> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store.
That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.
qalmakka 83 days ago [-]
Yeah QA is basically nonexistent at Microsoft, at least it hasn't been since the early Windows 10 days. At work we ended up getting rid of all of our Windows runners because we found out that running our tools on WINE got objectively more reliable and deterministic than having to deal with Microsoft's bullcrap
estimator7292 83 days ago [-]
If windows borks itself how many people will just give up and buy a new computer? That's Microsoft's entire game right now with obsoleting perfectly good hardware.
But yes, this one is most likely just plain incompetence
Gigachad 83 days ago [-]
Microsoft destroying your computer with bugs is just as likely to make someone go buy a MacBook.
forgotTheLast 81 days ago [-]
That's the lesson anyone who works as tech support for their tech-illiterate relatives learns eventually.
pavel_lishin 84 days ago [-]
No, but re-enabling OneDrive might qualify.
TiredOfLife 83 days ago [-]
You have to explicitly add a Microsoft account and enable the photo synchronization on Samsung phone. It's not enabled by default.
Also by default OneDrive uses the cloud files where it downloads none of the files unless you specifically ask to do it.
fuzzfactor 83 days ago [-]
Sometimes it's a fairly fine difference between dark and merely dim.
hulitu 82 days ago [-]
>Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.
It gets your data.
jowea 82 days ago [-]
That it picked up from the floor after it the disk overflowed? I'm not saying the rest of it isn't a dark pattern, but the final issue is just a couple of bugs.
deng 83 days ago [-]
FYI: You can still install Win11 with a local account. When prompted for your account, hit Shift+F10 to get a terminal, then enter
start ms-cxh:localonly
and a window will pop up where you can create a local account and continue with the installation.
Yep, it's all insane. And before the "switch to Linux" replies: yes, I am using Linux, but Friends&Family still rely on Windows software. The big elephant in the room is of course Office, and I mean the REAL Office, not the MickeyMouse version that runs in the browser. No, LibreOffice will not do, neither will running Office in a Windows VM, nor running a 20year old Office version in Wine.
kotaKat 83 days ago [-]
Until the day the machine has been UEFI-flagged to require online connectivity regardless. Yes, that's a thing, and the flag's been lurking in the UEFI since Windows 10 1809, even. Intune/Windows Autopilot leverages it for out-of-the-box MDM enforcement.
I think this exact reason why MS will fight to the death to keep Office off Linux machines.
It's the last hurdle before 'normies' moving to Linux.
echoangle 83 days ago [-]
If you use Rufus to burn the iso to the boot drive, you can also chose to create an offline account there (and also disable some other installation requirements like TPM).
Wowfunhappy 83 days ago [-]
I'm a school teacher nowadays, but both my current and previous school have used Google Docs for everything. When I was in graduate school getting my teaching degree, everyone used Google Docs. All of our students use Google Docs.
Is this reliance on Office an enterprise thing?
em-bee 83 days ago [-]
why will libreoffice not do? just the difference of the UI, or incompatibility worries?
in my opinion these are just transition issues. iaw. it's not a problem with libreoffice but the problem is that there is a transition.
same with a windows VM. just the issues with interaction with documents outside the VM, or that using a VM is not really solving the problem of getting rid of windows?
bombcar 83 days ago [-]
Interoperability is still an issue, and people who are already suspicious of you messing with their shit really do not want a “different office” at home than at work.
em-bee 83 days ago [-]
people who are already suspicious
see, that's the problem. it's not a technical issue. it's lack of trust. i am not saying that there are no issues, but by far the biggest issue is and has always been expectations and trust. the expectation that there will be no problems, which is not even fulfilled when you upgrade windows or word, and also the subtle differences, quirks that you got used to, are different now.
it's resistance to change, while completely missing that microsoft forces more change on their users than linux or libreoffice ever did. if we could sell a switch to linux/libreoffice as a windows upgrade, people would moan, but it would not be any worse than an actual windows upgrade.
deng 83 days ago [-]
By far the biggest problem is interoperability with people using MS Office. I'm fully aware that Microsoft is essentially sabotaging this by making their format deliberately obtuse, but here we are.
