No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive
idiallo.com453 points by firefoxd 6 hours ago
453 points by firefoxd 6 hours ago
I used to use Windows Backup with One Drive years ago but it just really pissed me off, especially with how My Documents is handled.
There was that time I discovered several GB of screenshots had been automatically saved to My Pictures from some setting they snuck into the printscreen screen grab tool and then that of course those were automatically uploaded to the cloud. After disabling the option it would sometimes reenable itself.
And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun. Ubisoft were terrible for this, after playing a game I'd notice a bunch of cache files they dumped into My Docs being uploaded. I mean putting save games and config files inside my docs is annoying enough, random cache files is just taking the piss.
Also windows backup would mess up my desktop between systems on occasion which was also very fun!
I disabled most of the shit but it was still annoying on occasion. Then a year or two ago I solved the problem by just using Linux for 90% of things, Mint at first but now Fedora, and grudgingly booting back into Windows for the other 10% of my needs.
> especially with how My Documents is handled
I stopped using these long ago because every other app you install puts something there so it becomes a landfill automatically.
Just create an additional partition and put all your non-OS files there. This is a classic idea people have been using since the DOS days, still working great.
I've been a Mac & Linux user since about 2007 or so, and I had no idea what Windows had become. Then a couple weeks ago I caved and built my son a Windows gaming PC. Egads, Windows is annoying! Even more so than I remember! I'm amazed that people actually put up with it for their daily driver. Right on schedule, my son came to me yesterday evening and asked what he should do about the backup warning. It didn't give any option other than enabling backup or telling it to remind later. WTF.
Not to say that MacOS isn't occasionally very annoying as well. It is. But as a tool it's also much more useful than vanilla Windows, which helps a little.
My Mac tells me 5+ times per day that it's unable to backup something or another because I'm not logged into the Apple cloud or whatever it's called. And there's not obvious way to make it stop.
This is not unique to Windows.
I don't run into that, but I do have an iCloud account and I'm logged into it, which probably helps. I'm logged into my Microsoft account on Windows, too, but it is still pushy.
The only, as per personal exp, way to properly setup a Win11 machine these days is strictly via LTSC release and WinUtil from Chris Titus + local account - clean and no "feature" updates for almost 10 yrs. Add to that Chocolatey for package management that takes away the "every piece of software adds it's own autoupdater crap"-pain and the OS is suddenly very capable for almost all computing needs.
On their own devices, lots of non-power users probably just accept whatever Windows suggests. Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.
Techie users might just find tweaks online that allows disabling dark patterns on their devices.
I don't know how people who care but aren't techie enough to install workarounds (or to tell good ones from bad ones) deal.
> Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.
Generally if the company is deploying Windows they are using OneDrive, although the exact configuration will vary.
Windows has always been designed with corporate customers in mind. That's true more than ever today, the whole Azure ecosystem is very lucrative for them. Personal Windows users have always been an afterthought, but starting around Windows 10 they became less important than their own data. Which Microsoft has been getting away with brazenly claiming as its own.
I think you're using "annoying" here to describe what is in fact, flat-out inappropriate.
People dont care about their operating system. Most Mac users never learn Mac and most Windows users never learn windows. They use their computers for emails, some presentations and occasional gaming. They dont want to learn different kinds of software. Which is fine. For most people its just a power tool they never read the manual for. They dont even know what other tools there are so they dont know that life could be better, by not using windows.
> Most Mac users never learn Mac and most Windows users never learn windows.
Why bother when annual releases will change everything?
> For most people its just a power tool they never read the manual for.
What manual?
I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
Even Linux allows such basic customization.
If Apple allowed this type of user-friendly customisation on MacOS, I suspect a lot of Windows users will migrate to Mac.
> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
Classic Mac OS was released first, with well-considered, consistent design standards. Windows arrived almost 2 years later, and in the interest of not looking it like copied Macs, Microsoft essentially flipped the positions of everything, including window controls, toolbars, desktop icon placement, and button order. (Yes, both copied Bell Labs).
Windows has no standards, so maybe they could provide that kind of option instead.
I have extreme doubts that there is any meaningful number of windows users holding out on trying macos based on such a thing.
The users are much more simple than this. Most have never even tried Mac. If they want to, they will just buy one the next time they need a computer and accept the new experience as being the new norm.
> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
> Even Linux allows such basic customization.
