It is sadly part of a dark pattern called "stickiness". You can dress it up as functionally useful or even important but ultimately it is about companies wanting to create enough of a dependency that you have to continue using them, which is anti-competitive.
Gone are the days where you bought something from a shop with no stickiness other than good service brought you back. Now there are far too many Marketing Managers who see stickiness as a win, even though the win is only to the supplier and not to the customer.
It is similar to those web sites who ask you whether you want "notifications" from them in your OS! Nope.
I've always called it adhesive ToS. I hate it and I think it should be illegal. You set up an account and all you need is an email address. Then, all of a sudden, they need your phone number "for security." Then your name and DoB "for the security of your account." Soon it'll be a credit card for age verification.
And the whole time you better give them accurate information because if they ever lock your account you'll be expected to send photo ID so they can verify it.
The next step is subscriptions. The entire point of forced logins is because that allows them to build future features as subscription only. Think about how online SaaS works and how everyone eventually switches to a subscription product by keeping, but abandoning the existing service and building all new features on a subscription model. With everyone forced to log in Windows is essentially a SaaS. They're just not charging for it. Yet!
Remember when you could get a free custom domain on Outlook.com or GMail? Anyone on those services was allowed to keep their stuff, but huge effort has been made to devalue and de-market those historical accounts. Microsoft shut down the entire admin side of things and Google excludes them from most new features.
I know someone who uses Facebook for work. Her account login stopped working, it always said she put the wrong token number even though she used their own token generator from the phone app.
It's my pet theory they just randomly lock accounts without ID on file so you have to upload ID to unlock it, which is apparently now required for new accounts. Because that's the only thing that worked because they have no support.
Free, community maintained software have all sorts of problems too.
Essentially, the problem is that the software is made to fit the developers needs, not the user needs. If they both have the same needs, that's great, if they don't most people are better off with a commercial solution.
Also keep in mind that in most major free software, the "community" is mostly for-profit companies that want the software to fit their own needs and they have no money to spend for anything else.
This is free software working as intended, and in some cases (like Linux), it works really great. But it is not a silver bullet and proprietary software still is the best answer in some cases.
This is why I qualified open source with "community maintained." When there's a strong partition between the community and the developers then FOSS looks a lot like closed software.
> This is why I qualified open source with "community maintained." When there's a strong partition between the community and the developers then FOSS looks a lot like closed software.
I'm just going to come out and say that I think Gnome and Firefox are two of the worst offenders of this.
Right. At least with Gnome even distro maintainers struggle to keep up with the churn and build it, users have little hope of success there. The result is a partition between the community and the developers who spend a lot of time in the code.
Firefox has a similar situation although I would argue it isn't quite as bad.
If you have suggestions on how to fix that I think a lot of people would love to hear it, but for now, sadly the task of building a fully complete desktop and application platform means that there is a lot of code and a lot of churn. This is true of every single major platform.
Worst, but not nearly the only. This kind of partitioning describes the vast majority of new projects that I encounter and have an interest in helping. Most ironic are those projects that simultaneously purport to have a mission for human rights and freedom.
Not really, you just happened to pick two projects that are particularly large and particularly old. Drive-by commits are a lot less valuable in those type of projects, unfortunately, but you can still find places to contribute if you spend the time to look.
While I did pick the projects for their notability, I could point out the fact that Gnome have an active disdain for extension developers and the entire idea of extensions as well as Mozilla continuing to make unpopular decision after unpopular decision with their browser.
> Essentially, the problem is that the software is made to fit the developers needs, not the user needs. If they both have the same needs, that's great, if they don't most people are better off with a commercial solution.
The first part may be true, but the second doesn't follow. In the case of software like Windows, etc, can you say it actually fits the user's needs? I mean sure, if Windows does what you expect and Linux / macOS don't, sure, it's great. But what if it doesn't?
I really hate non-resizable control windows, what can I do about it? I also hate the pure white interface that burns my eyes. How should I go about tweaking it? The list of ways Windows annoys me is extremely long, and I don't feel like I have any say in them. The same goes for macOS, though to a lesser degree.
This software seems to be made to benefit the "developers" (MS). People have been complaining about telemetry in Win10 and MS just ignores it.
You could argue that since I'm still using my 2013 MBP and basically only use Windows when I have no choice (gaming), I'm not really a client any more of either MS or Apple.
I guess in the case of bespoke software, or even in a case where each client is big enough for a company to listen to them, then they may steer the software's direction.
But for a random consumer OS? I really don't think so. My client is a fairly big European company, and they use Windows on their employees' desktops. There are ways in which Windows annoys them, but they have exactly 0 ways of changing this (other than dropping Windows).
Do you mint your own hardware as well? The problem with hard rules is there's numerous exceptions when it doesnt make sense to follow, invalidating the "rule" all together.
> The problem with hard rules is there's numerous exceptions when it doesnt make sense to follow, invalidating the "rule" all together
But rules aren't invalidated by exceptions ? The only thing that matters is, trying to follow the rule to the best of your abilities when it gives you enough benefit.
In the end what matters is each independent situation - the rules are only guidelines to get started.
FFS this was understood decades ago with the ISO 9001 revamp where they sanctuarized that obtaining quality products wasn't most efficiently achieved by following bullet point lists religiously, and even then it was already common sense.
It's a general rule that solves the stickiness problem, I don't think you need to go deeper than that. Is it or is it not true that going with community maintained software as much as possible prevents stickiness? We don't want to miss the forest.
That rule is simple to state, but damn near impossible to actually execute. I can't imagine the hoops you'd have to jump through to have a cell phone following this simple rule. I appreciate the push towards open source -- obviously a lot of good has come of it, but I'll happily take stickiness for convenience in many situations.
It might appear that way but much of the cost of non-community-maintained software is hidden and people don't realize it until long after it becomes expensive to leave. Because of this I'm not sure I agree.
I don't think it's true for most mainstream consumer-level stuff. For example, you're suggestion would mean I can't play console video games, stream movies, or even watch DVDs.
So you don't do mobile? Because I don't know of any truly functional mobile platforms other than Android and iOS, neither of which is community-maintained.
First company I quit in my professional engineering career was over this. Not precisely this, but same concept. My constructive cynical take is this: If a company is spending money on this kind of stickiness, they aren't spending it on features users want and need. Which opens the doors for competitors to do just that. Their artificial moat will provide them some protection, but against a long term onslaught of "lock in" vs "features people want", the latter will eventually win. That company I quit has taken a long time to die, but its demise is of no surprise, because they lost focus on the thing that made them successful to begin with.
I would love to see the internal documents that Apple has on maintaining stickiness. I’m sure it contains a trove of terms and concepts that would enable a meaningful discussion.
For example, using Apple Music was the default for the HomePod. Using any other music service was clunky (coincidentally or deliberately).
Another point is the Apple Watch. Switching to an Android phone would mean getting rid of two devices.
This is extremely anti-competitive. In the old days, this was called "lock-in".
The reason it is wrong is the extreme power imbalance between you and the service provider. No matter how independent you are, or how much time you are willing to spend (another highly unequal resource), their ability to force others to use their system might also coerce you into using it as well.
I would not call this "stickiness" - it is about having control over your customers. The latter is hierarchical, not on eye's level. Stickiness could imply a quid pro quo status though.
But it shows in the quality of Windows in my opinion. These feature get priority, aren't really thought through and some earlier versions of Windows 10 weren't able to sort or move icons on your desktop without serious bugs.
Of course I will also not use a MS account to sign into my PC. Ridiculous thought.
Microsoft has been using this dark pattern for a while now.
Around 1-2 years ago, I upgraded MS Office on my Windows laptop. It asked me for my username/password-- which I didnt think strange, as I assumed it needed it to upgrade.
And thats when I got a message "Good news! Your Windows machine now uses your Microsoft to login."
W.T.F.
I was never asked, never warned, just tricked into replacing my local login with an online one.
Took me 10-20 minutes of Googling to get my original setting back.
I have now turned off ALL updates for Windows-- it is my backup machine, for a few programs that only run on Windows.
Every update on Windows scared me (and still does), as I dont know what dark pattern they will try this time.
Do you really need Windows? Our family laptop runs Linux, it does Teams for school, MineCraft, Netflix. You could do Office365 from a browser, although I admit, it is less than ideal. But it seems like you are almost at the emotional state make the jump... what's holding you back?
I bought a Dell Latitude E5450 for 350 eur about 2 years back. It was used but looked new. It came with Win 10 Pro, which sits on my NAS as a gzipped bit for bit copy now.
Everything works out of the box on Ubuntu 20.04 and will continue to work until it dies far from now. I can open the thing up and replace everything I would expect I could replace (inc battery). It's all I need speed-wise. If the kids drop it I won't cry. Fun fact: When I play MineCraft with my son (I do it from my work Win 10 computer), he has has booted, started MineCraft and dug a hole to bedrock before I even get to click on the MineCraft icon. The thing is fast and snappy and remains so.
I made accounts for both kids and they can do many things themselves, perhaps because the UI looks more like an iPad than Windows does (i.e., hit the menu and a grid of icons fly in to fill the screen.)
I'm dreading the day they ask for a local install of Office365 though... Or something like Adobe's tools. So far my oldest is 8 and it hasn't happened.
Funny anecdote, I installed Ubuntu on my own laptop to improve my minecraft FPS when I was 9 (~9 years ago).
I googled something like "how to get more fps in minecraft" and the first result was a minecraft forum post to which the only response was "install Ubuntu". At the time, Ubuntu had a .exe installer, so I thought it was just like any other program and installed it to my C: drive along with everything else. I think I did have the concept of other OS since I'd used both Windows and MacOS previously, so I figured it out after the reboot. It did increase my minecraft FPS from ~15 to ~30 on average, so I didn't have any complaints.
I stuck with that laptop until high school, when I got a new laptop and started dual-booting Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else, which is where I'm at now.
Indeed funny! What happened after you installed the .exe Ubuntu? You clicked the icon and then ..?
I'm just past the 'stage' you're in now, I recently deleted my partition running Windows (kept it for GTA5). Only Ubuntu now.
I don't remember much about the installation process. I think I just got to choose between automatic or manual partitioning, which is when I presumably went with automatic and chose the C: drive.
Are you able to play GTAV on linux? Or just given up on the ability to play it? That and a few racing sims are the only things keeping me on windows these days.
Not the person you're replying to (and I don't play GTAV), but you can look here to see if it works in Steam via Proton: https://www.protondb.com/app/271590
It's rated Gold, and appears to work out of the box for some people, others have had to add an option to the command line that Steams uses to run it, and some people have seen some problems running it.
If you do end up going this route and try it, please file a report on protondb letting others know how it went.
You may also want to check out PlayOnLinux which eases the creation of sandboxed installations for different Windows software (not just games), in which each one could use its own Wine version, libraries, modules etc.
Windows just works. I can't remember the last time I had a driver issue with wifi or had an issue with new hardware working. Every game targets Windows first, so they all work without any extra work. My computer is a tool, and I don't want to spend any of my free time configuring things, like I have when running Linux in the past. I spent enough of my time at work doing that!
Every time I install windows, I spend easily half a day hunting down drivers. All of this is installed automatically with linux, and especially Ubuntu installs. The last time I installed windows, I got two black strips on either side of the display. No amount of GPU driver shenanigans would fix it. It worked first try on linux.
Anecdotal of course, but I've had the opposite experience. When I install Windows, the first thing I do is let Windows Update take care of everything. You could say it's "installed automatically". The only drivers I've needed to install in the past 5 years was Nvidia drivers for graphics cards or the odd printer driver. And downloading these drivers is super easy taking 5 minutes at most - the first search result for "nvidia download drivers" is the correct one.
Maybe I'm just unlucky, but every time I've installed Linux something with the drivers always breaks - video playback is choppy, wireless drops randomly, audio breaks, the fingerprint reader doesn't work. Using WSL2 or a VM is much easier when I want Linux.
I had this same problem. Was it an old Radeon card? I don't remember the model, but Microsoft's website said it was too old, so it only has basic support from Windows 10. That means black bars. Drove an ultrawide monitor in Linux just fine.
I agree with the sentiment of not wanting to waste time on your OS, but I disagree that Windows solves the problem. A computer that reboots without my permission is not usable.
Roblox. I had my kids on linux originally, but there's no linux version of Roblox, and the proposed workarounds I found were unreliable, out of date, or more work than I was willing to invest in.
Oh no, I'm just going to have to hope they won't ask for it before Proton (or something) starts supporting it :)
But you are right, a time may come when they will want Windows. Although my wife's computer runs it (needs it as a teacher), so they may use that for Win only stuff. I'll deal with it when the time comes.
I could do a VM with GPU pass-through and Steam client... Although that may also turn out to be more than I'm willing to invest (and essentially you still run Windows). Or maybe I'll dual boot...
I don't think Steam wants any more from me than any other payment processor. And for that matter, if you don't want to give them CC/address, you can use Steam gift cards, right?
I confess I'm not sure; I've trusted Valve with a very specific part of my life (buying games) for nearly 20 years now, and they've held up their end of the bargain the entire time. My trust in them has paid off (so far!)
Very well said. Fully agree with you. Both the personal desktops in my home, including the one used by my Sr Citizen non-techie Dad : are Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Thanks for sharing this constructive and helpful info.
Minecraft for kids is arguably safer on Bedrock servers and clients with the parental controls managed through the Microsoft account.
While Mojang made efforts, the premise of the Java version was unrestricted server community and that remains the dominant paradigm.
Not everything should be for kids, not saying “think of the children” and use Win10 or iOS, just commenting on a less known value-add of a Microsoft Account for Minecraft parents:
How does Minecraft keep my child safe?
With the Better Together update now out on Windows 10, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, and recently Playstation 4, any parent or guardian can rest comfortably knowing that there are a few systems in place to keep their child safe. [And able to cross play with friends on any of those.]
If your child is playing the Java Edition of Minecraft then they're still being protected by all the great features Mojang has baked into the legendary game. However, the Java Edition of Minecraft does not require Xbox Live integration since it does not support crossplay with other devices, and therefore loses out on many of the parental control features parents enjoy elsewhere.
If your child is playing Minecraft on PC, it might be worth getting them the Windows 10 version instead. It's always on-par with every other platform for new features and updates, supports crossplay between platforms so your child can play with more of their friends, and can be moderated by Xbox Live and Microsoft Account parental controls. That's a win-win-win.
I only ever saw my son make his own worlds locally and we play together on my own server [0], where I have 2 worlds currently. Sometimes Bedrock friends join, I installed GeyserMC for that (as you also mentioned) [1].
It was indeed a great pain to get the girls from next door to join with their Android tablets, it required multiple back and forths between me and their father... So that was why. To be honest it does annoy me that they had to give up so many private details to get the benefits of this "outsourced protection".
Well, my philosophy is to be there, check in on them, educate them about dangerous stuff but also to let them explore. I'll handle more difficult stuff through AdGuard when the time comes. The kid knows not to do weird things on their own. I regularly explain to them that the internet is like a jungle. Don't just wander off without me and my digital machete by your side, I tell them ;)
Still haven't found a way to digitally sign a pdf with a smart card on Linux, unfortunately. If anyone knows how, I'd love a tip. Last thing I absolutely can't do except on Windows, and it is required by a lot of DoD processes I have to follow.
I unfortunately kept all my backups as NTFS and I maintained that for a while because "legacy" and I was lazy. Converting them all is gonna take a while. So I'm sort of waiting until it's inevitable.
