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Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

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Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#411

Post by Grombobulous »

NBJack wrote: post #328
Grombobulous wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other potentially obvious question is why bother using an OS that’s out of support when Linux is so good? I left Windows 11. The last straw wasn’t Microsoft accounts or Windows updates. I actually thought the OS was fine, most OS updates actually added great new features, and anything I considered an annoyance was easy to disable permanently. Toss your Windows 11 ISO into Rufus and disabling things like Microsoft…

Love Linux, but Nvidia drivers are still shit on it. I'm not willing to take a performance hit for the convenience. Which I guess is a little ironic, given you left Windows over AMD driver issues. The last time I had instability on a Nvidia card in Windows turned out to be a faulty card I had to RMA.

It is funny isn’t it? I imagine maybe a clean install or some other intervention might have helped me. The instability only affected two specific games at least on a regular basis and it was kind of a new thing.

But yeah, switching to Linux with an AMD card is basically an upgrade compared to Windows.

(My card is a 9070XT)

Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#412

Post by Grombobulous »

Grimm665 wrote: post #331
Grombobulous wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other potentially obvious question is why bother using an OS that’s out of support when Linux is so good? I left Windows 11. The last straw wasn’t Microsoft accounts or Windows updates. I actually thought the OS was fine, most OS updates actually added great new features, and anything I considered an annoyance was easy to disable permanently. Toss your Windows 11 ISO into Rufus and disabling things like Microsoft…

> The other potentially obvious question is why bother using an OS that’s out of support when Linux is so good? I'm in the process of setting up a Linux desktop to replace my Win10 one, and for me it's these (if anyone has suggestions for migration or replacement, I'd love some opinions!) - Lightroom. If anyone knows how to either run this under Linux, or migrate an entirely catalog of photos (plus edits) to somethin…

For games, my tip is that if you happen to be in CachyOS or some similar distribution, make sure you use the bore kernel for gaming.

I switched from the standard kernel to the bore kernel and went from a pretty disappointing experience in terms of performance and stutters to a really great one.

Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#414

Post by fortran77 »

projektfu wrote: post #403
fortran77 wrote: post #318

I don't know what the disconnect is. I'm running Windows 11 Arm right now on the best laptop I've ever owned -- an Asus Zenbook A16 with OLED screen and 48 GB of RAM (all for $1699). It's super fast -- it beats a 2026 Macbook Pro rendering Blender "Classroom". I have a Microsoft account, I don't know what the big deal is. I follow the happy path. It's nice to have settings (and I can control which ones) sync across m…

Do you like coming back to your work and finding that it rebooted on its own schedule and lost your context? That's my biggest frustration. If I only had one computer, it would be fine, but I manage an organization that's too small for enterprise and so I have to deal with the silly ads and gizmos on a dozen computers, managing group policy requires a domain and a lot of expertise I shouldn't need, and I'm not even s…

I run pro, so I have a group policy that eliminates forced reboots. For most users, forcing updates isn't a bad idea.

Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#415

Post by trashface »

cm2187 wrote: post #119

I enjoy windows 10 hugely now that it is out of support. It became way better when microsoft started tormenting the users of win11 instead of win10, and now that windows update doesn't bring new catastrophes and unexpected reboot, the OS is finally not interfering with usage anymore.

Win10 is still getting updates if you opt in. My dad's computer started hard locking after a recent update - I spend a few hours trying to fix it, and I'm not terrible at debugging win10 issues, but I couldn't find the problem. Had to reset windows. It worked fine after doing that (of course, there was no actual hardware problem, as I had guessed), but I have to reinstall all his tax software since he does his (and my) taxes on it. So the long term reliability of win10 is rather questionable at this point; I suspect vibe coding has infiltrated the windows update process.

Personally I'm on linux full time now, which has its own issues but enshittification by Microsoft is not one of them.

Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#416

Post by BizarroLand »

memcg wrote: post #345
seethishat wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really about personal privacy. Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold. If you don't want others reading your email, viewing your pictures, seeing your tax returns, etc. then you should encrypt the drive. I call this "The Pawn Shop Threat Model" ;) And, IME it is likely to happen.

I have purchased 6 multi Tb external drives at estate sales. My son brought home a few from a summer working as a mover. In his experience it was divorcing spouses throwing out each others stuff. All of these drives had Pii and personal photos. Some of the estate sale drives included pii of children and grandchildren.