Does Windows allow such customization? I think that's the relevant comparison. Both macOS and Windows are trying to be "user-friendly," which more and more means "take what we tell you and like it." I personally am a techie and like the Unix way of exposing everything that one can imagine to customization, but I do know that I'm often lost when I want to learn a new piece of customization-minded software and have to decide how to, and whether to, twiddle lots of knobs before even getting into just using it. I think that there's definitely a reasonable place for an OS that spends its time getting those settings right so that the user doesn't have to worry about them.
(Whether any particular setting is right or wrong is, of course, going to depend on the user. I'm a Mac user, there are some defaults I've always hated, and others that I think used to be good but are moving in the wrong direction. But, so far, I stick with it at least in part because there are lots of other things it gets right, and it doesn't feel fundamentally hostile to me in the way that Windows does.)
I agree, nowadays Linux seems like the only reliable solution. Even macOS, with the latest "liquid glass" update, feels like a toy for kids.
I just wish the Affinity suite would be available for Linux too.
My 2c. I agree with the parent and article: OneDrive can be a major problem with Windows. They push it on you, your personal documents can be moved to OneDrive without your permission etc. Confusing and user-hostile design.
Linux has its own idiosyncrasies, which may or may not make it worth. E.g. ABI diaspora, installing things can be inconsistent and high-effort, the cycle of copy+pasting CLI commands and system file edits from old forum posts or these days LLMs to fix something, treating your PC like a multi-user system that has an admin by default, etc. My general experience is that installation and things work smoothly with the built-in or package-managed software, but gradually degrade as you start installing software and drivers.
> treating your PC like a multi-user system that has an admin by default, etc.
I think I have the opposite orientation: In the past when family and friends needed help to install/rescue their machine (on Windows versions that supported it) I always ensured there was a separate "Manager" admin login and then made their main account "limited", albeit with UAC popups.
If nothing else, it made repeat visits much easier.
Do you think it looks like a toy just because of how it looks, or because of how it works?
Spotlight got a major update in macOS 26 where it can now perform actions. I can open spotlight and type "run <enter> <some terminal command or script>" and get the output right there, selecting it will put the resulting text into my current window.
16:16 up 23:27, 1 user, load averages: 1.72 1.78 1.90
Spotlight is also context aware... Say I run across some text in another language:
Spiegami come funziona questo coso.
I'm not a fan of all the UI choices that have been made, but those will get ironed out over time. Meanwhile, I get some more powerful out of the box features without needing to resort to 3rd party apps.
Having run Linux every day, I can say we’re in trouble if that is the reliable option :)
(Agree that Liquid Glass is miserable, though.)
The Open Source ecosystem is a bit weird in that your system can be as reliable or not as you want, depending on what projects you follow. It really truly is a mixed bag in the sense that you can actually have a solid setup if you are happy with it being boring.
> The Open Source ecosystem is a bit weird in that your system can be as reliable or not as you want
I'm going to dig into this a little. This feels like shifting responsibility onto the user when things don't go well. E.g. comparing the platonic ideal of Linux when analyzing practical options. I make lots of mistakes in all aspects of my life. I know historically, and projecting into the future that I will get into trouble with Linux, so I don't daily-drive it. Yes, there are always ways to fix things when a system gets in a bad state, but there is a time and effort cost to this.
Saying it's my fault for breaking it doesn't help restore the system. e.g. "Should have used the LTS release", "Should have only installed software from the package manager", "Shouldn't have used sudo", "Shouldn't have edited a system file without knowing what you're doing". If I was doing those things, it probably seemed like the best of available options, e.g. the only way to make a certain piece of hardware or software work.
I think it is an accurate description of the situation. I agree that responsibility is accumulating at the user’s feet in an unfortunate manner.
But somebody must be responsible for making your computer work, who should it be?
The companies that sell operating systems don’t seem to be fulfilling the obligation to make a bug free and user-friendly OS. The Open Source community never really had accepting that responsibility as a “business model” because they aren’t businesses.
Incidentally, most people seem to want their computer to be the good kind of boring.
Especially non-tech people. Look at how popular Ubuntu VMs are with research chemists. And successful chemists tend to be highly technical.
I’m not sure what the good kind of boring is, if we could define it, it might be tautologically true that that’s the thing people want.
> Look at how popular Ubuntu VMs are with research chemists.
Are they? I actually have no idea.
> And successful chemists tend to be highly technical.
But not necessarily in any IT sense. STEM skills are very specific.
Sorry, it looks like I’m just being petulant and saying “I’m not sure” about your every sentence, haha, that wasn’t my intent but it is what I ended up doing I guess.