I have over 2TB's of data. While yes I can read them on linux, it it's always perfect and there are issues regarding permissions on occasion or an issue where it doesn't recognize the directory for some odd reason. No idea if it's a linux issue, the standard ntfs reader I have on my distro, or what. But, I figure if I'm going all out linux, might as well make it difficult to jump back out :)
2TB is not much at all. Tip from experience: Don't touch your important ntfs data with the linux drivers, instead get an ext/btrfs driver for windows. winbtrfs[1] is stable and works great for that purpose.
Hey thanks! I'll have to look into this more but would you recommend ext4 or btrfs? I just want something that will last, not necessarily the latest and greatest.
Although I don't feel qualified to answer this, I'd recommend ext4. It just works. They are trying to achieve the one fs to rule them all with btrfs, but I'm not too sure how stable it is at the moment. It had a lot of issues in the past, and if you don't plan to use subvolumes, screenshots etc you're better off using ext4.
Fun story: I once had an issue where I couldn't do anything with my btrfs volume because it ran out of metadata space and I couldn't even tell it to allocate more. The solution wsa to grab a usb drive, format it with btrfs, make a volume group so more metadata space would be available to the filesystem, then make it allocate more space on the normal ssd. Everything was fine after removing the flashdrive from the volume group. It was a scary evening.
If you ask me, btrfs had issues in the past and it caused them some reputation damage but it's getting there. And many distros started using it as their default, as does Synology.
It's a safe pick if you ask me. Still, I would go for ext4 if you don't specifically want or need things like storage pools, snapshots and such advanced (ZFS-like) features.
You're probably not going to be able to use that bit for bit copy later.
I did something similar with my last linux laptop, and none of the workarounds to put the partitions back worked when I needed a quick windows test machine.
Actually I did the same with My wife's Asus, I dd-ed the whole drive, gzipped it and ran Linux for a year. Then I restored it. It worked fine. I guess I won't run into problems as long as the drive is the same drive, or perhaps a bigger one.
Even without an MS account, when using Microsoft Store with a local account, I won't be surprised if they used some hardware fingerprint such as MAC address to assign a unique ID to that account.
They add a unique identifier to EFIVARS. That's why if you install a MS store application without being logged in, completely wipe/replace your disks you can still see the list of previous installed applications in the store.
I don't know about use of the store in general, but if you use the MS store to buy a Windows license they automatically convert your account and link the license to that account.
Source: built a new PC a few weeks ago and naively assumed they'd just give me a product key or ask how I wanted to receive it.
I have no reason to believe that Microsoft will not pull a Google and start spuriously locking people out of their accounts (as happens every few months on HN), which may then prevent me from logging in to my own computer.
In fact, I've already been locked out of my Microsoft account for "suspicious activity" (which was literally just purchasing Minecraft) and was required to enter a phone number to unlock it. Literal theft - I was compelled to either give up additional personal information or lose access to the software I paid for.
My private MS account was locked after posting a question in their forums. I had to confirm my identity and had to give them my telephone number. Couldn't even delete the account because for that I have to be logged in...
Got an answer to the question though, so thank you anonymous internet stranger. I wish I could confirm that your solution worked...
I wiped a brand new Windows laptop just last week and installed Linux because Windows 'S' Mode wouldn't let me install Firefox without a Windows account. Very happy with the change to linux and I don't have to worry about accidentally saving personal documents to the OneDrive cloud.
Product companies should take note, I'd probably own a few more electronics if they didn't require that consumers 'create an account' or associate an email address in order to use the thing.
I've been considering making the switch to a Linux distro full-time, this move by Microsoft might be deciding factor. It sounds like they restricted Firefox installations to force users to use Edge.....
> I've been considering making the switch to a Linux distro full-time
I forget what my last straw was, but I went full Linux for all of my home computers around 2012 or so. At the time it bricked a piece of novelty hardware for me which I later ended up selling anyway, and that was not a hard choice to make.
My life has been so much better.
I segregate my usage of Windows and Mac OSs to work. I enjoy my OS sanity when at home.
That makes no sense. Why would you use 'S' mode if you didn't want to be connected? It's specifically a version that does not store data/apps locally, so of course it's going to require an account...
Some devices, like the Surface Go, come with Windows S mode by default.
To disable S mode you need a Microsoft account as you need to access the store to do so.
I think there are some workarounds for this, but the default way is the store.
It's the version/mode of Windows that was installed when I bought the laptop. I tried about three different approaches to switch it out of 'S' mode but none of them worked.
I think what the parent comment was aiming at is that you need a Windows account to follow that. I don't think you can use the store without an account, therefore not able to escape the S mode, therefore not able to install Firefox.
When Windows 10 came out, the telemetry, MS account features, forced auto updates/reboots made my computer feel like it was no longer my own.
Having used Microsoft OSes since DOS, this was the straw that finally broke the camel's back.
After dabbling in Linux for years, this was motivation to commit 100% to using Linux as my main OS. It was mildly painful at first, but after sticking with it, I would never go back.
MS is making me sad. I like what they are doing in some areas, like WSL2, but on the other hand, they are taking cues from Apple on how to treat computing customers.
The "we'll protect you, but you need to login and install everything through our store" paradigm is an awful trade, in my opinion.
I don't know, I think they are bad in a different way from Apple, and in my opinion this way is worse. Apple enforces what is and isn't allowed on their platform with an "Apple knows best" attitude, but besides this the UX basically respects the user and gets out of your way.
Microsoft uses dark patterns to actively bully the user into doing what they want you to do.
Also WSL2 is fine, but I have the feeling they are only doing this because Windows was becoming the 3rd class development platform behind Linux and Mac. For modern development you need to be able to speak *nix, so MS did not have much of a choice here but to come up with some kind of solution.
Your last point is probably correct. Until WSL2 (and really WSLg) I didn't really consider having my dev machine run windows.
I also agree that the dark patterns garbage has to stop. If you want to shape my behavior, convince me it is in MY interest. If you are forcing my hand for your interests, I'll find someone better.
Same. After my third reinstall of Windows 10 thanks to broken forced updates I fully switched and I don't think I'll ever go back. I lost a lot of software compatibility but gained a sense of freedom, with an OS that doesn't feel like it's actively trying to ruin my day, but just...runs. Without doing anything weird by itself.
Exactly the same. I bought a new computer 2017, the telemetry, account nagging and forced auto updates + reboots became too much.
Updates could remove old Windows applications I had installed, change the default application association, or just break the installation. Every warning that I thoughtfully chose to dismiss came back with every update. Don't like to integrate your AV with the cloud? We will make sure you to warn you on every. single. update.
It felt like I didn't own the system nor that I was the administrator of it.
All this made me switch to Linux permanently. It made me take the steps from dualboot, VMs and experimentation.
For those few times per year when I need Windows, I connect a separate disk with Windows, boot it up and do my thing.
Usually the next time I come back to the computer, Windows has forcefully rebooted back to Linux. Thanks.
If Windows 11 requires an account, I guess I'll stick to my old Windows 10 installation until it stops working. Hopefully I won't need Windows for anything by then.
I am in the same boat, I dropped all Microsoft products in 2014. There is literally nothing I do with my PC for which I need Microsoft products. It's very unfortunate to keep seeing these things pop up. It's like MS does not care or value the users of the machines and their operating systems.
I switched to Linux entirely and used nothing else during approximately 2009-2014. I managed to do everything I wanted, including playing the latest games (with a bit of effort), and it felt so much better. What ultimately made me switch back was the lack of support for DX11 in Wine. I've heard that they've solved those problems now and gaming on Linux seems to be viable again.
I would love to switch back in response to this. Unfortunately, I've since transitioned to working fully remote and I worry using Linux for my work might not be viable.
i had pretty much the same feeling about not owning my computer anymore. someone person/people in redmond were deciding my computer should update and not me.
the last straw for me was one time when i had 10 minutes to kill before i headed out the door, so i sat down to do stuff on my computer, but when i turned out in it decided it wanted to update, and took most of the 10 minutes to do that. so dumb
Pretty much the same reasons why I also moved to Kubuntu. I fix computers for a living and even I found it a comfortable switch and actually find using Linux preferable to Windows 7. A lot of the command-line tools I use are faster and compiling software is a cinch. Thanks, Microsoft, for making my job easier.
I would love me to move to Linux completely. However healthy share of my income comes from my desktop products. And since I have tens of thousands of customers for those it would be a business suicide trying to convince them to use Linux. Even without it there are programs I use on Windows that are not available for Linux. So no, moving completely to Linux is currently unrealistic for me.
your can't just run the windows stuff in a VM? although it helps if you have a beefy enough system, otherwise it can be kind of sluggish if you have a lot of other things open in Linux as well. its a great way to keep windows at arms length though
using seamless mode in virtualBox is pretty neat too
>When Windows 10 came out, the telemetry, MS account features, forced auto updates/reboots made my computer feel like it was no longer my own.
Oh you don't know how good we have it. You just wait until Pluton comes out. Right now there is always a patch, a registry hack or some kind of modification that makes everything bearable. With Pluton you are 100% at the mercy of MS.
If it's true that Windows 11 (home or pro) requires me to create an online account, then I'm finally done with Windows at home. I really hope that it isn't, but it does seem like this has been coming since Windows 10.
I can understand from a company perspective that this kind of thing reduces piracy (and losses for a $2tn company), potentially improves the Windows upgrade route in future, and has minor benefits to some customers (cloud storage + 'take your account anywhere').
But there's exactly zero technical reasons to push this onto customers.
I mostly use Linux all the time now so it won't be a problem to completely ditch Windows, but it's a shame that it's come to this.
Do Microsoft care about piracy of Windows at the home level?
It feels like they just want that sweet recurring Office 365 and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate revenue, and they'll effectively give you Windows to get it.
Last I checked, you can still use an old used Windows 7 key to activate 10 on a brand new motherboard. They could stop it, but they don't make more than a token effort.
That's kind of my point. A $2tn company can probably just write off what little piracy there is left, even more so now that everything is "webby". So why they feel the need to add this to a platform they're now effectively giving away for free for the reasons you state is even more bizarre.
I guess data is the next billion dollar department in Microsoft, and this is them harvesting even more of it.
My reading of it is, it makes signing up to 365 and XBGPU as frictionless as possible. If you're already identified and authenticated by the time you're presented with the options...
If you force people to do it early in the process, you won't struggle to through that objection and difficulty when you want them to metaphorically pull out their wallets.
And to make advertising more targetted, again it's recurring revenue.
Well, I grabbed the current dev ISO and installed it in a VM. I could not find a way to login without an MS account.. however, I will admit I didn't try the "incorrect password for a windows account" to force it. Maybe I'll try that and see..
> I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
Yes, you will. Eventually. They'll continue to beat you down until you submit. Because, here's the secret. Even though you built the machine from the ground up, hand selecting all the parts, once you install Windows, the machine belongs to Microsoft. No, really, it does. They certainly think so. And they're a rich powerful organization, so it must be so.
Windows isn't anywhere near as ubiquitous as it used to be. Once W11 requires a MS login I'm not installing it for any friends or family - they're getting on the Linux express or working it out themselves.
I won't be party to this BS, this isn't the future I wanted to facilitate.
Both Android and iOS require an account to be practically useful for most people, and have for years. Microsoft is "only" following suit, and I'm afraid that a bunch of hackers here aren't enough to stop the tide :-/
There's a solution I put out there for my non-technical friends. I just tell them to buy two Android devices.
Obviously with iOS this won't work, but then again, iOS devices aren't cheap enough for this to be a reasonable approach anyway.
Device #1: Buy the cheapest device you can. I give my friends specific recommendations. Invent a new burner gmail account for it. Install whatever you want off the Play Store - obviously, use all the normal caution to avoid any malware. Never put any personal info on it, so never put a SIM card in it, just connect over wifi.
Device #2: Buy a nice Android device. Never sign in. Put the SIM card in this one. Side load apps and update them by extracting the APK from device #1. Export your contacts from Google and load them manually (and save a backup). Access your email using IMAP from a third party app. Backup your photos using a third party app. The point is _not_ to use Google Pay, Google Assistant, and Google Cloud.
• Google Maps works without being signed in
• Google Play Store will update Google Maps (and the default apps on the device) without being signed in, but it does use dark patterns to try to get you to sign in
• Android OS updates will work without being signed in
It is more work, no question. It works for me. Your mileage may vary. Disclaimer that I'm posting in kind of a hurry, so I'll just admit the details here probably don't make sense.
It's the same amount of effort for a desktop PC and desktop OS: apps have to do their own updating because I installed them myself. The sibling poster suggested using an alternative app store, which seems like a good way to make this less onerous, with the downside of more malware...
I want the same benefit as the desktop PC, specifically that I own it, control it, and don't have to sign in to use it.
An open source replacement for Android just can't put in the same level of effort as the entire Android ecosystem does, so LineageOS is at a fundamental disadvantage.
If I am going to go with a different OS than Android, I'll get a Librem so I'm paying the company that made the hardware AND software, with incentives aligned for me to be a supported, acknowledged user.
A free software android distribution doesn't need to put in the same level of effort as the entire android ecosystem does, considering it profits off the entire android ecosystem and probably isn't even in the same business as most distributors who allocate considerable resources towards making their devices as user hostile as possible. Therefore, lineageos has a fundamental advantage over all other vendors, as they can create a much better experience with a fraction of their competitors workforce and money.
I don't know when you last layed your eyes on a "competitive" android os spinoff, but I'm honestly shaken every time I see what other people have to endure on their mobile computers. It's a disgrace.
That is hardly a solution. You also act like by "inventing" a burner account that Google has no clue who you are, but that is simply not the case. If so their service would be overrun with spammers. Generally they require that you also verify a real phone number to setup an account.
Also, once you've done all this you can download APKs from Google Play Store without needing a burner phone. They've had extensions that do this for some time. Might as well just do it from the computer and or use an alternative app store.
If you really don't want someone to sign in to Google services, then there are ROMs made specifically for that. Have them use CardDav and CalDav. Use email with IMAP, etc. The route you've chose seems way too convoluted for no purpose other than the illusion that you're somehow unidentifiable.
> By purchasing a burner phone, I am definitely traceable by law enforcement
Well, it really depends on how you buy it and where you use it. Yes, they can locate your phone based on triangulation. However, you can buy a prepaid burner phone outside of your area and then use it to create a Google account and then make sure you are using a VPN when connecting from a residential location. However, I don't really see the use in buying a burner phone just to download APKs from. You can do the same without one. I agree, that it does work to accomplish what you mentioned but I was just trying to explain that there is a much easier route without the additional burden.
Then you're not one of those people I would recommend it to.
You seem to have missed the biggest part of why I recommend this to some people - never, ever put a SIM in the burner phone. It's just for that burner gmail address you use to get into the Google Walled Garden.
You don't need a separate Android device for that though. That was the point. You can do that with third-party extensions, websites, etc. Last but not least, in order to create a Google burner account you likely need a real phone number. Whenever you sign up for a Google account it asks you to verify a phone number.
At least on Android, they're not really hiding the option of not using an account as opposed to what microsoft is doing. Probably because most people will use one anyway for the play store.
This kind of behavior inspired me to finally make the switch to full-time Linux eight years ago. I've tried Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, and a handful of smaller distros. But with the Cinnamon desktop environment my day to day computing experience is truly enjoyable next to the constant slew of confirmation dialogs and dark patterns a Microsoft experience provides.
However - you're right. Whenever I want to play a video game, there's a 90% chance I have to use Windows to do it. So now I keep two computers - one for gaming, one for everything else. Each time I log into the gaming computer I'm reminded how much Windows sucks.
I just feel really bad for the average computer user who knows intuitively this is wrong but doesn't know how to do things like install linux or have the money to purchase an Apple machine.
I think you're vastly overestimating the average computer user here :) Most will make no meaningful distinction between a local account and an online one. If they could sign into Windows with their Facebook account they probably would.
