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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

#51

Post by em-bee »

bombcar wrote: post #47
em-bee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why will libreoffice not do? just the difference of the UI, or incompatibility worries? in my opinion these are just transition issues. iaw. it's not a problem with libreoffice but the problem is that there is a transition. same with a windows VM. just the issues with interaction with documents outside the VM, or that using a VM is not really solving the problem of getting rid of windows?

Interoperability is still an issue, and people who are already suspicious of you messing with their shit really do not want a “different office” at home than at work.

people who are already suspicious

see, that's the problem. it's not a technical issue. it's lack of trust. i am not saying that there are no issues, but by far the biggest issue is and has always been expectations and trust. the expectation that there will be no problems, which is not even fulfilled when you upgrade windows or word, and also the subtle differences, quirks that you got used to, are different now.

it's resistance to change, while completely missing that microsoft forces more change on their users than linux or libreoffice ever did. if we could sell a switch to linux/libreoffice as a windows upgrade, people would moan, but it would not be any worse than an actual windows upgrade.

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

#52

Post by kotaKat »

deng wrote: 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…

Until the day the machine has been UEFI-flagged to require online connectivity regardless. Yes, that's a thing, and the flag's been lurking in the UEFI since Windows 10 1809, even. Intune/Windows Autopilot leverages it for out-of-the-box MDM enforcement.

https://oofhours.com/2019/08/17/requiring-a-network-connecti...

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

#53

Post by TiredOfLife »

jowea wrote: post #3

> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store. That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.

You have to explicitly add a Microsoft account and enable the photo synchronization on Samsung phone. It's not enabled by default.

Also by default OneDrive uses the cloud files where it downloads none of the files unless you specifically ask to do it.

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

#54

Post by Lammy »

happymellon wrote: post #36
Lammy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Only for gaming and for piracy. I also need it for BD ripping since DVDfab Passkey operates as a Windows driver.

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

#55

Post by Wowfunhappy »

deng wrote: 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'm a school teacher nowadays, but both my current and previous school have used Google Docs for everything. When I was in graduate school getting my teaching degree, everyone used Google Docs. All of our students use Google Docs.

Is this reliance on Office an enterprise thing?

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

#56

Post by fuzzfactor »

Looks like the major monthly "update" Tuesday this week reverted the setting in Edge under Profiles where if you haven't been actively signing in, you are signed into Edge automatically using credentials it may be able to find elsewhere, without any action from you, or apparently without any notification. Among other things.

Update turned it back ON by default.

Even if you found it and turned it off manually, another Edge update came in a couple days later and turned it back on again.

Just in case you intentionally turned it off, "somebody" probably doesn't want you to know if or when it comes back on. But in the author's case you can't help but notice anyway due to complete malfunction with no clues given as to why.

But that's not the first thing I noticed.

This time, beyond a doubt, nobody is getting updated faster than it was under Windows 98 dial-up, where we had download speeds and processor speeds orders of magnitude slower.

That's been looking pretty iffy a lot of times for a year or two, but now I think no matter how fast your fiber and how blazingly overclocked your processor, there are so many shipped defects needing correction that you're in for major delays like never before. It's just not as advanced in UX compared to when people were more advanced by comparison relative to the technology at their disposal.

There's also the factor of how busy your SSD and network have become, more & more occupied at all times with tasks useless to your own particular efforts, whoever thought piling a 3GB+ "update" on top of that was a good idea?

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

#57

Post by beng-nl »

nubinetwork wrote: post #50
avdelazeri wrote: post #43

I abandoned Windows over 10 years ago, when a mandatory Windows 10 update rewrote by UEFI partition and messed up my dual boot setup. It took me an entire evening to fix, at which point I swore that no machine owned by me would ever run Windows again. The more I hear about Windows 11 makes me think I really dodged a bullet there.

Windows has been doing this since forever.

Can confirm this has been happening since the simple BIOS+MBR days - after install Windows would just write MBR code to boot into the windows partition.

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

#58

Post by rekabis »

As a security professional and Windows user of over 35 years, I always do everything within my power to steer people away from using Microsoft accounts in favour of using local accounts.

99.9999% of all users benefit exclusively from local accounts and the stability they bring. Microsoft accounts are a headache and a security/stability risk in virtually 100% of all implementations that I would not want to inflict on anyone.

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

#59

Post by subscribed »

bitwize wrote: post #16
Lammy wrote: post #7

> The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account. Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege l…

The problem with Linux, they say, is that you have to fiddle with it endlessly to get it working; Windows, by contrast, Just Works Right Out of the Box. Oh, but you don't actually want to use Windows as it comes out of the box, so they tell us you have to use a custom build, replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe, create an unattend.xml, don't connect it to the internet during the install procedure, run these commands, mak…

TBH I use both windows and Linux since ages and it's Linux that's painless and always works, but my main personal OS is still Windows (10) because I can't get all I need running well (or at all) on Linux.

And yes, the windows updates resettling all these little necessary settings is little infuriating.

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

#60

Post by defrost »

subscribed wrote: post #59
bitwize wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Linux, they say, is that you have to fiddle with it endlessly to get it working; Windows, by contrast, Just Works Right Out of the Box. Oh, but you don't actually want to use Windows as it comes out of the box, so they tell us you have to use a custom build, replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe, create an unattend.xml, don't connect it to the internet during the install procedure, run these commands, mak…

TBH I use both windows and Linux since ages and it's Linux that's painless and always works, but my main personal OS is still Windows (10) because I can't get all I need running well (or at all) on Linux. And yes, the windows updates resettling all these little necessary settings is little infuriating.

While you should never blindly trust a stranger that suggests you open and admin power shell and enter

  PS C:\Windows\system32> irm "https://christitus.com/win" | iex
it's worth a shot - that downloads the latest stable Chris Titus WinUtil as a tabbed text GUI with easy click options and various recommended setting levels to deal with all of that.

See: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

https://christitus.com/windows-tool/

Chris Titus on his own (and contributors) Util: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuaNw8Tpn7Q

Some third party run through and rave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i43BZyJ4azc

It's all open source powershell scripts from windows insiders that gets heavy eyeballs - fast track installs of common software, easy set update tweaks (eg: only the serious security updates), disable telemetry and AI bloat, etc.

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