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I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

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Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#391

Post by COGlory »

brushfoot wrote: post #73

This makes me want to move back to Linux, but last time I tried Ubuntu (2020) there were lots of little annoyances. Off the top of my head: - Screen tearing. I Googled around and installed the Nvidia drivers for my laptop, but it never went away. - No detection of tablet mode. - No auto screen rotation. - Slow Blender rendering. Probably a PEBKAC with my driver setup, but it just worked in Windows and it was easy to…

So for some quick background, I currently operate a number of Linux PCs. 3 GUI workstations at work. 2 headless servers (one at work, one at home). 2 desktop PCs (one at work, one at home). I also have multiple laptops running Linux (including a Dell XPS with Nvidia graphics), and I have a PinePhone (Linux phone).

I say this from the bottom of my heart as someone that loves Linux: If you have a laptop with Nvidia graphics - don't bother trying to run Linux. The experience is just miserable.

There are two major things in the way:

1) Nvidia's drivers themselves are not very good and present day-to-day problems (like screen tearing and other artifacting), especially when trying to use Wayland (the next generation window manager on Linux). This may be fixed soon, Nvidia has been finally laying the groundwork for better compatibility with Wayland desktop. Alternately, if all you need is X11, then go ahead and don't bother with Wayland, which sidesteps this problem nicely. But if you have a higher DPI display and want decent display scaling, or ever plug into an external display, unfortunately Wayland is a necessity, and currently, it's miserable with Nvidia.

2) Power management/graphics switching is a miserable experience. There is prime render offload, but it's not very intelligent. Which means you have to remember to start applications with a flag every time you want to use the Nvidia GPU, which introduces all kinds of bugs. Alternately, you can just leave the Nvidia GPU as default, but that introduces more bugs (for instance, on my XPS, it killed my audio because somehow the Nvidia GPU took over audio output and after months of trying, I still couldn't fix it). Furthermore, it completely drains your battery. This is something that is almost certainly not going to be fixed.

On desktop, Linux is 95%-99% usable. On an Intel or AMD laptop, it's the same way. But on a laptop with Nvidia graphics, it's just not worth the headache. There's no complete solution, there's only tradeoffs.

That said, I recommend openSUSE Leap as an OS, because I find it's the best of all the tradeoffs. It's very stable, there's a corporation behind it that needs to keep it running. The release cycle is nice for desktop. YaST makes things very easy to manage the PC. The only real "tradeoffs" are that you need to install AV codecs from a community repository, and Nvidia drivers from a community repository (both are easily enabled through YaST).

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#392

Post by fish45 »

teekert wrote: post #155
shantnutiwari wrote: post #119

Microsoft 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…

Do you really need Windows? Our family laptop runs Linux, it does Teams for school, MineCraft, Netflix. You could do Office365 from a browser, although I admit, it is less than ideal. But it seems like you are almost at the emotional state make the jump... what's holding you back? I bought a Dell Latitude E5450 for 350 eur about 2 years back. It was used but looked new. It came with Win 10 Pro, which sits on my NAS a…

Funny anecdote, I installed Ubuntu on my own laptop to improve my minecraft FPS when I was 9 (~9 years ago).

I googled something like "how to get more fps in minecraft" and the first result was a minecraft forum post to which the only response was "install Ubuntu". At the time, Ubuntu had a .exe installer, so I thought it was just like any other program and installed it to my C: drive along with everything else. I think I did have the concept of other OS since I'd used both Windows and MacOS previously, so I figured it out after the reboot. It did increase my minecraft FPS from ~15 to ~30 on average, so I didn't have any complaints.

I stuck with that laptop until high school, when I got a new laptop and started dual-booting Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else, which is where I'm at now.

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#393

Post by at-fates-hands »

saul_goodman wrote: post #371
probably_wrong wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I lost my GMail account - they demanded a telephone number so I relented and gave them mine, but they refuse to accept it. They won't take my work number either.

Phone numbers have become the new SSN tied to your physical identity. In most cases you have provide extremely detailed personal info to get a working phone number. There are probably still some ways crafty folks can get a working phone number without it being tied to your physical identity, but you must go way out of your way to do so. Privacy and freedom of speech are dead, long live the constitution.

I've tried several privacy apps where you can set up phone numbers not attached to your identity and google refused to let me use any of them.

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#394

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

nickjj wrote: post #377
HeckFeck wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a shame to watch the decline of Windows. There isn't much I can recommend to non-technical users looking affordable computing relatively under their control. Manipulation and user hostility is unacceptable. Any of these possibilities would be nice: * The market presents a kinder (and equally-affordable x86) solution and users follow. * ReactOS lurches leaps and bounds ahead. * Microsoft realises this trajectory…

Running native Linux for non-technical users ends up being a great move as long as the programs they want to run work on it. For example imagine a retired non-technical person who occasionally trades stocks. Even major trading platforms like Interactive Brokers have native Linux clients. Non-technical users want a stable system that doesn't constantly change. Windows loves to hit you with popup notices or UI changes…

> Non-technical users want a stable system that doesn't constantly change.

...and you're recommending Linux Desktop for that? An operating system famous for breaking compatibility with itself every 2 years or so? Not to mention between distros. I mean, I suppose you can just leave them on some arbitrary un-updated version of Ubuntu forever, but the same could be said for Windows 2000.

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#395

Post by robomartin »

Let me take a contrarian position here.