'ownership' is just a term to mean the physical representation of your expensive hardware. When you install Windows you can't just use the parts that allow you to benefit from their hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work without giving them the data they also ask for before you can use it. Everyone is moving to this but it only works because people still want to reap the benefits of the investments these big companies have made, so for as long as people pay for the products/use the products they'll continue to make using Windows/iOS/Android such a value proposition with the "only" price being yout data. No amount of money can match what they'll get in share value from having that user data.
Microsoft can reset that password for you. Or, presumably, anyone that convincingly pretends to be you. Which is why I'm not going to tie my Windows login to an MS account.
One thing Microsoft does really well is passwordless logins. As long as you've set up MFA with the Microsoft Authenticator app, you won't need your Microsoft account password to log in ever again. Instead, when you log in, you receive a notification in your Authenticator app which lets you log in without a password.
Except on the Xbox. I turned mine on the other day and it requested that I re-enter my stupidly long, randomly generated password. There was no option to send an authorization email or use a code. Entering that password with an Xbox controller was a very unpleasant experience.
Would you mind sharing few of them? I use fingerprint reader on my phone and laptop, is there a reason I shouldn't? Face recognition is something I have a problem with. I don't like cameras, especially those you cannot unplug.
Fingerprints, as far as most readers are concerned, aren't too difficult to duplicate sufficiently.
You can obtain someone's fingerprints from photos, as the German defence minister found out years ago[1]. Also you leave them everywhere and your laptop is likely covered in them. You can't effectively change or revoke them.
You can reproduce them with varying levels of success with photoshop, a laser printer, gelatin and some home PCB etching gear.
And unlike passwords, there's no 5th amendment right covering them for Yanks. (The latter is debatable for passwords, but is absolutely not for fingerprints.)
They may be "good enough" security, depending on your threat model. But they're pretty shit for security, all things considered.
For biometrics in general, there's a huge list, starting from cannot change and therefore rely on the implementation, all the way down to hard to deny that I have access. While I can say, no, I don't have a password to this random device you are showing me, with biometrics, you can just wave it in front of my face and it unlocks. Maybe even when I am asleep / unconscious.
For the specific case here, about my laptop: for instance, I can't simply hand the notebook to my dad, _telling_ him the password and he's good to go. This is the downside where I can't simply share a (biometric) login, even if I want to. Which also means that every access automatically implies that it's really me, and not someone else I just gave quick access to without reconfiguring the system.
I see. I don't find the lack of ability to share a device as a problem, but I can understand your first point.
On a side note, I was thinking about using both - password/PIN (something I know and must be conscious to provide) AND a fingerprint. Sadly, Windows Hello can't be configured this way.
yea its a real shame that combining them isn't more common.
i would also like more granular control. like a pin+fingerprint when im connected to my home network and full passphrase when not, ie when im travelling or whatever. if i know I'm going to be home for the evening and nobody else is around it would be nice to not have to use anything at all
From the opinion piece: "I don’t know why Microsoft wants everyone to use an online login. I don’t know why Microsoft felt it had the right to treat its customers the way it did with the Get Windows 10 campaign or its six-year battle to push everyone to use online accounts."
I don't know the actual answer because I don't work for Microsoft but I'm lazy enough to assume it is about money. Its financially rewarding for Microsoft to have hordes of Home users online. That telemetry is valuable. Those eyeballs are valuable. That level of engagement is valuable. Its telling that Pro and Enterprise versions operate without the same level. Home users always online is worth Microsoft either enforcing or in the very least "encouraging" this state.
That is a sufficient theory for me. I might not have the full picture but its accurate enough to form opinions and predict Microsoft's future behavior. I'd expect multiple pathways around leveraging that online presence even further. You haven't seen anything yet. This is just the beginning.
My take is it reduces friction. It gets you signed in and authenticated once, at start up. From then on, you never have to see a signup box or login box or TFA token again for services in the ecosystem. At the moment this would be the MS Store, Gamepass, and via Gamepass Electronic Arts. I imagine it will end up in the Edge browser as well... when a header identifies a Windows browser, automatically start the OpenID authentication dance with the Microsoft servers without even giving you the option to 'login with Google/Facebook/3rdPlace'.
> I don't know the actual answer because I don't work for Microsoft but I'm lazy enough to assume it is about money. Its financially rewarding for Microsoft to have hordes of Home users online. That telemetry is valuable. Those eyeballs are valuable. That level of engagement is valuable.
Knowing every user is signed in and authenticated means they can develop new features as a (connected) subscription service. They can attribute usage and bill you for it. That's what it's about IMO. All new features, even ones that should be part of the core OS, will eventually be subscription services. I bet anyone using a free account will be getting their last feature update when they install Windows 11.
I've seen the exact scenario play out over and over with SaaS. Windows with forced logins is essentially SaaS and they can use the same dirty tactics to make you pay forever if you want a usable product.
It could backfire with an OS though. I'd be pretty excited for a version of Windows that doesn't get any new features or have any "online" features.
This makes me want to move back to Linux, but last time I tried Ubuntu (2020) there were lots of little annoyances. Off the top of my head:
- Screen tearing. I Googled around and installed the Nvidia drivers for my laptop, but it never went away.
- No detection of tablet mode.
- No auto screen rotation.
- Slow Blender rendering. Probably a PEBKAC with my driver setup, but it just worked in Windows and it was easy to select Nvidia vs. integrated graphics.
- MS Teams shared my desktop as a giant blur.
- LibreOffice is still bad and incompatible with what my company does in Office, though that may matter less with Office Online.
Is there a distro that Just Works more so than Ubuntu? I'm sure I could have solved all of the above with enough time and effort, but I'm not in a good position to do that right now.
As a long time Windows user that tried Linux in the past with no avail, I finally found my love in Manjaro KDE. Because it is based on Arch, it is closer to cutting edge which is a good thing wrt hardware support. I especially love that you can just switch kernels from the GUI.
The good thing is that it Arch with safety belts, with a wide array of curated packages. If you feel more adventurous, you can also reach out for arch packages from the same package manager.
Being on KDE means I am ahead of Windows.
Using MS Teams in ungoogled chromium for maximum privacy works.
I have no experience with Nvidea drivers, but I see a lot of hits at disabling the Nouveau driver. But again, this might be solved with running a more recent kernel.
It's not as simple as Windows, but my time investment to read the release notices is minimal. An other benefit is that your system doesn´t slow as your os install ages.
I tried Manjaro recently - just in time to run into the Nvidia update disaster (black screen on boot, broken X-server due to system update). And no amount of fiddling with the config files and nouveau / proprietary drivers brought the system back into a usable state. So back to Ubuntu it was...
I'm not arguing that this will necessarily fix your woes as I have no experience with any Nvidia hardware but one of the greatest but in hindsight obvious discoveries I made with regards to management of my Arch based system was discovering how to downgrade packages. Once you know how to do this, it's a lot less painful having to deal with broken updates - which are pretty rare anyway.
I personally cannot stand using Ubuntu and it seems I'm not alone in that regard. I hear nonstop issues with it from my friends who tried it and I attribute a lot of failed Linux converstions of people thanks to it.
Same exact experience here. Now I get why people told me to avoid rolling release distros.
I used Manjaro entirely because of its i3/bspwm DE versions. Ubuntu now has a good equivalent in the form of regolith. Avoid Manjaro if you care about long term system stability
- Give Pop!_OS a try. It's main selling point is that it just works with modern hardware.
Aside, don't expect switching OS-es to be a walk in the park. Most things will work as good as on windows. You'll probably have to do some custom configuration for your laptop. Tweaks for your specific laptop model will be documented on the arch wiki.
I don't know. I installed Linux Mint three years ago and it was kinda of a walk in the park. Only now I don't have to take care of my OS (why is it slow? What are those things running on startup? Is this malware? Etc. Is this program legit?). It just gets out of the way.
I'm a long-time Linux user and my job is to develop open source software primarily used on Linux. My suggestion to you is to get a Mac. I'm not aware of any Linux distros that are suitable for non-developers. I wish it was otherwise, but it just isn't.
Actually I put Linux on my mother's laptop. Since then the amount of support calls got down to nothing. Her use is of course limited to just web browsing / email.
> I'm not aware of any Linux distros that are suitable for non-developers
This is quite a bold statement. I'm not a developer and recently installed a number of linux distros to try which is best. Some of them were actually easier to install than Windows or MacOS. For example Linux Mint was a breeze, and I used full disk encryption and other 'advanced' settings.
I think it depends on what you do with it. I have a linux machine which I use primarily for Steam and watching movies, and I feel like anyone could do it (except for the install of course, you would need a technical friend for that)
So for some quick background, I currently operate a number of Linux PCs. 3 GUI workstations at work. 2 headless servers (one at work, one at home). 2 desktop PCs (one at work, one at home). I also have multiple laptops running Linux (including a Dell XPS with Nvidia graphics), and I have a PinePhone (Linux phone).
I say this from the bottom of my heart as someone that loves Linux: If you have a laptop with Nvidia graphics - don't bother trying to run Linux. The experience is just miserable.
There are two major things in the way:
1) Nvidia's drivers themselves are not very good and present day-to-day problems (like screen tearing and other artifacting), especially when trying to use Wayland (the next generation window manager on Linux). This may be fixed soon, Nvidia has been finally laying the groundwork for better compatibility with Wayland desktop. Alternately, if all you need is X11, then go ahead and don't bother with Wayland, which sidesteps this problem nicely. But if you have a higher DPI display and want decent display scaling, or ever plug into an external display, unfortunately Wayland is a necessity, and currently, it's miserable with Nvidia.
2) Power management/graphics switching is a miserable experience. There is prime render offload, but it's not very intelligent. Which means you have to remember to start applications with a flag every time you want to use the Nvidia GPU, which introduces all kinds of bugs. Alternately, you can just leave the Nvidia GPU as default, but that introduces more bugs (for instance, on my XPS, it killed my audio because somehow the Nvidia GPU took over audio output and after months of trying, I still couldn't fix it). Furthermore, it completely drains your battery. This is something that is almost certainly not going to be fixed.
On desktop, Linux is 95%-99% usable. On an Intel or AMD laptop, it's the same way. But on a laptop with Nvidia graphics, it's just not worth the headache. There's no complete solution, there's only tradeoffs.
That said, I recommend openSUSE Leap as an OS, because I find it's the best of all the tradeoffs. It's very stable, there's a corporation behind it that needs to keep it running. The release cycle is nice for desktop. YaST makes things very easy to manage the PC. The only real "tradeoffs" are that you need to install AV codecs from a community repository, and Nvidia drivers from a community repository (both are easily enabled through YaST).
Elementary OS is positioning itself a Linux distro that Just Works TM, but I haven’t used it anywhere near as much as Ubuntu/Gnome so I can’t definitively say.
For what it's worth, Elementary OS is really a cool OS as long as you don't expect to be able to customize it. Its UI and ergonomics are really different from the Gnome/KDE/XFCE and is really consciously designed.
The trade of is that you have to love it or hate it because you can barely change anything, but it deserves to be loved. I'm back to Windows for an undetermined span of time but I'll gladly reinstall ElementaryOS as soon as I can probably pay for it.
How is it really different from GNOME? The interface looks like modified GNOME, the apps look similar to their GNOME counterparts, and they even refer GNOME in their HIG.
It's just simply not Gnome at all. It's not even a fork. Most of the base apps are developed by the ElementaryOS team (with their own framework on top of Gtk) and they are really impressive.
So, listing differences with Gnome would be like comparing Gnome & KDE.
I had the issue with Screen Tearing, its baffling to me that out of the box Windows with no GPU drivers for AMD/Nvidia does not suffer from this issue, yet this issue has existed on Linux since the dawn of time.
However, moving from Ubuntu to Manjaro (KDE Plasma) based on recommendation from someone on HN, oh it almost /just works/ without issues. There's just little gotchas along the way but atleast it doesn't make me want to tear my hair out like Ubuntu flavours do.
Sounds like you have a more complex 2in1 setup.
Linux isn't great for those since those system are heavily designed to be used with Windows and will require the Linux community to play catchup and implement the correct drivers for Linux to play nice on it.
Recommend a simpler laptop that is well known to work well with Linux. There are resources out there to determine how well Linux will run on it before purchase.
I just worry about people swearing off Linux forever when they can't successfully install Linux on their Microsoft Duo Surface that just released a month ago, and then they post about the horrible time they had with Linux.
In the past decade I have never had any troubles installing Ubuntu on any computer I've owned. It is plug and play most of the time! But nobody talks about when things work just fine :)
pop os seems to work better out of the box than ubuntu. i use pop myself and screen rotation works ok (x1 yoga gen4) but i get screen taring every once in a while.
zorin os is another one to check out. ui is more like windows and i think it has a tablet mode
I agree! Linux Mint is very easy to install and to use. I tried both the ubuntu and debian flavours and I love the simplicity and elegance of cinnamon.
This requirement just does not make sense to me. Why would Microsoft even have this requirement? Do they want to force users into an account so it is easier to lead them into Office packages? It can't be for greater data profiles on users since they could do this in other less explicit ways. Microsoft just doesn't have the ecosystem like Apple to make this worthwhile from their point of view or the users.
To be honest, I think it’s as simple as it being a better experience for the type of people who would buy the Home edition.
Forcing them to log in with a MS account allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices. For one thing, both those devices pretty much require an online account as well. And they contain far more sensitive data.
But more importantly, they also provide frictionless backups, syncing, and a whole host of online services as table stakes, and MS wants to do the same.
"I think it’s as simple as it being a better experience for the type of people who would buy the Home edition.
... allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices.
This. 100 times.
The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.
Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.
We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.
Android devices give the users this choice. Android devices are definitely made for regular consumers.
Already, on Windows 10, all normal users used an MS account. The only way to get around it was to set up a computer without internet and then click some non obvious buttons while the computer begged for an MS account. If the goal was making it easy for normal users to have an MS account, Windows 10 succeeded.
The change here is that power users no longer have the choice to not use a cloud account. This change provides no benefit to the average user.
Another big one is being able to reset your laptop password without having to take your PC into the shop for someone to break into it. And if you turned on Bitlocker let's hope that they saved their recovery key or escrowed it to their MS account.
This is the biggest feature for my relatives who no longer feel dependent on a "tech person" to help them out.
> The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.
(Smart)phones and tablets are not computing devices any more than a refrigerator. You cannot do any real work on them. Even finding a text editor, let alone editing, is a challenge. Other stuff like SW development or CAD/CAE is the same.
> Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.
Nothing to do with it. Just pure control and data collection.
> We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.
We are back in the 1960 with disabled user interfaces. When you need to search the internet to disable dark patterns is the same like reading the source code to check with which options to invoke the shell.
This is obviously and objectively untrue, and this attitude contributes to the exact problem that’s being pointed out above.
You can make a decent and convincing argument that consumer devices should be more open without trivialising the (very much real) work that many, many millions of users do with them.
> (Smart)phones and tablets are not computing devices any more than a refrigerator. You cannot do any real work on them.
Nonsense, of course you can. 'Real work' isn't just programming or whatever. Writers, painters and musicians do plenty of 'real work' on tablets and such.
Agreed. However I would just like to point out that since Apple refuses to provide a proper file shell or means to manage your files across applications on iPads (and iPhones as far as I'm aware) without resorting to some type of cloud situation, I prefer to use DAWs that run on native os systems like windows or macOS.
> Forcing them to log in with a MS account allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices. For one thing, both those devices pretty much require an online account as well. And they contain far more sensitive data.
