One thing I disagree with the article about is that drives should not be encrypted by default. For the vast majority of people an encrypted drive is just data loss lying in wait.
I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily. This is a trade off I'm willing to make over losing access to data.
I understand business uses for it, and for that they have an IT team to manage key backup and backups in general. Plus when you're using company equipment it is theirs, not yours.
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 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.
OP might mean "laptop" instead of computer. Or more specifically, laptop that is regularly taken out of the home.
I'm with you. If someone wanted to steal any of my computers, they'd have to break into my house. Possible, but also statistically unlikely, as I live in a reasonably safe community and lock my doors. I don't see the benefit of full disk encryption on a bunch of computers I keep in my home. For the special case of a laptop that is frequently taken out of the home and used in public, where thieves might be? Sure, encrypt it.
In a small business, I've been responsible for buying laptops for a while.
In about 300 person-years, we've had two laptops stolen. Both were stolen while the staff were on trips abroad, and the staff were both rather careless IMO.
It's been a while since I've set up a windows machine and this may already be mentioned, but when I sign up for signal I got lots of warnings that were like "warning if you lose your phone and encryption key you will lose your data"
That way I know what I'm signing up for.
Just put "encrypt? Yes no" in the on-boarding flow and let people know what the risks are and what they may be protecting against. I'd probably default to off because people don't read wizards and the last thing someone wants is to lose their entire HDD because they accidentally made a decision they didn't understand.
And maybe for a certain period of time they can nudge users to read about encryption and decide if it's right for them, or just easily disable that nudge. Maybe even basic education like "if you find yourself forgetting your password often then maybe encryption is not for you" or something like that.
Windows is already optimized for extracting as much value from customers as possible, may as well help them make at least one informed decision.
> 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.
There is a very real security vs. availability trade-off though. Is the average person more concerned with others reading their emails, viewing their pictures, seeing their tax returns, or are they more concerned with losing access to those things themselves?
Losing access to an encrypted drive is a very real possibility (people often forget their passwords, and are used to that being recoverable), and is the data loss is probably more impactful than privacy loss for many people.
And the worst part is, I have seen computer repair shops that refuse to work with a laptop if it has an encrypted system drive, under the guise of "how would we then validate the fix?"
For the typical user, this is far far far more likely to happen than that they would “pop out” the drive and read it in another machine.
Defaults should be safe for most users. Power users are exactly the people who can deal with changing a setting. It’s constantly surprising to me when technical people insist that defaults should be optimized for technical people.
This is not the correct model. For a typical user, they can bring the laptop to someone knowledgeable, who will pop out the drive for them.
The main question is: What is the biggest risk: theft or data corruption.
In my experience, corruption and ransomware is more common so FDE should be off for households desktops or laptops, as these rarely leave the house. A business tends to have managed devices and data loss is a legal nightmare, so FDE should be on. The main thing is: people should be able to choose.
Users should be given a choice and clearly and concisely explain the consequences of choosing one or the other. Simple as that.
What it should definitely not happen is to do this behind scenes and store recovery codes on a microsoft account. Why those codes have to be stored on their servers?
A screen should display the recovery codes and instruct the user to print them and keep them in a safe place in case of requiring them. I should be able to recover my data completely offline. End of the story.
Obviously "physical access is full access", but it's shockingly easy to break into a Windows box if you have access to the unencrypted drive. I learned with I was a teenager how to use the recovery partition to mount the C: drive, then copy "cmd.exe" to "utilman.exe" or "sethc.exe" and get an instant root shell on the login page. Takes about 2-3 minutes, can be done in the time somebody leaves their laptop to go to the bathroom at Starbucks.
To me that's the main thing about disk encryption, it's to stop a nasty rootkit from being installed trivially as much as it is about stopping the guy at the pawn shop from getting your tax info. Whether you're on macos, linux, or windows, it's really quite easy to fully compromise a machine if you have hands on it.
Agreed, specifically about the tax info concerns. All my drives are encrypted with either luks, veracrypt, or native zfs encryption if my server data.
My primary concern is a robbery while I'm not home. It's trivial to break in, steal hard drives, and then go pop them into another machine on your own time to scan the files looking for tax or other sensitive docs.
While encryption keys are a risk, you can always save the random key file or passphrase in cloud storage (using symmetric encryption) and/or in your password manager.
Curious: Are you specifically worried about a robber who is targeting your tax information in particular? Home breakins are relatively rare, and when they do happen, for the vast majority of them, the robber grabs whatever cash, jewelry, and other small, easy-to-pawn valuables, and are probably not going to care about computers. And for those rare robbers who actually grab your computer, what percentage of them are really going to bother going through the hard drive looking for tax returns of all things?
This attack concern sounds like a small fraction of a small fraction of a small fraction!
Unless you are a celebrity or billionaire business mogul where your tax returns or other sensitive documents might be worth something...
Maybe I am the fool. :) I think about crime in the way I would do it, which is to grab the valuables police are unlikely to care about (hard drives) that allow me to quickly clone and encrypt myself, so I can destroy the tangible evidence, and then I have unlimited time to crack and review the information, and then even more time to execute my malicious attack against identities or whatever other I information I do find.
Only slightly better than this would be to break in, install a root kit, and then leave everything else untouched so as to try and minimize the knowledge that I was there, but I'd still be concerned that my c2 server would eventually point to me.
Maybe I should read about these actual crimes or get meds. The first couple years of my first kid's life were full of anxiety that someone would break in and steal my kid while I was sleeping at night.
Thieves are typically not technical people. If they were, they'd be using their technical skills at a legitimate job, not relying on burglarizing to make a quick buck.
They also are interested in getting in and out as quickly as possible. They're not going to take the time to disassemble a computer to remove just the hard drive, they're gonna steal the entire computer.
> Maybe I should read about these actual crimes
You should, especially on the kidnapping front. The extreme majority of kidnappings are from a relative or someone the child knows who will run off with them during the day, not break in at night.
...
Not sure that actually will make you feel better, tbh.
> I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily.
Everyone has different security needs. But (maybe it's different on Windows), what's hard about popping the disk to another machine and then decrypting it with the key? Does Windows not give you access to the key?
Windows does give access to the key. The issue with Microsoft account and especially Windows Home onboarding is that it doesn't tell you that it encrypted the drive and there is a backup key (which it uploads to Microsoft account, often readable by authorities with a court order).
Many normie users not only get locked out of their laptops but they also forget their Microsoft account password causing complete loss of data.
1. Use a password-based encryption method (not tied to hardware identity) if you prioritize moving the disk around. Then it is just as readable in a spare machine.
2. Use an easy to remember password/passphrase and write it down somewhere you keep paper documents, if you prioritize recovery.
This still provides meaningful protection when you need to discard the drive. The random downstream recipient of the hardware will not know your password, even if you skip the step where you "crypto-shred" the drive by setting a new random password.
When an SSD fails it often reverts to read-only mode. The manufacturers may require you to return the drive to receive a replacement or refund. By which point it is too late. You now have the choice of potentially risking the disclosure of your personal data to a third-party (and your shipment could end up on a lost-parcel auction of it did not get delivered) or missing out on your warranty.
Agreed, I have personally come to the same conclusion. I do not encrypt the drives in my home desktops and servers so that the recovery/migration is easier when the time comes. The risk of someone stealing my desktops from my home is very low and the impact of someone going through my family photos or Linux ISOs is nothing. I roll my eyes at my friend when he explains the solutions for how to input the encryption password when his server restarts.
At the time of writing, there are already other replies to this comment how "it's mandatory today to encrypt drives" without any qualifiers. I am growing more and more frustrated by people who try to force security measures like this "because it is more secure that way" without first taking a look at the risks, impacts and associated costs. I think they simply force these security measures on others to feel good about their choices.
It was a breath of fresh reasonability when I found out that apt intentionally uses only HTTP instead of blanket HTTPS everywhere because the packages are signed, therefore they can be verified by the client, and using HTTP allows easier caching with cache proxies and such.
> I roll my eyes at my friend when he explains the solutions for how to input the encryption password when his server restarts.
Isn't this rather trivial? You gen a keyfile, register it with luksAddKey, then update /etc/crypttab, no? The real concern is making sure that keyfile is stored securely, but you can simply symmetrically encrypt it and upload it to your favorite cloud storage provider.
Uuh, I am not sure. I believe that he was talking about having full disk encryption which means that he needs to input the password to unlock the boot partition.
You can use TPM2 to automatically unlock the root partition and not have to input a password manually at boot. This is how my laptop (running Arch, btw) is setup. Whether or not disk encryption is necessary for a system that is physically secure at home or elsewhere is debatable however. But a laptop can be easily left somewhere and disk encryption seems necessary unless it never leaves home.
That's a valid point. I feel for you. Similar thing has happened to a friend because of his dorm roommate torrenting some ... not linux isos illegal stuff.
With that said, I still find this risk quite unlikely to happen (at least in my country) with data loss due to being unable to decrypt the drive being more likely due to me changing computers often. If I were in a country such as the current U.S. for instance, I would most probably encrypt everything I could get my hands on. In addition, I think it is one more reason to have good offsite backups and to invest time into those. For me, losing the data/not having access to it for a long time while the police have it is a bigger impact than them finding out what porn I watch in my opinion. I don't mean it in a "nothing to hide" kind of way, but in a "I don't think they could do much any/damage with that information" way.
plus, my first windows machine went through a botched windows update and got stuck in an encryption key doom loop. now matter how many times i entered the key, it won’t let me into the computer. had to take it to the shop (tbf it had a lot of other issues too). when i got a new one the first thing i did was turn off encryption
I'd argue the proper solution here is backup, as a hdd could die at anytime and leave you with approximately the same outcome. While encryption adds some overhead and increases the surface area for failure, it ultimately requires the same backup solution as anything else.
Windows gives you recovery keys for each encrypted drive. With those you can even access tpm-protected drives on another machine.
I'd say it's mandatory today to encrypt drives. In the age of SSDs it's not really possible anymore to delete files and to be sure they are in no way recoverable by an adversary.
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.
> 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.
Yesterday when I booted my windows 10 desktop PC I got a bunch of popups (Win32 MessageBox) about errors in some O365 AI dll files.
Turns out some MS AI software was silently installed on my PC in late may.
I do not have MS Office or anything that should require any AI software.
What you probably have is a component of O365 as an updater installed - check your programs and features because msft bundled this awhile back and once its removed it will stop the update treadmill.
Didn't they create Windows Installer (i.e. MSI) originally to meet the needs of Microsoft Office? And now they have MSIX to replace it, both of them built into Windows, but they still need a third installer system for Office, which is now also apparently built into Windows?
Note, there is a way to turn on extended support (updates). I'm getting updates on my w10. And random restarts, argh. Googling it should be enough to find it.
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 account requirements is a trivial process.
What I actually rage quit Windows over was AMD graphics drivers and a couple of my video games crashing.
What caught me by surprise is just how little I’d miss it. I thought I’d need to dual boot or run a Windows VM for little random things. Nope, I just don’t need them.
I didn’t expect to find an OS with more software that I tend to like better. Like my email client, where I moved from Thunderbird to Evolution and for the most part I find that to be a step up in user experience.
> 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 something open source (including the Negative Lab Pro plugin), that would be amazing.
- MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.
- Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)
> - MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.
For a traditional "all batteries included" collection management music player try Strawberry and Quod Libet. You should also look into the MuiscBrainz Picard tagger, it's a bit unwieldy to use but is very powerful once you learn it's wonky workflow.
It seems that various MS Flight Simulator editions run on Proton. Focus on recent ratings, as the overall score reflects often reflects old versions of Proton.
> - Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)
It's a major step up in power but the steam deck has really pushed the wine/proton environment to near parity. The only things that really don't work through it reliably is anti-cheat stuff that I really don't want on my machine anyway.
I can't speak for the experience with nvidia drivers but it's pretty amazing how far it's come.
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.
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.
Oddly I’m like mostly using proprietary Windows software on my Linux machine these days (games).
I also think the AI era goes very far in eliminating those 5% problems. I have a mostly non-technical friend who set up an old laptop with Linux for the first time and he told me that he’d never have been able to do it on his own without AI. Anytime there’s an issue, his solution is just a quick question or copy/paste away.
Running Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC still gives you updates until 2031 with the added benefit of no app store. I run it as my main OS since last October and have yet to encounter any issues.
>Running Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC [...] have yet to encounter any issues.
It depends on the type of software a user runs. I installed Windows 10 LTSC on a friend's computer last year thinking she could run it for at least 5 more years and just ignore the newer Windows 11/12/whatever.
But she needed Intuit TurboTax 2025 and it requires Windows 11 and it's a hard requirement. The installer aborts on Windows 10. It's not a soft requirement like Adobe where they only support Windows 11 but their installer still runs on Windows 10. Autodesk Fusion 360 is another example that requires Windows 11.
I'm guessing if there's a future Windows 12, Intuit TurboTax will be aggressive about making it a requirement that forces the issue even though nobody wants to upgrade to it.
I'd say that comes down to the difference between requirements (i.e. will it run at all, does it use features only found in win11) and support, and the developer's decisions around that. I can appreciate not supporting win10 even if it runs as they have a written or implied burden to make sure it keeps operating correctly for the lifespan, and that may include keeping test systems around or handling bugs that turn up in the OS that's getting reduced support itself, or other factors like drivers. Then there's the question of whether people would be willing to pay for a "your mileage may vary" level of support on something commercial.
Only downside I've encountered using W10 IoT LTSC is that I had the temporarily change the currentbuild key (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion) in registry to 19045 to be able to install docker and WSL2.
I use Windows 10 with a relatively obscure firewall software with a per-process/per-service whitelist, and try to not be stupid on the Internet. I also do regular backups. This should cover most of the risk model applicable to me. Has worked so far.
Why would they need to be any more worried about those now than before?
The same holes exists and have existed for some time already. If he was not worried about them before why be worried about them now? And if you're worried about security holes why not be worried about the ones that exist now?
In general I find it funny that some people think that system is "secure" when it's on the latest version. At time t0 version N is considered "secure" then an update is made at t1 with version N1 and suddenly N is no longer secure. But it didn't change... it's the same version it was before.
Fact is a computer system is never going to be 100% secure.
From definition, a 0-day is not patched in any system because it's not known. But back to your real question.
The biggest attack vectors are the browser, the mail client and direct network access.
I would never use outlook, edge or connect my computer directly without NAT or firewall to the open internet. And would never open a website without a add blocker.
You can count all other known big attacks(on unpatched Windows 7!!!) on one hand.
1) Remote execution via Wifi Stack
2) Remote execution via True Type Fonts
3) 0-Click code execution via USB Stick Icon processing
Windows update instead gives AT LEAST Microsoft a steady remote code execution on your and millions of other computers. It's a really interesting attack target when you go big. Why I should trust M$ to get the security there right?
Windows 10 wouldn't let me run Minecraft because the OS was out of support. I upgraded to 11, and it wouldn't let me run without logging into the OS Store, in addition to Minecraft. I removed my Windows partition completely. I run MC on Linux now.
> "To avoid the next problem: 'Microsoft locked my data behind bitlocker, and now I can't get it back.' they need to store that key on the MS account."
Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?
I don’t see what the problem is. Just don’t get into any business that MS considers shady, or disparage the company publicly, or piss off an executive, or get sanctioned because your work with the UN is at cross purposes with the current US administration.
You are probably talking about Kahn.
The international Criminal Court is not part of the UN. It is distinct from the International Court of Justice.
As of October 2024, there are 125 states parties to the Rome Statute, which are represented in the court's governing body, the Assembly of States Parties. Countries that are not party to the Rome Statute and do not recognise the court's jurisdiction include China, India, Russia, and the United States.
Member states represent around a third of the world population.
I think that when you have an MS account with the automatic online key backup, BitLocker is actually turned on automatically, and the user isn't presented with the option to back it up elsewhere. You need to know about this, and manually back it up.
And it's even more scary that MS uses dark patterns to trick older non-technical users into enabling MS online accounts. When the bitlocker activation automatically happens during tricking the user into going from a local account to online account it is without the user's consent or real participation. They don't print out a copy of the key or move it to a usb drive becuase they aren't aware their drives are being encrypted. And afterwards they can't set up recovery keys because the computer itself only shows the blue aka.ms screen. It's effectively dead until they follow the demands.
This is not theoretical, it actually happened to my mother on the local account Win 11 computer I set up for her sewing applications. I had to drive across town in order to figure it out since the weird URL I'd never heard of (aka.ms) and demand for pasting private info sounded so much like ransomware. And in fact, it was effectively ransomware, it was just demanding online activity rather than money.
>Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?
Depends. The average user would be more afraid if its not backed up online.
The actual average user is fine. The problem is most companies seem design for some hypothetical average user, who they hate and/or think is a dumbass.
Have you seen the user of median (average) intelligence? That's who you seem to describe. The users of even lesser intelligence make me question the survival fitness of our species.
I've dealt with users for a few years. Those were already selected to be a bit more technical than your average person because of a niche I am in. I can tell you an average user is in fact a dumbass.. Vast majority doesn't understand concepts like files. People have all kind of crap on their computers as they randomly click around and download everything. They save information in the downloads folder and complain it disappears. Their computer is 10x slower than yours because all the crap that runs on it.
The are also very aggressive when it comes to not reading error message or in fact learning anything about how computers or their OS works. Add to this usual entitlements and not seeing a problem with being dumb on purpose and you get a picture of an average user.
The companies know that and the dumbed down design we get is a diret consequence of it.
It would be the most beautiful, elegant, well-designed and thoroughly hardened network I'm certain. I get it, the software I'm complaining about was designed for profit.
The point I'm trying to make is imagine you have to tell a customer that they can't keep using the network design they have, which fits their requirements almost perfectly, because it's too much burden for your network engineers to maintain. Instead, the customer can use this other network design that is suitable for the average customer. So it works, but not as well as before, and the customer will probably need to find some workarounds or shift other processes to accommodate. It's just shit.
My rather distant friend has a tendency of not reading what happens on the screen. She uses her computers for years only for browsing the web and writing papers. Whatever else obstructs her way is dealt with "next next finish" approach. Despite I told her many times, she should read and look up for solutions online if there's any doubt.
She locked her W11 laptop. Disk was encrypted and she couldn't recall neither login or password for MS account.
Encrypting disk by default but giving the password to microsoft makes no sense.
I'm way more scared of airport security stealing my laptop and getting access than I am of someone breaking into my home with the purpose of accessing my data.
Basically it hassles people like your friend, protects against the very unlikely scenario while leaving the more likely scenario unprotected.
Not to mention of course the bitlocker backdoor that was discovered last month.
I'm afraid that the average user still does not think about backup. Sharing with other devices, probably yes, but the two concepts are only distant cousins.