It really depends on your hardware/distro combo.
Buy a newly announced Windows laptop with a new CPU model. Try Ubuntu, you're day is about to suck.
I've faced many fewer hiccups on CachyOS/Arch in the past few months than on Windows. In the first month of owning this hardware, I had an unexplained BSOD that actually bricked my whole Win11 install. And this is pretty recent/funky 2-in-1 hardware, not an old ThinkPad I've cherry-picked for good Linux support. This is an important moment for free software; the big platforms are finally cinching down on users hard enough that we have a shot at convincing regular people to join us. Please don't blow it with vague complaints.
Yep, I dual boot Linux Mint & Windows 11 and only bother with the latter when I need MS Teams, or some other proprietary software that tends to be more reliable on Windows. In terms of performance and user experience Mint wins easily.
I only rarely need to use Microsoft Office or Paint.NET and a Windows VM on Linux has solved the problem entirely for me. I don't know if videoconferencing would work as well, but I'd really recommend giving it a try! I've already gone without a proper Windows install for almost 2 years.
Since MS is making the office UX web based, I'd suggest people try just loading 365 in a browser like edge (It's generally flawless for MS products). Especially apps like Teams.
Once you realize that the dedicated app is basically just a browser shell, using a real browser becomes somewhat of a no brainer.
Edge even supports PWAs on linux which can give you the "app" experience without the app.
But the browser versions of Office products royally suck. I still actively use the 'open in app' option over the default action of opening a document / spreadsheet in a browser window.
The Office-in-browser experience is laggy and slow and long-learnt familiarities are gone.
I don't know how it is today, but about 3 years ago I worked in a shop that used MS Teams. I was sneaky enough to get myself a Kubuntu install when everybody else was on Windows, but I had no problems using Teams on Kubuntu back then.
The Teams Linux client was discontinued but it works well enough in a browser.
same experience here with Omarchy. it’s been (mostly) flawless. the only reason i keep windows around at this point is fortnite.
MacOS and Windows might break[1] less often than Linux, but when it does I stand less of a chance of fixing it. Linux is usually more fiddly, but if does something I don't want its usually only a few minutes to find the config file or a plugin for the Desktop Environment to alter the behavior.
[1]: "Break" here meaning "behaves in a way I don't want"
Seriously, such remarks add nothing except exposing intended bias. In other words that's called a trolling.
Holding the opinion that Linux is currently the most reliable OS option is "trolling"?
He's saying its not very good if thats the case. Which is not the case. I am satisfied with GNU+Linux. It doesn't work against me. It would be great if there were FOSS alternatives to the remaining proprietary software on my computers. Making it sound like linux is almost just as bad, does sound weird. Also nothing about what's actually that bad about "linux".
I would call it a constructive contrarian claim, quite distinct from trolling.
Tahoe crippled my Intel 2019 MBP and cost me plenty of time and incurred a lot of frustration until I gave up and reformat the ssd.
I am switching to Linux for both my desktop and laptop from here on out.
Does a premium hardware solution exist that competes with MacBook on practical battery life?
Probably not quite, though recent laptops improved. But on a desktop setup it doesn’t matter anyway.
With Affinity (likely) switching to a subscription model, I wouldn't hold out hope they're avoiding enshitification.
> feels like a toy for kids.
I wish unserious complaining like this wasn't mixed with actual technical criticism of software.
It is very serious. I love the way Catalina and Mojave looks; dark mode or light mode, it just screams "professional" at the top of it's lungs.
Big Sur is, somehow, the exact opposite. Corners are rounded off as if they could hurt someone, and margins are padded more than a cell in solitary confinement. Space is wasted everywhere. It's Fischer-Price design philosophy and I'm hardly the only one to point it out.
In a side-by-side, so much screen real estate gets wasted that it's genuinely disgusting: https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/fin...
Agree on all points. Tahoe ruined macOS for me. Not only does it waste screen real estate, but it’s not performant at all and my M4 pro is no slouch.
Just feels like I’m using an iPad now.
Here’s a fun exercise. Look at how huge the window borders are to achieve that insane corner radius. The cursor changes to the resize arrow at the corner before it even touches the window, the bottom arrow is a good 4-5px away from the window lol.
I think that "serious" is not the right word here. But rather, saying "it's like a toy" is not constructive. When someone says "it looks like a toy" that tells me nothing about what they don't like about it. Saying "I don't like the rounded corners and wasted space" is something concrete you can have a discussion about, so it's better to use that kind of phrasing.