The online account option let's MS provide these services. Forcing the account prevents users from opting out. Even on iOS, it is possible to use an iPhone without an Apple account. An iPhone b without an Apple account is severely handicapped by the inability to sideload apps. On Android it is not hard to set up an account without logging in to Google.
All true, but I also think it's kind of missing the point of the article a bit: which isn't that a Microsoft account is bad in itself, or even a bad default, but rather that they go out of their way to make it as hard as possible for you to opt-out of a Microsoft account as you need to play all sort of non-obvious tricks to do so. They could just have some small text with "no thanks" and a popup "you'll miss out on sync, backup, etc. are you sure?"
The objections are more abstract, as in "it's my bloody computer, allow me to do what I bloody want!" Well... Microsoft says no apparently.
Password recovery seems like another big reason to push this. Many consumers don't really have any tech support, aside from vendors like Dell or HP. With an MS account, Microsoft can manage this process.
How about security ? If MS needs to know your password than you can leave your computer without any password. Security is the same. Or you never heard of Solar Winds ?
So because you can log into a website with your Google account and theoretically this means that a malicious Google could log in as you this means you might as well let anyone log in as you?
Most consumers buy their PCs from big box vendors who can help with password recovery and whatnot. Microsoft might do it better, sure, but why would they want to pick up the cost of doing it themselves when they've been outsourcing it to OEMs for so long?
I disagree that most PC vendors are capable or good at helping consumers reset passwords of local Windows accounts. This is not a trivial process, take a look at the HP support page on this issue.
It's unlikely that people with Windows Home have a password reset disk and there's likely only the one account on the machine. That leaves them with "have a computer repair service recover your local password" or "reset your computer". In my opinion, the majority of people would be better served by a Microsoft account, where Microsoft can handle the reset through their website, rather than a password reset disk or wiping their machine in desperation.
Also note how excited HP is to get out of the business of handling this very situation.
> HP recommends using a Microsoft account for signing into Windows. Using a Microsoft account offers many benefits, including easy password recovery. If you currently have a local user account, consider switching to a Microsoft account after recovering or changing your current password.
> the type of people who would buy the Home edition
I haven't looked particularly into the differences between 'normal' Windows 10 and the other tiers but in the past, 'professional' versions were actually missing things (codecs etc.) that you'd want on a general usage PC.
As far as I know Windows 10 Pro has everything home has and more. You may be thinking of enterprise editions when you mention missing consumer features.
I am sure there are more, but the only things I know of that are in Pro and not Home are BitLocker and full Hyper-V. You still get WSL2 and Docker using Hyper-V under the hood on Home. There is also the Active Directory support, but unlikely an individual user cares much about that.
I can't really think of anything missing from Pro.
It already takes a lot of effort to configure Win10 with a local account; so much so that there's basically zero chance of somebody doing it by accident.
In addition to what others have said, Microsoft accounts back up your full disk encryption keys to the cloud.
Microsoft ships Bitlocker with every OS and given the TPM requirements one can speculate that it will be turned on by default on every Windows 11 computer.
I've seen an increase of tech support posts where people boot up their computer after an update or motherboard change and they're asked for Bitlocker decryption keys and they don't know what those are. Their data is lost forever. Their computers are bricked.
The experience of working in IT and modding online tech communities has taught me that computer literacy is very poor even among those who use computers every day. They're just appliances to most people. And this is OK. The problem is that the people who can't figure out what a right click does will never figure out how to back up their full disk encryption keys or even what they are.
Forcing a Microsoft account on Home SKUs eliminates this problem.
This is how Chromebooks work. A Google account is needed to sign-in. The motive is not mysterious -- I don't believe it is security, it is pushing free services to collect more data. We all know that selling people's data is deliriously profitable.
Of course, people will create less-attributable accounts.
Hopefully it will have to be disintegrated for enterprise customers who aren't going to use Microsoft accounts, and presumably for everybody. Antitrust prosecution might also help.
I suspect they are testing the waters and see how far they can go with W11. If there is enough outrage about a particular issue, they will simply drop it.
OneDrive, Edge (if you're into it) and setting sync.
What do you mean it does not makes sense? I am not using MS login myself but saying it doesn't make sense is ridiculous.
It's exactly same as what Apple does.
As for people who say it's required on Windows: It's not. You can create local account during setup, the link is there once you cancel your online login. It's hidden at first, but it's there. You don't even have to disconnect your internet or anything like that. Shit move by MS (dark UI pattern) but it is totally possible.
On Windows 10 Home, in latest releases, you actually need to disconnect the cable to get the move on without a Microsoft account links to show up. Word on the street is Windows 11 is going to make them actually mandatory on Home, instead of only pretend mandatory with lots of prompting.
I don't know about windows, but the comment you're replying to says microsoft encourages you to set up a online account (which I suspect most people outside of a domain would actually want), but allows you to set up a local account.
Yes it's a Dark UI pattern, but I have a feeling Apple do the same thing (I haven't set an apple laptop up for 8 years so my memory is vague)
It's possible to use the iCloud password instead of your local account password, but it's very opt-in and not at all suggested by default. Signing into iCloud doesn't replace anything about your local accounts besides that.
God damn it how many times I have to say it: it's not required on Windows as well! You click cancel, then click tiny link at bottom to create local account. You are talking about things you have no idea about man.
In the latest releases of Win 10 Home, at least once you have connected to the network, that button does not exist. They prompt you to enter your WiFi info first, then ask you to log in. And once you have entered the WiFi info you cannot get back to that screen and remove it until after you have set everything up. At least not without a factory reset, which I didn't actually try.
They force you to log in with a MS account during the initial setup then once you are in you can add a local admin account. Then you can log into it and remove the MS account. Its absolutely horrible.
I have been dealing with this a lot lately, had several laptops that were Home and could not get in to them without the MS account. Its a huge pain.
It seems you'll have to say it many times more untill this dark pattern will be removed. Apple uses the same teqchinque to trick you into using iCloud making it look like requrement for use your iPhone. For my taste it is cheating and dsigusting because even when you know it can be avoided you should work hard to find it especially when you are in a hurry and this trouble is by "design".
You can say it however many times you want, but you are wrong. You would have been right had you been talking about Windows 10 Home ~1-2 years ago.
But today, Windows 10 Home only gives you the option to login with a local account if you are offline (no cable, no WiFi) or you fail to login to an MS account multiple times. Only in one of those cases do they give you a small, relatively hidden option to use the local account.
There is zero-touch enterprise provisioning available, that requires you to be connected to a suitably configured local network (if learns about what it needs from dhcp tags), but this is not something that normal users need to be concerned about. For a non-MDM-managed mac, you can do everything offline just fine. Or you can be online, if you do not want to use iCloud account (I'm not using it either), you can finish the OOBE wizard and everything will be just like the user wants.
Yes. Well, BitLocker is in Pro, Pro for Workstations and Enterprise. Same for Hyper-V, if that matters to you; not available in Home.
Home edition is for non-commercial use. I don't know if that's in the EULA or not, but that's the use case that Home is meant for.
Pro and higher are for work use cases, and features add on as you go up the line. Pro for Workstations and Enterprise support slightly different feature sets, IIRC. Creating new ReFS filesystems is only available on Pro for Workstations, for example.
The other benefits of Pro for Workstations is a higher RAM limit (2TB vs 6TB) and socket count (2 CPU sockets vs 4 CPU sockets), NVDIMM-N support, and SMB Direct. Not normally features that would be missed on a normal PC.
I know the post is about Windows 11 but I installed Windows 10 for someone on a laptop about 2 months ago and it had the most crazy dark pattern I've ever seen to be able to proceed past the installation screen without a Microsoft account.
Short of not connecting to the internet first the only way I saw where it was possible to create an offline account was to first attempt to sign in using an incorrect password with a hotmail account. It was only after failing that where an option appeared to create a local account.
It doesn't stop there too. Now once in a while when they turn the machine on and reach the login screen, there's a big banner that says something along the lines of "Hey, you're missing out on very important features and are less secure by not registering an account with Microsoft..." with a call to action to link a MS account. This also hides the login screen by default and the only way to ignore that and get to the login screen is to click somewhere in the empty space but for a non-technical user this isn't intuitive. They always try to click the only thing that looks clickable. It's so shady.
Sadly I had to make a MS account for them in the end to unlock Windows "S" mode into a regular version of Windows 10 Home so I could install an app that wasn't in the app store on their machine. The only way to do that was to make a MS account for the Microsoft Store but fortunately you can still login to Windows itself with the offline account. It never ends.
Microsoft really is one of the worst examples in the dark pattern department that I've ever seen.
Same with their email service, where you can register an account without issues and after a few weeks of use I was presented with an unskippable input field for my phone number. Don't want to give MS your phone number? Too bad, better hope you don't need those emails anymore.
LinkedIn is so full of dark patterns that there is barely room for the site any more. I keep missing recruiter messages because my LinkedIn email just goes to spam because they send so much junk to try and boost engagement. It’s like being stuck in a room with a car salesperson. I’m thinking of deleting it
Linkedin used to ask you to pay them to view public profiles if you were logged in, but if you logged out you could see the profile just fine since it was public. And there was no limit to that either, didn't need to get there from google etc. Not sure if they still do that.
I really don't get it. Microsoft has an OS and a Cloud (Azure and Windows) and make pretty much good money with it, but both have a great need for privacy. I really don't get what Microsoft is thinking.
Microsoft is thinking that Apple somehow manages to have billions of people creating "iTunes" accounts, and they don't, and what the hell, John, why don't WE get all that sweet data and them big account numbers, can't we do what they do? Sure, Bob, but some people will get upse--Screw them, John! what they gonna do, move to Apple and pay more get the same treatment? Just fix the damn process, John, I want those account numbers up 300% by Q3.
....actually you do not need an iCloud account to use a mac or iPhone, but on iPhone you do need an iCloud account to download apps. On mac you can setup and use the machine entirely offline forever.
The same irony goes for the Windows 11 CPU support, the next version of macOS supports machines twice as old as Windows 11 supports. Microsoft embraces alt payment methods in the store and supports regulation, Apple doesn't and is the monopoly. The world is upside down in such strange ways in 2021.
> you do not need an iCloud account to use a mac or iPhone
... but you are similarly prompted and dark-patterned to create one anyway. It is just marginally easier to skip the choice, if you don't mind being nagged or diving into the buried option you need to switch it all off. And without an account, loads of features like family Screen Time don't even work.
Apple paved the way, while MS was being cautious because of the browser-related legal challenges. They made all this socially acceptable, so at one point the guys in Redmond rightly went "why can't we do the same?" and here we are.
Microsoft started the majority of this back in Windows 8 and made it a dark pattern to skip in 10, this isn't really an Apple thing. The whole industry moved this way.
Windows 11 breaks the bar here and requires internet now. It's not a dark pattern or skippable like you are implying here and it's not on remotely the same level as Apple or Google. Microsoft clearly is being the worst of anyone here.
They aren’t afraid of those legal issues any more. They basically say Firefox is malware if you try to install it and you have to click that you are okay with insecure software to continue
you would think, but that's not the case. It's used to correlate data sharing between data brokerages. Facebook has your number, Twitter has your number, Microsoft has your number. What better FK to link all this data together than that? Now Microsoft knows what you searched for. Twitter knows what you bought on Amazon. Facebook knows who you hung out with. It's all about the data brokerages.
Obviously it can be for more than one purpose. See spam reports from email1@outlook.com with phone number $x? Disable sending email for all accounts with that phone number. They've already signed up for three accounts this month with that number? Stop them from making any more without paying for a new number.
I mean, sure, it can be used this way. Often is for email deduplication of accounts. It's real strength comes from 3rd party data brokers and correlating various data profiles to you, the consumer.
I'd be very surprised if these companies actually share the private data with each-other (or any external party for that matter). I worked at a FAANG and they take private data handling very seriously (you can't even access it internally without a very involved approval process and always partially).
They don’t share it directly with each other, it’s through data brokers. Oracle being the biggest (here in the states) along with Experian, equifax, etc. I’m not talking about platform specific data. I’m talking about browser history, cookies, transactional, and the like. I know for a fact that one FAANG uses your browsers history to run adtech against it to show you relevant ads related to a previous search. Just because you couldn’t access it, doesn’t mean someone else wasn’t.
I'd be very surprised if these companies actually share the private data with each-other (or any external party for that matter).
They share it with "trusted partners." Which means data brokers. It's like money laundering, but for information. Look for the word "partners" in the small text of anything you commit to from signing up for e-mail to installing software to buying a car.
It literally injects a "are you really, definitely sure you want to switch away from Edge?" kind of entry in the top search results when you use the preinstalled Edge to look up another browser. That is absolutely a dark pattern in my book, of the manipulative and desperate kind. Not to mention the constant struggle to (re)set your favorite browser as default where Windows fights you at every corner in pretty much the most extreme way that Microsoft can hope to get away with unless they want to risk sanctions from the EU.
That's how I lost my GMail account - they demanded a telephone number so I relented and gave them mine, but they refuse to accept it. They won't take my work number either.
Phone numbers have become the new SSN tied to your physical identity. In most cases you have provide extremely detailed personal info to get a working phone number. There are probably still some ways crafty folks can get a working phone number without it being tied to your physical identity, but you must go way out of your way to do so.
Privacy and freedom of speech are dead, long live the constitution.
The saddest thing is that many HN readers (and the tech community in general) have been instrumental in privacy's demise.
Despite paying lip service to privacy, many people here still work on privacy-eroding companies and services.
How many people here work Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or LinkedIn, Palantir, etc... (not to mention less well-known names that still erode privacy).. probably a lot.
Many founders (another group heavily represented on HN) are just after their pot of gold at the end of the IPO, and will gleefully walk over as many users' backs as it takes.
In some ways worse, though, are the people who are intimately familiar with technology, and who are enabling the people at the top. These people all have a choice of who to work for and what to do. No one's holding a gun to their head making them work on tracking and spyware and user-disempowerment, and yet they do.
It's frustrating for sure but the reason that they want a phone number is because it's an excellent key to join lots of independent records about you. The companies who ask for your phone number don't care if the phone company knows where you live. They don't even need to ask the phone company, all they have to do is join up with a vendor who you did disclose your address to.
You can at least do yourself a mild favor and don't tell your phone number to all those brick n mortar companies who ask for it. "we'll never call you" -- of course they don't, they just want your individual identity to track you.
I got my account reported and locked on twitter and they would only unlock it if I supplied my phone number. Now I have no twitter and am honestly happier for it.
AFAIK many mail providers have disabled password authentication via IMAP/SMTP. They force you to go through oauth flow (ie. opening a webview to log in).
IMAP does accept plain text passwords, but this is not a real security threat either because of TLS. I hate all the FUD security blogs that tell you otherwise. This "industry" has become extremely useless and doesn't even give sensible security advice anymore.
Yes, of couse 2FA is theoretically better. Until facebooks leaks half a billion phone numbers + account information. That is a vastly more serious threat.
I don't know a single case where TLS was compromised from an IMAP client. Perhaps if it is 15 years old? I hate this industry so damn much. People should be homeless, not security advisers...
>I don't know a single case where TLS was compromised from an IMAP client. Perhaps if it is 15 years old? I hate this industry so damn much. People should be homeless, not security advisers...
You're thinking of the wrong threat model. They're not concerned about passwords being stolen being in transit, but rather using the IMAP endpoint for credential stuffing attempts. An IMAP login attempt contains very little zero metadata, so it's very hard to judge whether it's legitimate or not. With a web login you can get tons of stuff to judge the authenticity of the user, eg. fingerprinting.
On a related note: people like criticizing Telegram because its encryption is "not industry standard". Except Telegram has existed for 8 years now, and MTProto encryption still hasn't been compromised.