The VM thing is tedious to set up, requires more resources and, as you say, does not really solve the problem. Also, there's the problem of Windows activation in VMs, which - at least officially - requires an expensive retail key.
83 days ago [-]
83 days ago [-]
beering 84 days ago [-]
The past few years I’ve been hearing crazy stories of workarounds and scripts to deal with all these new features in Windows. Isn’t that what was preventing people from using Linux? Replacing utilman.exe with cmd.exe is not something a normal user would ever do.
ipdashc 83 days ago [-]
I was thinking the same thing. Never thought I'd see a world where Arch has an installer (and, jokes aside, many Linux distros have very straightforward GUI installers) while people have to... "hit Shift+F10 to get a terminal, then enter start ms-cxh:localonly" to install Windows with a local account. Jeez.
Gigachad 83 days ago [-]
Normal users in this situation either buy a new computer or take it in to a tech support business to have it fixed.
An average user will never install an OS manually so the only areas it’s succeeding are where it’s preinstalled like on the steam deck.
happymellon 83 days ago [-]
> buy a new computer
Which wouldn't fix this. The new computer will run out of space after it's finished downloading the backups
> take it in to a tech support business
You think Geek Squads going to be able to fix this?
Krssst 84 days ago [-]
Protect yourself, use a local account. Windows 11 does not allow this but Rufus will help when you create your Windows installation media. And obviously never enter your Microsoft account credentials into any Microsoft app until you're certain it won't be linked to your local account.
akimbostrawman 83 days ago [-]
This is digital Stockholm syndrome. The only actual way to protect yourself from windows is never installing it in the first place and switch to a FOSS OS.
BatteryMountain 83 days ago [-]
I have a machine with Windows 11 Enterprise LTSB and it did not ask me to login in with microsoft credentials after/during install. No Microsoft Store or other bloat, no One Drive necromancy.
Krssst 83 days ago [-]
I'd like to use it but no way to buy it as a non-professional customer. Regular people have no choice if they need Windows-exclusive software or hardware.
p0w3n3d 83 days ago [-]
Sounds like just avoiding dark patterns at all cost to me
avdelazeri 83 days ago [-]
I abandoned Windows over 10 years ago, when a mandatory Windows 10 update rewrote by UEFI partition and messed up my dual boot setup. It took me an entire evening to fix, at which point I swore that no machine owned by me would ever run Windows again.
The more I hear about Windows 11 makes me think I really dodged a bullet there.
nubinetwork 83 days ago [-]
Windows has been doing this since forever.
beng-nl 82 days ago [-]
Can confirm this has been happening since the simple BIOS+MBR days - after install
Windows would just write MBR code to boot into the windows partition.
com2kid 83 days ago [-]
This kind of shit used to be explicitly tested against. Get a Windows 7 install, fill up all but the last few bytes on the main HDD, it'll work fine, you'll be able to login and delete stuff.
Completely saturate memory, RAM full, swap full, the OS will still work. It'll be slow and messy, but you'll be able to navigate around enough to get shit ton.
Heck I suspect these scenarios would work even on Windows 10.
What kind of laughable tests doesn't even bother with the most obvious edge cases of "disk full"?
That isn't an uncommon scenario, quite the opposite, it is a very common scenario.
Gigachad 83 days ago [-]
They moved all the resources in to shoveling copilot garbage in to everything.
Lammy 84 days ago [-]
> The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account.
Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege level interactive user account :) https://security.stackexchange.com/a/66747
This garbage and more is the reason I did my Framework 12's installation of Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15) using this `unattend.xml` generator to disable internet requirement, disable mandatory Microsoft Account, disable intrusive spyware, disable disable disable: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
Sucks to have such an adversarial relationship with my own computer though. One shouldn't have to Know All The Tricks to avoid this shit.
bitwize 83 days ago [-]
The problem with Linux, they say, is that you have to fiddle with it endlessly to get it working; Windows, by contrast, Just Works Right Out of the Box.
Oh, but you don't actually want to use Windows as it comes out of the box, so they tell us you have to use a custom build, replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe, create an unattend.xml, don't connect it to the internet during the install procedure, run these commands, make these registry changes, apply these group policies, and install these aftermarket utilities and then you can FINALLY get a decent Windows experience.