For the average consumer it is likely that a MS account is a good path. No different from connecting your iPhone to the App Store and iCloud, which most consumers do.

For the average consumer such things as automatic updates and some degree of management is a good thing.

Profesional and enterprise users are a different matter. In this case what is being presented here is a nonexistent problem. If a professional or enterprise user can’t figure out how to install and run Windows with the degree of control they desire, well, they might not actually be pro users. Using Hone edition? Please.

This is not a problem.

Something to gripe about for fun and entertainment? Sure. Have a blast. A problem? Nope. Never has been and never will be. MS has always provided professional users with the flexibility they require. Not doing so would destroy their business.

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#396

Post by chopin »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #385
bserge wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Year of Linux on desktop, it's coming home boys! I'm joking but secretly hoping it happens.

I'm over in Mac-land so a bit unclear on the state of things, but it seems like the problem must be marketing by now, right? I can't think of any use cases for mainstream users where Windows is a requirement. Graphic designers, digital art types, and musicians are all fringe and mostly on Mac anyway. PC gamers are a fringe crowd. Practically all productivity software has migrated to the cloud. Desktop Linux usability…

When I buy a computer, Windows 10 is installed as default. You have to go out of your way to get a computer which hasn't. I think it's as easy as that.

I've setup Linux on all machines I own or maintain, for all users including my wife. The frequency of hickups is not higher than it was with Windows and It's easy to roll back to a known good configuration, much easier than with Windows. I never looked back.

Edited to add: The last machine I bought was a Purism laptop. The first machine which did not have Windows pre-installed.

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#397

Post by denton-scratch »

leppr wrote: post #163
skinkestek wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that compared to the the UX issues of Windows it is fantastic. Obviously this varies from person to person but I have verified already a more than a decade ago that it worked very well with ordinary users as long as they didn't need MS Office or anything like it. And true: Netflix doesn't work but for that I use my phone/tablet that I cast to my TV. You may say: not everyone has a PC and a phone but as far as…

Netflix works fine on Linux. Either enable DRM on Firefox, or install Google Chrome, then use your browser of choice to access https://netflix.com .

Netflix works fine in Firefox. Nothing to install.

I've got rid of my Netflix account; between Sky, Youtube and Freesat, there's more stuff to watch than I have time in the day.

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#398

Post by xtracto »

xtracto wrote: post #213
BatteryMountain wrote: post #46

Earlier 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 use Linux in my main PC, both to work on programming and to play games. I've been familiar with Linux and using it on an off for more th as n 15 years. Nevertheless, my days of advocating for others to use it are over (I even used to frequent comp.linux.advocacy!). People that are used to Windows will have a very hard time moving away of it. No matter how easy the migration path, there will always be something pain…

Just as an example of something that happened to me just today: I wanted to connect 2 monitors to my linux Home PC: 1 in the Nvidia GPU HDMI and another one in the integrated Intel HDMI. It doesn't work out of the box, and it is apparently not possible, at least not without thinkering with the BIOS and some config files (and the main response returned by google https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=265946 doesn't work).

So yeah, I can imagine how people coming from windows might be frustrated with that.

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#399

Post by kitsunesoba »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #385
bserge wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Year of Linux on desktop, it's coming home boys! I'm joking but secretly hoping it happens.

I'm over in Mac-land so a bit unclear on the state of things, but it seems like the problem must be marketing by now, right? I can't think of any use cases for mainstream users where Windows is a requirement. Graphic designers, digital art types, and musicians are all fringe and mostly on Mac anyway. PC gamers are a fringe crowd. Practically all productivity software has migrated to the cloud. Desktop Linux usability…

Linux simply has too many rough edges still exposed to appeal to a lot of less technical users. Even in the best case scenario (super standard desktop with hardware well supported by FOSS drivers), there’s always some odd thing that requires one to pull out the terminal, usually because UI functionality was insufficient or failed to work as expected.

That does not bother me or probably most of us on HN much, but for most people it’s like periodically needing to muck around under the hood of their car. It’s too much, they just want to drive and take the vehicle in to get oil and brake changes every once in a fairly long while. Anything more is tedious overhead.

The situation with proprietary drivers still kinda stinks too. The distros I’ve seen handle it best are Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers control panel and pop!_OS which just sidesteps the issue altogether for Nvidia hardware by shipping an ISO with non-free Nvidia drivers included, but the rest just leave you with a package manager, terminal, and whatever you can scrounge up on the internet. Yeah it’s technically the responsibility of Nvidia, etc to fix that, but it’s negatively impacting adoption nonetheless.

Re: I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

#400

Post by grumpyprole »

gentleman11 wrote: post #386
kiawe_fire wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I’ve just become “one of those people”, but I honestly think if not for the buzz around the M1 from Apple, we would be seeing a lot more activity on the Linux side. “The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.

Linux needs killer app equivalents. Many of the foss versions of windows programs have pretty painful UX or are missing key features (eg, smart select in gimp is really frustrating to use vs photoshop or affinity). Foss really needs to start tempting designers to participate more

It's worse than that. The desktop efforts are heavily fragmented and arguably the leader, RedHat's "Gnome", while quite polished, is actually quite user hostile (e.g. works very differently to anything else, perhaps to dodge patents; and constantly changes/removes popular features). Linux needs to have a standardised "platform" with stable APIs.
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