exactly).
But then there was a strange glitch on every single game (both native and Proton-based). Periodically (e.g. every ~10 seconds on some 3D games, on every screen reload on some other) the screen turned black for about 2 seconds.
Then I remembered that I had some issue when I first installed Debian 12 two years, though I forgot which issues exactly, and that I solved them by switching from Wayland to X11.
What DE? And that's with all the latest components as above? I wouldn't use Debian stable for gaming purposes, since it falls behind very quickly. Debian testing / unstable is a better idea, and even then you'd want to install latest amdgpu firmware manually potentially.
KDE, not sure what version the kernel and the drivers are, whatever Debian stable has. I think kernel is 6.12.
I'll try updating the firmware and drivers manually if I have more issues in the future, thanks.
Yeah, for sure always have latest kernel, Mesa and firmware if you are having any gaming issues. 6.12 is already old by now.
Linux Mint is terrible. Horribly outdated software, how are they still on X11? Both their DEs are forks which introduces problems...
Like, in regular Gnome/KDE land, you have Wayland which is a huge improvement over X11, HDR works, fractional scaling works... None of that works on Mint.
Not sure why you are downvoted, what you said is true. Mint has some WIP to support Wayland in Cinnamon, but it's way behind other DEs and I wouldn't recommend using it.
Voted down because the "Linux Mint is terrible" statement clearly isn't true.
Wong wording may be, but the point of the post is correct. Mint just lags behind with Wayland support and in being up to date for handling recent hardware especially.
The former is Mint's specific problem, while the latter is a general problem of all long period release distros that don't take care of updating Linux kernel, Mesa and etc. to actual recent releases.
When Mint always comes up as a distro for newbies coming from Windows, then lacks all the features of a modern system, yes, it's terrible.
It's almost like monopolies aren't good for the consumer. We need some real power for enforcing the Sherman act. Too many companies have been able to buy all their competitors
Yeah but that sweet sweet ABI, we just gotta have that stable ABI, bum ba dum.
Remember that ABI when you're pulling out your hair over whatever MS's latest snafu is. The PC isn't about personal computing, no ,no, its about desperation. Its about using the fulcrum of ABI stability to see how much someone can accept wedged down their throat, because yeah, well, don't wanna loose that ABI.
Remember that ABI, 'next time 'Error: Something Happened.'
Unfortunately, anti-trust doctrine in the US has gone from "too little competition in a market is inherently bad" to "any % of market share is OK as long as it doesn't result in consumer prices getting too high too fast." We've really lost the plot of why anti-trust regulation was passed in the first place.
> We've really lost the plot of why anti-trust regulation was passed in the first place.
I don't personally have any knowledge of the answer to this question but, hundreds of people had to vote for it and they rarely all have the same things in mind when they do.
It's better to focus on what legislation does and says rather than what it was meant to do.
MacOS is just as aggressive about turning on icloud as windows is with it's crap.
When Apple forces users to use an online account to access their local Mac, and disables their OS unless they turn on iCloud on their Mac -- then you can claim equivalence between them.
I literally just got my first Mac computer a few months ago. I tried to set it up as a local account with no online account. I could not.
Maybe it is possible and I just missed it. But either they don't allow it, or they have enough dark pattern bullshit to trick me, either way, it's the same as windows to me.
Unless the way VMs install a distro is somehow fundamentally different from a new computer, then it's literally two clicks when installing Sonoma to use a local account when prompted (Setup Later and then click Skip). I just tested this.
I'm pretty sure there was some keyboard shortcut to skip apple id login/creation during initial setup - not sure if that's still possible nowadays but I did used it once on my mbp few years ago
All you have to do is choose Set Up Later when presented with the screen for logging in with an Apple account.
the fact that you have to have an apple account to do all kinds of basic developer tasks (installing Xcode / Xcode command line tools, which are needed for lots of stuff last time I checked (a few years ago?)) is evidence that they suck also. But not nearly as bad as Microsoft who are actively scum from the moment you first turn the computer on.
"I need a free developer account to download Xcode" is certainly more user friendly than "I have to pay a subscription fee or pay up front to use Visual Studio".
Visual Studio is free for individuals though even for commercial purposes.
I can claim equivalence between them whenever I want. If both OSes adopt and enforce my biggest pet peeves, then no amount of eye candy or freebie features will fix my workflow.
Gatekeeping and second opinions don't really move the needle on where I stand with either company.
Showing up in a thread you haven’t even participated in and saying “I’ve already made my choice, quit giving me second opinions” is comically self-centered.
I’m sorry but you’re mistaken. It’s literally a normal skip button when first setting up the machine.
https://youtu.be/rE-hFyANr0Y
And unlike Windows it doesn’t turn itself on randomly or install additional apps like OneDrive, Teams, and Skype etc. with every OS update.
Yep, just setup a new MacBook Air and did not have to link an Apple account during setup.
I’ll concur with Apple being way more aggressive about this as well. icloud and if you try to use music on you iPhone with your collection of music Apple Music is always being pitched. Though the windows default start menu is something to behold these days (or widget panel..). I deleted Apple Maps from my phone because I never used it, but nothing would free up the 10 gigs of data it was storing…. Sigh.
Linux is good enough to be a daily driver for most things these days.
New phone came with no standalone music player only YouTube Music. But fair play to them you can click "local files only" at first launch and it keeps out of your way.
My Android tablet keeps bugging me about updates and what not. Wish I could install my preferred flavor of Linux on it, but it seems infeasible at this moment.
Agreed about switching to Linux. I don't agree on macOS though. Apple is nasty in its own way and has a ton of anti-user patterns no one should be dealing with. If you want to decide for yourself and not things being decided for you because "we know better than you what you really need", just use Linux.
Apple had a go at doing this with iCloud, but clearly there was enough consumer pushback (a friend lost all their files after cancelling iCloud, thinking it was a backup service, not realising it deleted the original copies on their machine) that they stopped the enshittification there.
> or MacOS (for now)
Reminder that Apple's revenue from ads is in the billions and climbing at an accelerating pace. The enshittification comes for all. They don't need to be good, they just need to be better than Microsoft.
macOS is absolutely awful about iCloud nag. If you try and use a Mac without an iCloud account, you'll get neverending popups and notifications begging you to go online. It's nearly as bad as Windows.
Neither GNOME nor KDE get anywhere near as bad. It's really only these commercial "holier than thou" operating systems that think they know best.
I haven't experienced this but I see you're the second comment pointing that out. I've been using macbooks for work for a long time and never once used iCloud nor do I remember seeing a confusing prompt. But I also rarely upgrade my machine.
With Windows, a regular seemingly normal update appeared almost as if I was upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and it prompted me to do the backup to OneDrive. I accepted it because I was worried the update to Windows 11 would get screwed up. After the update completed it was just a normal update after all and there was no need for me to accept that onedrive backup!
iCloud nags appear in the Settings app and Notifications menu. When you are signed out, Apple will assault you with notifications (that you must disabled with a script) until you log in: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250786208?sortBy=rank
I've got my fair share of horror-stories with both OSes, I switched between dailying Mojave and Windows 10 for a big portion of my life. Nothing will ever top updating to Catalina, booting up Ableton Live and seeing all my paid plugins go from "working fine" to "completely unsupported" in the span of an update.