Same with Google. Same with Apple. Each I feel are worse than MS. The other day I tried using an iPad and could not proceed without signing in, and giving over my credit card details. The dark pattern being that it tricks you into thinking that you _can_ proceed without either.
It is a shame to watch the decline of Windows. There isn't much I can recommend to non-technical users looking affordable computing relatively under their control. Manipulation and user hostility is unacceptable.
Any of these possibilities would be nice:
* The market presents a kinder (and equally-affordable x86) solution and users follow.
* ReactOS lurches leaps and bounds ahead.
* Microsoft realises this trajectory is wrong and rows back.
* Everyone wakes up and realises that Stallman was right.
For the foreseeable, none are likely. What we really need is something to go horribly wrong that demonstrates practically why remote control and data collection of your own system is a bad idea. That will be the only way the point is driven home for the passive masses, unfortunately.
Running native Linux for non-technical users ends up being a great move as long as the programs they want to run work on it. For example imagine a retired non-technical person who occasionally trades stocks. Even major trading platforms like Interactive Brokers have native Linux clients.
Non-technical users want a stable system that doesn't constantly change. Windows loves to hit you with popup notices or UI changes where if you take the "ok" route things about your system change, or you accidentally click a notification that comes up and suddenly your browser is changed or worse. They also don't want to turn on their machine and have to wait 30 minutes for an "important update". They just want to turn their machine on and have it be exactly how it was yesterday.
A non-technical person I know thought he was hacked and wanted to buy a new computer because a shortcut icon was moved from his desktop to his recycle bin and he thought someone wiped out his computer. Now in Microsoft's defense they didn't delete his shortcut, but that's the type of mindset non-technical folks have. The slightest change is a catastrophic event.
> Non-technical users want a stable system that doesn't constantly change.
...and you're recommending Linux Desktop for that? An operating system famous for breaking compatibility with itself every 2 years or so? Not to mention between distros. I mean, I suppose you can just leave them on some arbitrary un-updated version of Ubuntu forever, but the same could be said for Windows 2000.
> I mean, I suppose you can just leave them on some arbitrary un-updated version of Ubuntu forever, but the same could be said for Windows 2000.
Certain programs they run won't work on old operating systems like Windows 7 or 2000 but they work on Windows 10 and Linux. Running an unmaintained old copy of Windows 7 would be pretty bad for someone non-technical because if they decide to ever go-to a questionable site of their choosing, chances are they will get themselves in trouble with a virus / malware.
You can run Xubuntu 20.04 LTS for a few years with unattended updates turned on so they get automated non-UI breaking security patches. Then when it goes EOL upgrade to the next LTS, or even turn on unattended upgrades too with a stipulation that something might change once every few years instead of twice a week. It's a really good environment IMO.
Lmfao, it's 2021. Stop parroting this tired meme. Linux runs beautifully if you aren't doing anything crazy with it.
I say this as a sysadmin responsible for maintaining a small fleet, the majority of which are Linux boxes. I've wasted far more hours helping end users with OS-level problems on Windows and, to a lesser extent, macOS. This is in spite of the fact that, again, the majority of the machines I manage run Linux, and all of these users are similar in technical capability.
Give it a try yourself. I'm sure a lot has changed since you last used it. Oh, and make sure you pick something that holds your hand a bit like Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Mint, or EndeavourOS.
I've been using Linux Desktop on and off for 2 decades now, have contributed to open source projects on Linux, have built my own Linux distro, and was once president of a LUG. It is my personal opinion that it isn't a good desktop operating system. You're free to disagree, but don't assume that I have no idea what I'm talking about.
And you might have been slightly more persuasive by not being a condescending ass, but that's asking a lot of a Linux Desktop evangelist in my experience.
This is misleading, as you can always turn on security updates, and turn off applications upgrades.
I don't even know that's possible on Windows (I guess answer is a loud and clear NO)
Debian Stable typically gets ~3 years of official security updates, but then in reality the LTS project is excellent and probably gives you two more years, and now there's also the ELTS project that might give you two more beyond that.
Which major commercial OS has a realistic expectation today of getting security updates for so long without being forced to change other parts of your system that you like as they are? Windows did, if you go back to the days when Microsoft published product lifecycle information many years into the future, before 10 deliberately broke that whole model and the stability that came with it.
MacOS averages 3-4 years too. My point was just that if you want a user experience that never changes and only gets security updates, Linux isn’t the answer either (as the great-grandparent comment implied). At most, if you luckily sync up with an LTS version, you get a couple more years.
I just set up Ubuntu 20.04 with Unity which is still there, and it looks exactly the same as the 14.04 it replaced. Might not be there in 22.04, who knows. But even switching to Ubuntu Gnome is less of a difference than the Win7 -> Win8 -> Win10 transition I had to guide some older family members through.
Non-server Windows editions, at least before 10, had security updates for almost 10 years. And new software often continues to function on old versions of Windows for far longer.
I wasn’t trying to imply that Ubuntu has longer support than windows, only that it doesn’t constantly make breaking changes. If you want you can use it and update once every five years and have a fairly stable desktop.
Sure, if you don't count all the software that no longer has a package in the latest version's repo and therefore is no longer available. Oh and whatever features GNOME decided to remove this time.
I suppose I don’t have enough experience because I stick to the latest LTS.
I agree that the Linux desktop has its shortcomings, but I still feel that it would be a great option for plenty of people who default to windows today. Especially if they spend most of their time in the browser as it is.
I’ve been a happy Ubuntu user for several years now and I’m not a tinkerer or anything, though I am more technical than the group we have been talking about.
In other words: people hate updates. Especially so if those updates don't give them anything new but just move stuff around instead.
That's what everyone working in IT should understand. No, you can't "always push an update". Always treat your every single release like your last one because there will be many people who will stick with that version.
It would also help if decision makers at large organizations would stop forcing everyone into Microsoft products such as Teams, Outlook, etc., when much better alternatives exist.
I'm over in Mac-land so a bit unclear on the state of things, but it seems like the problem must be marketing by now, right? I can't think of any use cases for mainstream users where Windows is a requirement.
Graphic designers, digital art types, and musicians are all fringe and mostly on Mac anyway. PC gamers are a fringe crowd. Practically all productivity software has migrated to the cloud. Desktop Linux usability seemed to meet the standard of Windows XP and Windows 7 years ago.
Is the problem really that you still have to grapple with graphics drivers on the CLI? Or is it just that Best Buy and CostCo still don't have motivation to put shiny Linux machines on the shelves?
and yeah I know all about the various shady Gates/Ballmer-era OEM deals… I just can't believe that not one OEM has snapped by now.
Linux simply has too many rough edges still exposed to appeal to a lot of less technical users. Even in the best case scenario (super standard desktop with hardware well supported by FOSS drivers), there’s always some odd thing that requires one to pull out the terminal, usually because UI functionality was insufficient or failed to work as expected.
That does not bother me or probably most of us on HN much, but for most people it’s like periodically needing to muck around under the hood of their car. It’s too much, they just want to drive and take the vehicle in to get oil and brake changes every once in a fairly long while. Anything more is tedious overhead.
The situation with proprietary drivers still kinda stinks too. The distros I’ve seen handle it best are Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers control panel and pop!_OS which just sidesteps the issue altogether for Nvidia hardware by shipping an ISO with non-free Nvidia drivers included, but the rest just leave you with a package manager, terminal, and whatever you can scrounge up on the internet. Yeah it’s technically the responsibility of Nvidia, etc to fix that, but it’s negatively impacting adoption nonetheless.
When I buy a computer, Windows 10 is installed as default. You have to go out of your way to get a computer which hasn't. I think it's as easy as that.
I've setup Linux on all machines I own or maintain, for all users including my wife. The frequency of hickups is not higher than it was with Windows and It's easy to roll back to a known good configuration, much easier than with Windows. I never looked back.
Edited to add: The last machine I bought was a Purism laptop. The first machine which did not have Windows pre-installed.
Wow, never seen those figures before… well forgive my American myopia. I would still describe American PC gamers as “fringe”, but I had thought the Asian market was similarly leaning toward console players, clearly that is incorrect.
Perhaps I’ve just become “one of those people”, but I honestly think if not for the buzz around the M1 from Apple, we would be seeing a lot more activity on the Linux side.
“The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.
Linux needs killer app equivalents. Many of the foss versions of windows programs have pretty painful UX or are missing key features (eg, smart select in gimp is really frustrating to use vs photoshop or affinity). Foss really needs to start tempting designers to participate more
It's worse than that. The desktop efforts are heavily fragmented and arguably the leader, RedHat's "Gnome", while quite polished, is actually quite user hostile (e.g. works very differently to anything else, perhaps to dodge patents; and constantly changes/removes popular features). Linux needs to have a standardised "platform" with stable APIs.
It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y."
If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead.
It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.
XFCE is honestly a mediocre middle ground between the actual minimalism of a window manager or the better functionality of say kde.
Most fragmentation is actually entirely different software with the same end goal as opposed to actual forks and it's not really clear that the developer of foo would have joined forces with the developer of bar had he not started his own project.
It’s not user hostile, I love gnome. It might slow down if you don’t reboot (could be a hibernation or suspend issue?) but the Ux is great. Windows is a nuisance after using gnome. You do need to install some addons that should be built in
The 'desktop' is an outmoded concept anyhow. More is being done on Mobile to the exclusion of the desktop. Who needs a big machine with a monitor when you can do just about everything on a Chromebook or iPad?
As far as Linux on ________, Let's look at where we're at now.
And, of course, there's the Linux Subsystem for Windows.
Linux won. It's over. Windows might be holding onto a majority if you only count desktops, but given even Microsoft has moved towards supporting Linux directly on their own OS... and moving towards Cloud As a Service and hosting, yep, Linux on Azure... Even Microsoft knows that Windows has found itself facing the once unthinkable: support Linux or find yourself increasingly irrelevant. Windows on ARM failed. Twice. Windows Mobile in all of its variants are dead now. Microsoft released an Android device. So given everything that we use today, something that ISN'T running a *ix type kernel is, in fact, the minority.
Microsoft is grasping harder with Windows 11... and in their shortsightedness, they ended up excluding huge chunks of systems that were still being sold even as recently as 3 years ago. It's quite unthinkable to me because the one and ONLY one major killing feature of Windows in general was that you could install it on decade-old hardware. Win10 ran pretty decently on my Phenom II x4 desktop which had 16GB Ram. Why shouldn't it?
And now Win11 is looking to exclude first gen Ryzen.
The tighter the grip, the more that will slip in between their fingers...
At this point, it's becoming easier and easier to support Linux... thanks to Proton on Steam, more native binaries (BlackMagic, for example, with DaVinci Resolve), more apps becoming webapps and only needing a web browser. At this point, I think what we're waiting for is for legacy companies like Adobe to shit the bed and render themselves irrelevant. (And boy have they gotten close.)
Yeah. The year of Linux on the Desktop is a meme... but should it actually happen... the concept of 'desktop' won't matter anymore, IMHO.
Why does Apple make it so difficult/borderline impossible to run MacOS on non-apple computers? Would it cut into their computer sales that significantly? I would imagine most people who want (and can afford) a Mac would still buy one.
What do they stand to gain in making macOS easy/possible to run on other vendor hardware? That opens them up to headaches that don't bring in revenue. They are in the hardware business, not the OS business. Their OS development is just a necessary evil. Apple wants people to buy their hardware. If the customer wants macOS, they'd be best off buying the one hardware that's designed specifically for macOS. This is unlikely to ever change because it's been Apple's business model from the very beginning, and it's served them well overall.
I'm not saying anyone has to like it, but there's an inherent advantage in not having to support other hardware of varying degrees of quality. Honestly, I'll take that form of vendor lock-in over frequent pointless changes, having advertising shoved in my face, and being forced to have an online account. Perhaps my opinion will change if Apple follows suit (they won't), but for now it was pretty easy to set up my M1 Macbook Air without signing in with an Apple ID.
> Would it cut into their computer sales that significantly?
Is this a real question? Many of the edge cases, both high cost and low, would disappear for Apple.
Additionally, all the tech support will fall on them.
Lastly, any bad user experience (cheap device with crap battery, low quality hardware that doesn't match the software experience, etc) would have a negative effect on them as a brand.
No, they wouldn’t. My last “Mac” was a PowerComputing clone, because other manufactures were doing hardware better than Apple. Jobs killed the clones, and I became a Linux user that never looked back. Apple maintains their walled garden because they know that their users would quickly realize the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
In short, Apple is a hardware company. It sells you electronic devices with some software and firmware required for these devices to function.
The software component in a Mac or an iPhone is larger than in a microwave oven. There is still equally zero incentive to port it to third-party devices, because it's the devices that bring in the revenue; software is a cost center.
Holy moly! If there was ever a self-answering question on this site! Look at how much traffic is being generated by Windows 11's lack of support for older hardware, and how confusing it is -- even for technical users -- to figure out of their machines are TPM-capable at all, or if it just needs turned on in the BIOS -- in order to install it. After 19 years of Linux on the desktop, and always dual-booting Windows for gaming, I'm delighted to spend the extra money on Apple hardware (and game on a PS) to avoid all of that sort of nonsense now. You may not like them, but Apple makes the answers to these kinds of questions pretty clear. I'm glad Apple doesn't waste their time and energy with supporting every piece of kit under the sun.
Why would non-technical users want computing under their control? Isn't the market going the other way, more and more towards walled gardens? Seems like a Chromebook or iPad would have far fewer headaches for the typical user who just wants Facebook and email.
The web as an open platform is a dev manifesto; for everyone else it's just a glorified entertainment and information hub, and making it safer and easier for them is what the market wants. Not more openness, but less of it, because less openness means less cognitive mode. They don't want to think about 100 ways to do the same thing, each with a different license and complex venn diagram of incompatibilities. They just want to get on with their day.
"If something goes horribly wrong"... even in that case, the vendors are less likely to fuck up than most users. Google/Apple/Microsoft clouds are much better at keeping data safe against device failures and ransomware than local Windows installs managed by average users ever were or could be.
If anything the future is really dumb computing, where the internet is just another appliance not too different from your radio or the television. Apps with corporate content hubs, not open platforms.
Computing as an open platform was due to the industry by and large being created by engineers. Now with mass adoption, we're seeing a switch to producer vs consumers, with different paradigms/devices/needs for each, like the differences between magazine publishers and readers. Readers don't care what software was used to create a magazine, they just want to pick it off a newsstand and read it. Same with digital entertainment; the underlying stack shouldn't be their concern if their intended usage is simply content consumption. Windows adds only unnecessary complexity to their usage. Stallman is not an average user, and it would be a massive disservice to humanity to design for the average user as though they were Stallman.
Not all freedom is beneficial. Sometimes it's just yet another useless decision to have to make in a world already overflowing with excess information. The human brain did not evolve to make careful cost-benefit analyses for every trivial thing in a post-internet world.
Even devs are moving towards serverless. Content creation might eventually move to "OS"-less, where content creation is moderated by walled hubs like Adobe apps on the iPad and developer experiences happen in virtualized clouds with web-based IDEs. Bare metal appeals to engineers, but for everyday users and developers, again, it's just excess cognitive load. Please don't make people think about useless crap. There are already infinite upcoming crises -- of the global sort -- for anyone born in the last few generations. Computing trivia is just... trivia, no more inherently interesting than the proper type of lubricant to use on the machines in the factory that makes their toaster. Don't make them think without good reason.
Surely the 'professional' versions don't have this requirement? I'm quite far from a Windows expert, but at the company I work for the IT folks control all aspects of authentication and maintenance (e.g. patches all come through our own servers, not MS or Apple). They'd tell MS to piss off if they tried to require employees to have MS accounts.
