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.
I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
111–120 of 657 posts
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#112I 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.
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#113I don't really get the selective targeted hate. 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?
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.
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#114It 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 Manag…
> bought something from a shop with no stickiness If you want this you can still have it, you just need to follow a simple rule: Absolutely no non-free non community maintained software ever period.
OSS software isn’t immune to this stuff either. Many projects want to increase the number of people using them.
What’s different is the community pushes back on annoying examples where customers are mostly stuck with that they purchased and don’t have a say.
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
He said, on a non community maintained forum. --- 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.
They also did say ‘software’.
Your monitor has software, as does basically everything built lately significantly more complicated than a fan.
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, Manjaro/Arch. 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 Debi…
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.
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#117I 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.
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#118I 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…
You can get out of "S Mode", a feature which is absurdly hidden in the MS Store [1].
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#119Microsoft 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.
Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I can't imagine the hoops you'd have to jump through to have a cell phone following this simple rule. It was hard, thankfully pine64 exists and it's no longer any more difficult than following on the desktop.
Rolled your own cellular infrastructure as well?