But they have gotten used to lose all their files on a regular basis. Sure they lament it when in happens but most aren't willing to do anything about that.
My SO lost all her pictures several times over the year when changing phones. She still complains about it when she wants to share or find something old she knew she had but she has mostly accepted it.
Having helped more than a few users with down PCs. They're mostly not even aware these backups exist. When you explain it to them the result is a mixture of relief and then fear that this was occurring without their awareness.
I remember how many people nuke their iPhone and then call support about getting all their babies photos back. iCloud is largely a support call reduction feature first and foremost.
Regardless of account type, there are many things that could require you to need those Bitlocker keys to get your data. Don't just associate them with an account, have Windows save the keys to a text file, and save that text file somewhere external, on a NAS or Dropbox or email itnto yourself or whatever, and print out 2 or 3 hard copies and keep them close by. I'm 1000x more worried about losing my data to a Windows crash/error than to theft or any other external actor.
I ditched Windows in 2022. I'm not going back to Windows unless Microsoft makes an OS for professionals that is stripped down out of the box to show how serious they are. No ads of any kind, no garbage online account features, nothing, just core offline-ready Windows. I bet it would perform drastically better too.
Same (2024), but i wouldn't come back in a hurry if they did so. Basically everything works now in Linux world, including my obscure devices, music & video editing, and my whole steam library... with better performance. It's sort of insane.
I just installed Bazzite-DX, and have been really surprised with how easy it was to install, and how well everything "just works". It even tells me when my wireless keyboard batteries are running out, something Windows couldn't do without running proprietary Logitech software.
Yup, Windows 10 LTSC here. It's a lot faster and smoother, but I'm already transitioning to Linux on my other boxes. Will probably move before LTSC runs out as well.
edit: I realised I overplayed how much faster and smoother it is. compared to standard win 10 or 11. Example being my login screen sometimes struggles to come up when the computer is locked (work around double mash CTRL-ALT-DEL)
I have a Surface Book 2 which was insanely fast when I bought it. Its pretty vanilla, I dont like to tweak Windows often it usually feels like it degrades, its been sluggish the last two years or so. Idk what Microsoft did but used to be vanilla Windows was performant enough, they must have fired their performance guys? Idk
I was in a hurry trying to log into my kid's Minecraft account, wound up clicking something to associate it with the Windows account... now the PC is in restricted mode and I'm having a hard time restoring the previously associated Microsoft account (among other things, have to ask permission to open the browser and approve the requests logging in on my phone)!
Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.
I ran into this trying to set up a new Dell laptop for my mom. It shipped to her in "S mode", meaning that among other things I couldn't install arbitrary software from the web. I assumed there'd be some straightforward way to disable it (even if it might be a little buried to discourage normies). But after several hours of searching through tutorials and mucking about in Windows settings, the command prompt, BIOS, and even the system registry, and I flatly could not do it. Never seen anything like it before. Ended up wiping and replacing Windows with Linux Mint, which she was happy with.
When I worked at a very big US company some years ago, I received for work a new Dell laptop with Windows also in "S mode", to replace an older Dell laptop.
However, at that time I had no idea about the existence of the "S mode". I could not install on the laptop some applications that were distributed and used internally in the company and which were essential for my work.
I requested assistance from the IT department, but at that time not even they had any idea about the existence of the "S mode", so they were equally baffled why on my previous Dell laptop I could easily install any application, while on its new replacement I could not. For a couple of weeks, various IT support people from teams located on several continents had repeatedly connected remotely to my laptop every day, trying to solve the problem, but without any success.
That’s crazy, surely it would have been cheaper to buy a new laptop at that point. I mean if you combine all the costs of those people trying to problem solve, plus the opportunity cost of you not being able to do your work…
Your assumption is that such big companies operate in a logical manner, the employee is a ball-bearing in a huge machinery, why should they care. IT support is probably outsourced, so for them is likely good to bill more hours.
MS windows installs are not being purchased because they are better or more desirable, the option to purchase non MS installs has been scuttled by MS licensing and bundling thier way into exclusive OEM installs.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Windows+also+in+%22S+mode%22
"Switching Out of S Mode
If you find that S mode is too restrictive, you can switch out of it for free. However, according to Microsoft Support, doing this is a one-way street—once you leave S mode, you cannot go back without completely reinstalling Windows.To switch out of S mode:Open the Start Menu and click Settings.Navigate to System > Activation.Look for the Switch out of S mode section.Click Go to the Store.On the page that opens in the Microsoft Store, click Get"
I responded because your solution was to use Linux Mint which I have installed a few times on older hardware. My experience getting older relatives to use Mint has not gone well. The most common is their reliance on Microsoft Office. Windows S mode and having to use the Microsoft Store might save me time supporting them.
For that, you must know that there is such a thing like "Windows S mode".
As I have mentioned, in another comment, some years ago I had the same problem when replacing an old corporate laptop with a new one, but at that time nobody from the IT support knew about the existence of the "Windows S mode".
At that time, seeing that none of many IT support people could do anything, I assumed that there was some kind of miscommunication inside the IT department, and there was some administrator who had configured some kind of secure Windows mode on my laptop, but the others were not aware about this.
Now I know that the laptop had come like this directly from Dell, but for some reason the IT department did not know about it.
You're responding to a comment talking about hours of tutorial dives and advanced config tweaks, my guy. You really think the official fix isn't the first thing I tried?
That button simply doesn't work. I forget the exact error message, but it was something generic and unhelpful. (Spoiler: none of the other solutions in the first few pages of search results worked, either.)
God, that's the worst. Minecraft is also what led us to accidentally bind my child's account to the administrator account on my TV PC, and because he's a minor we can't actually unbind that account. I've tried for hours and have not succeeded.
"Just make a new account." It's possible but then we'd have to make sure we get every single saved game for all the various games moved over and ugh.
> […] but then we'd have to make sure we get every single saved game for all the various games moved over […]
Every single game save? Why? I get it if you are deep into a month long Factorio game or have a huge Minecraft world, but on the whole games are ephemeral entertainment. If it's not worth backing up, it's usually fine to just start a new game.
I switched my kids to Linux too. They have a multi-seat setup so now they can both use the PC at the same time. With the state of Linux gaming, we have yet to encounter a reason to boot back into Windows.
As a feature, the games that refuse to work under Linux tend to be the type that sell cosmetics or other things you probably don't want to deal with anyway. Or infuriating salty MOBA types.
Kinda inverse for me but abandoned Windows after having a local account for my kids, and I bought them MS Flight Simulator on my Microsoft Account from the MS Store.
There was no way to use this expensive purchase from the kid's account on the same machine! Stupid bullshit - I gave up on Windows from then on.
I have to figure out by my kid's new Minecraft account is banned/blocked or whatever even though she hasn't even used it, looks like the standard pump for extra PII scam every account setup runs now. She was about on the verge of tears telling me about it.
I deal with the shenanigans at work but I'm at least paid to eat shit there. That's how they run things I guess, you give them money, then they extort you to get more if you want what you paid for or they'll make your kid cry. I'm grinding my teeth just thinking about it.
> Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.
Not everything. I say: use the option to switch to Linux.
I installed PopOS and Steam for my 11 y/o. She games either on her Nintendo Switch (not Microsoft) or on her iPad (not Microsoft) or on Linux (not Microsoft).
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.
I really did not want to change from 7 to 10. I did it begrudgingly partly because "It is the last version of windows".
Well, they were right in one sense. It is the last version of windows I will have. I now have an old box set up with Linux Mint, so I can get familiar with it before switching over all my main PCs
I found Fedora Workstation 'mature' and an easy thing to switch to - there are a few Gnome conveniences like taskbar and menus that can be easily turned on (Claude helped me there).
Exactly my turn. Win 10 is clearly the last Windows for me. For private I still use Win 7, for work I used Win 10, but the driver support for my old dell laptop(2014) is so shitty, that it's overheating and throttleling as soon it has to do some normal things.
When the last bastion of Windows, the driver support is falling, I can switch to Linux. Since 2 month I use openSuse on this device and be happy. No running fan, no problems. Windows is dying.
Oh man, unfortunately all the things I need windows for doesn’t work well in a VM:
Solidworks, needs special license to work in a VM that my company is not willing to pay for
DAWs, need real time access to low level audio stuff
Games, well, lets just say the experience is better with wine on linux
With the exception of work, at some point I decided that not only is windows dead to me, but any application that can only run on windows is also dead to me.
I installed it on a VM the other day, and trust me it was only because my job, which pays me, required it. I couldn't believe it was trying to get me to sign in to a Microsoft account to finish installation. I had to look up some arcane way to skip it. The article I read listed other methods, many of which no longer work so it seems they really want you to log in.
Then it was showing me shit like the FTSE 100 price right on the desktop, and some stupid thing about the football world cup. All totally unsolicited spam. I couldn't believe people put up with Windows some 15 years ago when I ditched it. Now I'm convinced some people are just conditioned to being in an abusive relationship and can't imagine any different.
That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.
I can totally see Internet availabilit correlating with the rise of unwanted stuff in the install. Believe it started with 3rd party games being part of the OS at first. I don't recall the yes/maybe later dialog "options" in win8 though, at least not in the beginning.
I actually really liked the win8 start menu change and the live tiles, even wrote some tiny homegrown apps with them. My logic was always "if I am opening the start menu, I will want to interact with that menu and only it until it's closed", so having it fullscreen made sense.
Actually it was Vista that made me quit for good, so I might be out of date with my "15 years" claim.
It's amazing how things can seem great when looking back at them. I remember when Bush was President of the US and we made fun of him for being "stupid". Now looking back he seemed like a great chap. The good old days...
> It's amazing how things can seem great when looking back at them. I remember when Bush was President of the US and we made fun of him for being "stupid". Now looking back he seemed like a great chap. The good old days...
Things were bad back then too. They're just even worse now (at least on those fronts).
Linux hasn't reached the point where it can be the main driver, not for my usecases. Everything works until very suddenly it doesn't and there's no budging.
I switched to Windows 10 as my main development machine few years ago after 25 years of continuously crashing Linux with an enormous pleasure. FreeBSD, well, there's nothing to crash there, that's the problem with it. Nothing.
I didn't know almost anything about this Windows OS so I just started playing some sort of whac-a-mole game with it.
I don't know what I did but right now I'm a happy (windows 11) user. I use Hyper-V with great success for driving my Linux and FreeBSD development. I like powershell and the dotnet platform and storage spaces and ntfs and many other. Good technologies, it feels good using. Windows terminal is almost OK. I stay away from crap like WSL and Code. I still use mutt for mail, not Office. And I can just play a game without any problems.
There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow. Actually, as of late, I feel more creep in Linux and FreeBSD than in Windows.
Everything just works. Sometimes it tells me it has some updates for me. I let it install them and that's it. I'm back to my game, no weird stuff.
No account problem, no copilots, just my shit and myself and no Irene.
When I read about other users having trouble with it I get pretty sad. I wish I could say "do this and that" but I have no idea how my whac-a-mole game drove me to this happy situation. I must have (de)activated some (attack) vectors by mistake. But I whacamoled it head to end, from bios to wallpaper. I kept hitting and hitting, backuping, restoring, backuping,restoring, until i won. I'm on Windows 11 Pro in testing mode right now. Getting back to a linux desktop as my main? Nah, not right now. I have my i3wm running on a gpu partition inside hyper-v and sometimes I drop to it...
I can't do all my arcane linux stuff in windows yet but i'm getting there. For now, I'm enjoying it. Been a while now. I just hope they don't notice me...
> I like powershell and the dotnet platform and [...] Windows terminal [...] There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow [...] I just hope they don't notice me...
Did you make sure to disable telemetry in .NET, and also separately in PowerShell, and also separately in Windows Terminal, and also of course in Windows itself? Otherwise your machine is sending your data to Microsoft by default.
Of course, even if you do disable all of those, there are likely to be other Microsoft programs with their own telemetry enabled by default. And even if you disable those, they could at any moment add more telemetry that you don't know about.
I am actually sending some optional telemetry data as well, consciously. Telemetry I don't care about or smells it's disabled. I was referring more to some other type of creeping. I don't mind telemetry for a good cause.
I think it is fair to encrypt the user hard drive since the majority of users are unaware that they're even leaking secrets and PII when e.g., they sell a laptop without wiping the disk first.
But I think it is also fair if the user was opening a CMD during install just to type `oobe /bypassnro` the user is advanced enough to understand the risks of not encrypting the hard drive (it is really easy to activate the BitLocker afterwards anyway, and for example in my case instead of storing the secret key in Microsoft I decided to store it in my password manager). So I really don't buy the excuses of this article.
Also WTH Microsoft, why it is so easy to reset the TPM key during e.g., a bios update and lose access to all your TPM keys (so you need to type your BitLocker key again). It should be a requirement from Microsoft laptops that the TPM contents are never lost unless the user explicitly asks for it.
You’ve forgotten the most important fact: users don’t provide enough of a revenue stream. Therefore they aren’t represented at the table when decisions are being made that effect their fate.
Similar to how there is no
actual citizen representation in the Congress of the US.
Functionally it's the same and have heard good things. In any case I will be switching to Linux for my gaming Desktop soon. I will still have Windows for the odd multiplayer game that isn't well supported by Proton.
Just like how Linus from LTT (just trust me bro on the source) said one day he needed a tool (hammer?) so he walked into the hardware store, found what looked like a hammer, and bought it. End of journey. And then he finally realized how a regular person buys tech. Most people do not care, do not know they should care, and do not care enough to know if they should care enough.
Ignorance isn't a good excuse. If you do backbreaking work in the worst shoes and complain about your foot hurting, you might want to start shoe shopping.
Shoe shopping and learning about new / different technology are not equivalent.
Shoes have a near uniform interface that is easily learned by parents or trial and error. Loading an alternative OS is foreign to most people.
People learn from others the best. Teaching others is the only means for them to realize there are better solutions than sticking with techo-fascist Microsoft.
I'm say this as someone that grew up on MS-DOS and used Windows OS up to Windows 7. After personal exploration, other OSes actually are easier and more stable. You now have to pay me to use Windows OS.
What would their choice be anyways? It's like saying "yet people still die, they do not really care, they even engage in activities which hasten their deaths!"
Flash it for her. The result will be a more stable (in terms of not shitting the bed randomly one day or changing the entire UI) and decluttered portal to whatever website she uses it for.
"You moved my Chrome. I liked my Chrome. Put it back. I can't get to the Facebook. I want to talk on the Facebook and I can't because you moved my Chrome."
Someone who is 75 years old today was 49 years old at the peak of the dotcom craze, and is probably a lot more computer literate than you're giving them credit for. What you're saying might have been true 20 years ago, but it isn't today.
Yeah, no. Maybe in the circles that we run in here on HN but Linda Q. Senior worked as a paralegal 25 years ago and is still using the email her ISP gave her in 2003. She asks her son to fix the wifi and doesn't update her iPad for months at a time. She just found out about Reddit within the last three years. She gets frustrated and clicks the mouse a bunch of times when a system doesn't respond to her input quickly. She doesn't really grasp the concept of an "operating system", just that the device runs some software.
Changing the OS she uses is like tossing a flashbang grenade at her while she's sitting on the couch.
If you talking of users who dont install their own software and just use browser only then Linux was better for them for decade.
Now you can even install something with read-only system partition with snapshots so not even a power outage can corrupt anything.
For non-power users who do need to install something it was never perfect, but now these immutable distributions are here. They have their own downsides though.
Guessing this is just a hypothetical, but if you really can do that (disable the DM via the GUI by accident), I'd be curious. If you told me to do that on purpose, my first instinct would be to uninstall the package.
If you do have permissions to install packages you can end up with a system in messed up state pretty easily.
1 - Enable wrong ROMFusion because you need these damn video codecs for VLC. I have like 20 years of Linux experience and I still messe up Fedora in 2025 trying to make video work.
2 - Just forget that big update going in background and shutdown system when not appropriate. Boom. On Windows its just much harder to accidentally do it.
Only solution is really distros with immutable root and snapshots.
to be honest i forgot chromebooks exist and now that you mention them i think they're the best solution for anyone whose computer is simply a medium to access a web browser
I have used a Windows OS almost every day of my life since 1999 or so. Last December I had a choice and switched to MacOS for work laptop. Since then I seldom use Windows and I don't really regret.
I still use an Xbox almost every day so there's that. In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox so we'll see.
Asha is doing some good decisions, or it seemed so until the XBOX Reset blog post.
However beyond XBOX, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers as per amount of owned studios especially since ABK acquisition, so even when XBOX is doing bad, Microsoft Publishing is doing great.
This stuff drives me nuts. Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this. Every time I log in to a Google account within the browser, it nags me to link the account to the browser itself. One time my partner clicked the popup that asks to link the account by accident (this is very easy to do and probably Google's intention) and it hijacked all of my bookmarks. When I logged out of the account, everything was gone. I looked into Firefox and Edge, but they have the same profile crap. I don't need or want to log in to my browser!
I've hit my limit with Microsoft, too. I'm going to start moving my PCs over to Linux. The last time I installed Linux on a personal device was in high school, almost two decades ago, and it took quite a bit of work to get everything running properly. I've heard that compatibility issues are much less prevalent now. If things to smoothly, I may even convert my main gaming and work PC, although I'll have to look more thoroughly into whether all my Steam games will be playable.
> Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this.
Consider Chromium (the open source build) instead of Chrome when you migrate to Linux. It is in the main repo of most distributions. Chrome is literally spyware. Also Firefox (with the real uBlock Origin, not the watered down version for Chrome/Chromium) is excellent.
Just last week I installed Windows 11 by downloading the ISO from Microsoft and creating a bootable USB stick with Rufus [1]. Rufus has options to make the Windows installer skip the Microsoft account login. Worked great!
There are reasons to install Windows. For one, I had to install it for my wife, and making her switch to another OS she isn’t used to would be quite a hassle. I also use it at work, and I need to run Visual Studio.
But I have the Pro version, and, AFAIK, there is a stark contrast between Pro and Home. Even though there is a push in Europe to make software Linux-compatible, there are still many, many companies and government institutions fully entrenched in the Microsoft world. Going Linux-only just for the sake of it sometimes does not make much sense business-wise.
In some industries, Microsoft subscriptions are a drop in the ocean. Switching out things like Entra ID, Office, and print/scanning solutions would cost so much more, and come bundled with enough risk that no sane project manager would take it on lightly.
As a C# software provider, making something Windows- and Linux-compatible is easier than ever. So giving up on Windows is effectively the wrong move, because you would miss out on the behemoth companies that are simply too large to transition easily.
I know the majority of HN readers are fed up with Windows. That is completely understandable. But not everything about it is bad.
