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Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

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Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#241
post #198

The onedrive integration is one of the most annoying things about windows for me right now. Not just the constant nagging, nor the "Adverts" pasted over my computer, but one day I woke up and something had decided to move all my documents to a new "onedrive" folder, despite never signing up for anything. (Or at least "asked me" in some super easy to miss clickthrough) This naturally broke a stack of apps and scripts,…

> This naturally broke a stack of apps and scripts,and my expectations. A great example of why you should be using environment variables and the proper system API calls to determine path locations, not hard coding them. But never let an opportunity to blame Microsoft for poor application code go to waste. Sounds like your expectations are a bit low.

And here I was thinking %HOMEDRIVE% %HOMEPATH% /were/ the "proper" variables to use. Or at least get to a location that I an responsible for the locations and addressing beyond that point.

Please enlighten me on what should be used instead.

Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#242
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time I am forced to reply to one of these, it is never pleasantly worded.

95% of the curse words and middle fingers I deploy in my daily life are now towards similar practices. The remaining 5% are when I stub my toe on things. Who out that damn furniture there anyway!?!

often times I have been known to give a misbehaving app on my computer the finger. sometimes, when it is really egregious, it gets both barrels. it serves no useful purpose other than i feel a bit better about my silent sign of protest rather than launching into the curse laden tirade that i really want to do. but i've been told (more than once) that is frowned upon behavior in a professional environment.

Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer chris titus's windows script, automates the whole process.

I would not recommend that script. On the default settings it messes with quite a few group policies which for example ends up preventing Visual Studio from installing dependencies. (i.e. InstallDefault, which prevents webview2 from being installed)

I think I tried something similar to wipe out the Edge and Onedrive nagware but it seemed to break windows update, so ended up reverting it.

Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#244
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time I am forced to reply to one of these, it is never pleasantly worded.

You don't have to reply to this one. You can just kill the process instead. I actually did not notice this popup on a new install this week, because I never exit OneDrive the clean and fair way. Nor do I uninstall it the clean and fair way...

> You can just kill the process instead.

> Before gently laying this process to rest we would just like to have a minute of your time to gather some information so we can provide our customers with a better service. [Ten question survey follows]

Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Huh, seems like 97% of the freeform text entry boxes contain profanity."

exactly!

this is definitely one of those "well, they were asking for it" defense situations. literally. they provided me a free form text box asking for my opinion. only an ID10T would expect anything less

Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#246

Why is OneDrive a closable thing? Shouldn't it just run behind the scenes (assuming the user has opted-in)? iCloud mostly works like this - once you sign in and tell the system to sync files, it just works. There's no visible app to start or stop.

Dropbox is also closable. Sometimes you might want to stop syncing for a while. Maybe you just copied a few gigabytes inside and you're not on the right network to let it upload.

Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#247
post #198

The onedrive integration is one of the most annoying things about windows for me right now. Not just the constant nagging, nor the "Adverts" pasted over my computer, but one day I woke up and something had decided to move all my documents to a new "onedrive" folder, despite never signing up for anything. (Or at least "asked me" in some super easy to miss clickthrough) This naturally broke a stack of apps and scripts,…

Worse still, I have a BYoD laptop that I own myself but use for work. If you accidentally click the wrong (BIG!) button instead of the correct (tiny!) link during authentication then... SURPRISE... you are now enrolled into mobile device management (InTune). One of the most common policies is to force home directory migration to OneDrive.

Imagine my surprise when I get an automated email from a customer Microsoft 365 tenant saying that I had shared content that violates their corporate policy.

No I hadn't.

Microsoft did. They hoovered up my content, shoved it into the customer's OneDrive, and then applied data loss prevention (DLP) policy. You know... to stop people sharing things through OneDrive they shouldn't be.

It's just unfathomable to me that we've all just rolled over and accepted this as normal. Literal dark patterns by every definition of the term designed to coerce and trick everyone in the world to store their data in Microsoft's cloud whether they choose to or not.

Secrets. Passwords. Source code. Classified documents. Private pictures of my family. Pictures of my naked children.

Sluuuuurp!

Got to meet those KPIs at any cost.

If anyone from Microsoft is lurking in this thread: THIS is how megacorporations end. This. You take a giant shit on your evangelists, your technical experts, then they'll jump ship. The other 99% of users don't matter. They really don't. They'll follow where the 1% go. This has played out over and over. It destroyed Digg. It destroyed Slashdot. It destroyed IBM. It will destroy Microsoft in time.

PS: Because of this incident I now refuse to store anything in any of the pre-defined folders like "Documents" or "Pictures". I keep everything in a separate folder hierarchy outside of my user profile because I can no longer trust my own personal computer to keep files where I put them.

Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really dude? That’s your take?

Sorry you ship code that's hard coded to C:\Crapware. It's unfortunate you think that's okay even though it violates conventions Microsoft has published for oh I don't know 30 years. Some people never learn.

I'm pretty sure that code which lands in C:\Crapware actually would not be affected by the above issue.

I install all of my dev shit in C: anything else gives path length errors in MSVC anyways.

Re: Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

#250
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This naturally broke a stack of apps and scripts,and my expectations. A great example of why you should be using environment variables and the proper system API calls to determine path locations, not hard coding them. But never let an opportunity to blame Microsoft for poor application code go to waste. Sounds like your expectations are a bit low.

And here I was thinking %HOMEDRIVE% %HOMEPATH% /were/ the "proper" variables to use. Or at least get to a location that I an responsible for the locations and addressing beyond that point. Please enlighten me on what should be used instead.

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/win32/blob/docs/desktop-src...

You're welcome.

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