During pandemic I started playing with smart home stuff and since I'm already within apple playgrounds I've got homepod mini since they stripped ipads from hub feature. After configuring the speaker I had apple music ad for about 3 months at the top of settings where ios software update notifications appears.
Its everywhere. You get nagged constantly for Apple music on your iphone too. My dystopian prediction is that in the near future, corporations will just garnish your wages so they don't have to do this.
I get absurdly annoyed at “Maybe later” buttons. No, go away, never come back, I’m genuinely not interested.
In my opinion, “Maybe Later” buttons are actually useful if implemented for the user's benefit. For example, maybe I do want to hear about OneDrive but I don't have time now. It's a reasonable middle ground between Yes and No.
But the problem is that modern tech companies are using it as a dark pattern to completely eliminate the No option. Sadly, I think this just might need to be regulated out. I don't see any reason why there shouldn' be a regulation that a “Maybe Later” button can't appear in a prompt as the only alternative to Yes, there needs to be a No/Never option as well.
Exactly. I wouldn't mind having three options: "Yes", "Maybe Later", and "No". It's the missing third option that sucks.
Like in Android: Do you want to back up your photos to the cloud? "Yes" or "Maybe later" which means being asked every week. Also, the checkbox is selected by default, and if you close the dialog by accidentally clicking outside of it (maybe because you were already going to click on something else, and the dialog opened in the last millisecond) that by Google standards counts as consent.
Of course, turning on the backup of photos in clouds only requires a single click (or misclick), but turning it off requires following a long tutorial very carefully...
The classic implementation for this is Yes and No buttons and then a checkbox to remember the selection.
Besides serving as a dark pattern, it also relieves devs from having ti store and check a user preference. You know, mutable state is bad, including user preferences. ;)
Instead of Windows Backup (which relies on M$ OneDrive), you can enable (in Control panel settings) and use Windows File History.
File History is a backup feature in Windows that automatically saves copies of your files from specific folders, like Documents and Pictures, to an external drive or network location. It allows you to restore previous versions of your files if they are lost or damaged.
To enable File History in Windows, connect an external drive or network location, then go to Settings > Update & Security > Backup, and select "Add a drive" to choose your backup location. Finally, turn on File History to start backing up your files automatically.
Ironically File History silently ignores all the contents of any onedrive folders when backing up.
I've used this for a few months and it ended up taking too much space and was quite fragile in my experience.
Even with this and OneDrive enabled, I managed to lose years of family photos when trying to free up space thinking "oh I've got this backed up" and then thinking the same when freeing up space when deleting my backup. I wish Windows could be less confusing...
Windows File History doesn’t eliminate the need for an actual backup of important files, but it’s a convenient feature to be able to quickly inspect or restore random files you changed or deleted recently-ish (roughly a year for me). It’s best to point it to a separate drive/partition and configure it to fill that one up and have it delete the oldest files whenever it needs more free space.
That's cool, I didn't know about this, I'll see if it might be simpler than something I hooked up with a bash script.
wbadmin is the GOAT. Multi version snapshots of the drives, which you can easily mount as they are vhdx
Sadly some of the potential is gimped (point in time restore of individual files) but in a pinch you can grab an eval copy of Server and run it in Hyper-V, attach the backup drive to that, and do it that way
I think you're missing the point. There are plenty of better backup solutions for windows, and the vast majority of them are not Microsoft products.
I am pointing out that existing Windows feature (File History) exists as alternative to Windows Backup (which requires Microsoft OneDrive, which is free only upto 5GB of cloud storage).
You are the one missing the point by suggesting off-the-shelf backup solutions.
For corporate users, getting off-the-self solution as alternatives (even if it's open-source) software may not be easy (corporates typically have strict controls on what software they allow for users, and usually they contractually need to reveal to customers if they are using open-source software), but they can use File History for free, by setting it to back it up to a network path/drive if their IT admins permit.
Where I work we start using OneDrive for backup, even on macOS. It hijacks your Documents folders, as well as a few others. I suspect most people don't even realize they're using OneDrive.
I've had to tell dozens of people to move their git repos to folders that aren't managed by OneDrive. I've seen where someone will change branches and OneDrive will start pulling files back down from the old branch. It's quite the mess.
Since no one mentioned how to actually dismiss the notification forever:
OneDrive is treated as a normal app that is installed by default, you can actually just uninstall it through Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel.
During a major update it will be reinstalled.
Along with Teams if you have Microsoft 365 for Business.
Bejeweled and friends tend to show back up again on consumer machines too, I've noticed.
Absolute headache...
Nuts. Is this still true? I just setup a Win11 Pro machine for a very non-technical person. Uninstalled OneDrive, hoping to minimize future pain when 90% of the needs are just a web browser and storing camera pictures.
(No, Linux was not an option)
I have absolutely seen them reinstall components like that, force their AV back on, force Windows Update back on, etc. It's probably actually good imo for the users I've seen, but admittedly "computer says no" is infuriating if you're sure of what you want.
Try using Group Policy to disable it. I think Applocker is on Win 11 Pro now - if it is, you can block the execution of whatever programs and DLLs you want. I've used that to block Windows Update.
Not just in Win11, AppLocker can be used in Win10 too.
AppLocker is included with all editions of Windows except Windows 10 version 1809 or earlier.
Applocker can help prevent users from running unwanted software (including DLLs and scripts).
However, AppLocker requires Local Security Policy, which isn't available in Home edition of Windows, but it can be installed easily for free.
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/local-security-policy-missing...
Here's how to use AppLocker to block an unwanted app:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/124008-use-applocker-all...
Well, I will at least throw in the Group Policy tweak when I have the chance. Thanks for the tip.
There is almost certainly a registry key you can set as well. 5 ways to do something, none documented officially.
Yeah for myself Pro licensing and domain is the way to go so I can configure Windows similar to my work network at home. But for people who have Home licenses I just set the registry keys. Windows Home doesn't have a UI to set policy, but it does obey it if the keys are there.
(This is a must-have to turn off web browser antifeatures as well, you can't block extension install from the browser settings for any browser but you can by policy.)
OneDrive has yet to reappear on my Windows machines, but I mostly only use 10 still, 11 could be that shitty
> Nuts. Is this still true?
Yes. Microsoft wants to protect you. /s
That's about as close to forever as you can get with Microsoft.
I've started using Tiny11 on all my setups, then running DeBloat afterwards. This removes every piece of crapware* and none of them seem to try to reinstall on update (so far, fingers crossed).
https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2024/01/08/the-complete-tiny1...
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
* be warned, this also removes Edge, so you have to grab your own browser installer of choice
I use Brave browser (a Chromium fork) on my old Win10 PC, and it is fast and stable even with tons of tabs/site open. One can disable its unnecessary features (VPN, Brave Rewards, etc).
