Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#751

Post by tripzilch » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 9:33 AM UTC

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #553

mastazi wrote: post #63

This is incredibly bad. In general I have a positive opinion about what MS is doing lately, but Windows is a glaring exception, it’s getting worse and worse at an alarming rate. In the last two months we had two consecutive updates that broke basic functionality for users who disabled web results in Windows Search (which is a very common setting among those who care about privacy) https://www.zdnet.com/article/window…

> I pay for the service so I don’t want to be the product. I think this is worth thinking about for a bit. The trope is that if you're not paying then you're the product. But it doesn't follow that if you are paying you are not the product. That depends entirely on business decisions that customers have little visibility into. For any product you pay for, there may eventually be a decision to extract additional reven…

As someone in another thread mentioned, it's because the marketing budgets are way bigger than what people would, or even could, pay.

Whichever corporations are paying for these revenue streams of monetized data and attention, they can (and do) easily outbid whatever a human customer is willing or able to pay for software or services that don't track you.

It's pretty obvious when you think about it. All the incentives for commercial software / services / sites anywhere are stacked against the user actually paying with money instead of data.

There isn't even a good infrastructure for getting/passing this money, unlike the giant system of ad networks passing tracking data back and forth.

People (complete idiots, IMHO) have been saying this is the transaction, you're paying with your data for the "free internet". But for starters, there is no choice. Also, nobody asked me. I've been "paying" with my data without consent for YEARS, even though I try not to.

And now we see it's not an either/or question. They can just make you pay for the service AND extract your data and track you. Because why not both? Again we don't have a lot of choice.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#752

Post by dspillett » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 9:39 AM UTC

mastazi wrote: post #63

This is incredibly bad. In general I have a positive opinion about what MS is doing lately, but Windows is a glaring exception, it’s getting worse and worse at an alarming rate. In the last two months we had two consecutive updates that broke basic functionality for users who disabled web results in Windows Search (which is a very common setting among those who care about privacy) https://www.zdnet.com/article/window…

> In general I have a positive opinion about what MS is doing lately, but Windows is a glaring exception, it’s getting worse and worse at an alarming rate.

I think following the money shows part of why this is true.

It used to be that MS had three cash-cows: Windows, Office, SQL Server. Everything else, even Exchange, sharepoint, etc, on their own, made relatively little or a loss but were part of the larger ecosystem and therefore used to sell the other three.

It is now the case that the cash-cows are Azure (including AzureSQL), Office, SQL Server (on-prem). Windows is very much off the top list and is there mainly to sell the rest of the ecosystem and the fact that dumping it (or even just de-prioritising it too far) would look very bad.

That MS ecosystem is increasingly OS-agnostic and going forward this is going to continue to be the trend. SQL Server runs on Linux too now. VSCode is cross-platform and either that will continue to grow more of Visual Studio's features of VS itself will start to become cross-platform. Office has online versions which while having many notable feature gaps are pretty useable for many tasks and are getting more so. Much of what runs on Azure is not Windows either very much so (i.e. is running on Linux in VMs) or effectively so (running as app services where neither the dev nor the admin cares about the OS underneath as long as the right APIs are available).

Given the amount of effort desktop Windows must take, I'm sure they'd be happy to dump it sooner rather than later: let someone else deal with all that hardware compatibility faf and all those "real" man-on-the-street demanding-but-clueless end users on the desktop and all the security issues that come with them, keep server Windows going for Azure/similar (where the range of virtual hardware can be nicely constrained compared to real hardware variance and the security surface can be easier to manage too), and support other OSs in VMs as well as possible to make running them on Azure resource as friction free as it can be (aside from the friction of needing to pay!).

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#753

Post by dspillett » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 9:42 AM UTC

gnud wrote: post #529

theclaw wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I recommend Keypirinha [1] over Launchy? I recently tried all of the launchers I could find for Windows and KP was by far the best, and does not get enough recognition in my view. [1] http://keypirinha.com/

Keypirnha is apparently only for "keyboard ninjas", so I'll stick with something made for the rest of us.

You may have just sold it to me as something I need to try though!

Different (key)strokes for different folks.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#754

Post by isostatic » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 10:07 AM UTC

tripzilch wrote: post #751

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay for the service so I don’t want to be the product. I think this is worth thinking about for a bit. The trope is that if you're not paying then you're the product. But it doesn't follow that if you are paying you are not the product. That depends entirely on business decisions that customers have little visibility into. For any product you pay for, there may eventually be a decision to extract additional reven…

As someone in another thread mentioned, it's because the marketing budgets are way bigger than what people would, or even could, pay. Whichever corporations are paying for these revenue streams of monetized data and attention, they can (and do) easily outbid whatever a human customer is willing or able to pay for software or services that don't track you. It's pretty obvious when you think about it. All the incentive…

> As someone in another thread mentioned, it's because the marketing budgets are way bigger than what people would, or even could, pay.

This makes no sense. Someone paying £43 a month for Sky TV in the UK is only worth another £5 a month in adverts. Maybe that works out fine, but I don't pay for Sky because of this. London Underground brainwashes millions of people every day. They spend £4.50 on a ticket, but TFL want an extra 15p from advert income. Passengers then spend the cost of that advertising and then some on products they see being advertised, a cost they wouldn't have born without the adverts.

Some businesses may make the bulk of their money from advertising other companies, but most don't.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#755

Post by paulcarroty » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 11:10 AM UTC

tanr54ok wrote: post #726

paulcarroty wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fake news! Use latest PS and Lr.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. But winedb gives garbage status to the latest, the installer on playonlinux is unverified and posted by a banned account. I have found no testimonial that the latest works now other than yours. So here’s the thing. Even if you’re right (and not confusing some older version as the latest.. that often happens in these discussions... what do you think is the latest version of adobe CC?), thi…

> playonlinux is unverified

playonlinux is dead last two years, authors decided to rewrite it.