- It is very "standardized" (i.e. there exist no distributions that do things differently from each other).
- It cares about binary backward compatibility: it is nearly always possible to run a binary from 30 years ago, and if you are willing to invest some own effort, eben running Win16 binaries can often be run. Compare this to GUI applications on GNU/Linux.
- The operating system and the applications are very separated. I can basically install every version of an application that I want:
If there exists a newer release of some software than what the "distribution" (which of course does not exist in the Windows world) provides that you want to try out: install it now, you don't have to wait for your distribution. There is also no nightmare that some shared library versions have to fit the ones provides by the distribution.
Similarly, I you want to stay with an older version of a software for a longer time: go for it.
It is a very common situation that for some pieces of software, you have very specific requirements which version you want: with Windows, this is very easy, while on GNU/Linux this is - in my experience - a nightmare for unexperienced users.
- If you build one software release on Windows, it will run on basically every Windows computer (the typical thing that you have to do at most is to additional install a runtime provided by Microsoft (e.g. for C++ or C#)). No consideration necessary how to handle each distribution.
I've been a daily windows user since 1998. I'm a geek. So, of course, I experimented with other operating systems. I've had Mac OS X laptops since 2006 (off and on), but I always had a main windows desktop. In 2018, I installed Manjaro XFCE on my laptop and forced myself to learn Linux and use the system. Now, I still have a windows desktop, but my laptop and my server run Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu) and I go weeks without ever powering-on my windows box. It's really great!
Yes it’s hard to see Microsoft become what feels to me a shell of what it once was. Back in the day I got MCP certification and MCSA certification for server 2008/2003.
I managed fleets of windows devices and felt Windows and PC’s were efficient and had a good balance of an operating system and schema that is powerful and effective.
With windows 11.. it’s like an all time low emerged. Where I am just fighting against a platform trying a variety of gimmicks designed to extra rents and push tools that are not really all that useful or polished.
Windows 11 feels bloated and just feels like a struggle.
For me it really is the time of Linux. Whether it be a workstation, a server or even a simple kiosk… Linux just seems to embrace the ethos of what windows has left behind.
I recently set up a new gaming PC, made from cannibalised parts of other machines. I installed Windows 11 as there was no point starting on an older OS (and Bazzite etc really struggled with the nvidia GPU so Linux was a non-starter even though I love my Steam Deck and Proton).
The one saving grace for all of this was Win11Debloat[0]. I cannot recommend this set of configuration changes etc more highly. It kills _almost_ everything that irked me about 11. Use at your own risk, but it's now part of my standard install practice.
I've mostly just used LineageOS for several years now, but I believe the first time setup pushes you to sign in to a Google account, but you can easily skip it. If you do sign in, it's sticky/permanent and I think may require a reinstall to get back out of it.
You can do that just fine. Huge swaths of people just use the Amazon app store or the Samsung One. F-Droid is also an option if you don't want to make any accounts.
Surprisingly no, you can use an Android phone without an account. Though you cannot install any applications from the Play Store, tbf I'll count that almost as a positive.
Without the MS account, it is _much_ harder to sell OneDrive, Copilot, Office365-whatever subscriptions etc to their users.
I get it. I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive. I'd be happy to pay that premium though, and I'm not going to buy any of those additional things.
But let's not pretend that this is purely an evil or thoughtless design choice that isn't economic in Nature. Windows has a cost and that cost gets subsidized by all the people who buy additional services.
I do not think that it is as well-reasoned as that. Far more likely IMO that teams are being evaluated on upsell uptake and so push these requirements to make the number on the dashboard go up.
Anyway, I’d be more sympathetic to this way of thinking if windows wasn’t getting worse over time. But it seems like investment in the OS is being disfavored for investment in AI-in-things-no-one-wants-AI-in, which is inverse of the subsidy direction you propose
I was forced to switch to Windows 11 despite promising myself that I would never do this.
WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I INCREASE THE WIDTH OF THE TASKBAR? I have a 30" monitor, I can afford to have 3 or 4 rows of windows in my task bar. But I can't, not because it's technically feasible but because a human at Microsoft that believes they are more important than their customers made a decision to remove that option because they think they know better.
Interesting, this was definitely possible in windows 10. I do remember upgrading form 10 -> 11 and not being able to use a vertical task bar anymore, but that appears to be getting patched now with the next release.
Just install Ubuntu already (if it supports the apps you need, most of which probably have web versions) and be done with it. Ubuntu 26.04 had a significantly better install experience than Windows 11.
Ubuntu won't run my software of choice(s).
Come on, Steinberg - we need a linux Cubase.
Ms can go whistle, and my w10 machines are treated better than ever.
Most probably do yes, but it's not a requirement to use any of Apple's devices. You don't need to do some command-line kung-fu to get around online account requirement like on Windows, you can just click "Skip" at the online account step, and that's it.
Perhaps you hear no complaints because unlike on Windows, MacOS does not spoon-feed you 10 screens of dark-pattern-riddled upsell ads with options of "Remind me later", "Yes" during set-up. It quite literally feels like being spat on, considering Windows is not a free operating system, and yet it still riddles you with ads and dark patterns as if some horrible shareware from the mid 2000s.
It's not really needed at all for macOS, but remains mandatory for even free apps on iPhone/iPad, so yes virtually all users have one. Same goes for free macOS App Store apps but that's not the only or even most common way to install stuff.
They might have all an Apple Account but thats not a requirement at all on macOS. Thats the difference between complaining customers and customers thatuse it because thez choose to use it.
> A user can set up a computer with a Microsoft account, switch to using a PIN every day, and never think about that account again. Then, one day, after a firmware update, a hardware change, or an unexpected issue, the system may display a BitLocker recovery screen requesting a recovery key.
This is absolutely TRASH behavior. One of my siblings not only experienced this but after setting Bitlocker off it turned on ONCE AGAIN automatically after some time.
I urged him to print those fucking codes on paper just in case after we carefully recovered them. This is one of the worst things that can happen to a non technical user.
As much as I avoiding any Microsoft technology at any cost. I do have a gaming rig at home, and yes I have Windows on it. I only use it to launch Steam and GOG, nothing else except the casual web browsing. I have been driving Arch btw and was fine, but these days you CAN install Windows 11 locally without Microsoft account. So I took it a shot for better game compatability.
This is not Linux/Window flame. I am trying to say, local account is possible and is working.
It's certainly possible, but it certainly ain't a happy path. If you have to do shift+F10, strategically disconnect your ethernet cable, or remember to tick a box when making your bootable USB to be able to make local account, something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.
Afaik local accounts have become harder and harder to create, intentionally, to the point where it's impossible for most people. It most definitely is not something that can be relied on to exist in the future.
A couple of years ago Microsoft bought the SwiftKey keyboard app (for iOS). Recently the other shoe dropped: they introduced a requirement to be logged in "for data backup", you get a banner on top of the keyboard that cannot be permanently turned off.
I am so tired of this relentless user-hostile push for accounts, logins and pervasive tracking.
Apple is very strict about keyboard extensions so I am surprised it is allowed. They require it to be functional even if you don't allow any data sharing back to the app, let alone a cloud account, but I guess banners make it past?
Because when I want to play a game, I want to play a game, not debug someone's hacky attempt to make it work on Linux.
Implementing a strict "no fiddly shit on my game machine" policy was one of the best choices for my mental health that I've made: It's a dedicated machine for gaming, with nothing really sensitive on it aside from gaming related accounts, and its only purpose is to play games with the least amount of immediate hassle. In other words, if the choice is installing something ugly or fiddling, that launcher, kernel level anticheat or whatever it is gets installed.
FWIW, with minor exception, Linux is better at "no fiddly shit on my game machine" now. I feel strongly about this too, to come home from work and debug some shit going wrong on my gaming system is no bueno, I'd rather just not play games. It has to work without fucking around.
Windows is now the OS that fucks with me and causes grief, since moving to cachyos the experience has been so bloody blissful it's not funny. I can, amazingly, just come home and launch a game and play the game and not deal with bullshit like taking 30 minutes to install some random update. Nothing randomly breaks. Nothing updates unless I let it. Nothing randomly pops up asking me to do some bullshit I'm not interested in for a result I don't care about. etc.
I mean this is sort of true in that windows is constantly introducing trash, but I've run into all kinds of nonsense:
1. Amd HDMI 2.1 fiasco and adapter workarounds -> debugged the adapter compared to the displayport spec pdf, emailed the company, got a firmware update, patched my kernel. Fixed! This one is going away for good with FRL support upstream soon.
2. Game stops responding to controller input after playing for a bit. Debugged, turns out the service for doing something fancy with shaders has shared fate with the steam input process. It launches a zillion threads and OOMs from virtual memory exhaustion which takes out steam input; fixed by adding a wrapper script for steam that reduces thread stack sizes to the windows default size.
3. Xbox elite series 2 controller back buttons not supported in 2.4ghz wireless mode; reverse engineered the USB packets, contributed support to out of tree xone driver.
4. Flydigi controller software not supported on Linux; find random GitHub project that reversed their hidraw protocol. It's got bugs, so fix them and use it.
5. Terrible banding in Silksong. Set up gamescope to apply dithering; this breaks steam input, figure out all sorts of incantations with LD_PRELOAD
But all of these are very much off the beaten path problems, lots of people have fun with normal controllers, no VRR, etc. My steam deck has been just perfect with zero effort, and I assume that's because I'm not treating the system configuration like a puzzle game.
I’ve long ago learned to ignore people that pretend that the system they use just works, go look at any mac user or windows users workflow, for most people there are dozens of hacky BS things they do to work around the inherent problems of the system they’re using they (naturally) just make excuses for their existing tools ignoring all of the workarounds and arcane knowledge they’ve accumulated while acutely feeling the pain of any new arcana that they have to learn for a new system.
Yeah, people who talk about how "fiddly" it is to game on Linux must not have tried recently, or have a very low tolerance for doing anything other than clicking play.
I occasionally have to right click a game and enable the compatibility in the settings - that's just a single checkbox. Steam handles the management of pulling whatever the most recent version of Proton-GE is for me and everything pretty much works. There's a setting in Steam itself that you can set a default compatibility tool.
The only games that do shaders preload are Marvel Rivals and Monster Hunter World/Wilds, and even those are quick and can be canceled if I cared to. Even modding is fairly straightforward using something like r2Modman for Steam games or Prism Launcher for Minecraft.
If that's too hard for some people then I bet they also don't run adblockers, which means I've written them off as actually knowing how to use a computer at the most basic level.
If I'm understanding that they're waiting this 5 minutes when they try to launch the game, there's a setting (go to Downloads, scroll down) to do the shader compilation in the background
Go away? I've been replaying Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) and it recompiles the shaders even on alt-tab (to clarify that feature has been there always since release). It's more on the developers to fix. After all, not even Windows games on winodws are free from shader stutter (with less ways to fix it than linux!)
Funny enough, I just switched to Linux for a game I play because it was a hassle on Windows.
My friends and I play Halo Infinite sometimes and I've had some performance issues with it on Linux so I've always booted into my Windows 11 partition to play it. It's about as vanilla Windows 11 install as it gets.
But over the last few months it has been crashing all the time. It started happening very frequently - like once every ~30 min. It was a vanilla install. Basically just the game and graphics drivers. And everything was up to date.
I started playing it on Linux and now it just works. There's still a weird performance problem, but I can live with that because it's at least stable.
There's one use case where VMs don't work, real time media processing. Mac is the preferred platform for this kind of think by most users but I use one application which is windows exclusive: rocksmith. It's theoretically possible to get something that's only marginally worse than the native experience, but I've never seen it done. Even if I could do it, I don't know if I could accept how the app behaves in practice.
It is too intimidating to change for one. Most users I deal with are terrified and bewildered by settings and can't even take the few steps to install an adblocker (and they want the adblocker!)
And from the article: "Technician's know how to get around this, but not everyone using a computer is a technician."
To use an alternative, you need to know someone with the knowledge and ability and able to request their time. Backing up data, burning USB sticks, installing, setup new backup solution, resyncing bookmarks, creating shortcuts to their email, replacements for the apps they use... all the details takes a lot of time, and it is ongoing work. Someone has to become 'the technician' and provide support. Otherwise, people have no option except to keep bumbling along with the default or somehow become 'the technician' themselves without any guide but web forums and ChatGPT.
No, because pretty much any model and harness could be used as a robotic Linux admin instead of Claude Code. I haven't tried Codex or Gemini for that, but I'm sure they'd be fine. Ultimately that particular Linux box is going to be used to host local models, which should also work.
An account with an AI provider gets me the ability to submit prompts and run agents with their model. I pay them, I get a useful service in return, and I can stop or switch providers anytime. Conversely, I get absolutely nothing in return for logging into my own machine with a Microsoft account. It benefits Microsoft -- somehow, I guess, who knows? -- but not me.
Yeah, compatibility on Linux is better now, especially with Valve implementing Proton so games would run on the Steam Deck.
But there are still incompatible games, and non-Windows operating systems are generally not a priority for many game developers. So, you have to hope that either Valve or the community have found a way to make them run on other systems.
And then there's the aforementioned niche stuff. Yes, your games may be compatible with Linux, but what about the tools needed to mod them? Plenty of modding and ROM hacking communities only develop for Windows, so anyone looking to get involved in those scenes has no real choice other than to use Windows. Wouldn't be surprised if plenty of non-gaming communities made heavy use of tools from the days of Windows 95 or MS DOS too, whose creators haven't bothered to update them in years or who have no interest in porting them to Linux in general. Bonus points if the tool is closed source freeware from some site that looks like it was made in 1995.
a lot of the compatibility stuff on Linux runs windows software, so that's usually not a huge blocker. Having recently switched to Linux as my main (used to run it in a VM) the real issues are all these things that don't quite work out of the box (different distros might get different results). For instance my audio when playing dota2 would randomly cut out and not return when using discord. It took a bunch of fiddling around to get both to work. Then there's weird compatibility things depending on choices you make, for instance, I used RustDesk a lot in windows. But it doesn't really work well in linux with wayland. So while my overall experience is Linux is pretty good... I'm now in a world where I can end up with all kinds of random issues, all likely solvable, but all likely semi unique to my setup.
Uncertainty of how it all works is my opinion. Like how is it installed. What is making a partition and what are these warnings? What happens to all my pictures and documents? What distro is best? Do I lose all my paid for software? How do I now do all the things I am used to doing?
I remember the first time I partitioned my hard drive and did a dual boot and I was really unsure about so many things. It is intimating.
Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) there is no viable alternative. It might be that they have software which requires Windows, it might be that they think it's too complicated to set up Linux, or it might just be that they aren't aware any other option exists. But those all boil down to the same thing: people think they have to use Windows, so they tolerate its nonsense.
I have no idea, I just have a copy from TPB.
Its still supported tho. Still getting security updates. I think until 2030 ish? I'm not sure, I think the older versions of LTSC had longer guaranteed support than the newer ones.
they also force you to give a recovery account. i’m thinking microsoft’s hands are tied in this matter, it might be the government forcing a kyc strategy
The current batch of elite have come up in a place where they have no real incentive to act in any way except that of their choosing. They're also exceedingly thin-skinned. If they think they can get away with ruining people who criticize them online, they'll do so.
It's an open secret that Windows is backdoored for the NSA to be fair and that isn't even including the truly dodgy stuff like Intel Management Engine being a backdoor on a BIOS level with remote access
Do you have a source for literally any of those allegations?
I'm as big of a Windows and ME hater as they come, but I'm not aware of any proven backdoors in either. Especially ME, which has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by the security community by this point. The only 'backdoor' discovered was the undocumented killswitch command that disables it after initialization.
It's safe to assume that Windows is backdoored, as it's closed, not audiatable and is a part of PRISM. It's not a proof, but this is how good opsec works.
And yes, this is not equivalent to what the parent said, but your reaction should be similar.
Apple doesn't force you to create an AppleID unless you want to use Music and the App Store. You can still run macOS as a standalone local user. So, it's not government-forced KYC.
I believe on my Mac (non-primary machine, FWIW) I ended up signing into an Apple account, and I doubt I did that for no reason. I don't rely on iCloud or spend money on apps. Is it required to get Xcode, which is required for some things from homebrew to work? You did mention the App Store, which maybe applies here. Is the App Store the only way to get Xcode?
Safe from coffee shop people or in a dorm, probably yes. If you lock your laptop with a good screensaver and have a decent PW, those people are not getting in anyway.
Plus with smart phones hardly anyone carries their laptop around these days.
But with what M/S is doing with Windows 11 "security" any ad company with $, lawyer with a warrant or alphabet soup agencies, can get a decent idea with what is going on even if they cannot get to see your data in Excel or Word.
But most M/S office data is now in the "cloud", so all bets are off for those files in many cases.
For the vast majority of users bitlocker just means that if someone steals your laptop or you leave it on a bus then short of a concerted effort by someone with technical ability, no one will have your photos or tax documents. It absolutely serves a meaningful purpose even if it has significant shortcomings.
Most people do all their Windows activity from one single specific location. It's Android and iOS that know you just drove down and made a stop at your city's most popular drug marketplace, or that you and your secretary were in the same hotel at 7pm yesterday.
This may get buried here, but there is one important distinction missing from all these articles.
Win 11 Pro allows you to enable local login, and disable all the intrusive microsoft stuff. Ive been on win 11 for the past 5 years and don't even remember my microsoft password at this point. IIRC you still have to set one up when you first install, but then once you switch to local login, any time you open up a microsoft app it makes you login in the app.
Its not a "good" solution, but given that Win11+WSL2 pretty much lets you run any software out there, its worth while doing.
Kinda related: back on Windows 7 I did add my MS account to Credentials Manager out of pure curiosity. But there was nothing else that could be done beside storing login and password. Even Windows Live applications bundle hold login data separately from Manager.
So I removed that account but when W10 was released, it was offered during initial setup of upgraded system. Windows still stored information about that account somewhere.
And yes, there are system tools still present today in W11 that allows users to create additional local accounts beside the default one set during installation - that's mmc snap-in (terrible name) local users and groups or net user for console. But I totally get it and support: people don't want to be forced for an online account out of the box, for a local workflow.
Microsoft is even trying to get Windows IoT / Embedded to be MS accounts vs local. The same method for disabling ease of local user accounts are being enabled there.
Windows IoT still forces all the useless trash to be installed ... such as XBox game bar. I have to spend every few months going through the means to disable this trash via the registry so it can be automated in air-gaped systems.
Original Window Embedded, pre-IoT branding, allowed full customization. Now it is near equivalent to standard desktop.
You have to pay me to use Windows OS ... even with gaming.
There is easier method. Set up local account during creating Win bootable install device via Rufus. During actual Win install it skips all steps about crating local account. Done.