I've only installed PRO versions of Windows 10 and you CAN setup a local account even if internet is plugged in. It is however, hidden behind a few clicks so you must actively search for it.
EDIT: maybe I'm wrong now, as other comment says they changed it a few months back. My last install was somewhere in Dec/2020
I just installed a copy of Pro last week, and was able to make a local account just fine. It’s hidden in the corner under what looks like regular text, but is actually a link (versus the big button to use a MS account). And a few more screens in, they’ll ask again with the same small link in the corner. And I think it asked one more time before finishing.
Dark patterns abound. It’s horrible, but there are ways around it. For reference, this is in the US (if it matters).
I installed a 21H1 Pro version just yesterday. On the user creation screen the local account is still hidden behind a "Domain join instead" button where you can actually use a local account. Of course most people at home would actually actively stay away from that button thinking it must lead to some enterprise IT voodoo.
I don't "do" Windows any more, except that it's installed on the company laptop. I do all of my work on a Mac, and gaming on a PS. So I am watching these Windows 11 threads with a lot of amusement. The fact that Microsoft is playing games with this -- such that you can't be sure what's happening, even on their "pro" SKU -- is telling.
The Mac was connected to the Internet, I had to do a couple of clicks during the setup to create a local account but it was easy enough to do - I had not searched beforehand and I hadn't set up a Windows machine in the last five years or so.
Side note for fellow people willing to run W10 on Mac Pro's, two things: the multi-socket variants won't run on the Home edition, you need the Professional edition, and if you're using Opencore you will need to enable the OpenShell EFI shell as you'll need to run bootmgfw.efi once from the UEFI shell.
I know no internet connection used to be solution, but I thought there was an option to bypass the ms account requirement during setup for the last couple years?
Its slowly became harder from update to update over the last couple years of updates, and completely removed under normal circumstances in one of the last major updates.
AFAIK leaving the ethernet unplugged is the only way to do it now.
You want an even darker pattern? Try requesting the windows telemetry data from a PC which isn't logged in through a MS account. You'll spend weeks going back and forth trying to explain to their support agents that you can't login to the website because you don't have an account. Frustrating doesn't begin to describe it. I've still not been able to get anything from them despite a 30 email chain.
Are you in the UK/EU? Hit MS with a subject access request (SAR) as per GDPR Article 15, and the clock starts ticking; the data processor (MS) must then provide all the personal data they hold on you, and other supplementary information. within one month (extendable by another two).
I'm curious what'll actually be in there; please do this and report back.
I keep hearing the line of MS's evil data collection to serve you ads and whatnot but I suspect the truth is much milder; they probably have mostly usage telemetry to drive their investment decisions and possibly perf / bugs because they fired their testing team.
Yeah, unfortunately that kind of advertising only works on the likes of you, me and other HN readers. The rest, even quite savvy technical people (as I've found), simply put up with the problem—that's if they recognize it as such. Microsoft knows this and writes us off as our numbers are in the noise. Essentially, to MS, we're irrelevant.
I had the same story as you. I was setting up my mother's laptop, and of course they are pusshing 'S' mode. The narrative is that for security reasons, S-mode will only allow things from the Microsoft Store to be installed. MS knows this, and to disable S-mode so you can install something like Chrome, you have to create an MS account. No matter where I looked, there was no way to disable S-mode without creating an account.
I had to perform a fresh re-install on a laptop earlier this year and even had to go to the lengths of physically removing the WiFi card from the machine before I could get the local account option to appear in the installer. What an absolute fricken waste of time.
Right, we need laws to stop this practice. If, say, I bought a new laptop several years ago with Windows 10 on it and agreed to the terms and conditions at that time and Microsoft then increasingly tightens those rules with updates etc. then I'm forced to agree to the new terms that I now disagree with or otherwise I could potentially be in trouble. This ought to be a job for consumer law.
Moreover, MS is inexorably moving stuff, utilities etc, that were once on its website to its store that requires login for, it seems, similar reasons. Clearly, knowing exactly who we are has financial benefits for Microsoft or otherwise it wouldn't bother.
My usual procedure is make a restore USB drive using whatever tool supplied, or just clone it with TrueImage, in case something goes arwy.
Then: "Disable secure boot, wipe SSD, reinstall Windows without connecting to the Internet".
You'll end up with a relatively bloat-free non-S Windows 10 install with a local account, no BitLocker (although it can be enabled later), and Windows will generally install all the hardware drivers for you.
Anything missing that you want can be grabbed from the manufacturer's website. Once everything's done, re-enable secure boot.
Agreed, this ought to mantra for everyone. Ever since XP, I have always installed or setup Windows in essentially this way—and I never do the setup with the internet connected (not even with Linux). If in the middle of the process I need an updated hardware driver then I'll download it on another machine.
Once the setup is done and the O/S configured exactly the way I want it (which often takes me considerable time), I'll then mirror the drive.
I then progressively repeat the process in stages, first with essential utilities, text editors and maintenance tools and work up to bigger programs, word-processors etc. At the end of the process I'll end up with at least four mirrors. If anything goes wrong I can restore the image which typically takes me 7 to 10 minutes and I'm right to go.
Doing the job in multiple stages is good idea if you want to remove traces of a program that, say, won't allow easy re-installation for licensing reasons. All such program are relegated to a latter-stage image, so the process then is to restore the immediately preceding one that is 'clean'.
Only when I'm finished saving the last image and I'm totally happy with the installation do I connect the internet.
I just installed Windows 10 on a laptop for my mom. On the account setup screen there's a little skip button to create a local account without a Microsoft account.
Your computer was connected to the internet and you're using relatively recent install media? I'm asking because I haven't seen that behavior in years.
I had a Windows 10 Pro laptop for the last 7 months or so (but ditched a few days ago it because Windows has become so terrible) and the two times I installed it, I definitely had an option to create a local account. At some point it was in the lower-left while onboarding (carefully disguised as some clickable text rather than a very visible button).
Both times the machine was connected to the internet. One time with the standard Lenovo media, one time from a fresh Windows 10 Pro ISO.
Could there be a regional difference? (I am in the EU)
> I know the post is about Windows 11 but I installed Windows 10 for someone on a laptop about 2 months ago and it had the most crazy dark pattern I've ever seen to be able to proceed past the installation screen without a Microsoft account.
I would set it up without access to internet as the easiest way to force it. It is pretty awful this has to be done this way. Eventually I will just exclusively use Ubuntu and call it a day.
I think the core problem is that wine needs to be tweaked and adjusted for the applications which are running, and often running certain software requires strange things with winetricks. It’s not stable enough for a distro
Which is a subsystem of windows to run linux, not a subsystem consisting of windows to run on linux. Ie that doesn't solve the problem of "I don't want to run Windows but want Windows software", but rather it solves the opposite problem of "I'm on Windows and want to run Linux software".
If only I could, but my experiences with Linux Desktop continue to be even more frustrating and painful than Windows despite Microsoft's apparent continued efforts to destroy desktop computing as a concept. Worse yet, the Linux Desktop community has demonstrated not only an inability to remedy said frustrations, but also a complete lack of desire.
I have some issues with choices made in Haiku, but overall it has a clearly superior understanding of desktop and personal computing and it would be great if it could become a reasonable alternative for me within the next decade.
I had the same experience a couple months back trying to set up a gaming PC. This was after the initial screen set my speakers to max and then blasted Cortana screaming at me in different languages. This was at about 3am in the morning, and I have pretty good speakers. After recovering from my heart attack, I then proceeded to fight for ~20 minutes on how to install without a Windows account - since I had already set up Wifi, the easiest way was to unplug my router for a bit. After a while Windows booted up, but would constantly BSOD on reboots. I gave up and bought a console.
Happened to me a few months ago too when setting up a new machine. The language was also so convoluted and strange that I didn't quite catch that this was creating an online account at the time.
I found a way to revert it and make the account an offline account afterwards, but I was so furious about this crap.
That being said, I don't see the banner you mention.
Albeit, it's not that obvious, you can create an offline account without failing to sign in. Maybe it's different with anything below Windows 10 Pro but that was my experience.
> Maybe it's different with anything below Windows 10 Pro but that was my experience.
It is different with the "S" Home edition which is what comes with a lot of decently spec'd laptops for typical personal use.
I run Pro here and there's a secondary text link off to the side that you can click to make an offline account. That link doesn't exist with the Home edition (specifically the "S" edition, I don't know about the regular Home edition).
In all cases this is with the US version too, which might play a role in what's seen when people install Windows across the world.
My username is "fucky" after I used an name to describe my feelings of having to create/use a Microsoft account. Exercise to the reader to guess the unshortened name
After watching this fiasco unfold I have a hot take: We need to stop judging these decisions based on our needs and consider the everyday computer user.
Yes, these decisions annoy myself and most users on this site, but we are in the minority here. Most people do not care and just want to be up and running. They want security/configuration to be easy. They don't want to have to think about it. I think that a lot of this will be good in the long run for security.
You yourself just explained how this is not a need of the everyday user: Most people do not need to have their PC/laptop account be the same as their account on some Microsoft services/apps.
Also, and to generalize - we need to stop judging these decisions based even on everyday single computer user's needs and consider the needs of the computing using _public_.
... and the public definitely does not need Microsoft to remotely control access to all Windows machines.
> Most people do not need to have their PC/laptop account be the same as their account on some Microsoft services/apps.
But having only one secure login helps keep things simple(r), Microsoft can help keep associated devices secure and bad guys out, 2FA gets easier, and there is an easy way out in case of forgotten passwords and the like. For most people I guess that's pretty convenient and helpful.
Besides, I don't think there's need for a term like computing-using public – let's talk about the general public. There won't be a lot of people in the general public who aren't either using a computing device like a phone or somehow affected by others using computing devices to store photos and phone numbers and the like.
The general public is in dire need of very secure systems that can be used with a minimum of specialist knowledge, attention and maintenance effort, strongly resist being used insecurely, and that still look good and are reasonably fun to use and still allow for activities like software development to happen. That's immensely difficult and I'm not aware of any good definitive solution to this.
This isn't just a question of being nice to grandma either, this is more about not leaving whole first-world economies vulnerable to highly sophisticated attacks with huge blast radii. We haven't seen much in the way of those, but who knows what we might have seen if platform security of the big targets hadn't kept up as well as it did?
This whole complex is something a lot of people deep in the tech bubble seem to not really get: There are millions of power users, true, but there are billions of people who just want to pay their bills in an app or play a game or message their friends. The latter cohort is not intrinsically motivated to become IT pros at all (more like scared of the complexity and very disinterested), and they're not getting paid to secure their home computer, so some buy anti-virus and that's it. People don't want insecure computers, but the learning curve, time and effort required, the extremely dry subject matter, the unclear benefits, the overall scariness, that just doesn't happen at scale. Humans are amazing at conserving energy, and this checks a lot of conserve-this-energy boxes.
iPhones are relatively hard to get into an insecure state; it's possibly, but the options to do so are limited and most aren't frictionless. I don't doubt most Windows home installs so far have been running with a passwordless admin account, with pretty much no restrictions on what to run and install, and many many footguns have been discharged as a consequence.
The saving grace, so far, has been that most of those billions who have started using privately-owned computers in earnest in the last decade or so have been using mobile platforms, which have been pretty well-secured from the get-go; but to keep their non-phone offers relevant to this huge market, Microsoft and Apple will have to pivot their general computing devices towards that audience a lot more. That involves making them much more secure by default and much more resilient security-wise to being configured and used "wrong". That may be bad news to professionals and enthusiasts, but so far Apple seems to keep macOS enthusiast-friendly enough by making dangerous choices scary and adding friction, and Microsoft still has other licenses than Home that I believe are more enthusiast/pro-friendly.
But seen in that light, requiring a Microsoft login makes a lot of sense, at least to me. Whether that's the main decision driver within MS, or the opportunity to gather even more data and engineer more stickiness and lock-in, I could only guess. They're surely not sad about another step towards a Microsoft Panopticon you can't get out of, but it's not like the security side is bogus, or not a big deal.
> But having only one secure login helps keep things simple(r)
1. It's not secure / doesn't keep things simpler: If you lose it, or it's get compromised, you're screwed on all your Windows machines, not just one.
2. It doesn't keep things simpler: If you lose it, or it's get compromised, you depend on Microsoft to access all of your Windows machines, not just one.
3. It's not "one login", unless Microsoft has gotten control over all websites, banks, ATMs, mobile phone apps and so on. It's just n-1 or n-2 sets of credentials instead of n.
4. Microsoft controls the authentication, so one could argue it's not secure.
---
> mobile platforms, which have been pretty well-secured from the get-go
Not sure how you figure that. More like the opposite.
This is straight up a bad argument. They don't need to add anything. They could've just kept the damn "let me proceed, I hate the antichrist" button and everyone would be happy.
If this mindset was prevalent in other industries as well then all kitchen knives would come with a mandatory 2 hour long instruction video on how to keep your fingers away from the blade.
that argument doesn't make sense to me. the decision that MS has made is everyone needs an account. couldnt they have just kept the opt-out option as it was and the 'minority' would be content and everyone else could use an account?
Almost crazier than this is the need to have a Microsoft account in order for your kids to be able to play certain games together on their Nintendo Switch that have been bought for 50-plus dollars, and have no indication on the package that having a Microsoft account is a prerequisite for collaborative play.
Microsoft makes little children cry. They did the same kind of nonsense to Minecraft Pocket Edition and later fucked up their login process causing my 8 year old to lose all his Minecraft worlds. I hate that company so much for so many reasons.
What Microsoft has done with Minecraft is so gross. I installed it recently after not playing for maybe a decade so I could try the RTX support, and I just had to shake my head at how packed the home screen is with micro-transactions now.
This started as a very simple, creative game for kids, and now the only way to play is to enter through the gift-shop. Minecraft was already one of the best selling games of all time. Is it really necessary to constantly expose 8 year old kids to aggressive marketing to maximize profits?
> could you tell me which games so i can avoid them
In this case it was the Switch version of Minecraft.
No indication whatsoever that (what I consider to be) a totally unrelated signup would be needed to collaboratively play the (very expensive) Switch game.
In my case, a bunch of kids needed to wait while I attempted to create a Microsoft login with my private email address (yes I buckled - unfortunately explaining privacy to an expectant and impatient crowd of eight-year olds isn't realistic).
But then I found halfway through the process, that I'd somehow used the same email for Skype many years ago, and the password was naturally long-forgotten - blowing that signup attempt.
Not fun to need to create a new email account, and go through the whole signup and login flow all over again, just to play a game that's been sold as a self-contained entity for a totally different non-Microsoft platform.
If you use Windows and assume you will have any form of privacy or control over the operating system, you are going to have a bad time.
Switch to Linux or be okay with Microsoft spying on you. Those are the choices.
MacOS is the uncontested king of spying. It literally logs every single executable you run, when you run it, and where you run it from. And it shares this data with no court order as part of PRISM.
I mean, I get it's important at HN to whine about Apple, but your pithy summary is not an accurate description of what the sneak.berlin author describes AT ALL.
I have to second this. The questions one has to answer:
What price do I set on my privacy and control?
vs
What price do I want to pay for inconveniences?
Privacy is a value (abstract) and inconvenience is a concrete experience (concrete). Many people find it easier to reason about concrete experiences then about abstract notions.
Keep an eye out for games supported on Proton (Steam's Wine facilitation) on protondb.com. In a mere five years gaming on Linux went from a solid selection of native games, to those, plus an impressive amount of high profile titles that just work out of the box (often with better performance on Linux).