Toy design isn't objectively bad. Windows XP has many colorful, misshapen buttons and they're amazing for the vision-impaired, same goes for Apple's Aqua UI. Fischer-Price design language is arguably why the iPhone is so popular, when you deploy it with intent the results can be spectacular.
What is the intent of dumbing-down the Mac design language? iOS superfans already have devices to use, the Mac has to compete in the professional segment of the market, not the casual one. The only motivation I can see is to enforce solidarity with VisionOS, which by most accounts seems to be a professional flop too. An ecosystem shouldn't aim for superficial similarity across devices, each experience should enforce their unique strengths/weaknesses in the UI and then network their state to each-other in the background. Apple used to know this.
Touch and mouse interfaces simply are different. After over a decade of pretending otherwise there are now sufficiently many counter-examples.
> Space is wasted everywhere.
Sure, that's a reasonable technical criticism. Wasted screen space is, in my opinion, an issue in modern interface design trends. Good design uses space in a thoughtful manner. The designers of macOS clearly don't agree with us, but we can have a reasonable technical discussion about that. We can consult the data. We can consult the users.
> It's Fischer-Price design philosophy
You're mixing the two again. Fisher-Price was not consulted in the design of modern macOS interfaces, and complaining about not liking the design language cheapens all your actual points. No real discussion can be had around this taste garbage. You're rage baiting.
It objectively does feel like a toy with those rounded corners though. How do you know Fischer-Price wasn't consulted?
It doesn't seem like a toy to me. Therefore, it is not objective but is just your subjective opinion. Which is fine, but don't overstate your opinions as being objective when they aren't.
It enables in non-consensual manners, break apps and games(because paths change and APIs work differently), clings onto your files even if you tried to save them from the OneDrive folder, and throws a tantrum and irreversibly delete your files if you dare unlink the PC and disable it.
I don't know why they commit to especially the last part. To me, it feels like that is why Microsoft's Windows efforts are getting a lot of negative press lately; there must be lots of writers and media individuals who had lost data to that exact behavior who are now perpetually biased against them for that reason.
Just why?
don't know why they commit to especially the last part.
MS thinks it knows better than you. It thinks its owns your data. Remember that this has happened before (7 years ago!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139
I think it's the curse of windows being attached to a tech company, and a tech company seems to want to keep pursuing cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utility. Over the years lots of little extra non-essential functionality has crept into windows to where you could almost compare it with a lightweight linux distro, or that it's hard to draw the line where the OS ends, and then you're getting into territory where everyone relies upon a different subset of what's available which MS has been increasingly able to use to justify adding more 'essential' features for modern computing.
> cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utilit
You can't re-sell a boring utility every one/two/three years.
Nobody wants it - not the top management (bonuses for the revenue growth), nor the middle management (bonuses for the succesful new projects), nor the guys who implements the things (reconginition for the new projects).
Or talking simpler - KPI. And there is no 'we improved the stability for 0.0000002% of clients' indicator along with 'customers are happy with the thing we sold them in 2017'.
And don't forget what it was some fruit company what even wasn't in the corporate which made it fashionable to have a 'totes new and refreshing experience (along with a hefty price tag)' every year or two.
Stability, performance, security, all of this stuff doesn’t matter until it becomes a crisis, then it’s the most important thing in the world
It's interesting how ChromeOS respects your choices more than Windows here.
There is a setting to disable Google Drive and it just works. It won't auto-enable, no popups or nags or anything. Even Google Docs/Workspace falls back to a trimmed down offline version.
On the other hand, Android keeps nagging me about enabling backups in Google Photos. I'm always one accidental click of the huge "Okay!" button in an unexpected popup away from having my data being uploaded to Google.
This was a genuinely baffling product decision. I couldn't continue using Photos due to this nagging dialog.
Google has another photo gallery app called just Gallery, that's what I'm now using.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
I've solved this long ago by disabling the app. Sadly, that means I can't view videos in the gallery, but I believe it's a fair compromise. I'd recommend taking a look at open source alternatives like Lavender Photos [1] or Fossify Gallery [2]
The PMs can't start out being aggressive, though, that comes after dominating the market, right? ChromeOS and Google Drive are generally good products which are probably so as to get penetration and stickiness.
Perhaps Gmail is a better example to see the incumbent acting as it wishes, enabling and disabling features without worry about the end user's POV.
After setting up an Android phone for someone recently, I think it's stuffed with dark patterns. The amount of times that OS was pushing me to enable or opt-out from syncing different things to their cloud and generally sabotage the privacy via various settings was staggering.