I bought a returned, "Like New" laptop for my wife. Some Lenovo, higher end consumer laptop. The onboarding process was terrible. Something like, the wifi drivers were not included. I had to create a local account to download the drivers. But there's no ethernet port. Luckily had a USB to Ethernet dongle.
I thought to myself...yeah no wonder someone returned this.
I hear you. I've had laptops where one could not even install the Windows 11 OS on using the official Windows 11 ISO on a bootable usb key, because there was this weird nvme driver required. Which required you to make an additional usb key (of modify your bootable usb key) with the weird nvme driver to load during Windows 11 setup. Luckily the top brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo) have pretty good support asssistant software for once you got Windows 11 running with internet those tools will install the rest for you.
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 machines. I pay for a Office365 subscription.
I don't see ads popping up anywhere. I did disable about a dozen things (those silly icons in the search bar, syncing desktop icons across machines, etc) all through exposed UI switches, no "hacks" or undocumented registry tweaks.
I've watched coworkers go through all sorts of contortions, and downloading hacked binaries from sketchy sites, just to avoid creating the local account and I'm not sure why. I use my name and info on my longstanding Microsoft account, but you can just as easily call one "mymaxasus_11111", and be done with it.
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 sure I can turn some of this stuff off using group policy.
By contrast, I got a few Chromebooks and all my employees prefer them. If it weren't for a few legacy things, I'd switch entirely to ChromeOS or ChromiumOS.
1. Personal Computers are personal. Inviting an outside observer into one is no different than inviting one into the bathroom. What I do in there is my business.
2. Friction. This is likely MS's attempt to slow-walk Windows into a subscription service. If nobody resisted, that walk wouldn't be slow.
I hope more people boycott products that require making an account to use. Most developers who would care about this sort of thing seem to draw the line at requiring a subscription, but IMO requiring an account is just as bad. There are cases where you do need an account for syncing data or whatever, but I don't see why I need an account for a fitness tracker, just show me the stats on the watch itself. Worst example of this is phones requiring an account to let you install apps, how did we let them get away with this?
... And that is the straw that broke the camel's back - and convinced my elderly father to accept my offer to migrate to KDE.
Also, I can now shield him from most of the incomprehensible unsolicited dialogs that triggered support calls. I haven't had to field a single complaint since I tuned his desktop !
Random bits out of my memory in no particular order, except the first one:
First and foremost Linux was free, no money, no licenses, no procurement procedures, download and install.
Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.
It soon became PHP vs ASP and Java run on both OSes equally well.
There were still many Unix developers around and they picked up Linux at least as a deployment target.
Web servers were developed for Unix first. Porting to Linux was trivial. Porting to Windows not so. We had to wait for IIS.
> Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.
No way. Why didn’t they have the foresight to see this was a bad idea?
Didn’t you just need one person to say something like requiring human intervention to provision servers is not scalable? It doesn’t require an expert to think of this really.
To be fair to them, one or two servers were enough for basically every single service back in the 90s when consumers started moving to the internet. Microsoft sold what they had. Their customers bought what they were used to. The usual stack was a mainframe or an AS400 exporting a file full of records. A Windows NT PC imported the file in either Oracle or SQL Server and served HTML pages either with ASP or Java. Then export from the local db, import into the AS400. The internet facing system was a bolted on afterthought.
Of course it was still a pain compared to command line, unless you grew up with only a Windows PC or a Mac under your fingers. No CLI on Macs until Apple rebuilt the OS on Unix so you didn't even know what a CLI was.
Now that Words/Excel are losing their battles against online documents, gaming is the only thing that's keeping me on Windows. Though I honestly enjoy using Windows 10, no way in hell will I upgrade my OS to Windows 11.
I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t automatically create the user folder based on real name on the MS account, with space in it, fucking up and complicating all sorts of things.
this is why ive finally ditched windows for everything.
ive been a dual boot linux user for years, but still booting into windows for games and work.
no more, i just couldn’t take the:
- constant nagging
- ads for all of microsoft’s other shit that i absolutely did not want to use. copilot, onedrive, xbox, and on and on.
- the nonstop “sign in to your microsoft account” etc…
- settings i very deliberately changed reverting back on update.
- how stupidly long updates would take.
i just finally went to linux for everything. i was concerned about work stuff, and i ahve to admit, its absolutely definitely not perfect, but it still … feels? … better. i’m not sure this is the right phrase, but it just feels more fun. i feel good when i diagnose a linux bug, like productive or something. that feels more like fun to me compared to the dark patterns of windows which feels frustrating. if that makes sense.
i’d rather spend 20 minutes fixing a weird quirk on linux than the deal with the assault microsoft is constantly throwing at me when using windows. and id absolutely rather put up with a feature that isnt fully complete yet on linux than deal with dark patterns on windows.
and gaming? at this point, if a game doesn’t work on linux, i just play something else that does. there are just way too many choices of rad games that run good on linux. it does help that the games i’ve been playing lately (like cyberpunk) run a bit better on linux anyway.
the only holdout for me at this point is video and photo editing, i have to break out my macbook for lightroom and premiere still. but from what i understand linux is moving very very fast in that area so i’ll just use my mb until those are caught up. the day i can ditch my adobe subscription will be the type of “let’s go to the bar and toast with shots” kind of day. and from what other people say, it’s very close.
the cherry on top for me is, weve moved our parents machines to linux mint. my gf and i jokingly wonder if they would have even noticed if we hadn’t told them, firefox just works for their facebook and amazon lol. huge bonus that i can update their machines with a quick ssh apt update which takes literally seconds vs windows which sometimes takes half hour plus.
FWIW every one of those issues can be solved by running Win11Debloat one time (except update length which is variable based on hardware, but auto-update/restart can be disabled).
Persists after updates, and is a straightforward easily auditable PowerShell script enabling/disabling Windows/app features via approved OS provided API interfaces without any hacky brittle workarounds that eventually stop working.
It's the first thing I install on any fresh Windows 11 install for the past 4+ years. I get more ads on MacOS thanks to their lovely Apple TV, iCloud, etc push notifications than I ever see on Windows 11 (≈ 0) after running it.
I've updated hundreds of times across multiple machines and it's never stopped working. I'm only reminded it exists by its absence whenever I use an out of the box Win 11 install on a new PC which is painful in comparison.
I actually prefer debloated Win 11 to plain Win 10 because I get all the benefits like vastly superior multi monitor support on 11 with basically zero negatives.
appreciate the response. i’ve already moved on tho. microsoft just destroyed the little bit of good will i had towards them. i’d already been dual booting for years anyway. and honestly, while not perfect, linux has come so far that the problems i did initially have were not deal breakers, at all. post install i spent maybe 2 hours figuring out workflow and pwa’ing anything id need regularly like teams. another 2 hours working out any weird kinks and its been smooth since.
two years ago there is no way i could have moved fully over, but new LTS releases are an entirely different ballgame than they were 2 years ago, it’s wild.
if anyone’s curious and considering it, for my work system im running ubuntu LTS (yeah yeah, i know. but for work i need the stability that comes from long term support releases.) and likewise for LTS, my gf runs mint on her work system. for our personals we both run cachy.
What are some common hold-ups you know of? I don't program but have still used GNU/Linux on my main machine for over a decade now. It can browse the web, play games, listen to music, watch TV and movies, you can draw, you can edit video, you can stream to Twitch.
Office 365 (I think this mostly applies to overly complex Excel spreadsheets with lots of macros? There are also a bunch of people here who say LibreOffice has bad UI, or that they (somehow?) have documents that are complex enough that LibreOffice can't display them properly. Openoffice is somewhat better on those fronts, but neither are good enough if it's for actual work).
That's a long article ridden with ads just to say "a redditor complains about shitty Windows OOBE requiring a Microsoft account (this has been the case for 10 years already)". Alternatives exists and are viable, now people still prefer pouring energy into complaining to a wall instead of actually moving. Getting abused is deserved at this point, it's been more than 10 years now, get a grip.
I beg to differ; Most people don't deserve to be abused, but those who dish out abuse on those who never asked for it, or on other such "innocents" absolutely deserve a full measure of abuse, since they clearly don't understand (or care) how it feels to be on the receiving end of it.
I get all the hate with the requirements for Microsoft account, but I have to admit, they have made life easier.
Case in point, moving to a new computer is absolutely painless now with a Microsoft Account because of OneDrive and Winget.
Make sure that Onedrive is setup to backup all folder (desktop, documents, pictures. you can do this by clicking the gear icon and selecting Manage Backups)
Next have this simple batch file run whenever the user logs in. It basically uses winget to update all packages to the latest version and export a list of all those packages and save it onedrive
Now if you move computers, you just log in with your Microsoft account so that you will have your desktop and everything because onedrive will come over.
Now just do an import with Winget and you will have 95% of your programs installed. Yes I know there might be some programs that aren't available for installation through Winget, but almost ALL popular programs are available.
It's that simple. Something that use to take days now takes minutes and 3 commands. Plus the fact that everything is backed up to the cloud, you just can't beat it.
Yes I get the same stuff can be done with Google Drive, Dropbox replacing Onedrive. Chocolatey, ninite as a package manager instead of winget. Using Onedrive and winget are native and available on ANY Windows 11 machine and they WORK.
One thing I disagree with the article about is that drives should not be encrypted by default. For the vast majority of people an encrypted drive is just data loss lying in wait.
I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily. This is a trade off I'm willing to make over losing access to data.
I understand business uses for it, and for that they have an IT team to manage key backup and backups in general. Plus when you're using company equipment it is theirs, not yours.
Is there some problem with setting a passphrase for recovery, beyond just the risk of forgetfulness or loss?
I'm not sure how BitLocker compares with LUKS, but the ability to set (or revoke) multiple keys in the drive header gives a lot of flexibility.
For example, The same drive could be unlocked multiple ways:
* A passphrase that you memorize or metaphorically throw in a vault somewhere.
* A key tied to the hardware so that it is automatically supplied, or requires a lesser input like a PIN.
* Same as above, but added to support another computer you anticipate swapping the drive to.
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 feel like there's other solutions to protecting your and your family's PII than encryption by default.
Could you share them?
> 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.
OP might mean "laptop" instead of computer. Or more specifically, laptop that is regularly taken out of the home.
I'm with you. If someone wanted to steal any of my computers, they'd have to break into my house. Possible, but also statistically unlikely, as I live in a reasonably safe community and lock my doors. I don't see the benefit of full disk encryption on a bunch of computers I keep in my home. For the special case of a laptop that is frequently taken out of the home and used in public, where thieves might be? Sure, encrypt it.
In a small business, I've been responsible for buying laptops for a while.
In about 300 person-years, we've had two laptops stolen. Both were stolen while the staff were on trips abroad, and the staff were both rather careless IMO.
It's been a while since I've set up a windows machine and this may already be mentioned, but when I sign up for signal I got lots of warnings that were like "warning if you lose your phone and encryption key you will lose your data"
That way I know what I'm signing up for.
Just put "encrypt? Yes no" in the on-boarding flow and let people know what the risks are and what they may be protecting against. I'd probably default to off because people don't read wizards and the last thing someone wants is to lose their entire HDD because they accidentally made a decision they didn't understand.
And maybe for a certain period of time they can nudge users to read about encryption and decide if it's right for them, or just easily disable that nudge. Maybe even basic education like "if you find yourself forgetting your password often then maybe encryption is not for you" or something like that.
Windows is already optimized for extracting as much value from customers as possible, may as well help them make at least one informed decision.
Your computer is not "likely" to be stolen and sold.
> 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.
There is a very real security vs. availability trade-off though. Is the average person more concerned with others reading their emails, viewing their pictures, seeing their tax returns, or are they more concerned with losing access to those things themselves?
Losing access to an encrypted drive is a very real possibility (people often forget their passwords, and are used to that being recoverable), and is the data loss is probably more impactful than privacy loss for many people.
And the worst part is, I have seen computer repair shops that refuse to work with a laptop if it has an encrypted system drive, under the guise of "how would we then validate the fix?"
For the typical user, this is far far far more likely to happen than that they would “pop out” the drive and read it in another machine.
Defaults should be safe for most users. Power users are exactly the people who can deal with changing a setting. It’s constantly surprising to me when technical people insist that defaults should be optimized for technical people.
This is not the correct model. For a typical user, they can bring the laptop to someone knowledgeable, who will pop out the drive for them.
The main question is: What is the biggest risk: theft or data corruption.
In my experience, corruption and ransomware is more common so FDE should be off for households desktops or laptops, as these rarely leave the house. A business tends to have managed devices and data loss is a legal nightmare, so FDE should be on. The main thing is: people should be able to choose.
Surely not likely at all for a gaming desktop that's going nowhere in my home.
For business users with notebooks who fly around a lot or spend time in coffee shops, it's possible.
> Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold.
No, it’s not.
Users should be given a choice and clearly and concisely explain the consequences of choosing one or the other. Simple as that.
What it should definitely not happen is to do this behind scenes and store recovery codes on a microsoft account. Why those codes have to be stored on their servers?
A screen should display the recovery codes and instruct the user to print them and keep them in a safe place in case of requiring them. I should be able to recover my data completely offline. End of the story.
Obviously "physical access is full access", but it's shockingly easy to break into a Windows box if you have access to the unencrypted drive. I learned with I was a teenager how to use the recovery partition to mount the C: drive, then copy "cmd.exe" to "utilman.exe" or "sethc.exe" and get an instant root shell on the login page. Takes about 2-3 minutes, can be done in the time somebody leaves their laptop to go to the bathroom at Starbucks.
To me that's the main thing about disk encryption, it's to stop a nasty rootkit from being installed trivially as much as it is about stopping the guy at the pawn shop from getting your tax info. Whether you're on macos, linux, or windows, it's really quite easy to fully compromise a machine if you have hands on it.
Agreed, specifically about the tax info concerns. All my drives are encrypted with either luks, veracrypt, or native zfs encryption if my server data.
My primary concern is a robbery while I'm not home. It's trivial to break in, steal hard drives, and then go pop them into another machine on your own time to scan the files looking for tax or other sensitive docs.
While encryption keys are a risk, you can always save the random key file or passphrase in cloud storage (using symmetric encryption) and/or in your password manager.
Curious: Are you specifically worried about a robber who is targeting your tax information in particular? Home breakins are relatively rare, and when they do happen, for the vast majority of them, the robber grabs whatever cash, jewelry, and other small, easy-to-pawn valuables, and are probably not going to care about computers. And for those rare robbers who actually grab your computer, what percentage of them are really going to bother going through the hard drive looking for tax returns of all things?
This attack concern sounds like a small fraction of a small fraction of a small fraction!
Unless you are a celebrity or billionaire business mogul where your tax returns or other sensitive documents might be worth something...
Maybe I am the fool. :) I think about crime in the way I would do it, which is to grab the valuables police are unlikely to care about (hard drives) that allow me to quickly clone and encrypt myself, so I can destroy the tangible evidence, and then I have unlimited time to crack and review the information, and then even more time to execute my malicious attack against identities or whatever other I information I do find.
Only slightly better than this would be to break in, install a root kit, and then leave everything else untouched so as to try and minimize the knowledge that I was there, but I'd still be concerned that my c2 server would eventually point to me.
Maybe I should read about these actual crimes or get meds. The first couple years of my first kid's life were full of anxiety that someone would break in and steal my kid while I was sleeping at night.
Thieves are typically not technical people. If they were, they'd be using their technical skills at a legitimate job, not relying on burglarizing to make a quick buck.
They also are interested in getting in and out as quickly as possible. They're not going to take the time to disassemble a computer to remove just the hard drive, they're gonna steal the entire computer.
> Maybe I should read about these actual crimes
You should, especially on the kidnapping front. The extreme majority of kidnappings are from a relative or someone the child knows who will run off with them during the day, not break in at night.
...
Not sure that actually will make you feel better, tbh.
> I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily.
Everyone has different security needs. But (maybe it's different on Windows), what's hard about popping the disk to another machine and then decrypting it with the key? Does Windows not give you access to the key?
Windows does give access to the key. The issue with Microsoft account and especially Windows Home onboarding is that it doesn't tell you that it encrypted the drive and there is a backup key (which it uploads to Microsoft account, often readable by authorities with a court order).
Many normie users not only get locked out of their laptops but they also forget their Microsoft account password causing complete loss of data.
Not your key, not your crypto. => Not your key, not your data.
Why would anyone want to encrypt their data and then hand their private key to anyone is mind boggling.
My solution for your concerns is twofold:
1. Use a password-based encryption method (not tied to hardware identity) if you prioritize moving the disk around. Then it is just as readable in a spare machine.
2. Use an easy to remember password/passphrase and write it down somewhere you keep paper documents, if you prioritize recovery.
This still provides meaningful protection when you need to discard the drive. The random downstream recipient of the hardware will not know your password, even if you skip the step where you "crypto-shred" the drive by setting a new random password.
When an SSD fails it often reverts to read-only mode. The manufacturers may require you to return the drive to receive a replacement or refund. By which point it is too late. You now have the choice of potentially risking the disclosure of your personal data to a third-party (and your shipment could end up on a lost-parcel auction of it did not get delivered) or missing out on your warranty.
Agreed, I have personally come to the same conclusion. I do not encrypt the drives in my home desktops and servers so that the recovery/migration is easier when the time comes. The risk of someone stealing my desktops from my home is very low and the impact of someone going through my family photos or Linux ISOs is nothing. I roll my eyes at my friend when he explains the solutions for how to input the encryption password when his server restarts.
At the time of writing, there are already other replies to this comment how "it's mandatory today to encrypt drives" without any qualifiers. I am growing more and more frustrated by people who try to force security measures like this "because it is more secure that way" without first taking a look at the risks, impacts and associated costs. I think they simply force these security measures on others to feel good about their choices.
It was a breath of fresh reasonability when I found out that apt intentionally uses only HTTP instead of blanket HTTPS everywhere because the packages are signed, therefore they can be verified by the client, and using HTTP allows easier caching with cache proxies and such.
> I roll my eyes at my friend when he explains the solutions for how to input the encryption password when his server restarts.
Isn't this rather trivial? You gen a keyfile, register it with luksAddKey, then update /etc/crypttab, no? The real concern is making sure that keyfile is stored securely, but you can simply symmetrically encrypt it and upload it to your favorite cloud storage provider.
Uuh, I am not sure. I believe that he was talking about having full disk encryption which means that he needs to input the password to unlock the boot partition.
You can use TPM2 to automatically unlock the root partition and not have to input a password manually at boot. This is how my laptop (running Arch, btw) is setup. Whether or not disk encryption is necessary for a system that is physically secure at home or elsewhere is debatable however. But a laptop can be easily left somewhere and disk encryption seems necessary unless it never leaves home.