Of course there may be one or two titles that tie you to Windows, or perhaps multiplayer specific gaming related software, but if you are flexible in that regard gaming on Linux is just… good.
My biggest pain point is that some of the mainstream multiplayer anticheat implementations don't work on wine. I'd like to be able to play Tarkov or Hunt or Apex on Linux, but I can't. So far, I have just not played those titles, even though I really want to. I don't really want to have to dual boot just to play them, because Windows 10 messes up my EFI booting. I used to run Windows with a GPU passthrough, but I stopped doing that once proton came along. Maybe I'll look at doing that again, though it was hell to set up on Gentoo at the time. Maybe other distros have smoothed that out a bit? It's been like 6 years since I did it the last time.
I know the wine guys have been doing great work trying to get anticheats working in wine/proton. Hopefully that progresses well. Getting anticheat to work in wine would really be the best.
It's gotten much easier with Nvidia cards thanks to VM gaming being officially supported. No more hiding the VM and that Error 47 nonsense.
Basically you bind the graphics card to the vfio driver by writing the PCI ID to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id and then you can use it in qemu with -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0.
If you have sane IOMMU groups and have an extra GPU for the host it should work with just those two steps. You still have to decide about how you handle input and output, but that's very user specific. Virtual input over the qemu GUI works well enough, there's also an evdev thing that lets you switch by pressing both Ctrl keys, or pass an entire USB controller. For audio I recommend scream[1] for the lowest latency (I get 2ms VM->PA->Speaker with MuQSS scheduler) with full 7.1 audio and if you don't want a dedicated monitor or switch monitor inputs there is Looking Glass[2] which captures frames and shuffles them to the host over shared memory. It also handles input via spice.
It's still a bit of work, but for me that's mostly on the Windows side rather than the passthrough stuff itself.
Thanks for the info. I appreciate that you took the time to write this. I think I will check out vfio passthrough again.
Something like Looking Glass looks cool. I definitely disliked having to switch monitor inputs back and forth every time, though that was just more of an annoyance than anything else, of course.
I ran Manjaro for about half a year recently, including using it for gaming. Very few games actually worked out of the box for me, including games with so called "native" Linux support.
I ran into multiple games with "official" Linux support that were simply broken or became broken by an update. Some of those that weren't broken had significant performance issues (that Windows on the same machine didn't have).
Is it possible to game on Linux? Yes. But at the very least it requires fiddling. As much as I love Linux, gaming is just a lot easier on Windows.
Many Linux games are only tested on Ubuntu. I personally haven't had more issues running Linux native games on Ubuntu than Windows native games on Windows.
Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games, ...
Admittedly I now dual-boot to Windows to play videogames, but that's not because of faults in native Linux games, just the reduced selection.
It's possible that some of the issues I ran into were due to Manjaro not being Ubuntu, but they could also have been due to drivers or some random setting somewhere in the system.
Plenty of people on protondb reported zero issues with the same games on their Manjaro/Arch boxes.
> Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games
Maybe it's the type of games I play, but this is extremely rare in my experience. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle with anything outside the game's own settings despite having a multi-monitor setup.
The annoying bit with those is that they are Steam only. I try to avoid Steam and instead buy from GOG because they are DRM-free and i keep offline copies of all of my games, but Wine still (just tried yesterday the version Void Linux installs in a VM) seems to have issues even with slightly older games.
There used to be a way to run Proton outside of Steam but i think it is now discouraged.
It's not impossible to run gog games through the proton compatibility layer of steam. In short:
1. Download gog install files into the same directory
2. Add the install executable as a non-steam game, and enable proton compatibility before starting it up.
3. Run the installer and complete the installation. Gog installers typically give the option to run the game from the installer, but that will only work once.
4. Find the path of the installed game, and the working directory of that executable by searching in ~/.steam
5. Edit the entry created from 2. with this exec path and working dir, and look up possible args from protondb.com
In that case, please give Lutris a solid look. It's a great app that eases the pain of installing games via WINE (and makes it easy to install particular versions of WINE on a per game basis).
Regarding screen tearing and trackpad issues, these are largely gone. Wayland has more or less solved the screen tearing issue and I have yet to encounter a poor trackpad experience using a modern machine, in my case an XPS 15 9570.
Neither of these issues have been resolved by Wayland on my modern Thinkpad 490. There is still awful screen tearing when watching videos and trackpad multitouch gesture support is still a mess on Linux. Gnome 40 added some gestures for navigating the desktop but beyond that the situation is horrible.
Screen tearing isn’t gone, unfortunately. Watching videos on my Linux machine is a pain. I use a Lenovo T460s and I’ve spent too much time looking for a solution (more then an hour). I like the freedom of a Linux OS (i3m is cool) but it looks so bad compared to MacOS.
I know about those solutions, and it works for me on sway in general. But is was not a simple out-of-the-box experience you have with X11.
And there are still multiple issues: For instance with X11 you can select a specific window. I have not found a way to do this in with a wayland compositor yet.
It's funny, I've been using Linux pretty much my entire adult life, and out of the issues you've pointed out, the only ones I've experienced have been with Windows; always reminds me to do a full wipe, not a dual boot.
Spend the time to get acquainted, soon you will see you can do almost everything you need on linux (and more) that you can on Windows/macOS, but with less mental overhead (after you are used to linux, it really is simpler).
I feel like comments like this gloss over the many UX issues many Linux distros have. For example the file picker. When you open a new file from the web browser (Firefox usually) you navigate to your file and pick it. Now if you open up another file, it forgot your last opened directory and takes you back to your home or default. On windows and Mac I believe it remembers your last directory.
Also saving files in Debian is a bit of a pain. I think it keeps searching instead of actually typing the file name when you save a new word doc from libre office or another application.
Plus other services, like Netflix and Hulu, may not work out of the box. You’ll have to find a workaround but I think their official stance is still “Linux is not a supported platform”.
Don’t get me wrong Linux is great and it’s in a wonderful spot compared to 10 years ago. But it still does not have the polish or UX that users from windows and Mac expect in an operating system.
Right but your comment glosses over the many UX issues windows has. For example, virtual desktops are associated with all your screens, not with individual screens. Never had this issue in any linux distro.
(I'm all ears on how to solve that file picker problem though, that is mildly annoying).
>I'm all ears on how to solve that file picker problem though
Use the for long time available patch for GTK file chooser, use an XDG portal to open KDE file chooser instead of the GTK one, or use a Qt-based (KDE or Deepin) rather a GTK-based environment. And for any interested programmers, a maintainer recently has outlined some steps[0] to introduce that functionality in a way that probably GNOME devs will accept.
I find that compared to the the UX issues of Windows it is fantastic.
Obviously this varies from person to person but I have verified already a more than a decade ago that it worked very well with ordinary users as long as they didn't need MS Office or anything like it.
And true: Netflix doesn't work but for that I use my phone/tablet that I cast to my TV.
You may say: not everyone has a PC and a phone but as far as I can see the overwhelming majority who has a PC also seems to have a smartphone.
The netflix complaint is a pretty confusing one. The last time I used windows was back when Netflix was a DVD rental service, and while there was a time when you had to go get Google Chrome to stream via Netflix on linux, even that hasn't been the case for quite a long time. I swear half the people in these threads tried like one distro ten years ago, ran into one issue, and sees this as a knockdown argument that normal computer users can't tolerate a single learning curve. Meanwhile, any time some acquaintance tries to do a simple task they've never done before on the OS they claim is easy to use (whether this be windows or macOS), it ends up being a huge hassle anyway, and sometimes there is simply no solution to the problem they want to solve
Like, yes, most things have a learning curve. I have yet to encounter any evidence that Windows having a particularly easy one for anything is more than propaganda
Regarding file-picker dialogs. I always found the most annoying dialog was actually with Windows: The folder chooser.
You only have a directory file tree, that is often not in the right directory, where the application was launched from. No really way to directly jump to a directory via a path, that you copied from a open Explorer, which you might have open next to it, because you started the .exe from there. So you have to click your way through.
The default Windows file-picker has let you paste in a path for decades. The address bar at the top can let you paste in a path and the "File name:" prompt at the bottom supports several different kinds of paths.
I use Linux in my main PC, both to work on programming and to play games. I've been familiar with Linux and using it on an off for more th as n 15 years.
Nevertheless, my days of advocating for others to use it are over (I even used to frequent comp.linux.advocacy!). People that are used to Windows will have a very hard time moving away of it. No matter how easy the migration path, there will always be something painful. The path of least resistance will always be running Windows. And in addition even the most polished Linux versions have issues. I've run them all. They are nice, but once you get into an obscure singular case, the console dance start. Wifi, sound, bluethoot, video, media-keyboard or mouse, fingerprint reader. There's always something.
We People who have been using linux for years are already used to it: google for a couple of minutes, open the terminal and copy/paste a bunch of commands. Sometimes it works, other times we compromise by not using that feature that doesn't work.
Just as an example of something that happened to me just today: I wanted to connect 2 monitors to my linux Home PC: 1 in the Nvidia GPU HDMI and another one in the integrated Intel HDMI. It doesn't work out of the box, and it is apparently not possible, at least not without thinkering with the BIOS and some config files (and the main response returned by google https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=265946 doesn't work).
So yeah, I can imagine how people coming from windows might be frustrated with that.
I use a Microsoft account so I can use the same account across my multiple desktops, my laptop, my wife's surface, and several different friend's PC's as well. We do our file permissions on our network storage based on our Microsoft accounts so it's super easy to grant/revoke permissions to things and have that work globally for us. On Windows, this is all free (not a single second of additional setup) with a Microsoft account. What instant thing would do the same for me in Linux?
None of the tools I use run in any of the Windows compatibility gadgets for Linux. The open source options are probably great if you can't access the good proprietary tools, but they're not remotely close. Some of them I used extensively before switching, so I speak from experience.
I use VS Mac exclusively. Wondering how long it will be before they try to leverage VS Code. There must now be plenty of young devs who have never used anything else.
It was never a requirement. It uses dark UI patterns (You have to click cancel, then there is a tiny link at the bottom that allows you to create local pc admin account with no MS attachment). Media likes to overblow things.
Imagine McDonald's applying such dark UI patterns: maybe forget part of your order, put your change on the table under a napkin so you don't notice it, only offer you the free ice cream the 3rd time you ask, etc. People would be up in arms!
But Microsoft?! Well, they are the darling of the tech world now so it must only be a prank no?
"But Microsoft?! Well, they are the darling of the tech world now so it must only be a prank no?"
Google and Apple do it too and no one has complained. Why suddenly the up and arms when Microsoft does it? That doesn't sound like a darling of the tech world to me.
I'm not sure this is true anymore. I bought a new laptop, and I could not figure out how to avoid signing in to a Microsoft account without starting over and refusing to set up Wi-Fi. I am quite savvy, but admittedly I had not used a consumer edition of Windows in quite some time. Nothing overblown here; dark patterns ought to be called out loudly.
Yep. I literally had to solve this yesterday helping a friend setup a brand new laptop (with Window Home edition) That little link is gone now. I had to Google to find that you create the local account by turning on Airplane mode before entering that screen. It then let me create a local account. ( And of course the other thing I did was immediately remove the McAfee security nagware - at least Microsoft has Defender already installed ready to take over AV duties )
I just recently did re-format my gaming PC with latest Win10 and it was possible. Maybe because I have "Pro" version, but it was possible on latest Win10.
Yes, Pro is different. Windows 10 Home will require an account at setup if there's any way it can get to the internet. (No wifi and nothing plugged into the ethernet port will give you the option.)
I'm aware yes. It was also possible by not connecting to WiFi or Ethernet while setting up Windows 10. But I thought that this meant that that option would go away with Windows 11. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, all I have is the news to go by!
I agree. No matter how much Microsoft tries, given they can't remove local accounts altogether I will refuse to log into a Microsoft account for as long as it is humanely possible. Same for secure boot.
I agree with the sentiment of the article and many of the comments here, but what really struck me as the expectation of online availability, and the memory of a time when the Internet was something you connect to, not something that is always there. I definitely remember the days of a AOL dial-up or when we played with the local ISP, and you had to actively, deliberately tell your computer it was time to connect. Of course, I type this on my always-connected work computer, and enjoy my always-connected mobile devices, but I wonder how things would be different (maybe better) if the Internet wasn't just always there.
The requirements doesn't list internet... and I was pretty sure my friend pressed some button or something that asked him for online login, when he tried to install Ubuntu for raspberry (because I'm not hardcore linux guy and I use Ubuntu and I will be able to assist him better in that OS), but after some googling around, it really turns out to be true - cant install without SSO login.
The solution for that guy? He just installed a different OS.
Yeah, Ubuntu seems to be happily trudging down the path of evil, right behind Microsoft. They, of course, don't have the massive marketing budget or UX polish to match though, so it's not going to go nearly as well.
But also a challenge. Linux also has to introduce purely Microsoft/Google/whatever-account log-on (without explicit local user log-in preceding it) as an option because this is what many zoomers expect. You just give them a new computer, they sign-in with their account and start doing their job. Businesses they run also expect this when ordering computers/integration from you.
The open source world actually needs to implement this + a decent offline alternative to Alexa or be left behind.
I will never want to use a Microsoft/whatever account either but other people will.
nah the problem is the bovine masses have everything synced to their microsoft account now. they dont even really know how the file system works
just log in to your ms account on a new laptop and wait a few hours while everything syncs up via onedrive and its like every computer is your home computer
> they dont even really know how the file system works
I wouldn't say this is a problem in the bad sense. That's Ok. Almost nobody (except low-level system engineers) really knew how the file system works ever. I always believed it's unreasonable to ask people to learn about file system internals.
What I really consider a problem which should never have happened and should be fixed ASAP is Windows hiding file name extensions by default.
And people having an idea of how a DOC file and a TXT file are different, what do TXT and HTML files have in common and why zipping MP4 videos doesn't save space feel a blessing for me to meet among non-devs.
> just log in to your ms account on a new laptop and wait a few hours while everything syncs up via onedrive and its like every computer is your home computer
And this is a convenience we have to reproduce. It almost is there - you can add a Microsoft account in Ubuntu but it still requires an extra step of setting a local user up and signing in with it first.
I've been using Windows on the desktop since 3.1. I dabble in linux on the desktop from time to time, and I use it on servers, but I've never made the switch.
I was recently spurred to action by two things.
1. The forced news widget in my taskbar.
2. Being forced to sign into a Microsoft Account to setup my father's laptop. The onscreen prompts promised me that I could disable the account later if I wished.
We all see what's coming here. We're experiencing different levels of it all over the place.
My work machine (as in, the device I use to make my living with and the only device I can't actively "play with") is now running Arch.
I'm out. You guys can do what you want, but there is zero chance this nonsense doesn't continue and get worse.
I have a habit of not shutting down my laptop for long periods of time. I used mac os for like 8 years, till High sierra and it got slow. this was a late 2012 macbook pro.
Then also owned a macbook pro 2018 with mojave, that crashed every 2 days like ol' windows. switched to ubuntu for my thinkpad, still hibernate wasn't reliable. end up putting win 10 pro on the thinkpad, n stability from hibernation is amazing. it feels like the old os x.
so yeah, win 11 for me is a moot point - no need to upgrade
Want better OS choices? Don't just sit down and take it. Go try Linux distros, file bugs, code fixes, and don't accept excuses. If an open-source maintainer is blocking progress, hard fork and keep rolling. I feel that the Linux dev community has become stagnant and insular and we need more people from the outside to get involved. Could be you.
When Stallman warned people about the risks of proprietary software, people laughed and continued using Windows.
You created this problem. You kept buying Windows when they added telemetry, ads and other forms of privacy invasion, so you emboldened to go one step further. And when they are done with this they will invade your privacy more and more.