Just don't use Windows Update, or it will all be reset again.
I'm glad I left that world behind.
Lammy 83 days ago [-]
I'm not telling you to use Windows. I'm telling you I use Windows lol
It sucks a lot actually, and everything that's good about it is good despite what Microsoft do to it and not because of them. I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast that both don't work so well on my OS of choice: https://old.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/1nkpkoo/burnout_...
happymellon 83 days ago [-]
Burnout Paradise worked fine out the box on my Steam Deck, and my Linux Chimera "console".
The hardest part was dealing with the shitty launchers.
Lammy 83 days ago [-]
> FreeBSD
Great to hear that about Proton though!
happymellon 83 days ago [-]
Sorry I misunderstood, though to be fair... ;)
> I'm telling you I use Windows lol
> I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast
Makes it sound like your OS of choice is Windows
Lammy 83 days ago [-]
Only for gaming and for piracy. I also need it for BD ripping since DVDfab Passkey operates as a Windows driver.
mixmastamyk 83 days ago [-]
After that I’d still have to clear hundreds of gigabytes of disk space it hordes under \Windows.
subscribed 82 days ago [-]
TBH I use both windows and Linux since ages and it's Linux that's painless and always works, but my main personal OS is still Windows (10) because I can't get all I need running well (or at all) on Linux.
And yes, the windows updates resettling all these little necessary settings is little infuriating.
defrost 82 days ago [-]
While you should never blindly trust a stranger that suggests you open and admin power shell and enter
it's worth a shot - that downloads the latest stable Chris Titus WinUtil as a tabbed text GUI with easy click options and various recommended setting levels to deal with all of that.
It's all open source powershell scripts from windows insiders that gets heavy eyeballs - fast track installs of common software, easy set update tweaks (eg: only the serious security updates), disable telemetry and AI bloat, etc.
subscribed 77 days ago [-]
Thanks a million, bookmarked.
hulitu 82 days ago [-]
> Windows, by contrast, Just Works Right Out of the Box.
Yes, it is after you install it on your box that it stops working. /s
type0 84 days ago [-]
> Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15
Not sure if you are aware of this but dual booting can be broken with new Windows update if you're not using different disks.
Lammy 83 days ago [-]
The BitLocker thing? I turned off the TPM and “““Secure””” Boot so it shouldn't do that.
estimator7292 83 days ago [-]
Windows still likes to occasionally clobber your EFI entries and wipe out grub if it sees it.
jaredhallen 83 days ago [-]
You can use the windows boot loader to boot other operating systems. I guess there's no guarantee an update won't remove it from the menu, though. A lot of systems have a boot menu built into UEFI these days, too, which will show you all the bootable partitions on the system.
Lammy 83 days ago [-]
I'm using rEFInd (because it's pretty!) and have the UEFI executable priority set, so as long as Windows doesn't reformat my ESP I should be fine. Or if it does I at least know how to fix it. Within FreeBSD it's a simple `mount -t msdosfs`, and shoutout to this utility for the Windows side of things: https://github.com/franzageek/WinEFIMounter
The one annoyance was that the Windows installer makes a puny 100MiB ESP by default, which would actually be enough for everything I have on there at the moment, but it felt small so I bumped it up to 1G before installing the second OS.
fuzzfactor 83 days ago [-]
I know the NT bootloaders would chainload Linux under BIOS, but have never seen a successful technique using UEFI.
Is there an easy-to-understand tutorial?
For dual boot I have been relying on Grub to boot Windows which it still does fine with UEFI.
BatteryMountain 83 days ago [-]
I had a similar issue earlier this year with my laptop. I use my own laptop for work and created a dedicated account (a Standard account, not Admin) for my work stuff. I signed in with our EntraID/Office365/Azure credentials. Worked fine for about a month. Then we added 2FA to everything and resetted passwords company wide (via our 3rd party IT "partner"). Half the the staff's email/outlook got cooked really good and but my machine in particular, one morning I turned it on and I could no longer log into windows. Not even with my local-only Admin account. Not with the Standard/Microsoft account that has hijacked MY system.