I used to think that and then the authorities raided my house (for bullshit reasons that had nothing to do with me). Now I encrypt everything.
That's a valid point. I feel for you. Similar thing has happened to a friend because of his dorm roommate torrenting some ... not linux isos illegal stuff.
With that said, I still find this risk quite unlikely to happen (at least in my country) with data loss due to being unable to decrypt the drive being more likely due to me changing computers often. If I were in a country such as the current U.S. for instance, I would most probably encrypt everything I could get my hands on. In addition, I think it is one more reason to have good offsite backups and to invest time into those. For me, losing the data/not having access to it for a long time while the police have it is a bigger impact than them finding out what porn I watch in my opinion. I don't mean it in a "nothing to hide" kind of way, but in a "I don't think they could do much any/damage with that information" way.
> popping out the disk and reading it from another system
The vast majority of people don't know that this is an option or how to do it.
plus, my first windows machine went through a botched windows update and got stuck in an encryption key doom loop. now matter how many times i entered the key, it won’t let me into the computer. had to take it to the shop (tbf it had a lot of other issues too). when i got a new one the first thing i did was turn off encryption
I'd argue the proper solution here is backup, as a hdd could die at anytime and leave you with approximately the same outcome. While encryption adds some overhead and increases the surface area for failure, it ultimately requires the same backup solution as anything else.
Windows gives you recovery keys for each encrypted drive. With those you can even access tpm-protected drives on another machine.
I'd say it's mandatory today to encrypt drives. In the age of SSDs it's not really possible anymore to delete files and to be sure they are in no way recoverable by an adversary.
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.
> 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.
Yesterday when I booted my windows 10 desktop PC I got a bunch of popups (Win32 MessageBox) about errors in some O365 AI dll files.
Turns out some MS AI software was silently installed on my PC in late may.
I do not have MS Office or anything that should require any AI software.
What you probably have is a component of O365 as an updater installed - check your programs and features because msft bundled this awhile back and once its removed it will stop the update treadmill.
Didn't they create Windows Installer (i.e. MSI) originally to meet the needs of Microsoft Office? And now they have MSIX to replace it, both of them built into Windows, but they still need a third installer system for Office, which is now also apparently built into Windows?
That's just the installers that you know about.
Note, there is a way to turn on extended support (updates). I'm getting updates on my w10. And random restarts, argh. Googling it should be enough to find it.
They're hosted on GitHub [1], if that's not implicit support from Microsoft, I don't know what is.
[1] https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
You are not worried about 0-days and other malware?
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 account requirements is a trivial process.
What I actually rage quit Windows over was AMD graphics drivers and a couple of my video games crashing.
What caught me by surprise is just how little I’d miss it. I thought I’d need to dual boot or run a Windows VM for little random things. Nope, I just don’t need them.
I didn’t expect to find an OS with more software that I tend to like better. Like my email client, where I moved from Thunderbird to Evolution and for the most part I find that to be a step up in user experience.
> 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 something open source (including the Negative Lab Pro plugin), that would be amazing.
- MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.
- Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)
> - MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.
For a traditional "all batteries included" collection management music player try Strawberry and Quod Libet. You should also look into the MuiscBrainz Picard tagger, it's a bit unwieldy to use but is very powerful once you learn it's wonky workflow.
Hadn't heard of Quod Libet, that's a good recommendation!
It seems that various MS Flight Simulator editions run on Proton. Focus on recent ratings, as the overall score reflects often reflects old versions of Proton.
https://www.protondb.com/search?q=microsoft%20flight%20simul...
> - Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)
It's a major step up in power but the steam deck has really pushed the wine/proton environment to near parity. The only things that really don't work through it reliably is anti-cheat stuff that I really don't want on my machine anyway.
I can't speak for the experience with nvidia drivers but it's pretty amazing how far it's come.
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.
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.
Oddly I’m like mostly using proprietary Windows software on my Linux machine these days (games).
I also think the AI era goes very far in eliminating those 5% problems. I have a mostly non-technical friend who set up an old laptop with Linux for the first time and he told me that he’d never have been able to do it on his own without AI. Anytime there’s an issue, his solution is just a quick question or copy/paste away.
Thanks for telling! Very interesting way of thinking about the security.
There's always the next great kernel level font or scrollbar exploit.
A simple trade off. Guaranteed malware from microsoft, or potential attacks that you can mitigate with firewalls, airgaps or Anti-Virus software.
Running Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC still gives you updates until 2031 with the added benefit of no app store. I run it as my main OS since last October and have yet to encounter any issues.
>Running Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC [...] have yet to encounter any issues.
It depends on the type of software a user runs. I installed Windows 10 LTSC on a friend's computer last year thinking she could run it for at least 5 more years and just ignore the newer Windows 11/12/whatever.
But she needed Intuit TurboTax 2025 and it requires Windows 11 and it's a hard requirement. The installer aborts on Windows 10. It's not a soft requirement like Adobe where they only support Windows 11 but their installer still runs on Windows 10. Autodesk Fusion 360 is another example that requires Windows 11.
I'm guessing if there's a future Windows 12, Intuit TurboTax will be aggressive about making it a requirement that forces the issue even though nobody wants to upgrade to it.
Those one-offs can always be in a separate VM (in Hyper-V or something)
Fusion 360 complains about Windows 10, but it still runs fine.
I'd say that comes down to the difference between requirements (i.e. will it run at all, does it use features only found in win11) and support, and the developer's decisions around that. I can appreciate not supporting win10 even if it runs as they have a written or implied burden to make sure it keeps operating correctly for the lifespan, and that may include keeping test systems around or handling bugs that turn up in the OS that's getting reduced support itself, or other factors like drivers. Then there's the question of whether people would be willing to pay for a "your mileage may vary" level of support on something commercial.
Only downside I've encountered using W10 IoT LTSC is that I had the temporarily change the currentbuild key (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion) in registry to 19045 to be able to install docker and WSL2.
Some software and games conveniently require at least 22H2.
I thought it was 2032. I use IoT LTSC as well and I can second that this is a great OS and everything runs without issue.
I would add that I've also used Windows 11 IoT LTSC and that experience is very similar to Windows 10 IoT LTSC.
I have Win11 Pro and have yet to encounter any issues
I use Windows 10 with a relatively obscure firewall software with a per-process/per-service whitelist, and try to not be stupid on the Internet. I also do regular backups. This should cover most of the risk model applicable to me. Has worked so far.
I don't suppose that you can share the setup with us? What firewall, how are the backups performed, how regular etc.
Microsoft already handles infecting their users, how many times have they broken Windows 11 through patches?
Man 0-days are expensive stuff no one throws them at random people.
Just use mass grave scripts[1] and enable 5 years of security updates.
[1] https://massgrave.dev/
Why would they need to be any more worried about those now than before?
The same holes exists and have existed for some time already. If he was not worried about them before why be worried about them now? And if you're worried about security holes why not be worried about the ones that exist now?
In general I find it funny that some people think that system is "secure" when it's on the latest version. At time t0 version N is considered "secure" then an update is made at t1 with version N1 and suddenly N is no longer secure. But it didn't change... it's the same version it was before.
Fact is a computer system is never going to be 100% secure.
Because the longer software is out in the wild, the more vulnerabilities are found. At least when they're found in windows 11 they should be patched
ESU updates are free for private users.
So till november 2026 or so everything is fine. Then I will probably have to switch to Linux.
Only if you accept signing in with a Microsoft account.
Not really. The odds are way higher that an update will hose your system and data.
From definition, a 0-day is not patched in any system because it's not known. But back to your real question.
The biggest attack vectors are the browser, the mail client and direct network access. I would never use outlook, edge or connect my computer directly without NAT or firewall to the open internet. And would never open a website without a add blocker.
You can count all other known big attacks(on unpatched Windows 7!!!) on one hand.
1) Remote execution via Wifi Stack
2) Remote execution via True Type Fonts
3) 0-Click code execution via USB Stick Icon processing
Windows update instead gives AT LEAST Microsoft a steady remote code execution on your and millions of other computers. It's a really interesting attack target when you go big. Why I should trust M$ to get the security there right?
No.
You mean Windows 11, or 10?
I joke
lol. He’s using Windows in the first place so, clearly no.
Truly updates should be focused on fixing bugs, security and performance improvements NOT new features.
Windows 10 wouldn't let me run Minecraft because the OS was out of support. I upgraded to 11, and it wouldn't let me run without logging into the OS Store, in addition to Minecraft. I removed my Windows partition completely. I run MC on Linux now.
It's still bugging me about windows 11
Maybe disable Secure Boot/TPM in BIOS? No more nag screens when PC doesn't support Windows 11.
Not true. I have an old laptop with no TPM and it still bugs me to upgrade to Windows 11, even though it doesn't meet the hardware requirements.
I never had it enabled on that machine.
I still get a full-screen "Upgrade to Windows 11" popup before I can get to the desktop every month or so when I start my Windows 10 machine.
> "To avoid the next problem: 'Microsoft locked my data behind bitlocker, and now I can't get it back.' they need to store that key on the MS account."
Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?
I don’t see what the problem is. Just don’t get into any business that MS considers shady, or disparage the company publicly, or piss off an executive, or get sanctioned because your work with the UN is at cross purposes with the current US administration.
You are probably talking about Kahn. The international Criminal Court is not part of the UN. It is distinct from the International Court of Justice.
As of October 2024, there are 125 states parties to the Rome Statute, which are represented in the court's governing body, the Assembly of States Parties. Countries that are not party to the Rome Statute and do not recognise the court's jurisdiction include China, India, Russia, and the United States.
Member states represent around a third of the world population.
Or anything that random LLM might consider shady...
Is that sarcasm?
What happens if MS decides that using competitors software is "shady" - they have previous form of unfair competition practices, so it's not unlikely.
Also, what happens if the US administration decides that MS software is only authorised if you have white skin and support Trump?
I think that was sarcasm.
It could also simply be a false positive, as that seems to be happening a lot lately.
You can save your recovery key in different formats (printed, on a USB stick, etc). The online recovery is just automatic.
I think that when you have an MS account with the automatic online key backup, BitLocker is actually turned on automatically, and the user isn't presented with the option to back it up elsewhere. You need to know about this, and manually back it up.
So the encryption of your personal computer is at the whims of the least competent employee at Microsoft?
I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
This has always been the case considering Microsoft made the encryption itself.
Very much so.
And it's even more scary that MS uses dark patterns to trick older non-technical users into enabling MS online accounts. When the bitlocker activation automatically happens during tricking the user into going from a local account to online account it is without the user's consent or real participation. They don't print out a copy of the key or move it to a usb drive becuase they aren't aware their drives are being encrypted. And afterwards they can't set up recovery keys because the computer itself only shows the blue aka.ms screen. It's effectively dead until they follow the demands.
This is not theoretical, it actually happened to my mother on the local account Win 11 computer I set up for her sewing applications. I had to drive across town in order to figure it out since the weird URL I'd never heard of (aka.ms) and demand for pasting private info sounded so much like ransomware. And in fact, it was effectively ransomware, it was just demanding online activity rather than money.
it does look sketchy, but microsoft used aka.ms since forever, especially for short links to various SDKs (aka.ms/pwsh7)
The actual URL was the least sketchy part of that story.
OH no worries bitlocker had a backdoor for the NSA so it's actually possible to use that to recover the data.
https://cybernews.com/security/researcher-releases-bitlocker...
>Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?
Depends. The average user would be more afraid if its not backed up online.
I'm not sure there's anything I dislike more than "the average user" because so much good software has been destroyed because of it.
The actual average user is fine. The problem is most companies seem design for some hypothetical average user, who they hate and/or think is a dumbass.
> The actual average user is fine.
I'm afraid i have some unfortunate news..
>t. someone who deals with "average users" on a daily basis.
Do you really? How? I haven’t done IT, but I would expect you to mostly see people who’d broken something.
Have you seen the user of median (average) intelligence? That's who you seem to describe. The users of even lesser intelligence make me question the survival fitness of our species.
Your average users are getting rid of PCs and getting Android tablets or iPads instead.
And they are used to lose all their accounts and data on a regular basis, which is also fine because they seem to accept that rather easily.
I've dealt with users for a few years. Those were already selected to be a bit more technical than your average person because of a niche I am in. I can tell you an average user is in fact a dumbass.. Vast majority doesn't understand concepts like files. People have all kind of crap on their computers as they randomly click around and download everything. They save information in the downloads folder and complain it disappears. Their computer is 10x slower than yours because all the crap that runs on it.
The are also very aggressive when it comes to not reading error message or in fact learning anything about how computers or their OS works. Add to this usual entitlements and not seeing a problem with being dumb on purpose and you get a picture of an average user.
The companies know that and the dumbed down design we get is a diret consequence of it.
Reading this feels like a calculator manufacturer trying to explain why it doesn’t matter that the calculators don’t do every operation exactly right.
I mean thats absolutely a take. Sometimes I like to think about how great a network I could build if I didnt have to service any customers.
It would be the most beautiful, elegant, well-designed and thoroughly hardened network I'm certain. I get it, the software I'm complaining about was designed for profit.
The point I'm trying to make is imagine you have to tell a customer that they can't keep using the network design they have, which fits their requirements almost perfectly, because it's too much burden for your network engineers to maintain. Instead, the customer can use this other network design that is suitable for the average customer. So it works, but not as well as before, and the customer will probably need to find some workarounds or shift other processes to accommodate. It's just shit.
My rather distant friend has a tendency of not reading what happens on the screen. She uses her computers for years only for browsing the web and writing papers. Whatever else obstructs her way is dealt with "next next finish" approach. Despite I told her many times, she should read and look up for solutions online if there's any doubt.
She locked her W11 laptop. Disk was encrypted and she couldn't recall neither login or password for MS account.
Encrypting disk by default but giving the password to microsoft makes no sense.
I'm way more scared of airport security stealing my laptop and getting access than I am of someone breaking into my home with the purpose of accessing my data.
Basically it hassles people like your friend, protects against the very unlikely scenario while leaving the more likely scenario unprotected.
Not to mention of course the bitlocker backdoor that was discovered last month.
I'm afraid that the average user still does not think about backup. Sharing with other devices, probably yes, but the two concepts are only distant cousins.
But they have gotten used to lose all their files on a regular basis. Sure they lament it when in happens but most aren't willing to do anything about that.
My SO lost all her pictures several times over the year when changing phones. She still complains about it when she wants to share or find something old she knew she had but she has mostly accepted it.
Having helped more than a few users with down PCs. They're mostly not even aware these backups exist. When you explain it to them the result is a mixture of relief and then fear that this was occurring without their awareness.
Yeah exactly.
I remember how many people nuke their iPhone and then call support about getting all their babies photos back. iCloud is largely a support call reduction feature first and foremost.
It does seem a lot like ransomware.
Microsoft offers it, but they don't need to store it. I store my bitlocker keys locally. (Printed out in a safe).
Regardless of account type, there are many things that could require you to need those Bitlocker keys to get your data. Don't just associate them with an account, have Windows save the keys to a text file, and save that text file somewhere external, on a NAS or Dropbox or email itnto yourself or whatever, and print out 2 or 3 hard copies and keep them close by. I'm 1000x more worried about losing my data to a Windows crash/error than to theft or any other external actor.
I ditched Windows in 2022. I'm not going back to Windows unless Microsoft makes an OS for professionals that is stripped down out of the box to show how serious they are. No ads of any kind, no garbage online account features, nothing, just core offline-ready Windows. I bet it would perform drastically better too.
Same (2024), but i wouldn't come back in a hurry if they did so. Basically everything works now in Linux world, including my obscure devices, music & video editing, and my whole steam library... with better performance. It's sort of insane.
I just installed Bazzite-DX, and have been really surprised with how easy it was to install, and how well everything "just works". It even tells me when my wireless keyboard batteries are running out, something Windows couldn't do without running proprietary Logitech software.
Which distro do you run?
Yup, Windows 10 LTSC here. It's a lot faster and smoother, but I'm already transitioning to Linux on my other boxes. Will probably move before LTSC runs out as well.
edit: I realised I overplayed how much faster and smoother it is. compared to standard win 10 or 11. Example being my login screen sometimes struggles to come up when the computer is locked (work around double mash CTRL-ALT-DEL)
I have a Surface Book 2 which was insanely fast when I bought it. Its pretty vanilla, I dont like to tweak Windows often it usually feels like it degrades, its been sluggish the last two years or so. Idk what Microsoft did but used to be vanilla Windows was performant enough, they must have fired their performance guys? Idk
Sounds like Windows 11 Pro would do it for you, then.
I have already used that version of Windows, it is hot garbage.
How is it 'hot garbage'?
I was in a hurry trying to log into my kid's Minecraft account, wound up clicking something to associate it with the Windows account... now the PC is in restricted mode and I'm having a hard time restoring the previously associated Microsoft account (among other things, have to ask permission to open the browser and approve the requests logging in on my phone)!
Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.
I ran into this trying to set up a new Dell laptop for my mom. It shipped to her in "S mode", meaning that among other things I couldn't install arbitrary software from the web. I assumed there'd be some straightforward way to disable it (even if it might be a little buried to discourage normies). But after several hours of searching through tutorials and mucking about in Windows settings, the command prompt, BIOS, and even the system registry, and I flatly could not do it. Never seen anything like it before. Ended up wiping and replacing Windows with Linux Mint, which she was happy with.
When I worked at a very big US company some years ago, I received for work a new Dell laptop with Windows also in "S mode", to replace an older Dell laptop.
However, at that time I had no idea about the existence of the "S mode". I could not install on the laptop some applications that were distributed and used internally in the company and which were essential for my work.
I requested assistance from the IT department, but at that time not even they had any idea about the existence of the "S mode", so they were equally baffled why on my previous Dell laptop I could easily install any application, while on its new replacement I could not. For a couple of weeks, various IT support people from teams located on several continents had repeatedly connected remotely to my laptop every day, trying to solve the problem, but without any success.
That’s crazy, surely it would have been cheaper to buy a new laptop at that point. I mean if you combine all the costs of those people trying to problem solve, plus the opportunity cost of you not being able to do your work…
Your assumption is that such big companies operate in a logical manner, the employee is a ball-bearing in a huge machinery, why should they care. IT support is probably outsourced, so for them is likely good to bill more hours.
Microsoft keeps being the best advocate for Linux.
Except normies don't have the option at computer stores.
Even the OEMs that do offer the option to have Linux pre-installed keep pushing for "Works best with Windows".
What is a non technical user to do, the choice ends up being macOS, Windows, or ChromeOS thin clients.
this is the primary problem to begin with.
MS windows installs are not being purchased because they are better or more desirable, the option to purchase non MS installs has been scuttled by MS licensing and bundling thier way into exclusive OEM installs.