Please note that Brave browser in mobile these days gives problems for some websites like Reddit.com, etc. Same sites open fine with Edge (another Chromium fork) and Firefox (Gecko engine).
I hate Chrome & Edge and their nasty of creating multiple instances and auto-starting and running in background even when I am not using the browser.
If I recall right, Chrome uses to have an nasty memory leakage issue so it will keep chugging for more memory even if not in active use.
Firefox uses to be sluggish, but it is better these days, and its extensions/plugins support (especially on Android!) is necessary to block ads & trackers (via uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger extension) is highly useful and necessary.
I prefer Brave for PC and Firefox for Android.
Or turn off all OneDrive notifications as a less intrusive method. It has worked for me well enough so far.
Back when I was using Windows, I had enabled this feature too (before I knew much about privacy) and when I finally decided to get rid of it, I remember consistently failing to disable OneDrive. I would log out, uninstall the app and then try to move my Desktop folder out of "OneDrive" in my home directory and next boot I'd have 2 folders again (with the "OneDrive" one being used, of course). I ended up reinstalling for another reason, but that finally fixed the problem.
I deleted everything from my OneDrive today and got especially mad that the Android app shows a download icon in folder details yet it's disabled. There's absolutely no way to get your files through there. Had to log in on the web just to get a ZIP of everything (it's surprising that's still possible). As soon as I move off Outlook I'm out of this ecosystem.
You can disable OneDrive using App locker.
Applocker can help prevent users from running unwanted software (including DLLs and scripts).
AppLocker is included with all editions of Windows except Windows 10 version 1809 or earlier.
However, AppLocker requires Local Security Policy, which isn't available in Home edition of Windows, but it can be installed easily for free.
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/local-security-policy-missing...
Here's how to use AppLocker to block an unwanted app:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/124008-use-applocker-all...
I think OneDrive has an "oops I accidentally rm-rf /" window for deletions. Anyway OneDrive used to drive me nuts until somehow it all just clicked in some sort of "aha!" zen mode so I haven't had much trouble with in a long time. The biggest issue is often large changes will time out without error and you have to kick it in the pants a few times.
Sorry if it wasn't clear in the original post, I meant I consciously deleted everything after getting sick and tired of the terrible UX.
It's not like I was storing anything meaningful there anyway, I hadn't logged in for a year and I don't regret doing so. I also got an email for deleting many files, which I happily ignored.
No I think you were clear, I was more responding that what you are describing sounds like when OneDrive gets stuck with a sync task that hasn't completed and doesn't know how to force to happen.
Last time I tried to restore a file from a customer's onedrive it just failed with a variety of 500 errors or just blank pages. The reason I was trying to restore it was because windows had moved all of their files into onedrive without their informed consent and (at least) this one was no longer accessible.
onedrive is not a backup: like all automatic sync systems it is a liability. It may be useful but it is still a liability.
And more importantly: it's not yours.
It's the same with Apple OS updates. I hardly ever want to update my Apple devices. The odds that such an update will actually improve my UX are indistinguishable from zero nowadays, and the odds that it will break something that I rely on are very nearly 1. (And yes, I get that I'm not getting security updates. That's a risk that I'm wiling to take in order to have an otherwise stable system.) And yet, I cannot get my Apple devices to stop nagging me.
Surprisingly, something I still haven't seen anywhere is having a "choice" with three buttons like:
- "Yes" -> Consent.
- "No" -> Popup asks you again some time later.
- "Don't ask again" -> Meaning "Yes, and don't ask again".
I really want to see a tweak to the California and EU privacy rules that requires opting in to data collection / sharing to be at least as hard as opting out.
For the first 5 years, the processes would be swapped, and set in stone. So, you'd need to call a number, sit on hold and be disconnected a few times to get a mailing address. Then you'd buy some stamps and an envelope if you want to submit a "Please sell my personal information" form. Grocery stores would charge you more if you used a loyalty card, and so on.
Of course, a better approach would make the collection, sale, querying, possession of, and engaging in transactions involving consumer marketing databases illegal. (All those protections are needed since Google redefined "sell personal information" to not include any of their revenue streams.)
Don’t give them ideas!!
I hate the "Not now..." b.s.
They need a "F*ck off forever" option.
And Windows itself still costs money somehow, despite clearly acting as a free product.
Windows 10 was indeed offered free worldwide to users already using older licenced versions of Windows.
Microsoft even touted Windows 10 as last version of Windows.
But it was typical bait-and-switch gambit by Micro$oft, and support for Windows 10 is ending in Oct 2025 (rejecting the pleas from thousands of companies worldwide to extend its Win10 support for longer while), because M$ thinks everyone will migrate to Windows 11 (not free).
However, many Win10 users will remain on Win10 for years (just as they had stuck around with Win7/Win8 for years), and many will migrate to Linux or MacOS instead.
Microsoft will out find the hard way that people can be as stubborn as it can be.
W10 is actually still the majority of windows versions. You can get 1 year extended support by switching to an online admin login & syncing to ONeDrive or buying it (with $ or MS points - whatever that is) and businesses can by 3 x1 year of escalating priced support. Support for win10 ends on Tuesday (oct 14)!
I know all this because my desktop that can easily run triple-A video games isn't good enough (secure boot) to be upgraded, so I'm supposed to buy a MS surface and use it as a boat anchor I guess...
Then you'll be glad to know that you can bypass the TPM2.0 (Secure Boot) check that Win11 installation requires.
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-re...
https://gist.github.com/asheroto/5087d2a38b311b0c92be2a4f23f...
So you can upgrade to Win11 even on an older PC. No need to pay through the nose for extended Win10 Support.
But in my personal experience, Win10 runs better on older PCs than Win11. I also prefer the Win1o0 start menu, to the Win11 one.
Yeah you can run Windows 11 on most Windows 10 machines, but in exchange for "better security" you get a bloated interface that just bogs down your perfectly fine computer. Windows as a platform has so many security holes that I think the chances of getting pwned by a very specific Windows 10-only exploit are realistically zero.
> because M$ thinks everyone will migrate to Windows 11 (not free).
Pretty sure upgrade to Windows 11 is free for Windows 10 licenses, too. If you need a new computer, sure, most people have a license tied to their computer, and they'll need a new license for that.
Microsoft will learn nothing they didn’t know before. They’ve operated like this before, and their bottom line will not suffer.
Reminds me of the iOS Gmail app. You click a link and a sheet appears to select a browser: Safari, Download Chrome, or System Default.
There’s a checkbox, but instead of “Remember my choice” it is “Ask every time.” Diabolical.
> Do you think Microsoft understands consent?
> ( ) Yes
> (•) Remind me in 3 days
That's already an improvement over having the first option selected by default.
Probably not voluntary - it's because preselecting the yes option is violating european laws.