I had to reinstall windows completely and lost about 2 days total + couple of days worth of code/work, nevermind my own data.
About a month after that something else broke my dev tools again and I switched to Fedora/KDE (as all my dev tools works fine there too). It's been fairly smooth sailing since then. Install updates frequently, my system is so nice fine tuned to my needs it's awesome. I'm not a linux noob but the first time a linux install lasted more than 6 months for me without breaking itself. Also run multiple user accounts on it to seperate home/work life. Fully encrypted, fingerprint reader works, webcam/mic works. Haven't had the urge to install windows again on this machine, nor another linux distro.
superdevius 84 days ago [-]
Time to migrate to Linux.
fuzzfactor 83 days ago [-]
Looks like the major monthly "update" Tuesday this week reverted the setting in Edge under Profiles where if you haven't been actively signing in, you are signed into Edge automatically using credentials it may be able to find elsewhere, without any action from you, or apparently without any notification. Among other things.
Update turned it back ON by default.
Even if you found it and turned it off manually, another Edge update came in a couple days later and turned it back on again.
Just in case you intentionally turned it off, "somebody" probably doesn't want you to know if or when it comes back on. But in the author's case you can't help but notice anyway due to complete malfunction with no clues given as to why.
But that's not the first thing I noticed.
This time, beyond a doubt, nobody is getting updated faster than it was under Windows 98 dial-up, where we had download speeds and processor speeds orders of magnitude slower.
That's been looking pretty iffy a lot of times for a year or two, but now I think no matter how fast your fiber and how blazingly overclocked your processor, there are so many shipped defects needing correction that you're in for major delays like never before. It's just not as advanced in UX compared to when people were more advanced by comparison relative to the technology at their disposal.
There's also the factor of how busy your SSD and network have become, more & more occupied at all times with tasks useless to your own particular efforts, whoever thought piling a 3GB+ "update" on top of that was a good idea?
BatteryMountain 83 days ago [-]
If you buy a Samsung phone, after initial setup (be sure to Opt-out of all the extra ToS), install all the google equivalent app (calc, calendar, contacts, phone, etc) enable developer mode and remove all the samsung variants via adb. Takes an hour but well worth it. Some packages/apps can only be removed via adb. On a brand new samsung, there are three Meta/facebook packages installed in android as hidden even if you have Facebook app uninstalled. Most of the samsung bloat, including One Drive can be properly removed like this. Phone runs silky smooth & battery lasts longer too after this process. My phone has very little left of samsung, but I do unfortunately have to use google's apps, which works great for what it is.
Don't try to remove the Samsung Gallery, as it will break the camera.
Don't remove all the Knox packages, as they will break NFC/Wallet apps.
You can remove all the AR/VR Emoji shit, half of them use the internet...
You can remove the "Weather" package. This is supposedly a widget.. right.
You can remove Hiya spyware package."spam call detection" straight from china .
You can remove netflix, youtube, instagram, snapchat, spotify, microsoft apps and other preinstalls this way too (instead of just disabling some of them). You can always install from the store again if needed.
I hate what modern tech/software ecosystem has become.
chii 83 days ago [-]
This is what it means to let someone else own the platform for your computing needs.
Stallman was right, and nobody ever listens until it's too late.
Kim_Bruning 82 days ago [-]
After fighting with it for half a day; I returned the last Samsung I tried and got a Fairphone 4 with E/OS instead.
Which... actually runs a lot of software out of the normal google app store anyway. But it also has a tracking blocker installed by default, and nothing is mandatory.
Couldn't be happier.
rekabis 82 days ago [-]
As a security professional and Windows user of over 35 years, I always do everything within my power to steer people away from using Microsoft accounts in favour of using local accounts.
99.9999% of all users benefit exclusively from local accounts and the stability they bring. Microsoft accounts are a headache and a security/stability risk in virtually 100% of all implementations that I would not want to inflict on anyone.
euroderf 83 days ago [-]
Atteibuted to Ian Fleming: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
So um how many dark patterns was that ?
fuzzfactor 83 days ago [-]
The 0th pattern was not enumerated, it is assumed you know it's the very existence of a Microsoft Account.
retrochameleon 81 days ago [-]
I installed Windows 11 LTSC for a work project recently. The experience left me shocked. The installer was shortened and brief, and upon first logging into the new OS, it was a thing of beauty. Clean desktop, empty start menu, no bloatware. Just a true clean slate to start from.