Bundling of Microsoft Windows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
Microsoft litigation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation
https://www.google.com/search?q=Windows+also+in+%22S+mode%22 "Switching Out of S Mode If you find that S mode is too restrictive, you can switch out of it for free. However, according to Microsoft Support, doing this is a one-way street—once you leave S mode, you cannot go back without completely reinstalling Windows.To switch out of S mode:Open the Start Menu and click Settings.Navigate to System > Activation.Look for the Switch out of S mode section.Click Go to the Store.On the page that opens in the Microsoft Store, click Get"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537350
I responded because your solution was to use Linux Mint which I have installed a few times on older hardware. My experience getting older relatives to use Mint has not gone well. The most common is their reliance on Microsoft Office. Windows S mode and having to use the Microsoft Store might save me time supporting them.
First DuckDuckGo result for "windows s mode": https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...
For that, you must know that there is such a thing like "Windows S mode".
As I have mentioned, in another comment, some years ago I had the same problem when replacing an old corporate laptop with a new one, but at that time nobody from the IT support knew about the existence of the "Windows S mode".
At that time, seeing that none of many IT support people could do anything, I assumed that there was some kind of miscommunication inside the IT department, and there was some administrator who had configured some kind of secure Windows mode on my laptop, but the others were not aware about this.
Now I know that the laptop had come like this directly from Dell, but for some reason the IT department did not know about it.
You're responding to a comment talking about hours of tutorial dives and advanced config tweaks, my guy. You really think the official fix isn't the first thing I tried?
That button simply doesn't work. I forget the exact error message, but it was something generic and unhelpful. (Spoiler: none of the other solutions in the first few pages of search results worked, either.)
God, that's the worst. Minecraft is also what led us to accidentally bind my child's account to the administrator account on my TV PC, and because he's a minor we can't actually unbind that account. I've tried for hours and have not succeeded.
"Just make a new account." It's possible but then we'd have to make sure we get every single saved game for all the various games moved over and ugh.
This'll tell you where saves are [1]. Move the important games first, and come back when he asks about the rest.
[1] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home
> […] but then we'd have to make sure we get every single saved game for all the various games moved over […]
Every single game save? Why? I get it if you are deep into a month long Factorio game or have a huge Minecraft world, but on the whole games are ephemeral entertainment. If it's not worth backing up, it's usually fine to just start a new game.
Good luck. I lost access to 3 of my 5 Minecraft licenses due to Microsoft login, and I’ll never forgive Microsoft for it.
Same here. That's when I switched my kids' machines to Linux. That was just 2 months back.
And was Windows 11 bug free, no. Was it easier to use, no. Absolutely irritating OS.
I switched my kids to Linux too. They have a multi-seat setup so now they can both use the PC at the same time. With the state of Linux gaming, we have yet to encounter a reason to boot back into Windows.
As a feature, the games that refuse to work under Linux tend to be the type that sell cosmetics or other things you probably don't want to deal with anyway. Or infuriating salty MOBA types.
Amusingly enough, I’ve had certain EAC games work _better_ under Linux than windows.
I used to dread seeing the EAC splash because it inevitably meant frequent crashes on windows, with no such issues on Linux.
amazing！
Kinda inverse for me but abandoned Windows after having a local account for my kids, and I bought them MS Flight Simulator on my Microsoft Account from the MS Store.
There was no way to use this expensive purchase from the kid's account on the same machine! Stupid bullshit - I gave up on Windows from then on.
I have to figure out by my kid's new Minecraft account is banned/blocked or whatever even though she hasn't even used it, looks like the standard pump for extra PII scam every account setup runs now. She was about on the verge of tears telling me about it.
I deal with the shenanigans at work but I'm at least paid to eat shit there. That's how they run things I guess, you give them money, then they extort you to get more if you want what you paid for or they'll make your kid cry. I'm grinding my teeth just thinking about it.
Pretty sure I’ve got multiple copies of Minecraft thanks to Microsoft login bullshit.
Recently moved desktop to Linux though so hopefully don’t need to deal with them again
> Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.
Not everything. I say: use the option to switch to Linux.
I installed PopOS and Steam for my 11 y/o. She games either on her Nintendo Switch (not Microsoft) or on her iPad (not Microsoft) or on Linux (not Microsoft).
Wife works from a Debian desktop PC, so do I.
Microsoft is not allowed in this house.
An option only available on households with UNIX skills, and work that has zero dependency on using Microsoft products.
Something that isn't available to everyone.
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.
I ran into similar MS account hell when trying to get my kid's Xbox account signed back in.
Absolutely hate it. Can't wait to ditch Xbox for PS.
I really did not want to change from 7 to 10. I did it begrudgingly partly because "It is the last version of windows".
Well, they were right in one sense. It is the last version of windows I will have. I now have an old box set up with Linux Mint, so I can get familiar with it before switching over all my main PCs
I found Fedora Workstation 'mature' and an easy thing to switch to - there are a few Gnome conveniences like taskbar and menus that can be easily turned on (Claude helped me there).
Exactly my turn. Win 10 is clearly the last Windows for me. For private I still use Win 7, for work I used Win 10, but the driver support for my old dell laptop(2014) is so shitty, that it's overheating and throttleling as soon it has to do some normal things.
When the last bastion of Windows, the driver support is falling, I can switch to Linux. Since 2 month I use openSuse on this device and be happy. No running fan, no problems. Windows is dying.
Windows has reached the point where it deserves only to run in a virtual machine for some needs.
Otherwise leave it behind and move on to Linux, BSD or whatever doesn't require a cloud account to work
Oh man, unfortunately all the things I need windows for doesn’t work well in a VM:
Solidworks, needs special license to work in a VM that my company is not willing to pay for
DAWs, need real time access to low level audio stuff
Games, well, lets just say the experience is better with wine on linux
With the exception of work, at some point I decided that not only is windows dead to me, but any application that can only run on windows is also dead to me.
At least on Proxmox the Solidworks and DAW latency problems are solvable.
The only limiting factor for me is - some games using anticheat (rainbow 6 mainly) - some programs that will never port (FL Studio, Adobe, etc.)
Apart from that, I have no desire to keep my home PC on windows.
I installed it on a VM the other day, and trust me it was only because my job, which pays me, required it. I couldn't believe it was trying to get me to sign in to a Microsoft account to finish installation. I had to look up some arcane way to skip it. The article I read listed other methods, many of which no longer work so it seems they really want you to log in.
Then it was showing me shit like the FTSE 100 price right on the desktop, and some stupid thing about the football world cup. All totally unsolicited spam. I couldn't believe people put up with Windows some 15 years ago when I ditched it. Now I'm convinced some people are just conditioned to being in an abusive relationship and can't imagine any different.
Moving 15 years back puts you into glory Win7 days. IIRC, the spam started with win8 which was released ~13 years ago and was very mild at first
That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.
I can totally see Internet availabilit correlating with the rise of unwanted stuff in the install. Believe it started with 3rd party games being part of the OS at first. I don't recall the yes/maybe later dialog "options" in win8 though, at least not in the beginning.
I actually really liked the win8 start menu change and the live tiles, even wrote some tiny homegrown apps with them. My logic was always "if I am opening the start menu, I will want to interact with that menu and only it until it's closed", so having it fullscreen made sense.
Actually it was Vista that made me quit for good, so I might be out of date with my "15 years" claim.
It's amazing how things can seem great when looking back at them. I remember when Bush was President of the US and we made fun of him for being "stupid". Now looking back he seemed like a great chap. The good old days...
> It's amazing how things can seem great when looking back at them. I remember when Bush was President of the US and we made fun of him for being "stupid". Now looking back he seemed like a great chap. The good old days...
Things were bad back then too. They're just even worse now (at least on those fronts).
Linux hasn't reached the point where it can be the main driver, not for my usecases. Everything works until very suddenly it doesn't and there's no budging.
Interesting. what kind if applications are challenging you?
Same. With every enshittification step Microsoft takes I want to switch, but alternatives are still worse.
I switched to Windows 10 as my main development machine few years ago after 25 years of continuously crashing Linux with an enormous pleasure. FreeBSD, well, there's nothing to crash there, that's the problem with it. Nothing. I didn't know almost anything about this Windows OS so I just started playing some sort of whac-a-mole game with it. I don't know what I did but right now I'm a happy (windows 11) user. I use Hyper-V with great success for driving my Linux and FreeBSD development. I like powershell and the dotnet platform and storage spaces and ntfs and many other. Good technologies, it feels good using. Windows terminal is almost OK. I stay away from crap like WSL and Code. I still use mutt for mail, not Office. And I can just play a game without any problems.
There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow. Actually, as of late, I feel more creep in Linux and FreeBSD than in Windows. Everything just works. Sometimes it tells me it has some updates for me. I let it install them and that's it. I'm back to my game, no weird stuff.
No account problem, no copilots, just my shit and myself and no Irene.
When I read about other users having trouble with it I get pretty sad. I wish I could say "do this and that" but I have no idea how my whac-a-mole game drove me to this happy situation. I must have (de)activated some (attack) vectors by mistake. But I whacamoled it head to end, from bios to wallpaper. I kept hitting and hitting, backuping, restoring, backuping,restoring, until i won. I'm on Windows 11 Pro in testing mode right now. Getting back to a linux desktop as my main? Nah, not right now. I have my i3wm running on a gpu partition inside hyper-v and sometimes I drop to it... I can't do all my arcane linux stuff in windows yet but i'm getting there. For now, I'm enjoying it. Been a while now. I just hope they don't notice me...
> I like powershell and the dotnet platform and [...] Windows terminal [...] There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow [...] I just hope they don't notice me...
Did you make sure to disable telemetry in .NET, and also separately in PowerShell, and also separately in Windows Terminal, and also of course in Windows itself? Otherwise your machine is sending your data to Microsoft by default.
Of course, even if you do disable all of those, there are likely to be other Microsoft programs with their own telemetry enabled by default. And even if you disable those, they could at any moment add more telemetry that you don't know about.
I am actually sending some optional telemetry data as well, consciously. Telemetry I don't care about or smells it's disabled. I was referring more to some other type of creeping. I don't mind telemetry for a good cause.
I think it is fair to encrypt the user hard drive since the majority of users are unaware that they're even leaking secrets and PII when e.g., they sell a laptop without wiping the disk first.
But I think it is also fair if the user was opening a CMD during install just to type `oobe /bypassnro` the user is advanced enough to understand the risks of not encrypting the hard drive (it is really easy to activate the BitLocker afterwards anyway, and for example in my case instead of storing the secret key in Microsoft I decided to store it in my password manager). So I really don't buy the excuses of this article.
Also WTH Microsoft, why it is so easy to reset the TPM key during e.g., a bios update and lose access to all your TPM keys (so you need to type your BitLocker key again). It should be a requirement from Microsoft laptops that the TPM contents are never lost unless the user explicitly asks for it.
You’ve forgotten the most important fact: users don’t provide enough of a revenue stream. Therefore they aren’t represented at the table when decisions are being made that effect their fate.
Similar to how there is no actual citizen representation in the Congress of the US.
Now stop whining and get back to work.
Install Windows IoT. It's for internet of things devices and has more strict updating procedures than conventional Windows.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/product-family...
Functionally it's the same and have heard good things. In any case I will be switching to Linux for my gaming Desktop soon. I will still have Windows for the odd multiplayer game that isn't well supported by Proton.
is media ungated/downloadable for iOT? also downgradable from pro or home?
Yet they use it, they do not really care, they even install Windows games that requires kernel level spyware read anti-cheat.
There are Linux distros that are newbie friendly and looks like Windows.
An end user that does not depend on Adobe, if you are still using that for whatever reason, they have no excuse to don't move to Linux distro OS.
People don't know about the stuff you're describing. They use the OS that comes with their PC or is the one everyone else uses.
This may be changing in Europe. Entire governments are fed up with Microsoft.
^^^^^ https://xkcd.com/2501/
Just like how Linus from LTT (just trust me bro on the source) said one day he needed a tool (hammer?) so he walked into the hardware store, found what looked like a hammer, and bought it. End of journey. And then he finally realized how a regular person buys tech. Most people do not care, do not know they should care, and do not care enough to know if they should care enough.
Yeah but they could have gotten a Makita XWT15Z 18V LXT Lithium Ion Brushless Cordless Impact Hammer instead?
(This is like my niece buying a $5000 Alienware to play Roblox because she thinks she “needs a gaming PC”)
At least she can play Minecraft with shaders.
I bet that $5000 PC came only with a 3050 and some high end shaders lag on it lol
palm hammers are kind of cool, but they require air.
Sort of like how most water cooling requires RGB. ;)
Ignorance isn't a good excuse. If you do backbreaking work in the worst shoes and complain about your foot hurting, you might want to start shoe shopping.
Shoe shopping and learning about new / different technology are not equivalent.
Shoes have a near uniform interface that is easily learned by parents or trial and error. Loading an alternative OS is foreign to most people.
People learn from others the best. Teaching others is the only means for them to realize there are better solutions than sticking with techo-fascist Microsoft.
I'm say this as someone that grew up on MS-DOS and used Windows OS up to Windows 7. After personal exploration, other OSes actually are easier and more stable. You now have to pay me to use Windows OS.
Microsoft is the baddy.
> they do not really care
What would their choice be anyways? It's like saying "yet people still die, they do not really care, they even engage in activities which hasten their deaths!"
> they have no excuse
That's irrelevant, because they don't owe you an excuse to begin with.
good luck getting ol' grandma to flash her desktop with Fedora/equivalent
Flash it for her. The result will be a more stable (in terms of not shitting the bed randomly one day or changing the entire UI) and decluttered portal to whatever website she uses it for.
Let me provide you a preview of how this will go:
"You moved my Chrome. I liked my Chrome. Put it back. I can't get to the Facebook. I want to talk on the Facebook and I can't because you moved my Chrome."
1. It's probably not hard to put her Chrome back where it was and set her homepage to Facebook.
2. These users wouldn't be the people referred to by the article though, right?
Someone who is 75 years old today was 49 years old at the peak of the dotcom craze, and is probably a lot more computer literate than you're giving them credit for. What you're saying might have been true 20 years ago, but it isn't today.
Oh no. Not at all. My mother would say "You moved my facebook" when she could not find Chrome. These people exist.
Yeah, no. Maybe in the circles that we run in here on HN but Linda Q. Senior worked as a paralegal 25 years ago and is still using the email her ISP gave her in 2003. She asks her son to fix the wifi and doesn't update her iPad for months at a time. She just found out about Reddit within the last three years. She gets frustrated and clicks the mouse a bunch of times when a system doesn't respond to her input quickly. She doesn't really grasp the concept of an "operating system", just that the device runs some software.
Changing the OS she uses is like tossing a flashbang grenade at her while she's sitting on the couch.
Fedora is quite capable of doing absolutely nothing but opening Chrome and going to Facebook.
And it looks completely different from Windows.
The icon is in a different spot. The task bar looks different.
DOA.
gift links for you:
https://linuxvox.com/blog/linux-os-that-looks-like-windows/
https://fosspost.org/make-linux-look-like-windows/
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-make-linux-look-like-window...
https://www.xda-developers.com/4-ways-to-make-any-linux-dist...
can you lock fedora down such that a few bad clicks dont disable the desktop manager and boots it into the terminal?
this is the real problem with Linux on the desktop for non-power users
If you talking of users who dont install their own software and just use browser only then Linux was better for them for decade.
Now you can even install something with read-only system partition with snapshots so not even a power outage can corrupt anything.
For non-power users who do need to install something it was never perfect, but now these immutable distributions are here. They have their own downsides though.
Guessing this is just a hypothetical, but if you really can do that (disable the DM via the GUI by accident), I'd be curious. If you told me to do that on purpose, my first instinct would be to uninstall the package.
Which few bad clicks would put a fedora install in that state?
If you do have permissions to install packages you can end up with a system in messed up state pretty easily.
1 - Enable wrong ROMFusion because you need these damn video codecs for VLC. I have like 20 years of Linux experience and I still messe up Fedora in 2025 trying to make video work.
2 - Just forget that big update going in background and shutdown system when not appropriate. Boom. On Windows its just much harder to accidentally do it.
Only solution is really distros with immutable root and snapshots.
> Only solution is really distros with immutable root and snapshots.
Lucky for you then, as Fedora does have an immutable desktop flavour!
https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/
Thanks. Will check it out, but unsure if Asahi have an option for this.
I guess you could use something like Fedora Silverblue if you feel like doing some initial explaining.
> good luck getting ol' grandma to flash her desktop with Fedora/equivalent
My kid's grandma (my wife's mom) brought me one Windows laptop too-many to fix "because there were ads everywhere".
I confiscated her laptop (I'm now using Linux on it) and had her buy a Chromebook.
People aren't using Windows under my watch / friends don't let friends/family use that mediocre piece of turd that Windows is / etc.
to be honest i forgot chromebooks exist and now that you mention them i think they're the best solution for anyone whose computer is simply a medium to access a web browser
“No excuse”
Lifelong windows user here - gave up last year, switched to macos for laptop & ubuntu for desktop - haven't turned back since
I have used a Windows OS almost every day of my life since 1999 or so. Last December I had a choice and switched to MacOS for work laptop. Since then I seldom use Windows and I don't really regret.
I still use an Xbox almost every day so there's that. In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox so we'll see.
Did you create an apple id?
At least macos doesn't require it to install software.
ios is a different story.
I didn't create an Apple ID. The MacBook is from work and I use AD account to access it.
What news are you referring to? The only news about Xbox I've caught is that it's declining in profit because they removed Xbox exclusives.
Asha is doing some good decisions, or it seemed so until the XBOX Reset blog post.
However beyond XBOX, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers as per amount of owned studios especially since ABK acquisition, so even when XBOX is doing bad, Microsoft Publishing is doing great.
That doesn't seem to address my comment. I was specifically asking why esalman wrote
> In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox
Since I wasn't sure what good news they were referring to.
Mainly they admitted that they lost substantial amount of subscribers when they hiked game pass prices last year.
They also gave away free Xbox consoles to attendees at Xbox fanfest.
This stuff drives me nuts. Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this. Every time I log in to a Google account within the browser, it nags me to link the account to the browser itself. One time my partner clicked the popup that asks to link the account by accident (this is very easy to do and probably Google's intention) and it hijacked all of my bookmarks. When I logged out of the account, everything was gone. I looked into Firefox and Edge, but they have the same profile crap. I don't need or want to log in to my browser!
I've hit my limit with Microsoft, too. I'm going to start moving my PCs over to Linux. The last time I installed Linux on a personal device was in high school, almost two decades ago, and it took quite a bit of work to get everything running properly. I've heard that compatibility issues are much less prevalent now. If things to smoothly, I may even convert my main gaming and work PC, although I'll have to look more thoroughly into whether all my Steam games will be playable.
> Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this.
Consider Chromium (the open source build) instead of Chrome when you migrate to Linux. It is in the main repo of most distributions. Chrome is literally spyware. Also Firefox (with the real uBlock Origin, not the watered down version for Chrome/Chromium) is excellent.
I wish you a smooth transition. These days odds are everything will work out of the box.
> "I don't need tips, I just want Microsoft to change it,"
They won't change it unless you give them a reason.
Switch to macOS or Linux. That will give them a reason.
Just last week I installed Windows 11 by downloading the ISO from Microsoft and creating a bootable USB stick with Rufus [1]. Rufus has options to make the Windows installer skip the Microsoft account login. Worked great!
There are reasons to install Windows. For one, I had to install it for my wife, and making her switch to another OS she isn’t used to would be quite a hassle. I also use it at work, and I need to run Visual Studio.
But I have the Pro version, and, AFAIK, there is a stark contrast between Pro and Home. Even though there is a push in Europe to make software Linux-compatible, there are still many, many companies and government institutions fully entrenched in the Microsoft world. Going Linux-only just for the sake of it sometimes does not make much sense business-wise.
[1] https://github.com/pbatard/rufus
Would make perfect sense if your competitor does it and automatically every customer is saving a microsoft subscription per employee.
In some industries, Microsoft subscriptions are a drop in the ocean. Switching out things like Entra ID, Office, and print/scanning solutions would cost so much more, and come bundled with enough risk that no sane project manager would take it on lightly.
As a C# software provider, making something Windows- and Linux-compatible is easier than ever. So giving up on Windows is effectively the wrong move, because you would miss out on the behemoth companies that are simply too large to transition easily.
I know the majority of HN readers are fed up with Windows. That is completely understandable. But not everything about it is bad.
So you can list what is good about windows?
Very important for business customers:
- It is very "standardized" (i.e. there exist no distributions that do things differently from each other).
- It cares about binary backward compatibility: it is nearly always possible to run a binary from 30 years ago, and if you are willing to invest some own effort, eben running Win16 binaries can often be run. Compare this to GUI applications on GNU/Linux.
- The operating system and the applications are very separated. I can basically install every version of an application that I want:
If there exists a newer release of some software than what the "distribution" (which of course does not exist in the Windows world) provides that you want to try out: install it now, you don't have to wait for your distribution. There is also no nightmare that some shared library versions have to fit the ones provides by the distribution.
Similarly, I you want to stay with an older version of a software for a longer time: go for it.
It is a very common situation that for some pieces of software, you have very specific requirements which version you want: with Windows, this is very easy, while on GNU/Linux this is - in my experience - a nightmare for unexperienced users.
- If you build one software release on Windows, it will run on basically every Windows computer (the typical thing that you have to do at most is to additional install a runtime provided by Microsoft (e.g. for C++ or C#)). No consideration necessary how to handle each distribution.
I've been a daily windows user since 1998. I'm a geek. So, of course, I experimented with other operating systems. I've had Mac OS X laptops since 2006 (off and on), but I always had a main windows desktop. In 2018, I installed Manjaro XFCE on my laptop and forced myself to learn Linux and use the system. Now, I still have a windows desktop, but my laptop and my server run Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu) and I go weeks without ever powering-on my windows box. It's really great!
Yes it’s hard to see Microsoft become what feels to me a shell of what it once was. Back in the day I got MCP certification and MCSA certification for server 2008/2003.
I managed fleets of windows devices and felt Windows and PC’s were efficient and had a good balance of an operating system and schema that is powerful and effective.
With windows 11.. it’s like an all time low emerged. Where I am just fighting against a platform trying a variety of gimmicks designed to extra rents and push tools that are not really all that useful or polished.
Windows 11 feels bloated and just feels like a struggle.
For me it really is the time of Linux. Whether it be a workstation, a server or even a simple kiosk… Linux just seems to embrace the ethos of what windows has left behind.
I think those of us who cared have already left-- for me Mac and Linux (2 laptops). Everyone else is a hostage now; tough luck
If MS isn't going to fix this, I'm not going to use Windows 11 again. https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-03-12/i-ll-probably-never-...
And what are you going to do about it, Windows 11 users?
I recently set up a new gaming PC, made from cannibalised parts of other machines. I installed Windows 11 as there was no point starting on an older OS (and Bazzite etc really struggled with the nvidia GPU so Linux was a non-starter even though I love my Steam Deck and Proton).
The one saving grace for all of this was Win11Debloat[0]. I cannot recommend this set of configuration changes etc more highly. It kills _almost_ everything that irked me about 11. Use at your own risk, but it's now part of my standard install practice.
[0] https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
There's a similar thing with Google accounts and Android, amirite? I've avoided having a Google account but it hasn't always been easy.
I've mostly just used LineageOS for several years now, but I believe the first time setup pushes you to sign in to a Google account, but you can easily skip it. If you do sign in, it's sticky/permanent and I think may require a reinstall to get back out of it.
Lineage is interesting but doesn't support my phone or others that is want. Same with Graphene.
You can do that just fine. Huge swaths of people just use the Amazon app store or the Samsung One. F-Droid is also an option if you don't want to make any accounts.
Yeah I use f-droid. I wouldn't want to use Amazon or Samsung etc.
Surprisingly no, you can use an Android phone without an account. Though you cannot install any applications from the Play Store, tbf I'll count that almost as a positive.
Does it allow users to receive Android updates?
you can use an iphone without an apple id.
- you have to dodge dark patterns to get through setup without one
- you can't install software
I'm still on 10. Basically don't care about the security risks. I will be forced to do something once new games won't work with 10.
I'm tired of needing an Apple account to use my hardware.
Without the MS account, it is _much_ harder to sell OneDrive, Copilot, Office365-whatever subscriptions etc to their users.
I get it. I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive. I'd be happy to pay that premium though, and I'm not going to buy any of those additional things.
But let's not pretend that this is purely an evil or thoughtless design choice that isn't economic in Nature. Windows has a cost and that cost gets subsidized by all the people who buy additional services.
I do not think that it is as well-reasoned as that. Far more likely IMO that teams are being evaluated on upsell uptake and so push these requirements to make the number on the dashboard go up.
Anyway, I’d be more sympathetic to this way of thinking if windows wasn’t getting worse over time. But it seems like investment in the OS is being disfavored for investment in AI-in-things-no-one-wants-AI-in, which is inverse of the subsidy direction you propose
> I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive.
Then buy Pro. Most people aren't happy to spend more money.
I was forced to switch to Windows 11 despite promising myself that I would never do this.
WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I INCREASE THE WIDTH OF THE TASKBAR? I have a 30" monitor, I can afford to have 3 or 4 rows of windows in my task bar. But I can't, not because it's technically feasible but because a human at Microsoft that believes they are more important than their customers made a decision to remove that option because they think they know better.
Whoever you are, I hate you.
The new taskbar was written by an intern on his first day using Copilot in Javascript. Zero fucks were given that day.
Interesting, this was definitely possible in windows 10. I do remember upgrading form 10 -> 11 and not being able to use a vertical task bar anymore, but that appears to be getting patched now with the next release.
This fixes that: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/
Product owners are the worst thing to happen to products since sliced bread.
Check out Start11. I’m forced to use Windows 11 for work but I’ve managed to get the Windows 10 taskbar and start menu back. It only cost $8.
I literally hate the Windows 11 taskbar.
THANK YOU. I bought it off Steam and it's exactly what I needed!
Winhawk is worth a try aswell (free): https://windhawk.net/
And OpenShell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
Just install Ubuntu already (if it supports the apps you need, most of which probably have web versions) and be done with it. Ubuntu 26.04 had a significantly better install experience than Windows 11.
Ubuntu won't run my software of choice(s). Come on, Steinberg - we need a linux Cubase. Ms can go whistle, and my w10 machines are treated better than ever.
Don't MacOS users all have apple.com accounts? I hear no complains though.
BTW, where do I create an account to for my Linux?
Most probably do yes, but it's not a requirement to use any of Apple's devices. You don't need to do some command-line kung-fu to get around online account requirement like on Windows, you can just click "Skip" at the online account step, and that's it.
Perhaps you hear no complaints because unlike on Windows, MacOS does not spoon-feed you 10 screens of dark-pattern-riddled upsell ads with options of "Remind me later", "Yes" during set-up. It quite literally feels like being spat on, considering Windows is not a free operating system, and yet it still riddles you with ads and dark patterns as if some horrible shareware from the mid 2000s.
It's not really needed at all for macOS, but remains mandatory for even free apps on iPhone/iPad, so yes virtually all users have one. Same goes for free macOS App Store apps but that's not the only or even most common way to install stuff.
They might have all an Apple Account but thats not a requirement at all on macOS. Thats the difference between complaining customers and customers thatuse it because thez choose to use it.
No.
Either you drink your Microsoft poison, or you leave.
> A user can set up a computer with a Microsoft account, switch to using a PIN every day, and never think about that account again. Then, one day, after a firmware update, a hardware change, or an unexpected issue, the system may display a BitLocker recovery screen requesting a recovery key.
This is absolutely TRASH behavior. One of my siblings not only experienced this but after setting Bitlocker off it turned on ONCE AGAIN automatically after some time.
I urged him to print those fucking codes on paper just in case after we carefully recovered them. This is one of the worst things that can happen to a non technical user.
As much as I avoiding any Microsoft technology at any cost. I do have a gaming rig at home, and yes I have Windows on it. I only use it to launch Steam and GOG, nothing else except the casual web browsing. I have been driving Arch btw and was fine, but these days you CAN install Windows 11 locally without Microsoft account. So I took it a shot for better game compatability.
This is not Linux/Window flame. I am trying to say, local account is possible and is working.
It's certainly possible, but it certainly ain't a happy path. If you have to do shift+F10, strategically disconnect your ethernet cable, or remember to tick a box when making your bootable USB to be able to make local account, something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.
Afaik local accounts have become harder and harder to create, intentionally, to the point where it's impossible for most people. It most definitely is not something that can be relied on to exist in the future.
A couple of years ago Microsoft bought the SwiftKey keyboard app (for iOS). Recently the other shoe dropped: they introduced a requirement to be logged in "for data backup", you get a banner on top of the keyboard that cannot be permanently turned off.
I am so tired of this relentless user-hostile push for accounts, logins and pervasive tracking.
Apple is very strict about keyboard extensions so I am surprised it is allowed. They require it to be functional even if you don't allow any data sharing back to the app, let alone a cloud account, but I guess banners make it past?
It wouldn't be so bad if they could manage proper SSO, but they keep forcing you to re-authenticate for some reason.
You don't need an online account to back up your encryption key.
All you need is your password.
And a well-designed disk encryption tool.
It does make me wonder why people keep running this OS...
Because when I want to play a game, I want to play a game, not debug someone's hacky attempt to make it work on Linux.
Implementing a strict "no fiddly shit on my game machine" policy was one of the best choices for my mental health that I've made: It's a dedicated machine for gaming, with nothing really sensitive on it aside from gaming related accounts, and its only purpose is to play games with the least amount of immediate hassle. In other words, if the choice is installing something ugly or fiddling, that launcher, kernel level anticheat or whatever it is gets installed.
FWIW, with minor exception, Linux is better at "no fiddly shit on my game machine" now. I feel strongly about this too, to come home from work and debug some shit going wrong on my gaming system is no bueno, I'd rather just not play games. It has to work without fucking around.
Windows is now the OS that fucks with me and causes grief, since moving to cachyos the experience has been so bloody blissful it's not funny. I can, amazingly, just come home and launch a game and play the game and not deal with bullshit like taking 30 minutes to install some random update. Nothing randomly breaks. Nothing updates unless I let it. Nothing randomly pops up asking me to do some bullshit I'm not interested in for a result I don't care about. etc.
I mean this is sort of true in that windows is constantly introducing trash, but I've run into all kinds of nonsense:
1. Amd HDMI 2.1 fiasco and adapter workarounds -> debugged the adapter compared to the displayport spec pdf, emailed the company, got a firmware update, patched my kernel. Fixed! This one is going away for good with FRL support upstream soon.
2. Game stops responding to controller input after playing for a bit. Debugged, turns out the service for doing something fancy with shaders has shared fate with the steam input process. It launches a zillion threads and OOMs from virtual memory exhaustion which takes out steam input; fixed by adding a wrapper script for steam that reduces thread stack sizes to the windows default size.
3. Xbox elite series 2 controller back buttons not supported in 2.4ghz wireless mode; reverse engineered the USB packets, contributed support to out of tree xone driver.
4. Flydigi controller software not supported on Linux; find random GitHub project that reversed their hidraw protocol. It's got bugs, so fix them and use it.
5. Terrible banding in Silksong. Set up gamescope to apply dithering; this breaks steam input, figure out all sorts of incantations with LD_PRELOAD
But all of these are very much off the beaten path problems, lots of people have fun with normal controllers, no VRR, etc. My steam deck has been just perfect with zero effort, and I assume that's because I'm not treating the system configuration like a puzzle game.
I’ve long ago learned to ignore people that pretend that the system they use just works, go look at any mac user or windows users workflow, for most people there are dozens of hacky BS things they do to work around the inherent problems of the system they’re using they (naturally) just make excuses for their existing tools ignoring all of the workarounds and arcane knowledge they’ve accumulated while acutely feeling the pain of any new arcana that they have to learn for a new system.
If your game is on Steam and does not use creepy “anticheat” software, you can probably just play it on Linux.
Yeah, people who talk about how "fiddly" it is to game on Linux must not have tried recently, or have a very low tolerance for doing anything other than clicking play.
I occasionally have to right click a game and enable the compatibility in the settings - that's just a single checkbox. Steam handles the management of pulling whatever the most recent version of Proton-GE is for me and everything pretty much works. There's a setting in Steam itself that you can set a default compatibility tool.
The only games that do shaders preload are Marvel Rivals and Monster Hunter World/Wilds, and even those are quick and can be canceled if I cared to. Even modding is fairly straightforward using something like r2Modman for Steam games or Prism Launcher for Minecraft.
If that's too hard for some people then I bet they also don't run adblockers, which means I've written them off as actually knowing how to use a computer at the most basic level.
I have that one linux friend who is always recompiling shaders every game update. It's only 5 minutes, but's it's every game update which can be lot.
I'm waiting for that to go away before I consider the jump. I figure there'll be enough people sick of that behaviour it'll get sorted.
You can just skip the shaders compilation for close to 0 performance impact in most games, I wish they (Valve) would make this the default behavior
If I'm understanding that they're waiting this 5 minutes when they try to launch the game, there's a setting (go to Downloads, scroll down) to do the shader compilation in the background
Go away? I've been replaying Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) and it recompiles the shaders even on alt-tab (to clarify that feature has been there always since release). It's more on the developers to fix. After all, not even Windows games on winodws are free from shader stutter (with less ways to fix it than linux!)
Implementing a strict "no games on my no fiddly shit machine" policy was one of the best choices for my mental health that I've made
Windows can be just as bad, I'm quite happy to restrict my games choice a bit to run them on a console that someone else makes work.
Funny enough, I just switched to Linux for a game I play because it was a hassle on Windows.
My friends and I play Halo Infinite sometimes and I've had some performance issues with it on Linux so I've always booted into my Windows 11 partition to play it. It's about as vanilla Windows 11 install as it gets.
But over the last few months it has been crashing all the time. It started happening very frequently - like once every ~30 min. It was a vanilla install. Basically just the game and graphics drivers. And everything was up to date.
I started playing it on Linux and now it just works. There's still a weird performance problem, but I can live with that because it's at least stable.
Do VMS not work for this?
There's one use case where VMs don't work, real time media processing. Mac is the preferred platform for this kind of think by most users but I use one application which is windows exclusive: rocksmith. It's theoretically possible to get something that's only marginally worse than the native experience, but I've never seen it done. Even if I could do it, I don't know if I could accept how the app behaves in practice.
It is too intimidating to change for one. Most users I deal with are terrified and bewildered by settings and can't even take the few steps to install an adblocker (and they want the adblocker!)
And from the article: "Technician's know how to get around this, but not everyone using a computer is a technician."
To use an alternative, you need to know someone with the knowledge and ability and able to request their time. Backing up data, burning USB sticks, installing, setup new backup solution, resyncing bookmarks, creating shortcuts to their email, replacements for the apps they use... all the details takes a lot of time, and it is ongoing work. Someone has to become 'the technician' and provide support. Otherwise, people have no option except to keep bumbling along with the default or somehow become 'the technician' themselves without any guide but web forums and ChatGPT.
To use an alternative, you need to know someone with the knowledge and ability and able to request their time.
Fortunately, my old pal Claude Code is always there for me. Need something installed/fixed/changed? Just ask... in plain English.
I don't need him for Windows, but man, that dude can make Linux walk and talk.
> Fortunately, my old pal Claude Code is always there for me
Is this just a form of changing one subscription for another?
No, because pretty much any model and harness could be used as a robotic Linux admin instead of Claude Code. I haven't tried Codex or Gemini for that, but I'm sure they'd be fine. Ultimately that particular Linux box is going to be used to host local models, which should also work.
An account with an AI provider gets me the ability to submit prompts and run agents with their model. I pay them, I get a useful service in return, and I can stop or switch providers anytime. Conversely, I get absolutely nothing in return for logging into my own machine with a Microsoft account. It benefits Microsoft -- somehow, I guess, who knows? -- but not me.
Games and niche software for the most part.
Yeah, compatibility on Linux is better now, especially with Valve implementing Proton so games would run on the Steam Deck.
But there are still incompatible games, and non-Windows operating systems are generally not a priority for many game developers. So, you have to hope that either Valve or the community have found a way to make them run on other systems.
And then there's the aforementioned niche stuff. Yes, your games may be compatible with Linux, but what about the tools needed to mod them? Plenty of modding and ROM hacking communities only develop for Windows, so anyone looking to get involved in those scenes has no real choice other than to use Windows. Wouldn't be surprised if plenty of non-gaming communities made heavy use of tools from the days of Windows 95 or MS DOS too, whose creators haven't bothered to update them in years or who have no interest in porting them to Linux in general. Bonus points if the tool is closed source freeware from some site that looks like it was made in 1995.
Some important software only works on Windows alas.
Not everyone does everything from a web browser.
a lot of the compatibility stuff on Linux runs windows software, so that's usually not a huge blocker. Having recently switched to Linux as my main (used to run it in a VM) the real issues are all these things that don't quite work out of the box (different distros might get different results). For instance my audio when playing dota2 would randomly cut out and not return when using discord. It took a bunch of fiddling around to get both to work. Then there's weird compatibility things depending on choices you make, for instance, I used RustDesk a lot in windows. But it doesn't really work well in linux with wayland. So while my overall experience is Linux is pretty good... I'm now in a world where I can end up with all kinds of random issues, all likely solvable, but all likely semi unique to my setup.