I recently was forced to get Windows 11 because my new build's motherboard only supported UEFI and there was some incompatibility with my 10 year old Windows 10 boot disk. Windows 11 is an abomination; I paid $200 for a Pro license and I still get ads. My kids will be learning computing on Linux.
No ads still on Win10, thankfully.
That Win11 is not an OS, it is an advertisement billboard.
It's pretty horrible. When I use Windows, my foremost reaction is "how can they expect me to put up with this?" before walking away in disgust. I get offended, and I'm a sysadmin professionally.
Then I remember, in a moment of Eldritch revelation, my mom daily-drives this OS. My siblings and cousins probably use it at work. Billions of people around the world chafe through these lockscreen ads, "live tile" updates, OneDrive nags, Windows + G Xbox Game Bar (whatever the fuck that is), Cortana... it's baffling. The same thing runs through my head looking at recent macOS screenshots. Are geriatrics really expected to put up with all this theatrical nonsense? Is this subscription service racket really more attractive than trying to compete as a normal desktop?
Been using Linux for six years now. I cannot remember a single time I've truly missed Windows or macOS.
"Are geriatrics really expected to put up with all this theatrical nonsense"
reminds of circa 2000 watching all the new Internet users struggling with the multiple/cascade pop-ups on websites. That's what's so odious about the situation now: The OS bears the same relationship to the user as those spammy websites.
speaking of "geriatrics" I wonder if the youth are actually responsible for a lot of this, unintentionally. this constant line between corporations and my device reminds me mainly of the smartphone experience. And, I'm told, modern videogames. Older folks like me tend to thnk of their desktop OS as inviolate--too many decades when a program phoning home on its own without my permission meant virus or other grave problem. Maybe people who grow up with smartphones don't have this boundary. Msft would know this.
This is the worst part of modern computing: Companies trying to get you to do things (or trick you into doing them, or worst: forcing you to do them as a condition of using the product). What ever happened to the user being in charge and deciding what to do with his computer? These dark patterns are getting so tiring. Companies need to butt out and offer features, not coerce people into using them.
At this point, the OS is mostly on autopilot for home users, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing - Google defaults to saving everything in a cloud, and the experience of Google Drive is pretty similar.
The corporate user and the power user are expected to use group policy to control their OneDrive, and they do. You can also sort-of force turn it and other components off with their App Locker system.
The home user probably should just allow it? If you want to plant a flag in the ground and say, no, the computer is mine and it shall obey, I can't argue on that ground except to say indifference among consumers outnumbers you. We accept less than total control in phones, cars, refrigerators...
I do a fair bit of pro bono help with small businesses and older people and the expectation that your computer should just save your stuff is pretty strong. Perhaps it was trained it by non-free software, but I think MS product managers are correct in betting people want Windows to be batteries included when it comes to saving peoples stuff.
Again, the power user has control, you just have to exercise it.
The OTA car updates, the OS's doing stuff we don't want, the ads on phones and websites, buying something on a new website knowing you're immediately put on an email list that you'll immediately unsubscribe from...
It's tough being a user.
Imagine being a non-tech savvy one who just has to wade through all that and doesn't know how to block it.
I wonder if most complaints are about pre-installed OEM Windows Home (the one with Candy Crush and 10s of other crap, including from a vendor) and bundled crappy cut-off OneDrive? I have Windows Pro and Office 365 Family option (5 accounts, full Office and 1TB OneDrive each). Most user-hidden Windows settings are in Group Policy Editor, or registry still works. OneDrive proper has toggles for every folder (Desktop, Documents, Puctures) discussed in the post.
After I lost 8 months of photos with a phone ~10 years ago, being sure it was all backed to Google Photos, I would rather trust Microsoft, than risk losing data, and now backup to both clouds. The paid Office+OneDrive is great value.
It just works. Yes, defaults are annoying, but could be changed. I recently enabled a blocked-by-default outgoing firewall, and I have much more questions to JetBrains Rider trying to ignore my system DNS setting and so to bypass Pi-Hole multiple times per minute, than to Microsoft.
That is probably the case, but Windows has always been schizophrenic when it comes to settings - there's the UI, the control panel, the second new control panel, the cli, group policy, the registry...
Frame it as "it's 2025 and this is my first look at Windows", it's pretty bad, and it sucks because if they installed on a Home SKU, we end up having to tell them to reinstall to get control.
Maybe we have Stockholm syndrome.
Microsoft is notoriously bad with naming. In this case likely intentionally. The SKUs: Home = Crap, Pro = OKish Windows, Enterprise = Pro. But people who do not care about lack of RDP server, Hyper-V, BitLocker do not care about the rest, probably. Then confusion araises from "first look at Windows" by pro users.
These are the reasons people are leaving Windows. Give it 2 more iterations of Steam OS and "Home" will see a no longer negliable decline.
These dark patterns are the zeitgeist really, for many years now. And they work very well, because of the combinations of vendor lock-in, product bundling, and companies getting better and better at PR.
Usually there is an easy workaround. For example with One Drive shenanigans, you just need to save the files outside of Documents, Pictures etc, and that's it. I got fed up many years ago and moved to Linux, because I like my fights with Linux better. With Microsoft (and most other corporations), it's their way, or the highway. And it always have been.
I'm fine with Tux, thank you.
I asked ChatGPT to write a Windows GUI C program that looks for a running instance of the onedrive EXE at regular intervals and terminates it while keeping a running log of the attempts in a scrolling window. It took a few iterations to get what I wanted and it was simple to compile with GCC.
You can use a Powershell to see if onedrive.exe is running and kill it with the -force option to do something similar ( ps * onedrive * | kill -force ) with no spaces between the asterisks and the word onedrive, but that turned out to be a little heavier to have running continuously than I wanted.
If you use a process like this, you absolutely need to run it at intervals because the onedrive exe seems to execute at regular intervals.
Hopefully everyone uses an Enterprise SKU of Windows so you can just control it with Group Policy.
On Enterprise, you can use its built-in App Locker features to block the execution of any Windows component. I've used it to block Windows Update completely at home after it filled my drive to the last byte and I was sick of my gaming box disobeying.
Why not just uninstall it via powershell scripts like those available from privacy.sexy?
I gutted OneDrive so hard it will likely never come back.
it'll come back in the next windows update
This will wreck havoc on your battery life, consider instead replacing onedrive.exe with a dummy executable and then using NTFS ACLs to deny "TrustedInstaller" permission to modify it
It baffles me how many people on HN cannot operate with a simple deny-all firewall. The windows version and updates I install are the only updates installed. The files I back up are the only files that back up. Nothing can connect to the internet. Not Windows Update, Not google chrome update, Not onedrive, Nor any virus or malware program.
Reliance on the internet is the problem. No windows version including windows 11 REQUIRES the internet to operate. Install your OS from disk. Activate by phone(or don't bother...). Install seasoned updates from catalog. If the program wont specify the ports and servers it uses, DON'T USE IT AND DONT WRITE CODE FOR IT.