Windows is certainly on the same path but I'm not sure how far ahead or behind they are in the competition to screw their users over with these dark patterns. They only have to trick you once.
I just bought my first windows 11 computer. Why are my personal folders like pictures and documents under a OneDrive folder? This is insane. Going to see how Ubuntu runs on it and hopefully never look back.
In Win10/Win11, you can move your user folders to another partition or folder path.
Right-click on them in Explorer, go to Properties, click on Location tab, and type/select the new path for them, click Move... then that folder and its contents will be moved to new locate.
I've movier following to D: partition as root-level folders: Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches, Videos.
> you can move your user folders to another partition or folder path
The fact that the default is to auto-magically upload your personal data on to somebody else's box (sorry "the cloud") is fucking insane.
Such things should be opt-in, not opt-out; and certainly not nag-ware.
^this is good, legit feedback for why this product/feature isn't good. It's not just "MSFT BAD!". Thanks for sharing.
The list of mind-boggling design decisions MS has made at this point is so long at this point that I don't blame people any more for saying 'MS bad'. Just pointing at the start menu search and Everything tells you everything you need to know, and more or less sets the tone you can expect from MS decision making.
Config files should go elsewhere, but save files seem like the should definitely go in mydocs.
Maybe, but not by default. But games as a rule don't give you the option to change this, so you're stuck with that one game and that one program using My Documents as a dumping ground without your consent, and now My Documents is no longer really your folder any more, at which point people make a folder on their desktop or whereever else called My Documents But For Real This Time or whatever.
> And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun.
I hate this problem with all OSes. We have folders that started out being places for users to put things like Pictures, Documents & home, but over time they get filled with crap from software and it's difficult to find your own files. We should have had a "program-files" subfolder or something by default in all these places to separate things that applications put there vs. things that you put there.
We do! On Windows, it's (user profile)\AppData. And to be fair, most software does use that. But there are always bad citizens that don't care and clutter up the user's documents folder.
Speaking for myself, but I would my game saves and config in the cloud if I were using OneDrive. That is however a separate issue from whether those files should be in the hidden appdata or in the visible my documents.
That's nice, I think Linux/XDG has some standards around this too, but they too are not enforced - and many people have no idea these standards even exist unless the OS warns or enforces these things. I think there might also be some gap between "these files are only internally needed by this software" vs. "these files are created by this software, but may be good to show them to the user". It's nice the OSes are making efforts to do that though!
Hope the PM in charge with the scammy copy designed to trick people into turning this on is happy with the boost in free users falling for it.
My dad turned it on not knowing what it meant and it completely messed up his workflows and now I have to figure out how to safely disable it and move his files back.
I will remember Microsoft causing this problem for him every time I think of or get asked if someone should use a Microsoft product or service.
This work is 10x more effort than it sounds too due to how severely mistakes are penalised (i.e. unrecoverable files), necessitating extreme caution.
When uploading 10k photos from macOS to Google Cloud using the Google Cloud macOS app, it said syncing had completed about 2 hours earlier than my back-of-the-envelope calculations predicted. "Great", I thought, but was still a bit suspicious, so just in case, before deleting the local copy, I closed the Google Drive app and reopened it, and it immediately started syncing - there were 2k photos/videos to go (!!). That's how insanely easily it could be to lose precious memories due to a tiniest bug in cloud software.
Surgical precision and extreme thoroughness are the only ways to approach these seemingly simple operations of moving files from one computer to another.
I wish more software companies had a core value of “every user created bit is sacred.”
Storage is cheap enough that this attitude is possible.
But I guess keeping all of your designers aware of it across thousands of teams is too hard.
> every user created bit is sacred
They only care about the bits they can sell to advertisers. Actual user data is only a burden to them, and occasional data loss is not a big deal.
As usual, user are not making them paying the price for being badly treated. Software companies do this because they can get away with it, that's it.
Even on HN many people can't be arse to use Firefox, how could we expect anyone to avoid giants like Microsoft?
Sadly Firefox has been utter garbage for me the last few months, routinely hangs for me on 3 different machines across two different OSes.
Running out of options these days
Honestly, the Google Drive for Desktop app was extremely reliable when Google was managing the files.
Then when macOS provided native support for cloud filesystems, it migrated to that. And it's been a complete mess. Uploads often don't get triggered until you restart the system, exactly what you're describing.
I'm pretty sure they're Apple macOS bugs, not Google ones. Because those kinds of bugs are constant across everything iCloud and Mac, but I don't generally see them on Google-only stuff.