Alternative OS are not limited to browser software...
Right, but that doesn't solve the problem they brought up in the first sentence of their comment.
Try doing a full screen rdp session from Linux at 4K resolution.
The lag will be with you. VNC won’t be any better.
He’ll, even some YouTube videos are overly taxing from Firefox in Linux.
Also Stream seems to think Windows is more equal than Linux…
> Try doing a full screen rdp session from Linux at 4K resolution.
You should be using Sunshine/Moonlight for that anyway. You will get ultra smooth low latency 4k@120fps streaming to and from linux.
I regularly play games streamed from my noisy big linux pc all the way across to the living room linux pc. It's brilliant.
How often do you do a 4k RDP session on Linux?
Switching to something else is still quite intimidating to the non hn crowd
to many people, Windows, IS "computer"
the Linux distro I want does not yet exist.
Uncertainty of how it all works is my opinion. Like how is it installed. What is making a partition and what are these warnings? What happens to all my pictures and documents? What distro is best? Do I lose all my paid for software? How do I now do all the things I am used to doing?
I remember the first time I partitioned my hard drive and did a dual boot and I was really unsure about so many things. It is intimating.
Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) there is no viable alternative. It might be that they have software which requires Windows, it might be that they think it's too complicated to set up Linux, or it might just be that they aren't aware any other option exists. But those all boil down to the same thing: people think they have to use Windows, so they tolerate its nonsense.
...don't look now, but, there's a trillion dollar gorrilla in the room right behind you.
I'm doing more and more on Linux Mint these days, but there are a few niche things that still only work good on Windows.
Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IOT is great tbh.. Install it without internet and you dont need a MS account at all.
double recommend it for those who still want to stay on windows and are doubtful about linux
Do they still offer this ISO officially? Link? Thanks
I think massgrave has a link to the iso on the Microsoft website in their listing of windows versions.
I have no idea, I just have a copy from TPB. Its still supported tho. Still getting security updates. I think until 2030 ish? I'm not sure, I think the older versions of LTSC had longer guaranteed support than the newer ones.
Went to Kubuntu long into win11 thanks for the memories Microsoft
they also force you to give a recovery account. i’m thinking microsoft’s hands are tied in this matter, it might be the government forcing a kyc strategy
"KYC" simply for operating your own PC?
Of course. How else are they to know that you posted criticism of the President on the internet?
So far there haven't been any instances of that, from what I'm aware of.
A particular foreign nation, on the other hand...
That's the goal, though.
The current batch of elite have come up in a place where they have no real incentive to act in any way except that of their choosing. They're also exceedingly thin-skinned. If they think they can get away with ruining people who criticize them online, they'll do so.
Which government? And what's your evidence
It's an open secret that Windows is backdoored for the NSA to be fair and that isn't even including the truly dodgy stuff like Intel Management Engine being a backdoor on a BIOS level with remote access
Do you have a source for literally any of those allegations?
I'm as big of a Windows and ME hater as they come, but I'm not aware of any proven backdoors in either. Especially ME, which has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by the security community by this point. The only 'backdoor' discovered was the undocumented killswitch command that disables it after initialization.
> Especially ME, which has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by the security community by this point.
Links? Activists say the opposite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Assert...
Not the parent, but have you heard of Snowden leaks? Also this from the old times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
Snowden says nothing about backdoor'ed Windows.
And _NSAKEY... There is no evidence that it was ever part of a backdoor. But it is good for a laugh.
It's safe to assume that Windows is backdoored, as it's closed, not audiatable and is a part of PRISM. It's not a proof, but this is how good opsec works.
And yes, this is not equivalent to what the parent said, but your reaction should be similar.
While it is closed, we've had enough leaks from that era of Windows (which are still on GH) to know the kernel is not backdoor'ed.
Apple doesn't force you to create an AppleID unless you want to use Music and the App Store. You can still run macOS as a standalone local user. So, it's not government-forced KYC.
I believe on my Mac (non-primary machine, FWIW) I ended up signing into an Apple account, and I doubt I did that for no reason. I don't rely on iCloud or spend money on apps. Is it required to get Xcode, which is required for some things from homebrew to work? You did mention the App Store, which maybe applies here. Is the App Store the only way to get Xcode?
Yes, it's that. Xcode is the only reason I've ever touched an Apple account.
If only Windows users fully understood why M/S wants you to create an account, people would leave en-masse.
The ID along with their telemetry, M/S can map you to what you do and from where. That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless.
> That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless.
Does the encryption keep the user's data safe if the device is lost or stolen? Yes? Then it fulfills its main purpose.
We need to define "safe".
Safe from coffee shop people or in a dorm, probably yes. If you lock your laptop with a good screensaver and have a decent PW, those people are not getting in anyway.
Plus with smart phones hardly anyone carries their laptop around these days.
But with what M/S is doing with Windows 11 "security" any ad company with $, lawyer with a warrant or alphabet soup agencies, can get a decent idea with what is going on even if they cannot get to see your data in Excel or Word.
But most M/S office data is now in the "cloud", so all bets are off for those files in many cases.
Non technical users still write down their passwords. So: no.
Do technical users have the option to install something better? Yes? Then this has no purpose.
For the vast majority of users bitlocker just means that if someone steals your laptop or you leave it on a bus then short of a concerted effort by someone with technical ability, no one will have your photos or tax documents. It absolutely serves a meaningful purpose even if it has significant shortcomings.
Except for the bitlocker vulnerability that lets someone with the physical computer bypass it. Other than that, it works flawlessly.
They also upload what you do
Most people do all their Windows activity from one single specific location. It's Android and iOS that know you just drove down and made a stop at your city's most popular drug marketplace, or that you and your secretary were in the same hotel at 7pm yesterday.
Windows users don't care. The MS account is some set-and-forget BS for the most part.
This may get buried here, but there is one important distinction missing from all these articles.
Win 11 Pro allows you to enable local login, and disable all the intrusive microsoft stuff. Ive been on win 11 for the past 5 years and don't even remember my microsoft password at this point. IIRC you still have to set one up when you first install, but then once you switch to local login, any time you open up a microsoft app it makes you login in the app.
Its not a "good" solution, but given that Win11+WSL2 pretty much lets you run any software out there, its worth while doing.
Kinda related: back on Windows 7 I did add my MS account to Credentials Manager out of pure curiosity. But there was nothing else that could be done beside storing login and password. Even Windows Live applications bundle hold login data separately from Manager.
So I removed that account but when W10 was released, it was offered during initial setup of upgraded system. Windows still stored information about that account somewhere.
And yes, there are system tools still present today in W11 that allows users to create additional local accounts beside the default one set during installation - that's mmc snap-in (terrible name) local users and groups or net user for console. But I totally get it and support: people don't want to be forced for an online account out of the box, for a local workflow.
You don’t have to login with the online account. Before you install:
- Disable the network cards in the BIOS
- Install
- When prompted to setup the network press Shift+F10
- Type: start ms-cxh:localonly
- Setup the local account
- After install completes re-enable the network cards in the BIOS
Nothing could be easier. Truly the most user-friendly OS.
Microsoft is even trying to get Windows IoT / Embedded to be MS accounts vs local. The same method for disabling ease of local user accounts are being enabled there.
Windows IoT still forces all the useless trash to be installed ... such as XBox game bar. I have to spend every few months going through the means to disable this trash via the registry so it can be automated in air-gaped systems.
Original Window Embedded, pre-IoT branding, allowed full customization. Now it is near equivalent to standard desktop.
You have to pay me to use Windows OS ... even with gaming.
There is easier method. Set up local account during creating Win bootable install device via Rufus. During actual Win install it skips all steps about crating local account. Done.
If you have Pro edition you don't have to do any of that.
Click "Sign in options"->Domain Join Instead
That's it, it''ll have you create a local account.
You do not need to disable network interface cards. Just do not connect a network cable and do not connect to a wifi ssid.
You also do not need to supply a password for the new local user account. It will now automatically login and have local admin rights.
I bought a returned, "Like New" laptop for my wife. Some Lenovo, higher end consumer laptop. The onboarding process was terrible. Something like, the wifi drivers were not included. I had to create a local account to download the drivers. But there's no ethernet port. Luckily had a USB to Ethernet dongle.
I thought to myself...yeah no wonder someone returned this.
I hear you. I've had laptops where one could not even install the Windows 11 OS on using the official Windows 11 ISO on a bootable usb key, because there was this weird nvme driver required. Which required you to make an additional usb key (of modify your bootable usb key) with the weird nvme driver to load during Windows 11 setup. Luckily the top brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo) have pretty good support asssistant software for once you got Windows 11 running with internet those tools will install the rest for you.
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 machines. I pay for a Office365 subscription.
I don't see ads popping up anywhere. I did disable about a dozen things (those silly icons in the search bar, syncing desktop icons across machines, etc) all through exposed UI switches, no "hacks" or undocumented registry tweaks.
I've watched coworkers go through all sorts of contortions, and downloading hacked binaries from sketchy sites, just to avoid creating the local account and I'm not sure why. I use my name and info on my longstanding Microsoft account, but you can just as easily call one "mymaxasus_11111", and be done with it.
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 sure I can turn some of this stuff off using group policy.
By contrast, I got a few Chromebooks and all my employees prefer them. If it weren't for a few legacy things, I'd switch entirely to ChromeOS or ChromiumOS.
1. Personal Computers are personal. Inviting an outside observer into one is no different than inviting one into the bathroom. What I do in there is my business.
2. Friction. This is likely MS's attempt to slow-walk Windows into a subscription service. If nobody resisted, that walk wouldn't be slow.
I hope more people boycott products that require making an account to use. Most developers who would care about this sort of thing seem to draw the line at requiring a subscription, but IMO requiring an account is just as bad. There are cases where you do need an account for syncing data or whatever, but I don't see why I need an account for a fitness tracker, just show me the stats on the watch itself. Worst example of this is phones requiring an account to let you install apps, how did we let them get away with this?
... And that is the straw that broke the camel's back - and convinced my elderly father to accept my offer to migrate to KDE.
Also, I can now shield him from most of the incomprehensible unsolicited dialogs that triggered support calls. I haven't had to field a single complaint since I tuned his desktop !
godspeed for anyone still using windows in 2026
i’m happy on mac even with its ux regressions, and my ubuntu workstation.
Linux succeeded in the datacenter because of some atrocious choices MS made early on.
Now it's going to succeed on the desktop for the same reason
Bye bye windows
Random bits out of my memory in no particular order, except the first one:
First and foremost Linux was free, no money, no licenses, no procurement procedures, download and install.
Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.
It soon became PHP vs ASP and Java run on both OSes equally well.
There were still many Unix developers around and they picked up Linux at least as a deployment target.
Web servers were developed for Unix first. Porting to Linux was trivial. Porting to Windows not so. We had to wait for IIS.
> Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.
No way. Why didn’t they have the foresight to see this was a bad idea?
Microsoft is called Microsoft because they make software for microcomputers. Networking and multi-user systems aren’t in their DNA.
Didn’t you just need one person to say something like requiring human intervention to provision servers is not scalable? It doesn’t require an expert to think of this really.
To be fair to them, one or two servers were enough for basically every single service back in the 90s when consumers started moving to the internet. Microsoft sold what they had. Their customers bought what they were used to. The usual stack was a mainframe or an AS400 exporting a file full of records. A Windows NT PC imported the file in either Oracle or SQL Server and served HTML pages either with ASP or Java. Then export from the local db, import into the AS400. The internet facing system was a bolted on afterthought.
Of course it was still a pain compared to command line, unless you grew up with only a Windows PC or a Mac under your fingers. No CLI on Macs until Apple rebuilt the OS on Unix so you didn't even know what a CLI was.
The operative question is: Will it make them draw any consequences?
Now that Words/Excel are losing their battles against online documents, gaming is the only thing that's keeping me on Windows. Though I honestly enjoy using Windows 10, no way in hell will I upgrade my OS to Windows 11.
asking account for insider program is evil.
I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t automatically create the user folder based on real name on the MS account, with space in it, fucking up and complicating all sorts of things.
this is why ive finally ditched windows for everything.
ive been a dual boot linux user for years, but still booting into windows for games and work.
no more, i just couldn’t take the:
- constant nagging
- ads for all of microsoft’s other shit that i absolutely did not want to use. copilot, onedrive, xbox, and on and on.
- the nonstop “sign in to your microsoft account” etc…
- settings i very deliberately changed reverting back on update.
- how stupidly long updates would take.
i just finally went to linux for everything. i was concerned about work stuff, and i ahve to admit, its absolutely definitely not perfect, but it still … feels? … better. i’m not sure this is the right phrase, but it just feels more fun. i feel good when i diagnose a linux bug, like productive or something. that feels more like fun to me compared to the dark patterns of windows which feels frustrating. if that makes sense.
i’d rather spend 20 minutes fixing a weird quirk on linux than the deal with the assault microsoft is constantly throwing at me when using windows. and id absolutely rather put up with a feature that isnt fully complete yet on linux than deal with dark patterns on windows.
and gaming? at this point, if a game doesn’t work on linux, i just play something else that does. there are just way too many choices of rad games that run good on linux. it does help that the games i’ve been playing lately (like cyberpunk) run a bit better on linux anyway.
the only holdout for me at this point is video and photo editing, i have to break out my macbook for lightroom and premiere still. but from what i understand linux is moving very very fast in that area so i’ll just use my mb until those are caught up. the day i can ditch my adobe subscription will be the type of “let’s go to the bar and toast with shots” kind of day. and from what other people say, it’s very close.
the cherry on top for me is, weve moved our parents machines to linux mint. my gf and i jokingly wonder if they would have even noticed if we hadn’t told them, firefox just works for their facebook and amazon lol. huge bonus that i can update their machines with a quick ssh apt update which takes literally seconds vs windows which sometimes takes half hour plus.
FWIW every one of those issues can be solved by running Win11Debloat one time (except update length which is variable based on hardware, but auto-update/restart can be disabled).
https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat
Persists after updates, and is a straightforward easily auditable PowerShell script enabling/disabling Windows/app features via approved OS provided API interfaces without any hacky brittle workarounds that eventually stop working.
It's the first thing I install on any fresh Windows 11 install for the past 4+ years. I get more ads on MacOS thanks to their lovely Apple TV, iCloud, etc push notifications than I ever see on Windows 11 (≈ 0) after running it.
I've updated hundreds of times across multiple machines and it's never stopped working. I'm only reminded it exists by its absence whenever I use an out of the box Win 11 install on a new PC which is painful in comparison.
I actually prefer debloated Win 11 to plain Win 10 because I get all the benefits like vastly superior multi monitor support on 11 with basically zero negatives.
appreciate the response. i’ve already moved on tho. microsoft just destroyed the little bit of good will i had towards them. i’d already been dual booting for years anyway. and honestly, while not perfect, linux has come so far that the problems i did initially have were not deal breakers, at all. post install i spent maybe 2 hours figuring out workflow and pwa’ing anything id need regularly like teams. another 2 hours working out any weird kinks and its been smooth since.
two years ago there is no way i could have moved fully over, but new LTS releases are an entirely different ballgame than they were 2 years ago, it’s wild.
if anyone’s curious and considering it, for my work system im running ubuntu LTS (yeah yeah, i know. but for work i need the stability that comes from long term support releases.) and likewise for LTS, my gf runs mint on her work system. for our personals we both run cachy.
this is among the same kind of problem that people have with facebook and google, and these "login with your ___ account" problems
if so much of your life is centralized through a few accounts, then these companies shouldn't have a legal right to ban you from using it
I have not needed to use windows for anything productive for 15 years.
At this point it sounds like you can’t use windows for anything productive for the next 15 years
some people do more than just write code
What are some common hold-ups you know of? I don't program but have still used GNU/Linux on my main machine for over a decade now. It can browse the web, play games, listen to music, watch TV and movies, you can draw, you can edit video, you can stream to Twitch.
Adobe.
Games with kernel anti-cheat.
Office 365 (I think this mostly applies to overly complex Excel spreadsheets with lots of macros? There are also a bunch of people here who say LibreOffice has bad UI, or that they (somehow?) have documents that are complex enough that LibreOffice can't display them properly. Openoffice is somewhat better on those fronts, but neither are good enough if it's for actual work).
> Games with kernel anti-cheat.
This one’s easy, if they don’t support Steam Deck (basically a proxy for Linux support), I don’t play them.
Tell that to someone with 6000 hours in Rainbow Six Siege and plays it every single day.
It's mostly professional software that is the issue. CAD, CAM, BIM, GIS, DAW, PLC, accounting, graphic arts, etc. etc.
Mostly hardware with previously-shipped drivers,
and no updates planned.
That's a long article ridden with ads just to say "a redditor complains about shitty Windows OOBE requiring a Microsoft account (this has been the case for 10 years already)". Alternatives exists and are viable, now people still prefer pouring energy into complaining to a wall instead of actually moving. Getting abused is deserved at this point, it's been more than 10 years now, get a grip.
> Getting abused is deserved at this point
Nobody deserves to be abused.
> "Nobody deserves to be abused."
I beg to differ; Most people don't deserve to be abused, but those who dish out abuse on those who never asked for it, or on other such "innocents" absolutely deserve a full measure of abuse, since they clearly don't understand (or care) how it feels to be on the receiving end of it.
I get all the hate with the requirements for Microsoft account, but I have to admit, they have made life easier.
Case in point, moving to a new computer is absolutely painless now with a Microsoft Account because of OneDrive and Winget.
Make sure that Onedrive is setup to backup all folder (desktop, documents, pictures. you can do this by clicking the gear icon and selecting Manage Backups)
Next have this simple batch file run whenever the user logs in. It basically uses winget to update all packages to the latest version and export a list of all those packages and save it onedrive
winget update --all --accept-package-agreements --accept-source-agreements --silent winget export -o "C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\WingetPrograms.txt"
Now if you move computers, you just log in with your Microsoft account so that you will have your desktop and everything because onedrive will come over.
Now just do an import with Winget and you will have 95% of your programs installed. Yes I know there might be some programs that aren't available for installation through Winget, but almost ALL popular programs are available.
winget import -i "C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\WingetPrograms.txt"
It's that simple. Something that use to take days now takes minutes and 3 commands. Plus the fact that everything is backed up to the cloud, you just can't beat it.
Yes I get the same stuff can be done with Google Drive, Dropbox replacing Onedrive. Chocolatey, ninite as a package manager instead of winget. Using Onedrive and winget are native and available on ANY Windows 11 machine and they WORK.