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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

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows still likes to occasionally clobber your EFI entries and wipe out grub if it sees it.

You can use the windows boot loader to boot other operating systems. I guess there's no guarantee an update won't remove it from the menu, though. A lot of systems have a boot menu built into UEFI these days, too, which will show you all the bootable partitions on the system.

I know the NT bootloaders would chainload Linux under BIOS, but have never seen a successful technique using UEFI.

Is there an easy-to-understand tutorial?

For dual boot I have been relying on Grub to boot Windows which it still does fine with UEFI.

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

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows still likes to occasionally clobber your EFI entries and wipe out grub if it sees it.

You can use the windows boot loader to boot other operating systems. I guess there's no guarantee an update won't remove it from the menu, though. A lot of systems have a boot menu built into UEFI these days, too, which will show you all the bootable partitions on the system.

I'm using rEFInd (because it's pretty!) and have the UEFI executable priority set, so as long as Windows doesn't reformat my ESP I should be fine. Or if it does I at least know how to fix it. Within FreeBSD it's a simple `mount -t msdosfs`, and shoutout to this utility for the Windows side of things: https://github.com/franzageek/WinEFIMounter

The one annoyance was that the Windows installer makes a puny 100MiB ESP by default, which would actually be enough for everything I have on there at the moment, but it felt small so I bumped it up to 1G before installing the second OS.

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

#33
post #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 i…

[deleted]

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

#34
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.

I have a machine with Windows 11 Enterprise LTSB and it did not ask me to login in with microsoft credentials after/during install. No Microsoft Store or other bloat, no One Drive necromancy.

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

#35
post #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 i…

If you use Rufus to burn the iso to the boot drive, you can also chose to create an offline account there (and also disable some other installation requirements like TPM).

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

#36
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Sorry I misunderstood, though to be fair... ;)

> I'm telling you I use Windows lol

> I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast

Makes it sound like your OS of choice is Windows

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

#37
I had a similar issue earlier this year with my laptop. I use my own laptop for work and created a dedicated account (a Standard account, not Admin) for my work stuff. I signed in with our EntraID/Office365/Azure credentials. Worked fine for about a month. Then we added 2FA to everything and resetted passwords company wide (via our 3rd party IT "partner"). Half the the staff's email/outlook got cooked really good and but my machine in particular, one morning I turned it on and I could no longer log into windows. Not even with my local-only Admin account. Not with the Standard/Microsoft account that has hijacked MY system.

I had to reinstall windows completely and lost about 2 days total + couple of days worth of code/work, nevermind my own data.

About a month after that something else broke my dev tools again and I switched to Fedora/KDE (as all my dev tools works fine there too). It's been fairly smooth sailing since then. Install updates frequently, my system is so nice fine tuned to my needs it's awesome. I'm not a linux noob but the first time a linux install lasted more than 6 months for me without breaking itself. Also run multiple user accounts on it to seperate home/work life. Fully encrypted, fingerprint reader works, webcam/mic works. Haven't had the urge to install windows again on this machine, nor another linux distro.

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

#38
If you buy a Samsung phone, after initial setup (be sure to Opt-out of all the extra ToS), install all the google equivalent app (calc, calendar, contacts, phone, etc) enable developer mode and remove all the samsung variants via adb. Takes an hour but well worth it. Some packages/apps can only be removed via adb. On a brand new samsung, there are three Meta/facebook packages installed in android as hidden even if you have Facebook app uninstalled. Most of the samsung bloat, including One Drive can be properly removed like this. Phone runs silky smooth & battery lasts longer too after this process. My phone has very little left of samsung, but I do unfortunately have to use google's apps, which works great for what it is.

Don't try to remove the Samsung Gallery, as it will break the camera.

Don't remove all the Knox packages, as they will break NFC/Wallet apps.

You can remove all the AR/VR Emoji shit, half of them use the internet...

You can remove the "Weather" package. This is supposedly a widget.. right.

You can remove Hiya spyware package."spam call detection" straight from china .

You can remove netflix, youtube, instagram, snapchat, spotify, microsoft apps and other preinstalls this way too (instead of just disabling some of them). You can always install from the store again if needed.

I hate what modern tech/software ecosystem has become.

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

#39
post #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 i…

I think this exact reason why MS will fight to the death to keep Office off Linux machines.

It's the last hurdle before 'normies' moving to Linux.

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

#40
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.

I was thinking the same thing. Never thought I'd see a world where Arch has an installer (and, jokes aside, many Linux distros have very straightforward GUI installers) while people have to... "hit Shift+F10 to get a terminal, then enter start ms-cxh:localonly" to install Windows with a local account. Jeez.
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