> when macOS provided native support for cloud filesystems
When was that? I haven't regularly used a Mac in a good four years. At the time I had the Google Drive app with a business subscription, and I don't think there was any other option. It was terrible, to the point I completely gave up on it. Just like the other poster says, it would say, "I'm all synced up", but only half my files would be synced. I'd need to restart it to get syncing again. When I would try to get a large amount of files from the cloud to local storage, it would randomly crap out.
Basically, it would stall very often, and this was on wired gigabit ethernet, not some spotty mobile connection from a phone via wifi in a crowded cafe.
May 2022:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/13067413
Apple calls it File Provider.
I've been using the Google Drive for Desktop file streaming version since it launched in 2017 (file streaming, not exactly sync), I think it was originally called Google DriveFS, and never had any problems until they switched to Apple's File Provider.
There's a different Drive app that only did sync, I think that's what you're talking about. It's much older. Then they got merged into the current one.
How many people who owned iPods had their music collection deleted by iTunes? Apple software not caring about the user's bits doesn't seem new...
A family friend upgraded to Windows 11 and had it helpfully turned on personal files being OneDrive enabled. It ate up her free space and suddenly she couldn't receive or reply to email anymore. She was nearly 80 and had no idea why until she had randomly asked me to help her with something on her computer.
This is an instance of Microsoft being evil.
Doing shady stuff to juice KPIs seems like standard operating procedure at Microsoft. My favorite example of this is a few years after Windows Phone came out (when it was already clear it was going to be a failure), Microsoft announced they would be paying developers $100 per app (up to 20 apps) for ANYTHING submitted to the Windows Phone store. Clearly some executive was being graded on "number of apps in the store". As expected, this resulted in Windows Phone having a wide and varied selection of apps as long as all you needed was Chuck Norris jokes, fart apps, soundboards, whack-a-mole, Simon, etc.
Face the facts your dad isn't as important as KPIs tied to one drive and 365 subscription numbers, don't blame the PM for making Microsoft money lol
It's not even something you have to "fix" just pay and enjoy
It seems that after the 90s/00s MS hate, there was a period where MS was seen as the good guys, and "this isn't the same MS" etc. Seems to be turning around again.
I never got the "this isn't the same Microsoft" talk. Usually used to shut down anyone's complaints about bad or deceptive behaviour. Not the same Microsoft, so this time must be a mistake!
Except they were still claiming to love Linux whilst paying off government officials to hurt adoption amongst other deceptive behaviour.
> there was a period where MS was seen as the good guys
Some people are really naive.
There was a period when they were as hostile to Linux and non-Windows as a competitor would naturally be, but they were not hostile to users.
Try Windows 98/2K in a VM and see how peaceful the Windows experience used to be.
I wish they gave more attention to the many bugs.
One is the many many years old renaming trouble, renaming a file in Windows Explorer inside the OneDrive sometimes select all while I am alread typing extension to the end of the file name, clearing everything with the following keystroke, either resulting in something stupid saved on Enter if I do not realise what is happening (and being mad not remembering what the original name was), or just have to cancel and restart the renaming. Very frequent and annoying.
But a ... lets call it funny, so a funny trouble I recently discovered is that file name completely fine with Wndows is incompatible with OneDrive, OneDriva mandates me to "change the filename! change it!" (with different words but the same tone). What the f! Microsoft is not compatible with itself? : D What a clusterfuck. It is fairly new, I believe there are spaces in fron of the file name that is generated with some software I am trying, I don't care that much, nonessential, but very comedic. I have too much difficulty with using Windows to care with all the trouble and spend any time on those, I work around those, I increasingly give no f. (my work mandates Windows, ah!)
I also seen some sort of message box when a certain software tried to automatically open a newly created file in OneDrive, something like this: "The file http://sharepoint.blablabl/bla/bla/newly_created_file.ext" cannot be found. Whaaaat?! I work with a desktiop only software, it does not even care about internet connection. Saving the file to an ordinary folder works great, opens automatically. Sounds like at some point querying the full path of the file produces an internet address? Again, I give no sht to this crp that much to go ino and investigate and diagnose this hundredths of bug, just to have fruitless conversation a very understanding and very useless support guy or a forum audience suggesting how should I wrap my life around the stupidity of Windows.
> I wish they gave more attention to the many bugs.
We all wish that. But if you look at their responses, when people report bugs, tough times. They. Don't. Give. A. Shit.