I've found a few cheap hard drives at thrift stores. I used to buy them just in case someone had left a crypto wallet on them.

They're usually formatted but not wiped, so even recuva was typically able to claw back all of the missing data and restore the whole drive.

Family photos, nudes, sex videos (homemade and professional), downloaded movies, pirated games, I've found them all.

If you're dumping a drive and you don't DBAN it first, other people getting to see your shit is 100% on you.

Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#417

Post by GoblinSlayer »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #286
Grombobulous wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other potentially obvious question is why bother using an OS that’s out of support when Linux is so good? I left Windows 11. The last straw wasn’t Microsoft accounts or Windows updates. I actually thought the OS was fine, most OS updates actually added great new features, and anything I considered an annoyance was easy to disable permanently. Toss your Windows 11 ISO into Rufus and disabling things like Microsoft…

I would guess because "so good" does not equate with 100% and presumably the user's needs fall in that 5%. Linux has been usable for non proprietary software for decades now. The fact that people are refusing to jump ship even when Windows actively undermines them and itself speaks volumes of people's aversion (or inability) to switch OSes.

Where to install it? There was wubi, but iirc it was discontinued?

Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#418

Post by trashface »

JohnFen wrote: post #347
seethishat wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really about personal privacy. Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold. If you don't want others reading your email, viewing your pictures, seeing your tax returns, etc. then you should encrypt the drive. I call this "The Pawn Shop Threat Model" ;) And, IME it is likely to happen.

> Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold. Likely? How likely is it? I've never had a computer stolen, nor has anybody I personally know. So it doesn't seem to me like it's all that likely. Personally, I find whole disk encryption to be more risky than it's worth. I much prefer encrypting things on a file-level instead.

I knew a guy whose laptop was stolen and it had a major companies game engine source on it - which was not open source (he had done some contract work for them).

Personally I used LUKS encryption on a system76 laptop for 7 years and it worked fine - still going in fact. I was always worried about it failing especially after an update, but that never happened.

For backups to offline media I still do use file-level encryption though.

Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#419

Post by GoblinSlayer »

pjmlp wrote: post #224
LtWorf wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need office open a browser, in the unlikely case that libreoffice doesn't do.

Says someone that never used native Office versus Office Web. Yeah Web version will do, if everything you need is doable with Microsoft Works, and no collaboration with others is required. Google docs serves my word processing needs, then again I don't do anything at home that wasn't already possible in Word 2.0 for Windows 3.1, Wordpad, or AmigaWriter.

Word is just a bloated wordpad, and that's how people use it - to write text with paragraphs and justifications (recently wordpad supports docx). Excel is just a bloated csv viewer, that's how people use it - to make tables with text in them, notably price lists. My company is an ms shop and uses ms office offline and google docs for collaboration. First time I hear that ms office can into collaboration beyond sharepoint.

Re: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

#420

Post by sgtaylor5 »

Grombobulous wrote: post #283
cm2187 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The computer is not exposed to the WAN (behind a firewall), the main way it could get infected is via a vulnerability in a browser, but these do get updated. And OS updates don't really protect you from malware in executables you install anyway.

The other potentially obvious question is why bother using an OS that’s out of support when Linux is so good? I left Windows 11. The last straw wasn’t Microsoft accounts or Windows updates. I actually thought the OS was fine, most OS updates actually added great new features, and anything I considered an annoyance was easy to disable permanently. Toss your Windows 11 ISO into Rufus and disabling things like Microsoft…

For me, I can't switch to Linux because of my accounting software; it's only on macOS. They are very few Linux business accounting software programs suitable for sole proprietors. GNUcash is too hard to set up. Online accounting software is not good, because one is giving ownership of one's financial data to another entity, who could deny access at any moment.

I've had five clients who have lost access to their Microsoft accounts permanently due to insufficient, or old, recovery information. SMS can't be used anymore. I've been thinking about recommending Yubikeys, but when older people don't even want to use password managers because they don't trust them, that's a hard sell.

The biggest problem is Microsoft changes the rules and requires all of these features, but doesn't tell any normal users of the changes nor the addition of the features.

Namely, it's the "blockers" one hasn't found suitable replacements for.

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