I do not believe it is reasonable to use an OS where you need to do hostage negotiation on a daily basis. If you need to go this far, what will you do when an MS update adds a bypass for the firewall you’re using?
> I do not believe it is reasonable to use an OS where you need to do hostage negotiation on a daily basis.
So much this. It's not that technically minded people can't figure out how to florb the nerfwedge. It's that it shouldn't be needed to begin with, and you have to know about it to begin with (which usually happens by getting burned by not doing it, either with one's own machine, or a friend's or family member's machine).
Eh, lots of us use Little Snitch or the equivalent. But I confess that seems like victim blaming to me. Users shouldn’t be expected to watch their freaking OS vendor like a hawk. That’s the one vendor you kind of have to trust: if they’re lying to you about what they’re doing, all bets are off.
This to me sounds like “I check my tire pressure every 8 miles because I don’t want them to explode catastrophically like they do for other people. Everyone should be doing this!” No. No, everyone should not have to do this.
> seems like victim blaming to me
I admit to being in the category OP speaks of; i.e. would love control over what programs can access over the internet, but haven't the slightest clue how to set it up and manage it day to day.
> It baffles me how many people on HN cannot operate with a simple deny-all firewall
What is the barrier IYO, is it that awareness (or technical knowledge) just isn't there, or that installing isn't the issue but doing day to day work with a restrictive firewall becomes an inconvenience?
Maybe just don't use Windows and dont write code for it... and especially don't give them $200 for the Pro version, because that is nothing but a signal that you're willing to keep letting him fuck you while you write them a check.
At least be thankful you can say "no" more than three times.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551504
OneDrive has a pretty annoying interaction with Microsoft Office-PDF exports (not print to PDF).
If you export a PDF to a OneDrive folder, Office (especially Word) will instead create this file onto OneDrive itself (not local).
Its a 50/50 chance that your local OneDrive will sync it properly especially if you're in a fast workflow (e.g., preparing for a meeting soon with minor amendments) or you wait for several minutes for it to sync or you logon to OneDrive web to get manually download the file.
You pretty much have to export to a non-OneDrive synced folder for PDF export to work on local reliably.
OP doesn’t say why they are against free cloud backup, and it doesn’t matter, but (like everything else in Windows) there’s a registry setting you could change to disable the notification. I think it is
` HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Notifications\ Settings\Microsoft.SkyDrive.Desktop\Enabled = 0 (DWORD) `
https://www.urtech.ca/2018/03/solved-gpos-to-disable-notific...
Oh so Linux is hard because you have to sometimes use the command line. Then people suggest registry hacks to make Windows work properly. Then Microsoft will just flip your registry setting back anyways. Stockholm syndrome is crazy.
Author here. I'm not against against free cloud back up. I was a Ubuntu One user before it shutdown. The problem isn't even that you can disable it via the registry.
The problem is that looking at the presented options, you can basically choose "Yes" or "OK".
Yeah, Windows users are used to the setting schizophrenia (5-6 places to control things), but if we met Windows today in 2025 it would be ridiculous.
Fine, there's a registry option. Do you think 99% of users even know what a registry is?
And folks say Linux setup is hard.
Yeah, at least if something breaks, I can be proud that I broke it and not some company flipping switches behind the scenes...
Hmm, I wonder if this setting can be 'read only' for the admin, or if MS tries to update it with the SYSTEM user.
I get frequent requests from like 4 vendors to get ""free"" cloud backup.
I just want to rant a bit about Microsoft right now.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft decided to auto-update my mom's computer to Windows 11, and delightfully the computer no longer booted. Even after a litany of different boot keystrokes and automatic repairs and attempted recoveries, it would not boot. I think it has something to do with the utter incompetence of the Windows automatic update process not correctly updating keys to satisfy UEFI but I am not sure.
Of course my parents being my parents, there were tons of precious documents that were not backed up anywhere else, so we needed to get them off before doing anything nuclear. After awhile, I was able to talk my dad through flashing an Ubuntu image and I was able to get a live USB going (because as far as I am aware there isn't a legitimate way to do a live USB with Windows), and from there he read me a tmate URL and I was able to mount the drive and rsync all the data to my server.
With many, many failed attempts at trying to convince them to install Linux Mint, I eventually walked them through flashing a USB drive with Windows 11, and we were able to nuke the drive and install Windows 11, which seems to be working, so I guess all's well that ends well, but not really. Key point here, before anyone says anything, the laptop is a bit old but it seems to be able to run Windows 11 just fine, it's just the automatic update that broke it.
You might be saying "live and let live, if they're happy with Windows then stop trying to force them to use Linux", and to that I would say "it's not just about them". When something breaks on their computer, it's expected that I am the one who fixes it. Microsoft, a for-profit trillion-dollar corporation, is so utterly bad at their main job that they actively broke my mother's computer with an automatic update that she couldn't easily opt out of for an operating system she didn't want, and if she didn't have a son who was a software engineer she would have been forced to buy a new computer. For all I know, another Windows 11 auto update will come in two weeks and break the computer, and I will be stuck going through this nonsense yet again, because I love my parents and I want to help them out.
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, especially if you work on the automatic update or the Windows 11 team, I'm afraid that I have to say that I actively dislike you. You've cost me many days of effort because ultimately I think you are extremely bad at your jobs and you should consider doing literally anything else.
On a tangent, one thing I wonder about for the future is all the people doing bypasses on the CPU requirements will at some point in the future be left high and dry. There's already been one win11 update where they started to need the popcnt extension that started showing up in CPUs after roughly 2008, raising the hard requirement from anything that's x64 although still below the official reqs. The scenario I wonder about is how many well meaning upgrades have been done to keep people on a supported version of windows, but MS can either update so the hard requirement matches official and leaves a lot unbootable, or detect it's actually unsupported and at that point refuse to update (I guess at that point you need another campaign such as "end of win11 25h2" to raise awareness of service pack levels subdividing the major OS version) while MS can point to "well, we never supported them anyway" as though that fixes the problem.
I'm struggling to think of a way out that doesn't involve forcefully educating users or MS needing to maintain a low requirements/long term support branch of windows forever
In my case, I was able to install a vanilla Windows 11 ISO with a flash drive, downloaded directly from Microsoft, so it's not like I was bypassing any CPU checks. All I had to do was muck about a bit in the BIOS/EFI to tell it to boot from the flash drive.
Part of the reason I like Linux, despite its occasional headaches, is how willing they are to keep supporting old computers. There are lots of distros that are lightweight while still being modern. Oh, and it won't automatically install an update and brick the computer, and even if I did I could use a modern filesystem that supports proper snapshots instead and recover, instead of something from 1993 that doesn't have any modern features.
I didn't hate Windows this much until a few weeks ago. I'm very annoyed.
Been there - I help a lot of older folks with their business computers.
The desire to make Windows an appliance falls flat when older PCs get on that auto-update treadmill.