HN seems to think PMs have a lot more power at Microsoft or large corps than they actually do. I assure you, a bunch of this stuff just comes top down because some VP's million dollar bonus rides on it.
The mandate to implement these kind of pop-ups doesn't come from above.
The mandate to identify ways to increase profit comes from above, and it is the PMs (through marketing/research/developers) that come up with ways to satisfy these requirements.
And failure to meet these requirements means a bad review and a chance of being laid off.
May i suggest some solutions? :-P
-> https://endof10.org/ (it has a map with people who can help install Linux)
-> https://www.opensuse.org/ (what i'm using on my PCs, works fine for the most part[0])
-> https://www.linuxmint.com/ (people seem to like this)
-> https://bazzite.gg/ (seems to be popular with gamers)
-> https://www.debian.org/ (almost everything is based on this :-P)
[0] for the most part because nothing - not even macOS where Apple controls the entire stack from CPU up to the OS - is without problems. Though i'm doing weird stuff with my PC - on my laptop i just threw it in ~3 years ago and it has been working without issues since then
My main reasons for using Windows right now are:
- Davinci Resolve
- Adobe suite
- AutoHotkey scripts, lots of them
- Microsoft Office, mainly PowerPoint, Excel and Word for creating and interacting with other companies' docs. Libre/OpenOffice mangled them/were missing features I depend on
- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.) last time I tried to switch, and rabbit holes that I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)
That said, I would love to switch back. I loved rofi [0] last time, for example.
Can anyone speak to the above? What's the status of running Windows apps like Adobe, Resolve, Office, for instance? Or AutoHotkey or equivalent?
- Davinci Resolve
Has nativ support.
- Adobe suite
- Microsoft Office
https://www.winboat.app But beta.
- AutoHotkey scripts, lots of them
I'm afraid there is no easy way. https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card
Get AMD.
> I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)
Fair. Second PC to play around from time to time is probably the best in this case. But I fully understand, unless as a hobby, that infesting a lot of time makes little sense.
I don't use it as much nowadays but https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora (kde desktop + automatic updates + baked in nvidia drivers) got me an as painless as possible nvidia experience (on a laptop I got my nvidia gpu to power down while idle which had been a huge time sink trying to figure out how to do on my own). Didn't notice any screen tearing personally, but that's probably something that depends on what applications / workflows one has.
In terms of office compatibility OnlyOffice iirc has the best compatibility. Easy to install via flatpak (I really enjoy this move in desktop linux because now I can easily remove network access from apps / set the permissions I want).
The only thing that seems unsurmountable is probably Adobe, not sure how much of a dealbreaker that is.
About AutoHotKey, you can do similar stuff as long as you are using X11 as there are various utilities for it, such as xdotool[0]. There is even an AutoHotKey-for-Linux project[1] (it also needs X11 - the author did try to port it to Wayland but gave up). For Wayland there are some alternatives like ydotool[2] (actually AFAIK since ydotool uses some daemon to inject events it works with anything, not just Wayland, but on the other hand it only provides a basic tiny subset of xdotool's commands) but the core protocol isn't particularly friendly to such automation.
[0] https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool
There is nothing like AHK. All mentioned tools are toys in comprison.
Agreed. AHK and Windows’ amenability to such things is an important reason why Windows is still my preferred GUI by far.
I suspect the problem they were indicating with “AutoHotKey scripts, lots of them” is that they just have a lot of scripts they’d need to convert. I get it—even switching to a new WM or distro can be a real pain.
Well, they did mention "AHK or equivalent" so it sounds like converting them isn't out of the question.
Things that used to be prohibitive are made much easier with AI these days. Especially tasks like this that do something fairly small and isolated and are easy to test.
ydotool helps bridge the gap in wayland. xdotool replacements ate even more essential since wayland strips away most of the hooks into windows.
Davinci Resolve has official support for Linux
Oh wow, thanks for this. I had filed it under "Windows and Mac only" in my head for some reason. Now I see that it was originally Linux only!?
Amazing that this free-to-download application supports Linux when Adobe doesn't. Or maybe not so amazing given their different approaches.
...and unofficial support for FreeBSD
https://github.com/NapoleonWils0n/davinci-resolve-freebsd-ja...
Linux for me is all about customization and control, particularly of hardware, which you'd usually do for optimization (performance, workflow, latency, stability), which is fun if you care about optimization and efficiency, but for "good enough/I'm used to it/I'm a satisfied paying customer" I suppose there's no reason to investigate or risk. The market has poured loads of capital into satisfying PC multimedia use-case.
