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People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

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Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#381

Post by longislandguido »

aurareturn wrote: post #266
lukeschlather wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do browsers and Electron apps magically take up less memory on Macs? What is "good enough?" I never notice problems on my 16GB Windows laptop, so just for fun I closed all of my 6 always-on Electron-type apps, all of the 10 browser windows I had open, a couple other ever-present apps, and it looks like without anything else Windows 10 takes about 4GB, which I think is in the same ballpark as OS X. And I probably have…

Swap on macOS is incredibly good. Not sure how Apple does it. Maybe hardware compression?

> Not sure how Apple does it.

They do it by prematurely wearing down the soldered SSD just in time for you to buy a new laptop.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#382

Post by longislandguido »

gopher_space wrote: post #270
chocochunks wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple wins on the perception of being a luxury brand. That's it.

I have thirty years worth of old laptops in a closet. The macs all have hinges that still work. It’s nice to own things designed to not fall apart after a few years.

Will you be adding the Neo to the pile in your closet?

Because that's where it belongs with 8GB of RAM.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#383

Post by BLKNSLVR »

The fact there has to be a 'fight' about this tells you all you need to know about the direction the company's leadership wants to take.

Get out before their terms allow them to sue your company and hold your data to ransom if you think about migrating away.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#384

Post by lobf »

alemanek wrote: post #157
emptyfile wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile every MacOS thread is filled with people complaining how everything is broken and only getting worse. Not that I'd know, I've probably seen <10 apple laptop devices in my life and never used one.

Apple is in the process of fixing Tahoe which was a regression from Sequoia the previous release. Tahoe is decent with 26.4 though from what I am hearing. Either OS version is far far better than regular Windows 11 though. Apple’s real differentiator is their silicon. M series chips are just incredibly good and you get a full workday out of them on battery. The M1 Pro I still have at work is easily the best laptop I…

I'm also still on my M1 and I just don't see a need to upgrade. I've never owned a laptop this long without even considering getting a new one. It's still so fast, so cool, great screen, biometric unlocking... it's just incredible.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#385

Post by BLKNSLVR »

ano-ther wrote: post #2

That would improve things. Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine. When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online o…

So now 'cloud' is a reason to need local backups. Full circle!

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#386

Post by chaosharmonic »

grujicd wrote: post #12

This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel for other products and services. It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how…

This is maybe just that I switched to Linux years ago and haven't touched Apple hardware much, but what strikes me is how little the OS matters anymore. So much of the tooling is cross-platform now, so many of the applications are web based, and so much of the native platform can know be emulated, that part of why the market share isn't guaranteed is a level of portability that didn't exist a decade or two ago.

Everything from Edge as a cross-platform Chrome derivative to .NET as a cross-platform open-source toolkit to their React Native builds and experiments with Android suggest that MS itself understands this. The Linux side demonstrates it with things like Proton and the forthcoming Android desktop mode. The Web demonstrates it in general as it expands in capability and more applications skip shipping native entirely in favor of technologies like Electron. And not that I don't personally sob in system RAM, or have extreme reservations about how we got these things (see: Google and antitrust), but I can't say I hate the ease of switchover.

Ecosystem lock-in didn't go away, but it feels like it's changed a lot.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#387

Post by BLKNSLVR »

tzs wrote: post #211
SirFatty wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must be the free version of OneDrive that forces cloud only.

It doesn't force cloud only. It defaults to cloud only. This is for both free and paid versions. It has been this way for 3 years.

Default = Effectively Force for most users, I would think.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#388

Post by goldenarm »

gamblor956 wrote: post #342
goldenarm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specs may be comparable, but not the end result : my $2000 Windows 11 laptop is slower and laggier than the Neo.

You must have some broken hardware. My $600 2022 corporate laptop is faster and smoother than a $600 Neo, and that's with the corporate spyware crap installed.

I double checked, the hardware is fine. It's a mix of catastrophic Nvidia drivers and Windows 11 famous lack of optimization. I'm much happier on my 3x cheaper laptop on Linux that can handle three 144hz displays flawlessly on the iGPU.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#390

Post by jorvi »

ctoth wrote: post #319
ryandrake wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be obvious, but all of those things have a single common denominator: Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing. This is the biggest generalized danger in computing today: That OS (and device) manufacturers have gotten it in their heads that it's OK for them to have a strong say in what your computer runs. User doesn't want X, Y, or Z running on his computer? TOUGH. We are going to…

All true, and yet: Windows accessibility actually works. I use a screen reader daily. Linux a11y is complete dogshit — AT-SPI2 is unreliable, Orca is barely maintained, Wayland broke what little existed. I need something that actually works. When Linux goes off and decides it'll rewrite its working desktop stack and it's still, ten years later, not useable? ADHD-Driven development might be fine if you can see your sy…

I mean, why are you even on Windows then? Apple is the accessibility king by far. Both Windows and Android are aeons behind.
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