For example, Windows now comes OEM with Bitlocker drive encryption enabled. Good in theory - when you toss/donate/sell your old PC, normies don't think about their personal lives and banking details being available, so that's good. However, they almost never get backups working right, and this cripples anyone from rescuing them from a drive failure in a critical PC that has their entire business books on it. This is not uncommon.
I think it's the unfortunate result of different PMs for different features strong-arming things on, but at different paces and maturity levels, and the result is Windows isn't safe to trust for the non-technical user.
My checklist these days when I end up assuming responsibility for someone: Drive encryption off, Passwords into a manager, Backups set, Updates disabled, Remote access installed.
The fact that it's 2025 and there's no legitimate way to run a live USB with Windows baffles me.
In the case of my mom's computer rescue, as far as I can tell, literally the only legal way to recover my mom's Windows NTFS drive contents was to use Linux. I had to use Linux to fix Microsoft's incompetence.
I am quite confident that my mom would mostly be fine with Linux Mint on this computer; 99% of what she does on the computer is use Chrome, which works fine on Linux. Hell, Edge works fine on Linux now if you want to stay in the Microsoft ecosystem. The only blocker now is that I am positive that she will not use a computer unless it can run Microsoft Office directly on the computer, and I have not been successful getting Office 2016 or Office 365 running on Linux with Wine or Proton in my attempts.
Maybe for Christmas I will buy my mom a Macbook or something. Then she'll be forced to move to something better.
Yeah, Proton and Wine seem perfect for gaming, but I have never seen someone get Office right. That might be an audience difference or perhaps MS deliberately frustrates that attempt.
You could try 11 IOT LTSC[1] which is super-stripped down like an appliance. Set a few GPOs, get her files synced, set remote access. You could even do something like DeepFreeze if she's prone to clicking on the wrong thing. Restricting her to running Chrome and Office with Applocker is a possibility for her safety - I have literally interrupted scammers "from Microsoft" on the phone with the elderly and naive.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...
I'm not sure my mom even does anything that the browser Office won't do; she uses Excel heavily but she's not using any advanced formulas or VBA or anything, and her use of Microsoft Word is generally using pretty basic formatting. Honestly I don't think that she does anything that can't easily be handled by Google Drive or OnlyOffice. That doesn't matter though; the web browser is a complete non-starter, and if it doesn't have the Microsoft Office branding she doesn't want to go for it.
This didn't used to bother me much, until Microsoft decided it would be best to brick her computer because the people who run Windows Update don't know what they're doing. The one job of Windows Update is to not break shit, and they've proven incapable of that. Whomever works on it should be embarrassed for working on one of the most consistently hated pieces of technology know to humanity.
I thought about using one of those appliance releases of Windows, but I also don't really want to LARP as a Windows Sysadmin, especially since I don't even have a Windows computer in my house. If I were to somehow convince her to use Linux, there would be "security via ignorance"; she doesn't know anything about how to use Linux so she wouldn't do much outside of the easy, relatively safe path, and if she did break it then it would be much easier for me to log in and fix it with tmate or Tailscale + SSH.
If she insists on Office and won't try Google Drive, perhaps you could experiment with setting up Office in a Chrome PWA for her and sidestep Windows?
Try out WinBoat. It seems to work really well for Office. Runs it in a Windows docker container so no Proton or libvirt stuff to fiddle with.
Interesting. I haven't heard about that one, I'll give a try today.
ETA
I installed it, and it works remarkably well. I'll try pitching it to my parents.
After the upgrade (which I even don't remember allowing), I had double UEFI entries. Cost me nearly a day to be able to boot windows (and it works only from the Linux boot menu)
If you confine Windows to a VM without Internet access it won't be able to exfiltrate your data or install unexpected new features. I find this to be a much better user experience.
It was really fun when the rearranged the directory structure to place all files under onedrive. I created a new directory outside, copy pasted everything, then deleted onedrive contents. Windows is all sorts of hell.
I just turn off notifications for OneDrive which ... works quite well so far. At least system notifications work as expected, and Microsoft has not (yet) allowed OneDrive to ignore system settings for now.
Why did we universally decide that this stuff is okay to do for businesses? Is it just because it's legal? Imagine if agreeing to things anywhere else in the real world worked the same way it does with Microsoft.
Hi there, would you like me to come in and talk about my religion and what types of nonbelievers deserve to be tortured for eternity? No? Okay, sounds good. I'll just plaster these signs and posters all over your property, so if you change your mind, you'll immediately know where to go. You'll only see them once a day, every time you exit your house! Also, for your own convenience, we'll be watching your front door, and every time you reenter your house we'll be nullifying your past response, so you'll just have to tell no to our faces again.
Hey, I really wanna do this thing with you, do you consent to it? You don't? You say you don't want to see me ever again? Okay, okay, chill out. But in case if you change your mind, I'll be asking you again every day of your life. It's for your own sake. Also, one day, I might see the smile on your face and just "assume" you'd definitely agree. But don't worry, that's just a minor, accidental, technical mishap! I'm committed to helping you and enriching your life. I care about you, don't you see.
Windows enshittification has come a long way unfortunately. You still have some options to remove crap. I have had very good luck with o&o ShutUp10++
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Also, if you want to stay on 10, 0patch is a good option.
Changing the win11 UI to something more usable with StartAllBack is also recommended. $5 one-time fee.
keep paying again, to have a usable device is not a solution, its more like the MS endgame
Everytime I see "maybe later" without the "no, never" option I want to slap the person who did this in the face.
My work decided OneDrive is how we'd do files. One of the worst parts is that it makes the recently changed files section of Explorer basically worthless.
Do they train their models on what’s uploaded to onedrive?
More files to train the AI on ;)
Seriously though: kick the habit, just move off Windows, the longer you stay in the harder it is to get out.
I turn off every 'to cloud' option I can find on any device I have. Apple's iCloud is just as evil. I have turned that off so many times over the years it makes me angry. It is clear that these companies push 'cloud' in general as a dark pattern to lock you in and harvest your data and actions. Even if they don't train directly, the metadata of usage is all there and I find it hard to believe they don't harvest every bit they can. We need laws and protections that require cloud independence similar to the browser wars. If you have a 'cloud' offering baked into your OS then it must be a competitive market offering. You should also be able to easily migrate to different cloud offerings.
Win 10 IoT guys. Or Win 11 IoT. Not more problems.
Yeah, I'm bracing myself for this. I'll get myself £4 licence for this and hope for the best.
It's not a legit licensed copy for you. Sorry. You might as well just pirate it.
Depends, there were court orders that claimed it were.
Don't want OneDrive. Don't want co-pilot. And I say that as someone who enjoys vibe coding because while the former two are push, the latter is pull. Pull is the remedy to enshittification. But good luck explaining that to someone whose job depends on that not being the case.
Does big tech understand consent?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Maybe later
Does big tech _undermine_ consent?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Maybe later
What makes this even worse is that MSFT doesn't just do it with their "free", subsidized or bundled versions. They also do it to users who are using the full paid versions of the OS and Office. I paid an extra hundred dollars to get Windows Pro pre-installed on my laptop and a key reason I did so was to avoid this crap. But they still have all the same upsells and dark patterns.