> what do you think is the latest version of adobe CC?

2019.

About 1star reviews - guest mostly people are confused about installer, it doesn't works for years.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#756

Post by hrktb » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 11:37 AM UTC

Nexxxeh wrote: post #520

hrktb wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contention might be on the time frame. Desktop OS and apps won’t go away for the next 10 or 20 years by sheer inertia of the corporate market, and the halo effect on home users. And I guess the past month/years issues don’t affect business users (corporate managed desks will have any problematic feature disabled from the start) “Everyone” migrating to OSX/linux won’t happen for many many years, even if they keep…

PC gamers won't be switching to an Xbox, and so we require a desktop. It won't just be halo effect on home users, but ironically also Halo effect. The remastered collection being ported over as we speak, starting with Halo: Reach iirc.

I am not at all in PC gaming community, but I had the impression that more and more people were moving to linux. In particular Steam for linux seemed to be praised a lot as a stable platform (up to a point where making non games run on Steam would be a viable option).

Would you see a future where gamers would embrace linux in enough numbers that it becomes a main platform ? I see their communities as willing to bear with some level of technical complexity as long as there are clear results, I was seeing the driver issues as the only real showstopper to have them move out of windows.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#757

Post by rvz » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 11:39 AM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #517

rvz wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but unfortunately, end-users just want to buy products that just work without fiddling around with settings, etc. The HN audience and generally programmers are usually pro-Linux which makes sense, but they keep forgetting that apps like Office, Adobe, etc are only on Windows / Mac which Linux has to resort to fiddling with hacks like Wine which is not enough for an out-of-the-box experience with end-users. T…

Arguments like this also ignore the success of Chromebooks. The "average" person doesn't actually care about the things you listed. Some professionals might. But the average person isn't a photoshop user, and libreoffice works well enough. A default Ubuntu install doesn't require much if anything in the way of settings mungery, and I recall many a nightmare of getting drivers working on Windows back in the day.

> A default Ubuntu install doesn't require much if anything in the way of settings mungery...

I don't think any user would be bothered in attempting to install Ubuntu to replace Windows unless they are 'tech-savvy' enough or a software engineer. Such users would only see that as a double negative in losing their apps + UX mental model just to get things done. They first have to unlearn Windows/Mac and then replace their missing apps just use the selected Linux OS (Ubuntu, ChromeOS, etc) which just isn't worth it.

> I recall many a nightmare of getting drivers working on Windows back in the day.

Yes, Windows is a nightmare for getting drivers working, but I have heard worse stories of Linux users complaining about X11/Wayland bringing down their desktop plus the graphical issues Wine has when running Windows apps and games.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#758

Post by Sir_Cmpwn » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 11:43 AM UTC

rvz wrote: post #757

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguments like this also ignore the success of Chromebooks. The "average" person doesn't actually care about the things you listed. Some professionals might. But the average person isn't a photoshop user, and libreoffice works well enough. A default Ubuntu install doesn't require much if anything in the way of settings mungery, and I recall many a nightmare of getting drivers working on Windows back in the day.

> A default Ubuntu install doesn't require much if anything in the way of settings mungery... I don't think any user would be bothered in attempting to install Ubuntu to replace Windows unless they are 'tech-savvy' enough or a software engineer. Such users would only see that as a double negative in losing their apps + UX mental model just to get things done. They first have to unlearn Windows/Mac and then replace th…

I'm not going to entertain any more ideas of "users are stupid and therefore cannot figure out an Ubuntu installation". It's extremely simple and I don't have that little faith in the average person. It's not hard, and I'd appreciate it if we dropped this stupid argument once and for all. It's defeatist and false.

>Yes, Windows is a nightmare for getting drivers working, but I have heard worse stories of Linux users complaining about X11/Wayland bringing down their desktop

In the last 10 years? This is no longer a problem.

>plus the graphical issues Wine has when running Windows apps and games.

The "average user" doesn't care. They want to read Facebook. See my previous comment.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#759

Post by saiya-jin » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 12:04 PM UTC

rovr138 wrote: post #642

Silhouette wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still wonder how true this really is. Every time this subject comes up, all I seem to find are people who just want a good screen, and often who don't mind paying a higher price for it. Presumably there are also people who are sufficiently price-sensitive when buying a large flat-screen TV that the reduction from having bundled junkware makes a difference, but as far as I know, I have yet to meet one. If anything,…

I wish I could buy a really good screen with no “smart” software at all. I can plug an Xbox if I want, or a shield, or a Roku, or an Amazon fire stick/tv, or an Apple TV, or a chrome cast Just add a bunch of ports and KISS. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

What about not simply enabling wifi connection on the tv? My few year old sony tv is the dumbest possible secondary pc monitor, with great screen quality. I couldn't care less about any of those apps, I have vastly superior PC for those if needed.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#760

Post by diffeomorphism » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 12:45 PM UTC

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #154

Meanwhile, the Linux world is wasting its biggest opportunity to take over the desktop space. IMO, Unintuitive interfaces (e.g. Gnome shell), forced package management (as opposed to decentralized distribution of apps) and lack of care for graphic design are the biggest things keeping the masses away from the Linux desktop, because in other areas (speed, robustness, privacy, control) it just blows Windows out of the…

> forced package management (as opposed to decentralized distribution of apps)

Is a great advantage over windows and is now common place with android, iOS, chromeOS and even windows (store, chocolatey) and macOS are trying to go in that direction.