I hate Windows and Microsoft and switched to Linux years ago with no regrets. I can't help but wonder the goodwill they would garner if this was the typical user experience with Windows. If I had some path to using Windows like this, and was able to use GPOs as a home user, I might not have left in the first place.
It's a convoluted pain in the ass to get licenses for LTSC as a business, and it's basically a nonstarter as an individual. There is a 5 license minimum.
I'm tired of companies being determined to make everything shitty in the name of value extraction from customers.
MBCook 83 days ago [-]
Well that absolutely didn’t go the direction I thought it would.
codeduck 83 days ago [-]
oh good, another reason to keep refusing a windows 10 -> windows 11 upgrade.
iqfareez 83 days ago [-]
This is absurd
Rendered at 14:17:08 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.
But yes, this one is most likely just plain incompetence
Also by default OneDrive uses the cloud files where it downloads none of the files unless you specifically ask to do it.
It gets your data.
start ms-cxh:localonly
and a window will pop up where you can create a local account and continue with the installation.
Yep, it's all insane. And before the "switch to Linux" replies: yes, I am using Linux, but Friends&Family still rely on Windows software. The big elephant in the room is of course Office, and I mean the REAL Office, not the MickeyMouse version that runs in the browser. No, LibreOffice will not do, neither will running Office in a Windows VM, nor running a 20year old Office version in Wine.
https://oofhours.com/2019/08/17/requiring-a-network-connecti...
It's the last hurdle before 'normies' moving to Linux.
Is this reliance on Office an enterprise thing?
in my opinion these are just transition issues. iaw. it's not a problem with libreoffice but the problem is that there is a transition.
same with a windows VM. just the issues with interaction with documents outside the VM, or that using a VM is not really solving the problem of getting rid of windows?
see, that's the problem. it's not a technical issue. it's lack of trust. i am not saying that there are no issues, but by far the biggest issue is and has always been expectations and trust. the expectation that there will be no problems, which is not even fulfilled when you upgrade windows or word, and also the subtle differences, quirks that you got used to, are different now.
it's resistance to change, while completely missing that microsoft forces more change on their users than linux or libreoffice ever did. if we could sell a switch to linux/libreoffice as a windows upgrade, people would moan, but it would not be any worse than an actual windows upgrade.
The VM thing is tedious to set up, requires more resources and, as you say, does not really solve the problem. Also, there's the problem of Windows activation in VMs, which - at least officially - requires an expensive retail key.
An average user will never install an OS manually so the only areas it’s succeeding are where it’s preinstalled like on the steam deck.
Which wouldn't fix this. The new computer will run out of space after it's finished downloading the backups
> take it in to a tech support business
You think Geek Squads going to be able to fix this?
The more I hear about Windows 11 makes me think I really dodged a bullet there.
Completely saturate memory, RAM full, swap full, the OS will still work. It'll be slow and messy, but you'll be able to navigate around enough to get shit ton.
Heck I suspect these scenarios would work even on Windows 10.
What kind of laughable tests doesn't even bother with the most obvious edge cases of "disk full"?
That isn't an uncommon scenario, quite the opposite, it is a very common scenario.
Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege level interactive user account :) https://security.stackexchange.com/a/66747
This garbage and more is the reason I did my Framework 12's installation of Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15) using this `unattend.xml` generator to disable internet requirement, disable mandatory Microsoft Account, disable intrusive spyware, disable disable disable: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
Sucks to have such an adversarial relationship with my own computer though. One shouldn't have to Know All The Tricks to avoid this shit.
Oh, but you don't actually want to use Windows as it comes out of the box, so they tell us you have to use a custom build, replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe, create an unattend.xml, don't connect it to the internet during the install procedure, run these commands, make these registry changes, apply these group policies, and install these aftermarket utilities and then you can FINALLY get a decent Windows experience.
Just don't use Windows Update, or it will all be reset again.
I'm glad I left that world behind.