If Facebook can require Facebook login for the Oculus then Microsoft can require Microsoft Login for Windows. It works. You made it work.
If wolves accept the convenience of eating leftovers from human camps what is the worse that can happen? Yeah, they got domesticated. That just happened to you. By using a Microsoft account now you are living inside Microsoft's data farm as marked cattle.
It is not your computer anymore. You gave computing away by being complacent just like the wolves were.
Your decisions matter, and your decisions have consequences.
This reminds me of the "Desert Island test" (https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html). Suppose you are on a desert island with a solar-powered computer, and no connection to the Internet. The original question was whether you could legally share modifications to the software in these circumstances, but it seems we unfortunately need now to ask an even more basic question: are we able to use the software at all?
Even the most ordinary technically intelligent person would have a problem with this. And Microsoft have legions of intelligent tech boffins. What happened to their common sense? Surely someone said, "Nah, this is dumb. We're smart. Our job is to make tech better, not worse. Let's not push this."
I just can't imagine a team of smart techs cheering this on with "Great idea!"
What pressures transpire to induce really smart teams to make such extravagantly poor decisions? It's a mystery.
Is it just the mists of time that make me feel like it didn't use to be this way? Growing up, new versions of Windows got me so excited. 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 all made me feel like my computer was better than it was before. Sure there were bugs, but my overall satisfaction went up every time. Now instead of reading to see what feature I'm going to gain, I read to see what feature I'm going to lose. I miss being a Microsoft fan. I miss not feeling patronized.
the confusion and distress starts with assuming its "your own pc". for at least a decade now the winning and profitable design pattern wants user devices turning into thin clients. the chromebook-ification of computing if you wish, or its X-terminalization [0] for somewhat older people
Windows is my offline desktop OS. I keep it around specifically because i want it to be that way. I'm fine with a locked down Android phone, as that is a different use-case. Microsoft already failed with its locked-down ARM Windows version once. If the users wanted such an Windows OS, it would have not failed.
to be honest I suspect everybody (including Microsoft) got wrong-footed by the mobile explosion. this redefined what personal computing means by placing simpler devices in the hands of billions.
maybe its just a matter of time before the pendulum swings back and we get really cool hardware repatriated to homes / desktops offering features that would be suboptimal in a thin client setup (due to latency, privacy etc)
Obviously it's because Microsoft isn't selling the OS anymore. They're selling various services, such as office 365, Xbox game pass, and individual apps you can buy off the Microsoft store.
At this point why not just make the OS free ? I actually like office 365, by far it's the easiest way to backup my data
lol... until they lose your data (like Canon cloud service), until they increase subscription cost heavily or block access to your account (e.g. due to "ToS violation".
Haven’t used Windows as a main driver for awhile. Windows XP (and maybe Windows 7 after a few updates) was the last usable update for me. The only reason I keep a Windows 10 license is for the occasional gaming session on a custom build pc.
Some commenters report heavy dark patterns when trying to create a local account, but the experience is somewhat less burdensome on the “Pro” edition of Windows 10. If I recall correctly, I was immediately given the option to choose between an “online” vs “local” account after install. I opted for the local account and then immediately disabled all of the telemetry.
I have to recheck telemetry settings after updating to make sure they haven’t sneakily re-enabled it. I recall at least one time the existing settings were still disabled but they added a new telemetry setting which was enabled by default after an update.
Same, Windows 7 was still usable for me but after I found out they reactivated telemetry behind my back in an update I gave up all Microsoft products for good.
For the average consumer it is likely that a MS account is a good path. No different from connecting your iPhone to the App Store and iCloud, which most consumers do.
For the average consumer such things as automatic updates and some degree of management is a good thing.
Profesional and enterprise users are a different matter. In this case what is being presented here is a nonexistent problem. If a professional or enterprise user can’t figure out how to install and run Windows with the degree of control they desire, well, they might not actually be pro users. Using Hone edition? Please.
This is not a problem.
Something to gripe about for fun and entertainment? Sure. Have a blast. A problem? Nope. Never has been and never will be. MS has always provided professional users with the flexibility they require. Not doing so would destroy their business.
You don’t become a 2 trillion dollar company by helping Joe Sixpack.
You do it by serving corporations, owned by a few of the ultra wealthy, who have captured all the economic productivity gains that MS-like software has brought the world economy.
Most employers are all in on MS products like Office365. Everything in that eco-system revolves around you MS account. That's the paradigm shift. I guess the flip is what makes you so special to buck the trend that most people have signed up for? If you think MS cares what you do due to some tinfoil hat type concern then that's one thing. Ultimately MS doesn't care what you do as you're not really that important. Your lack of MS online account is gonna be lost amongst billions of these things. Who cares?
Until the Microsoft account was introduced I could never could on authentication working to mount SMB shares.
My fear is that Microsoft is going to wreck it all in a fit of mindlessness. I wrote them a letter when they were in danger of impulsively stealing TikTok. So many of us depend on their products that we’d be devastated if they destroyed their ecosystem for no good reason. (Someday Microsoft may need to pick a fight with the CCP, but it had better do so for a good reason.)
> So many of us depend on their products that we’d be devastated if they destroyed their ecosystem for no good reason
This is what free software people have been warning against for decades now, and yet governments and big structures still willingly give their hands to be tied instead of allocating some funds to the development of solutions that don't have this problem and would be far more cost-effective in the end.
"But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that"
That's nearly 25 years old. Fortunately we can still use Free operating systems on at least desktop and laptops, but if you choose to use proprietary software, you get what you get.
EULAs already often prohibit disassembling the binary. That feels completely crazy to me, it's like saying that you aren't allowed to press Ctrl-U on a website. Is it actually legally binding?
I'm a FOSS advocate. Please don't make it sound like that. There's plenty of issues with FOSS, including funding.
Like, what we also warn about the fact that a majority of people on earth directly or indirectly depend on projects like, I dunno, coreutils, openssh and what not which receive fuck-all funding.
> Until the Microsoft account was introduced I could never could on authentication working to mount SMB shares.
This still does not work properly for me when mapping SharePoint drives. (Since going fully remote this is is the only type of mapped drive I use.) Every once in a while I need to open up the SharePoint URL in Internet Explorer in order to get the drives working.
Apple has so far not gone this way, and I'm very happy about that (if anyone from Apple is reading).
They do try to encourage you to log in with an Apple account, but they don't seen to use dark patterns to do this. You can use a Mac without one but you will miss out on the store and any iCloud feature... but the machine still works fine.
There is an "allow your Apple account to unlock your local account" feature, but again no dark patterns. You can just uncheck it.
This has me really quite upset and a bit worried. I feel very strongly that I will never accept this type of ultimatum and I've already talked to my wife about going back to Linux again.
At the same time, I worry this might mean I may no longer be able to work from home, if my employer "upgrades" to Windows 11 and introduces some dependency on it. I guess if this happens I may need to accept commuting for two hours a day, again.
I shudder at the prospect of going back to using a PC! I've been using a Mac from work. My wife and I are both pissed off at Microsoft for doing this to our home PC. I built that PC for her to do some Photoshop work. So I can't really get rid of Windows. If she switches to a Mac, I will happily forget about the money wasted on that Windows license and format that hard drive and put a Linux on it immediately.
There is this strange patent registered by Microsoft Technologies [1] which mines human body/bio activity into a crypto currency. From what I understand, it can measure your energetic flow when you are exposed to certain ads/applications/Blue Screens/etc. ;-) I am sure it gives are very detail of your inner workings (psyche?) to Microsoft.
"Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified."
I guess this mining technology requires the mining user/body to be connected to the internet, hence this move by Microsoft to require an active online account facilitates to role out this patent technology.
While we're at it, windows fakes letting you install qbittorrent, then flags it as virus and silently deletes it. Only way to install it is either disable realtime protection forever or make an exception. If installed and re-enabling realtime protection, it deletes it again...
When Pandora's Box was opened, all the evils of the world were released and burst out into the world, leaving only hope. Hope is the evil that stayed behind, close to people's hearts.
My pseudo-workaround to deal with this is to use a Microsoft account for the sole purposes of backing up my digital entitlements. After I've logged in once, I create a local admin account using the control panel and never use the online account again.
On my personal I’ve tried and failed to change my login email address for a domain I no longer own.
At work I’m constantly updating registry to take videos, pictures etc out of my explorer window. Fracking clueless. Why should any of this be in Windows Pro is beyond me.
If you login with a Microsoft account, what is your home directory name? Does it have an @ symbol in it? Do you then have to type that in every time you want to access a file at the command line?
It seems as though this bullshit is perfectly acceptable in business environments. Hell, many businesses are mandating that all employees have a Microsoft account anyway (Office 365). Why would business environments care that their workers' have to make a Microsoft account to log into their work laptops? IT surely has remote control of it and can get them access if they get locked out.
The people who are MOST upset about this are the HN crowd. We're control freaks who are used to Linux, and the thought of Microsoft making us log into their filthy servers to run our own PCs maddens us.
So yeah, ReactOS may become a viable techie OS at some point. I encourage everyone to contribute to it if possible, as it is open-source.
That's true when everything is working as expected. But when things go bad (e.g. you can't login to your machine), business do care.
My business depends a lot on Azure AD. A couple months ago, Azure AD went down for several hours worldwide. It was a wakeup call that SLAs can be broken and that the vendors are usually not transparent regarding the uptime of their platforms (the status pages are always green!).
> Why would business environments care that their workers' have to make a Microsoft account to log into their work laptops?
One case in point would be: If that business happens to be located in the E.U. where GDPR prevents employers from exposing their employees to privacy liabilities of this sort. For example GDPR is already a major stumbling block to the adoption of Office 365 by european business, which is why many are using ancient versions of office, microsoft-alternatives, or are using Office 365 but without being able to really sleep all that soundly, hoping that employees won't sue and privacy regulators won't act. The legal position, however, is quite clear.
This must be a poorly documented / communicated item that you must use an MS account to log into your system. You may have to jump through some hoops, but surely you could run something like a Powershell command to get past the GUI and do exactly what you want to do. Just like many people here would do with a Linux system. Maybe more of a PITA, but it would be worth the effort for me. And I bet there's some easy tricks.
There's a difference between "supported" and "possible." Add a layer of marketing and UI magic and you get a lot of confusion.
Edited to add: Just because it's a new OS, doesn't mean the guts of the thing went through huge changes. The ways you create an account is probably the same from 10 to 11. It's just the GUI which is changing.
Windows used to cost money but now is free with ads in the taskbar and requiring a Msft account to hook us into the ad ecosystem. Should they also offer a paid version without those revenue features?
Can some explain what's wrong with setting up a microsoft account on a random email? It seems to me there are no differences in telemetry concerns vs. what exists currently.
Now you have a cloud dependency to access your local files
- What happens if your Microsoft account gets blocked (rightfully or wrongfully)?
- What happens if the next Windows update, Microsoft "helpfully" activates onedrive sync of your folders by default and exfiltrates your data? (HTC did this to me before with their Sense UI).
- Maybe the latter leads to the folder if OneDrive syncs some copyrighted data to their service they think you're pirating?
> Now you have a cloud dependency to access your local files
That doesn't make sense and isn't how signing into windows with a microsoft account works now.
> What happens if your Microsoft account gets blocked (rightfully or wrongfully)?
A microsoft account that was created to set up a computer and then never touched again?
> What happens if the next Windows update, Microsoft "helpfully" activates onedrive sync of your folders by default and exfiltrates your data? (HTC did this to me before with their Sense UI).
> Maybe the latter leads to the folder if OneDrive syncs some copyrighted data to their service they think you're pirating?
Seems a little farfetched to me. I'd rate it on a similar level of risk to apple requiring me to create an id if I want to use any apps on my iphone.
I generally run Windows Server. It's got less "stickiness" and bloat in general. I assume that the 2022 version won't require the user of a MSFT login.
Imagine if you are on a remote island with no internet, you will just pray for a starlink to pass overhead or be assigned you your sky in order to re-format a system lol
Ms windows will become their gaming is. Linux will b their productivity os. Though Linux will b free, you will still need support contracts to get their enterprise software to work on it. Thus they will b able to significantly downsize their support department. If you don’t pay for the os you won’t b entitled to support.
I already did the mistake of using Google account in Chrome back in the day and it turned out that they were stealing my saved passwords without any warning.
Nasty as these dark patterns that make you create a MS account are, it's not like we haven't moved forward. I don't really see the same amount of horrendous, unnecessary bloatware like i used to. It wasn't like it was perfect 15 or 20 years ago.
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I don't like this move either but you need an account to use a Mac, iPhone or Android and nobody seems to fuss about it.
So why only target Microsoft for doing what their competitors have been doing for a along time and why not protest against Apple and Google for making this practice the norm in the first place through their monopoly in the mobile space?
Nope, you don't need an account to use a Mac. You can set it up just fine without one. My Mac doesn't have any Apple ID.
You can use Android without an account too. I have it set up that way on my phone, I use F-Droid and Aurora Store (in anonymous mode). I previously used MicroG which was amazing but I moved back to OxygenOS for other reasons. But even with full Play Services installed you can use them (and push notifications) without a Google account. It significantly cuts down on tracking doing that.
Android pushes a Google account heavily but it's not mandatory. You can't use paid apps then but the only paid Android apps I use (Nine Email and Cryptomator) provide a way to pay them directly and sideload it, using a license key. For which I thank them! It also shows that I'm not the only one wanting this, as they clearly see value in offering this option.
Only with iOS it's difficult as Apple is so difficult about sideloading. I don't use iOS as a result (except for work but only for testing).
Well, here... And in every other discussion where it comes up. But also directly to the vendors.
I manage hundreds of Macs at work, and Apple is always pushing us to use VPP (Volume Purchase Program). However, most of the apps we need are not in their store at all, so there is no point. And their 'federated' accounts don't work for us due to arbitrary limitations on Apple's side (Specifically: The UPN must be equal to email). I really don't want every user creating their own account which we don't manage. It's messy for support and the latest Macs lock themselves to the user's account so we can't recover it when it's returned (Activation lock). Also, because all those accounts have to be manually cleaned up if we ever do move to federated accounts. So I've set everything up to not use Apple accounts at all.
So yes my objections have been made clear to Apple. And this is on the work side even, in my personal scope I'm even more against this.
You don't need an account to use a Mac or iPhone. You need an account to use App Store (duh), but you don't need to use the App Store, especially on Mac, where applications are mainly installed without using the App Store.
There's no way to add apps, but it still functions as a phone and communication device. Clearly not why someone would buy an iPhone, but it's not the same as being completely unable to progress with the system because one can't login.
This is an uncelebrated (accidental) security feature. One of the most secure "burner" devices there are, is an iPhone or iPad with no iCloud configuration.
Good for semi-anonymous browsing for instance, also because fingerprinting of the browser looks the same as a bunch of other iOS devices.
This thread is about Microsoft. If you want to complain about Microsoft getting unfair treatment, you should have to find a single comment in this thread that defends similar behavior by Apple or Google first.
I am equally annoyed by all of Apple’s dark patterns. Every time I update iOS I know I will have to go through a dozen of modals nagging me for Apple services. Android and iOS are in a race to the bottom in term of user experience and privacy invasion. Should I be happy that microsoft is keen to join them?
Setup icloud, setup apple wallet, setup apple music service, etc. And then I am getting nagged again regularly for apple music service when playing my mp3s.
Gone are the days where you bought something from a shop with no stickiness other than good service brought you back. Now there are far too many Marketing Managers who see stickiness as a win, even though the win is only to the supplier and not to the customer.
It is similar to those web sites who ask you whether you want "notifications" from them in your OS! Nope.