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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

451–460 of 490 posts

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#451
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't mix up poop and chocolate - while Google's accounts aren't really that great (the whole GSuite mish-mash of nonsense doesn't really help), they are several orders of magnitude better than whatever MS is trying to do here. You have a million different ways to permanently screw yourself with a MS account, especially since they basically kept all the "account types" hidden while applying over them a veneer of homo…

> You can basically use any Google account everywhere a Google account is required This is not true if it is a Google Workspace (or whatever they are calling it now) account. Learned this the hard way when getting YouTubeTV. To be fair, it was just a couple of hours of frustration and annoyance but still, for whatever reason, the workspace accounts that you pay for are second class citizens.

A Google Workspace account does not work for Nest. I signed up for the free Google-email-but-with-your-domain thing more than a decade ago. A bit more recently but back when I was still a Google fanboy I bought a Nest thermostat and was astonished that my account could not be used for Nest.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#452

One of the magical things microsoft has accomplished is that governments and corporates trust them so much. Some kind of Stockholm syndrom. Here in the Netherlands they somehow have convinced local governments (like cities & provinces) that working with them is still GDPR compliant, even thought they should only work with EU based companies to store data. But other companies like DigitalOcean, AWS and Google cloud (e…

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Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#453

Well, I found that I am mostly using my Linux desktop specifically because it doesn’t require me to obligatory sign in into the services I don’t want to use. Unlike Apple, Microsoft and Google. And also this is why I don’t use Ubuntu anymore.

Apple, fortunately, doesn't require any account signins to use anything that comes out of the box on a Mac, iPad, or iPhone. I know this because I have one of each running in my home with no associated cloud accounts whatsoever. They do nag you a bit (not aggressively like Microsoft, who is like "are you sure you want a terrible experience using this computer?"), but it is entirely possible to be productive outside o…

A large number of software engineers, even those at rival companies, actually use Macs for their work. If Apple forces those users to set up an online account for basic functionality, I'm sure Apple would lose so much business, because those companies aren't going to want to deal with iCloud.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#454

Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. When I was a city councillor I had a corporate O365 account from the council (used for council email and virtual meetings over teams) and simply trying to sign out of the thing or switch to another account was always fraught (I've got a personal account that's basically just to associate my windows license with and a work account used for azure access). You'd often end up in a s…

Unfortunate, it sounds like a mess and a half. Does any one know. If I found myself in the same situation would creating different windows accounts, one for each teams/azureAD account help keep them separate?

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#455
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue has been bugging me since Windows 7. Only "proper" solution is to /not/ sign into your MS account when seeting up the new machine for the first time. Create a local account with the name as you want it, and then only afterwards link it with your MS account (if you have to). Only problem is, latest Win11 installer does not allow you to create a local account anymore at all. So you need to install Win10, do…

If you can't bypass the Win11 online account requirement by being offline during install, then try this: In the "Let's connect you to a network" page, use these steps: * Use the Shift + F10 keyboard shortcut to open Command Prompt. * Type the following command to release the current network configuration and press Enter: oobe\bypassnro Note: The command is a single phrase without spaces. Note2: This will reboot the m…

I tried exactly this process, and it did not work. The commands were not found by the command prompt. Possibly because I was installing Win11 Home?

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#456
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that shit is why I took a brand-new NVIDIA Shield back to the store immediately after getting it home - it literally cannot be used without signing into a Google account. I bought it thinking, "hey nice, I can use this 4K Android home theatre device without Google being involved, since it's from NVIDIA and thus hopefully free of all that crap". I even did my homework on this: no material included with the produ…

This is probably not a helpful answer for most people, but the Shield has an unlocked bootloader, and it's popular enough to have lots of custom ROMs that you could flash that don't have that problem.

Oh no way? Nice, good to know if I ever have one again.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're just really difficult to support. MS makes it very easy to secure and admin at massive scale. You can roll out policies and updates to hundreds of thousands of machines with like 1-2 admins, and the other 8 IT people manage 200 Linux and Mac machines.

Oh, so it's not the users at all, it's that you have tools to manage Windows and didn't set up tools to manage anything else even though they exist; like a Linux admin complaining that Windows is unmanageable because ansible doesn't work well on it.

You're maliciously misunderstanding. The tools available to manage Windows are simply either much, much better, or much better value.

And everything just works out of the box with like... 3 lines of PowerShell.

You can replicate some of it with Ansible, sticky tape and a few spare weeks, but it's not the same at all.

I'm actually Linux admin, grew up with open source and spent my career serving pages and automating myself out of a job. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but for enterprise use they are _next fucking level_.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#458
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this discussion makes me glad I'm sticking to local logins for the Windows devices I still have to use. Once that option is gone, I guess that's the end of Windows on my devices.

This is the main reason I switched to Linux[1]. Online accounts, that are not in your direct control, shouldn't be connected directly to device sign-ins. Changes to the account, or the details of the account can cause loss of data and the ability to sign-in to your own device. They are pushing more and more people into the perception of renting a experience rather then owning a device. Its great money for me to help…

Your article resonated with me. The last straw for me was when MS Edge signed me into itself without my input or permission. I don’t know why that was the last straw but I just felt really violated by that. Thankfully Linux on the desktop has come really far. It truly is a breath of fresh air.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#459
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... Of course he has his important files in cloud storage anyway but it’s very annoying nonetheless ..." That doesn't sound reassuring if the cloud storage is, itself, Microsoft connected ... or even using auth/login mechanisms that connect to the Microsoft account.

It is Google Drive, actually

So good luck with Google customer support when Google's algorithms decide that your login attempt is suspect or your usage violated whatever terms of services they might have buried in their legalize.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#460
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The focus of those points feels completely irrelevant to the reality of my using a general PC to drive my TV. They seem to simultaneously assume the use of a generic point and click operating environment, while rejecting the additional functionality that would necessitate doing so. My Kodi box boots straight into Kodi. I have a mini wireless keyboard on it (Rii X8?), but the alphanumeric functionality isn't particula…

Look, I’m not saying you can’t use a PC for a TV if you want. I was specifically responding to the assertion that it was both cost-competitive and better performing when neither is true. It certainly allows you to do different things but it’s unclear how many people care about those more than the extra cash.

How is it not more cost effective and better performing AND nore flexible than an Nvidia shield or similar? Im not talking about Chromecasts here.
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