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Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

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Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#21
post #17

This kind of shit used to be explicitly tested against. Get a Windows 7 install, fill up all but the last few bytes on the main HDD, it'll work fine, you'll be able to login and delete stuff. Completely saturate memory, RAM full, swap full, the OS will still work. It'll be slow and messy, but you'll be able to navigate around enough to get shit ton. Heck I suspect these scenarios would work even on Windows 10. What k…

They moved all the resources in to shoveling copilot garbage in to everything.

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#22
post #6

Protect yourself, use a local account. Windows 11 does not allow this but Rufus will help when you create your Windows installation media. And obviously never enter your Microsoft account credentials into any Microsoft app until you're certain it won't be linked to your local account.

Sounds like just avoiding dark patterns at all cost to me

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#23
post #3

> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store. That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.

Yeah QA is basically nonexistent at Microsoft, at least it hasn't been since the early Windows 10 days. At work we ended up getting rid of all of our Windows runners because we found out that running our tools on WINE got objectively more reliable and deterministic than having to deal with Microsoft's bullcrap

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#24
post #16
post #7

> The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account. Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege l…

The problem with Linux, they say, is that you have to fiddle with it endlessly to get it working; Windows, by contrast, Just Works Right Out of the Box. Oh, but you don't actually want to use Windows as it comes out of the box, so they tell us you have to use a custom build, replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe, create an unattend.xml, don't connect it to the internet during the install procedure, run these commands, mak…

I'm not telling you to use Windows. I'm telling you I use Windows lol

It sucks a lot actually, and everything that's good about it is good despite what Microsoft do to it and not because of them. I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast that both don't work so well on my OS of choice: https://old.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/1nkpkoo/burnout_...

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#25
post #3

> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store. That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.

Sometimes it's a fairly fine difference between dark and merely dim.

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#26

Atteibuted to Ian Fleming: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." So um how many dark patterns was that ?

The 0th pattern was not enumerated, it is assumed you know it's the very existence of a Microsoft Account.

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#27
FYI: You can still install Win11 with a local account. When prompted for your account, hit Shift+F10 to get a terminal, then enter

start ms-cxh:localonly

and a window will pop up where you can create a local account and continue with the installation.

Yep, it's all insane. And before the "switch to Linux" replies: yes, I am using Linux, but Friends&Family still rely on Windows software. The big elephant in the room is of course Office, and I mean the REAL Office, not the MickeyMouse version that runs in the browser. No, LibreOffice will not do, neither will running Office in a Windows VM, nor running a 20year old Office version in Wine.

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#28
post #24
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Linux, they say, is that you have to fiddle with it endlessly to get it working; Windows, by contrast, Just Works Right Out of the Box. Oh, but you don't actually want to use Windows as it comes out of the box, so they tell us you have to use a custom build, replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe, create an unattend.xml, don't connect it to the internet during the install procedure, run these commands, mak…

I'm not telling you to use Windows. I'm telling you I use Windows lol It sucks a lot actually, and everything that's good about it is good despite what Microsoft do to it and not because of them. I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast that both don't work so well on my OS of choice: https://old.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/1nkpkoo/burnout_...

Burnout Paradise worked fine out the box on my Steam Deck, and my Linux Chimera "console".

The hardest part was dealing with the shitty launchers.

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#29
post #2

The past few years I’ve been hearing crazy stories of workarounds and scripts to deal with all these new features in Windows. Isn’t that what was preventing people from using Linux? Replacing utilman.exe with cmd.exe is not something a normal user would ever do.

Normal users in this situation either buy a new computer or take it in to a tech support business to have it fixed. An average user will never install an OS manually so the only areas it’s succeeding are where it’s preinstalled like on the steam deck.

> buy a new computer

Which wouldn't fix this. The new computer will run out of space after it's finished downloading the backups

> take it in to a tech support business

You think Geek Squads going to be able to fix this?

Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

#30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not telling you to use Windows. I'm telling you I use Windows lol It sucks a lot actually, and everything that's good about it is good despite what Microsoft do to it and not because of them. I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast that both don't work so well on my OS of choice: https://old.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/1nkpkoo/burnout_...

Burnout Paradise worked fine out the box on my Steam Deck, and my Linux Chimera "console". The hardest part was dealing with the shitty launchers.

> FreeBSD

Great to hear that about Proton though!

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