All Windows Pro gives me is the very complex enterprise policy manager with its thousands of options but all the upsell nags, user privacy and other "good for MSFT monetization" options are still defaulted on in Windows Pro. And these options are buried deep in separate tree nodes. It's the same dark pattern Facebook uses around privacy settings. Whenever they have to provide privacy options that allow opting out they adopt "malicious compliance" and over do it in as granular and complex a way as possible - with no "opt out of everything" macro option.
Now I know that I can change all the policy manager options in the registry editor too, and frankly, it's not really much more complex. A couple years ago I realized I make so many changes fixing a new Windows install to be livable and useful that I'd never remember them all. So every time I make a registry change to fix something, I store a registry script that'll make the edit automatically in dedicated folder on my server (it's easy to export a single registry key as a script). As of today there are over a hundred scripts there. I'm getting to the point where I'm probably going to switch to Linux soon. Which sucks because I used to really like Windows (with a few notable exceptions which can be addressed with fixes and helper apps). But the level of work required to keep Windows usable and useful has skyrocketed in recent years. Before I was just dealing with occasional random bugs, regressions and feature oversights by a generally well intentioned OS vendor. Now I'm fighting a rapidly escalating battle against a malicious opponent. It's so dumb because I'd actually pay $100/yr for a "Power Windows" version with no ads, upsells, agenda promotions, dark patterns and a full restoration of all the power user features they keep dropping from Windows 11 (like advanced taskbar functionality).
I hear where you're coming from. The corporate shops customize fleets with group policy and InTune, and it's a hassle to do the same one-off at home.
You might get traction with trying the IOT LTSC versions, which are often very stripped down. Used to be LTSB, then LTSC, but now on 11 I think you need to opt for IOT LTSC which is different than just LTSC.
IOT LTSC will have half the processes out of the box and less bullshit that you hate. It's possible apps that do OS checks will grump at you - Adobe Lightroom for example comes to mind, but it's an idea.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll put it on the list for when I'm next forced to reinstall. That's when I'll take a hard look at how well I can replicate the Windows experience (back when it was still good) on Linux.
They do change the settings to opt you in and move them around after updates, it's such a cat and mouse game, but the user is the mouse
There are few things that irritate me more than the gradual replacing of "Yes / No" with "Yes / Maybe later".
It's so disrespectful, infantilizing, and paternalistic.
But you see it everywhere now -- Microsoft, Apple, mainstream respected news and media sites constantly asking if you want to use their app instead of their site, or upgrade your plan.
And I don't understand why. It's hard to believe it increases conversion. But it does make people like me angry at the brand.
> It's hard to believe it increases conversion.
It isn't for me. I see people being converted just to stop the nagging, or just doing it on auto-pilot. It worries me, but it makes it pretty obvious why the corps aren't asking for proper consent. They don't care, they don't need to, and it's clearly working.
What I'm saying is, if they're going to nag you anyways, "yes/maybe later" doesn't obviously seem more likely to get people to click yes than "yes/no". In response to e.g. "Do you want to enable x right now?"
I believe nagging increases conversion. I'm just taking about the obnoxious "maybe later" wording.
perhaps you want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive and a Copilot? have you made Edge your default browser yet?
Can we crowdfund someone going to the Microsoft campuses, heckling every employee nonstop on the grounds, and when security comes up, just tell them "maybe later"?
someone already tried something similar with politics, but it didmt work out very well.
see what Neil Young has been saying about getting big corporations out of our lives. They skillfully buy out potential competitors and kill them to keep their monopolies.
What he has to say would have been a lot more believable before he sold half his back catalog to a hedge fund. Queue the McDonalds commericial that includes "keep me searching for an arch of gold"...
interesting. Old age has a way of bringing huge regrets sometimes, perhaps?
Of course, a lot of music stars sold out for one reason or another. tbh
Consent is considered freely given if someone has a choice to say “yes” or “no”, without any additional consequence.
The choice to say only “yes” or “ask me again later” is closer to what a stalker or a psychopath offers.
Can you say you disagree to the TOS?
@Everyone. If you must use Windows, use Windows 10 LTSC.
At this point, Windows has jumped the shark. It's clear Microsoft now see the future of their company as cloud services, with the desktop gateways just as an endpoint for that, and the progressive enshittification of the Microsoft ecosystem has reached the point at which it is no longer the sensible OS for the mainstream, but is now a gamified mess like pay-to-play gaming.
Fortunately for most of us, Linux and MacOS exist. But companies that have built their entire IT infrastructure on Windows really have no clear way out other than to follow Microsoft down the rabbit hole - which is, of course, the whole point of these recent changes.
I've been running mostly Linux (with some macOS) as a daily driver for the past 15 years and have seen more and more articles like this pop up on HN over time. I've felt for a while that Linux is more user-centric, but it seems like Windows 11 is a whole other level of user-hostile, to the point where even average users seem to be catching on. My own father managed to set up Linux on his computer without any prompting or help, and I didn't even suggest it to him. It's a dual-boot setup, but he boots into linux nearly every time and prefers it. It's starting to feel like a turning point.
I'm wondering if there's a market out there for helping regular computer users switch to linux?
> I'm wondering if there's a market out there for helping regular computer users switch to linux?
I'm more feeling like average users are just jumping straight to a phone (or maybe a tablet) as their main computing experience, and their PC are either pushed out of their life completely, as their other devices can do its job while being less hostile, or their PC is reduced to doing only the tasks which are either impossible or very-very inconvenient on a phone or tablet (PC games, long-form writing, content creation, Excel, et cetera).
Linux has some of these remaining niches nailed down pretty well, but still not well enough that the choice is obvious (Proton is really good, but kernel-anti-cheat is still a thing. Libreoffice is good for simple writing, but not for the Office power-user), and even then, this is really just the crumbs that are left after most users just exit the PC market as a whole, since they figured out the don't need one in the first place any more.
I deeply hate Microsoft, and most modern commercial software design, but OneDrive has consistently been the best app I've ever used for large file storage. Can anyone explain why they hate it so much? I have near instantaneous access to my documents on my computer and phone. I've been considering a move to Mint, but I like OneDrive so much I'm not sure that I want to lose it.
The web version is awful, absurdly cumbersome to navigate, difficult to search, confusingly structured, slow and just generally terrible.
The native version was forced onto people's Windows machines and automatically configured to sync people's local desktop and documents to Microsoft's servers without explicit consent, so some of the hate directed towards Onedrive might be an expressions of hate of Microsoft's abusive and deceptive behavior. But even if the Onedrive app itself is amazing (I don't know if it is), installing anything from such an untrustworthy company seems like a bad idea.
when you lose onedrive, what else do you lose?
All Your Files Data and Media!
if you want to use onedrive ok thats a choice, if its impossible to store locally, and you have the sword of deletecles hanging over your head, thats not a choice, thats a consequence.
