Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 657 posts

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

#601

Post by Eric_WVGG »

alasdair_ wrote: post #489
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>PC gamers are a fringe crowd. Sure, if 1.5 Billion people are a "fringe crowd" https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/314009-3-billion-people-w...

Wow, never seen those figures before… well forgive my American myopia. I would still describe American PC gamers as “fringe”, but I had thought the Asian market was similarly leaning toward console players, clearly that is incorrect.

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

#602

Post by akagusu »

lbriner wrote: post #34

It is sadly part of a dark pattern called "stickiness". You can dress it up as functionally useful or even important but ultimately it is about companies wanting to create enough of a dependency that you have to continue using them, which is anti-competitive. Gone are the days where you bought something from a shop with no stickiness other than good service brought you back. Now there are far too many Marketing Manag…

More sad than companies using this pattern is that people know it but don't care about it.

It does not matter how many bad things a company can do, people simply doesn't care.

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

#603

Post by Vahkesh »

cosmojg wrote: post #535
Vahkesh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been considering making the switch to a Linux distro full-time, this move by Microsoft might be deciding factor. It sounds like they restricted Firefox installations to force users to use Edge.....

What's keeping you on Windows? Linux is as capable as ever these days.

Honestly, not much at this point.... Just don't have the time to commit to a smooth transition.

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

#604

Post by mackrevinack »

FpUser wrote: post #224
acapybara wrote: post #133

When Windows 10 came out, the telemetry, MS account features, forced auto updates/reboots made my computer feel like it was no longer my own. Having used Microsoft OSes since DOS, this was the straw that finally broke the camel's back. After dabbling in Linux for years, this was motivation to commit 100% to using Linux as my main OS. It was mildly painful at first, but after sticking with it, I would never go back.

I would love me to move to Linux completely. However healthy share of my income comes from my desktop products. And since I have tens of thousands of customers for those it would be a business suicide trying to convince them to use Linux. Even without it there are programs I use on Windows that are not available for Linux. So no, moving completely to Linux is currently unrealistic for me.

your can't just run the windows stuff in a VM? although it helps if you have a beefy enough system, otherwise it can be kind of sluggish if you have a lot of other things open in Linux as well. its a great way to keep windows at arms length though

using seamless mode in virtualBox is pretty neat too

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

#605

Post by mackrevinack »

acapybara wrote: post #133

When Windows 10 came out, the telemetry, MS account features, forced auto updates/reboots made my computer feel like it was no longer my own. Having used Microsoft OSes since DOS, this was the straw that finally broke the camel's back. After dabbling in Linux for years, this was motivation to commit 100% to using Linux as my main OS. It was mildly painful at first, but after sticking with it, I would never go back.

i had pretty much the same feeling about not owning my computer anymore. someone person/people in redmond were deciding my computer should update and not me.

the last straw for me was one time when i had 10 minutes to kill before i headed out the door, so i sat down to do stuff on my computer, but when i turned out in it decided it wanted to update, and took most of the 10 minutes to do that. so dumb

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

#606

Post by neop1x »

41209 wrote: post #310

Obviously it's because Microsoft isn't selling the OS anymore. They're selling various services, such as office 365, Xbox game pass, and individual apps you can buy off the Microsoft store. At this point why not just make the OS free ? I actually like office 365, by far it's the easiest way to backup my data

>> by far it's the easiest way to backup my data

lol... until they lose your data (like Canon cloud service), until they increase subscription cost heavily or block access to your account (e.g. due to "ToS violation".

Good luck

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

#607

Post by patrick451 »

pradn wrote: post #577
teekert wrote: post #155

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…

Windows just works. I can't remember the last time I had a driver issue with wifi or had an issue with new hardware working. Every game targets Windows first, so they all work without any extra work. My computer is a tool, and I don't want to spend any of my free time configuring things, like I have when running Linux in the past. I spent enough of my time at work doing that!

Every time I install windows, I spend easily half a day hunting down drivers. All of this is installed automatically with linux, and especially Ubuntu installs. The last time I installed windows, I got two black strips on either side of the display. No amount of GPU driver shenanigans would fix it. It worked first try on linux.

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

#608

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

logifail wrote: post #566
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I unfortunately kept all my backups as NTFS and I maintained that for a while because "legacy" and I was lazy. Converting them all is gonna take a while. So I'm sort of waiting until it's inevitable.

> Converting them all is gonna take a while What sort of backups? (My experience is that) NTFS filesystems mount just fine on other OSes, particular Linux.

I have over 2TB's of data. While yes I can read them on linux, it it's always perfect and there are issues regarding permissions on occasion or an issue where it doesn't recognize the directory for some odd reason. No idea if it's a linux issue, the standard ntfs reader I have on my distro, or what. But, I figure if I'm going all out linux, might as well make it difficult to jump back out :)

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

#609

Post by stubish »

sfgweilr4f wrote: post #368

From the opinion piece: "I don’t know why Microsoft wants everyone to use an online login. I don’t know why Microsoft felt it had the right to treat its customers the way it did with the Get Windows 10 campaign or its six-year battle to push everyone to use online accounts." I don't know the actual answer because I don't work for Microsoft but I'm lazy enough to assume it is about money. Its financially rewarding for…

My take is it reduces friction. It gets you signed in and authenticated once, at start up. From then on, you never have to see a signup box or login box or TFA token again for services in the ecosystem. At the moment this would be the MS Store, Gamepass, and via Gamepass Electronic Arts. I imagine it will end up in the Edge browser as well... when a header identifies a Windows browser, automatically start the OpenID authentication dance with the Microsoft servers without even giving you the option to 'login with Google/Facebook/3rdPlace'.

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

#610

Post by insulanus »

lbriner wrote: post #34

It is sadly part of a dark pattern called "stickiness". You can dress it up as functionally useful or even important but ultimately it is about companies wanting to create enough of a dependency that you have to continue using them, which is anti-competitive. Gone are the days where you bought something from a shop with no stickiness other than good service brought you back. Now there are far too many Marketing Manag…

This is extremely anti-competitive. In the old days, this was called "lock-in".

The reason it is wrong is the extreme power imbalance between you and the service provider. No matter how independent you are, or how much time you are willing to spend (another highly unequal resource), their ability to force others to use their system might also coerce you into using it as well.

Once Apple/Intel/Microsoft normalize requiring TPM-verified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module OS booting, this dark pattern will become even more oppressive.

Post reply on HN