It sucks a lot actually, and everything that's good about it is good despite what Microsoft do to it and not because of them. I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast that both don't work so well on my OS of choice: https://old.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/1nkpkoo/burnout_...
The hardest part was dealing with the shitty launchers.
Great to hear that about Proton though!
> I'm telling you I use Windows lol
> I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast
Makes it sound like your OS of choice is Windows
And yes, the windows updates resettling all these little necessary settings is little infuriating.
See: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
Chris Titus on his own (and contributors) Util: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuaNw8Tpn7Q
Some third party run through and rave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i43BZyJ4azc
It's all open source powershell scripts from windows insiders that gets heavy eyeballs - fast track installs of common software, easy set update tweaks (eg: only the serious security updates), disable telemetry and AI bloat, etc.
Yes, it is after you install it on your box that it stops working. /s
Not sure if you are aware of this but dual booting can be broken with new Windows update if you're not using different disks.
The one annoyance was that the Windows installer makes a puny 100MiB ESP by default, which would actually be enough for everything I have on there at the moment, but it felt small so I bumped it up to 1G before installing the second OS.
Is there an easy-to-understand tutorial?
For dual boot I have been relying on Grub to boot Windows which it still does fine with UEFI.
I had to reinstall windows completely and lost about 2 days total + couple of days worth of code/work, nevermind my own data.
About a month after that something else broke my dev tools again and I switched to Fedora/KDE (as all my dev tools works fine there too). It's been fairly smooth sailing since then. Install updates frequently, my system is so nice fine tuned to my needs it's awesome. I'm not a linux noob but the first time a linux install lasted more than 6 months for me without breaking itself. Also run multiple user accounts on it to seperate home/work life. Fully encrypted, fingerprint reader works, webcam/mic works. Haven't had the urge to install windows again on this machine, nor another linux distro.
Update turned it back ON by default.
Even if you found it and turned it off manually, another Edge update came in a couple days later and turned it back on again.
Just in case you intentionally turned it off, "somebody" probably doesn't want you to know if or when it comes back on. But in the author's case you can't help but notice anyway due to complete malfunction with no clues given as to why.
But that's not the first thing I noticed.
This time, beyond a doubt, nobody is getting updated faster than it was under Windows 98 dial-up, where we had download speeds and processor speeds orders of magnitude slower.
That's been looking pretty iffy a lot of times for a year or two, but now I think no matter how fast your fiber and how blazingly overclocked your processor, there are so many shipped defects needing correction that you're in for major delays like never before. It's just not as advanced in UX compared to when people were more advanced by comparison relative to the technology at their disposal.
There's also the factor of how busy your SSD and network have become, more & more occupied at all times with tasks useless to your own particular efforts, whoever thought piling a 3GB+ "update" on top of that was a good idea?
Don't try to remove the Samsung Gallery, as it will break the camera.
Don't remove all the Knox packages, as they will break NFC/Wallet apps.
You can remove all the AR/VR Emoji shit, half of them use the internet...
You can remove the "Weather" package. This is supposedly a widget.. right.
You can remove Hiya spyware package."spam call detection" straight from china .
You can remove netflix, youtube, instagram, snapchat, spotify, microsoft apps and other preinstalls this way too (instead of just disabling some of them). You can always install from the store again if needed.
I hate what modern tech/software ecosystem has become.
Stallman was right, and nobody ever listens until it's too late.
Which... actually runs a lot of software out of the normal google app store anyway. But it also has a tracking blocker installed by default, and nothing is mandatory.
Couldn't be happier.
99.9999% of all users benefit exclusively from local accounts and the stability they bring. Microsoft accounts are a headache and a security/stability risk in virtually 100% of all implementations that I would not want to inflict on anyone.
So um how many dark patterns was that ?
I hate Windows and Microsoft and switched to Linux years ago with no regrets. I can't help but wonder the goodwill they would garner if this was the typical user experience with Windows. If I had some path to using Windows like this, and was able to use GPOs as a home user, I might not have left in the first place.
It's a convoluted pain in the ass to get licenses for LTSC as a business, and it's basically a nonstarter as an individual. There is a 5 license minimum.
I'm tired of companies being determined to make everything shitty in the name of value extraction from customers.