I can sympathize a little with Microsoft here. MS got totally angry and fed up with what was happening. I'm not sure how many people really understand how bad ransomware was getting. Microsoft just finally said enough is enough and started implementing counter-measures. Being more forceful about getting people to backup their files is one of them.
Yes, it's annoying, and many might say what's the big deal? People's harddrives used to die all the time and they would still lose data. Why suddenly because it's ransomware, is it a bigger deal? I think it just adds a moral dimension to it that wasn't as acute before.
MS took the risk to be a little bit of an asshole as a way to counter even bigger assholes.
That's only really acceptable if they can hold up their end of the deal and maintain absolute privacy and security for that data without trying to analyze it and apply Minority Report pre-crime to everything.
You're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower. Microsoft didn't do this to help or hurt users or ransomware. There's no deeper meaning behind the action past improving business metrics in order to meet goals and please management and shareholders. They're not thinking about good or evil when implementing this, even if the PR firms they hire might make it look that way.
So you can imagine my incredulity when a few days ago I received one email message telling me that if I don't take action urgently, my One Drive account is going to be deleted, maybe even my files in the cloud.
But maybe in a week you will change your mind. Better ask you again in 7 days!
I will never trust OneDrive with any files after it silently deleted thousands of my files while syncing - I hit the hidden maximum number of files limit and then it permanently deleted the remaining files with no warning.
> "What if I just don't want OneDrive? Microsoft has embedded it so deep into Windows that there are no easy ways of getting rid of it."
This is not so, at least for the present. In current Windows releases, go to "Control Panel," then "Programs and Features", then select and uninstall OneDrive. If it's not installed, it cannot run.
Before you do this, make sure you have moved all your files from OneDrive to your local storage devices.
In the future, Microsoft will doubtless make OneDrive mandatory, along with requiring everyone to have a Microsoft account and watch their ads 24/7. But there's a remedy for that too -- install Linux. "Yet another European government is ditching Microsoft for Linux" : https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-german-state-schleswig-hol...
These small paper cuts are the reason i had to choose linux and for 4-5 years, i haven't faced that much trouble.
Here's your reminder that you can uninstall OneDrive in Europe.
In Ubuntu I turn off motd ads, in Windows I turn off this stuff, it doesn't come back, I only remember it exists when I see the outrage journalism headlines. I don't see why more people don't just take the steps to remove annoyances.
You can plug your ears and close your eyes, but Microsoft is becoming increasingly adversarial to their customers.
It's clear they want to remove local accounts and tie everything to O365.
My mom (68 yo) recently got a Windows update that then prompted her to backup her stuff. I had disabled all this and used Win11 debloat previously. OneDrive only had 5gb of storage and prompted her to upgrade.
She thought she got hacked because it was asking for money. Then when I went to turn it off it warned me that I might suffer data loss disabling one drive. Which is a story that we have seen play out many times.
Sure enough I backed everything up to an external drive, and when I disabled OneDrive the files were totally gone.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5309251/...
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1ef8pgr/one_dr...
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/i-tried-to-disable-onedrive-lo...
So sure, you can get around it, but there are going to be hundreds of millions of other people who won't.
I don't know if it is still true, but I noticed a difference in the behaviour of Home and Professional editions a number of years back. Home was definitely more agressive. Then there was a recent reinstall of Windows. The One Drive backup popup came up, but didn't give me an option to say no. It only allowed me to delay the decision by a week or a month.
the problem is MS keeps taking steps to resurrect those annoyances.
i have uninstalled onedrive at least 6 times on one computer. i never intentionally installed it
Oh please. The Ubuntu thing isnt even anywhere close. Also you know that there is more than one Linux distro, so nice try justifying it.
I've often wondered if there is a way you can be malicious with this, a way of 'beating' them at their own game.
1: Make random files full of absolute garbage data
2: Upload 5GB of garbage data, delete (free limit capacity)
3: Repeat 1 and 2, forever, 24/7.
At 10mbps it would take 68.3 minutes, at 50mbps it would take 13.7 minutes to upload 5gb.
At 10mbps you could upload 5gb 7665 times, at 50mbps 38,325 times a year.
that works out to 38,325gb/10mbps and 191,625 GB at 50mbps per year
So yeah, if Microsoft wants to allow a user to upload 10's of thousands of completely worthless useless bytes of data and delete and reupload why not?
Anyone care to think how many hard drives you could destroy with the constant writing? And you could also automate downloads too, so they have to deal with reads.
Let's see how long they want your 'data' for then ey?
Consider it a digital form of 'fly tipping' and it's completely free, legal and they have begged you to do it!
i guess they will ban those type of account and the user may not even be able to log in...
i think thats the idea.
Can someone answer why is this ok on iOS and macOS but not Windows?
They all provide backup via their own paid clouds and ask for an opt-in.
On MacOS, you still get local user accounts and Apple's optional online features are still optional.
Microsoft is using all the levers at their disposal to force users to use online Microsoft accounts to log onto their local computer and even turn on formerly optional features like One Drive.
My assumption is that Microsoft is using their access to user data to build up everyone's advertising profile, and forcing you to be logged on through a Microsoft account makes sure that the data they collect is linked to a specific person.
Windows Recall is another example of a "feature" they wanted to force on users that can be used to fill out everyone's advertising profile.
Why is your assumption for Microsoft different from Apple?
If Microsoft was worried about serving the needs of end users, wouldn't they offer free customer service like Apple does?
Apple's main revenue is not from advertising but mostly from expensive hardware
It is not ok on iOS or macOS or even Android or whatever else. The feature to have some online storage with backup is fine, IMO, but what is not fine is the OS nagging you to use that feature. This thing must be opt-in and only if the user themselves initiate it.
Also it should not be locked to a single online storage provider but use some sort of standardized protocol (or at least some pluggable mechanism) to allow any online storage provider - including using self-hosted options - to work with it.
This is how you make something that works for your users instead of taking advantage of them.
Does iOS constantly (multiple times a day) spam you if you don't enable backup?
(I've had it turned on for so long that I honestly don't know what they do.)
I’ve never enabled iCloud backups and it has never pestered me about it after the initial iPhone setup process (the modern version of which doesn't even pester me then since it copies the setting from my last iPhone). I backup locally to my mac, which admittedly they made require a password each time now, which is a bit annoying, but it’s not asking me to enable icloud backups regardless.
They have always required a password for encrypted backups, do they now require for all local backups? Or is unencrypted not an option anymore?
No, but I haven't seen Windows ask multiple times a day either. But iOS does try to get me to turn on iCloud every time the phone reboots and somewhat randomly without rebooting.
Yes, it periodically pesters me with it.
you sort of, answered your own question. the lack of user value for microsoft is a keystone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_(architecture)
Err... I don't understand what keystone means in your sentence.
Frankly it's more of a fact than an occasionally seen odd double standard behavior at this point. It's literally not okay when Microsoft does it; iPhone users literally love this exact same feature. They should be working a lot harder on solving this mystery.