Live data from Hacker News

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

extremetech.com

411–420 of 657 posts

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

#411
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is great, however it also makes screen recording more difficult.

True. For "wl-roots"-based compositors like swaywm, check out wf-recorder[1]. [1] https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder

I know about those solutions, and it works for me on sway in general. But is was not a simple out-of-the-box experience you have with X11.

And there are still multiple issues: For instance with X11 you can select a specific window. I have not found a way to do this in with a wayland compositor yet.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam Proton and Soldier runtime do wonders. I am playing Witcher 3 through it. Using mods. No lags or crashes.

The annoying bit with those is that they are Steam only. I try to avoid Steam and instead buy from GOG because they are DRM-free and i keep offline copies of all of my games, but Wine still (just tried yesterday the version Void Linux installs in a VM) seems to have issues even with slightly older games. There used to be a way to run Proton outside of Steam but i think it is now discouraged.

In that case, please give Lutris a solid look. It's a great app that eases the pain of installing games via WINE (and makes it easy to install particular versions of WINE on a per game basis).

It's how I run my GOG games on Pop OS.

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

#413
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Indeed funny! What happened after you installed the .exe Ubuntu? You clicked the icon and then ..? I'm just past the 'stage' you're in now, I recently deleted my partition running Windows (kept it for GTA5). Only Ubuntu now.

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

#414
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is misleading, as you can always turn on security updates, and turn off applications upgrades. I don't even know that's possible on Windows (I guess answer is a loud and clear NO)

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

#415
post #389
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Albeit, it's not that obvious, you can create an offline account without failing to sign in. Maybe it's different with anything below Windows 10 Pro but that was my experience.

> Maybe it's different with anything below Windows 10 Pro but that was my experience. It is different with the "S" Home edition which is what comes with a lot of decently spec'd laptops for typical personal use. I run Pro here and there's a secondary text link off to the side that you can click to make an offline account. That link doesn't exist with the Home edition (specifically the "S" edition, I don't know about…

Yeah, Pro (and above) is also the only one that has the Hyper-V or whatever, if that's even still a requirement.

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

#416
post #117

I 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…

Microsoft really is one of the worst examples in the dark pattern department that I've ever seen. Same with their email service, where you can register an account without issues and after a few weeks of use I was presented with an unskippable input field for my phone number. Don't want to give MS your phone number? Too bad, better hope you don't need those emails anymore.

[deleted]

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

#417
post #117

I 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…

Microsoft really is one of the worst examples in the dark pattern department that I've ever seen. Same with their email service, where you can register an account without issues and after a few weeks of use I was presented with an unskippable input field for my phone number. Don't want to give MS your phone number? Too bad, better hope you don't need those emails anymore.

Google paved the way for that trick, Gmail does exactly the same.

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

#418

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…

> Do you really need Windows?

Probably not, unless you are a gamer.

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

#419
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…

>Is the problem really that you still have to grapple with graphics drivers on the CLI?

Bullshit on distros like Solus OS.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep an eye out for games supported on Proton (Steam's Wine facilitation) on protondb.com. In a mere five years gaming on Linux went from a solid selection of native games, to those, plus an impressive amount of high profile titles that just work out of the box (often with better performance on Linux). Of course there may be one or two titles that tie you to Windows, or perhaps multiplayer specific gaming related sof…

My biggest pain point is that some of the mainstream multiplayer anticheat implementations don't work on wine. I'd like to be able to play Tarkov or Hunt or Apex on Linux, but I can't. So far, I have just not played those titles, even though I really want to. I don't really want to have to dual boot just to play them, because Windows 10 messes up my EFI booting. I used to run Windows with a GPU passthrough, but I sto…

It's gotten much easier with Nvidia cards thanks to VM gaming being officially supported. No more hiding the VM and that Error 47 nonsense.

Basically you bind the graphics card to the vfio driver by writing the PCI ID to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id and then you can use it in qemu with -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0.

If you have sane IOMMU groups and have an extra GPU for the host it should work with just those two steps. You still have to decide about how you handle input and output, but that's very user specific. Virtual input over the qemu GUI works well enough, there's also an evdev thing that lets you switch by pressing both Ctrl keys, or pass an entire USB controller. For audio I recommend scream[1] for the lowest latency (I get 2ms VM->PA->Speaker with MuQSS scheduler) with full 7.1 audio and if you don't want a dedicated monitor or switch monitor inputs there is Looking Glass[2] which captures frames and shuffles them to the host over shared memory. It also handles input via spice.

It's still a bit of work, but for me that's mostly on the Windows side rather than the passthrough stuff itself.

[1]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream [2]: https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass

Post reply on HN