I'd suspect there's probably versions of all those that have been made to function basically through WINE.
If your curious, it's very easy to use it as a hypervisor, and pull out what you can, though IOMMU/SR-IOV might be tricky.
Alternatively, checking if Blender/GIMP service your use cases wouldn't even require switching...
AutoHotKey has been solved a lot of different ways, for sure.
But yeah, granular detailed control over your hardware is still the primary use-case for Linux, so if you view bad defaults, annoying install procedures, occasional show stopping bugs a hindrance rather than an opportunity, maybe it's not a strong candidate.
I hear that. I enjoy that kind of tinkering; I just have too much on my plate with my business to go as deep into it as I used to. But I'm still interested in Linux, if only because it's a much-needed third option. I've been on and off it as a daily driver over the years.
I'm guessing others here who are primarily on Windows can relate to this. We've been disappointed with what Apple and Microsoft are doing, and we want, not necessarily more customization of our OS, just less interference.
1. office.com
2. Google drive/docs/*
3. Hacky office on Linux work around - several found on github
Davinci Resolve seems to run faster on Linux.
I would vote for Bluefin: https://projectbluefin.io/
It's very similar to Bazzite, which you listed, but not gamer focused. You get an easy install, auto updates (without reboots), and a bulletproof, immutable OS that is nearly impossible to break.
If you want bling and tiling, Omarchy is the new hotness: https://omarchy.org/
Having half of the demo screenshot on the front page taken up by Grok is a bad sign. A very bad sign.
Omarchy “by dhh”? Nope, maybe not.
You can have a negative opinion of DHH, but why not provide some context as to why your dislike of him would cause you to think this Linux distro is a bad option? I don’t know anything about the distro.
Not wanting to use the works of / a project lead by someone that holds beliefs that are repulsive to you is a perfectly valid reason.
Out of the loop, why not?
An open source developer (the creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy Linux) made a political comment someone didn't like. Now there is a concerted effort by a small group of terminally online histrionics to ruin his life and get all his projects cancelled. The comment was apparently made on his personal blog and not in any official capacity.
As far as I know, this is the blog post that led to the backlash https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
> made a political comment someone didn't like
It should be noted that this specific framing ("it's just a disagreement," "someone didn't like it," "it's nothing big") is used by the people that, instead, like the "comment." It's an extremely common pattern. So is one of the words he uses later, "histrionics."
The comment in question is an ethnonationalist blog post. Not a comment somewhere, but an actual goddamn essay. But you don't have to take my word on it, you can read it yourself:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
You should also click through his archive for more, because this isn't really new for him, it's just taking it to a new low.
> by a small group of terminally online histrionics
Again, witness the minimization of the actual thing he said and the redirection to the critics. Why? It's the argument pattern they've adopted.
The term that the parent post would be looking for it actually "social shaming." You see, shame used to be an effective tool against bigotry. Not wanting to associate with bigots isn't histrionics. On the contrary, being OK with bigotry is bad, and wrong!
I'm one of the immigrant groups people don't seem to like very much these days, but even I recognize some degree of ethnonationalism or desire to restrict immigration is NOT bigotry. I can empathize how jarring it must be to begin to feel like a minority in your own country - even if they aren't minorities nationally, they may be in local urban pockets. Unfettered immigration IS causing problems in many places, is often supported by businesses looking for cheap labor and it's absolutely reasonable to be opposed to it.
Moreover, the false equivalence you're drawing between opposition to immigration and bigotry is part of what let the problem fester in the first place. I think people should be allowed to oppose immigration without being called racist, its not the same thing. The open bigotry and racism by the right in many countries is partly a reaction to this false equivalence. They saw immigration in some cases as causing social disorder, as a tool to suppress wages, as causing increased crime etc. and they were forcefed a message of "all immigration is good and any opposition is racist" to reasonable objections. No one is obligated to accept every person who wants to come in.
This is false. I do not, in fact, have an opinion one way or the other about his blog post. I don't care at all what the man has to say about politics. But I still disapprove of people trying to drag his politics into the thread, and start flame wars, every time the man comes up.
He expresses his opinions on his own blog. You are being extremely toxic in public.
Go read his recent blog post about England for the English and how cool he thinks Tommy Robinson is
May I suggest you give fedora a go? It still feels like the most mature distro out there, but I can be biased
TBH if i decide to change OS again, i'll probably go with Gentoo because AFAIK it provides means to have custom patches for packages and i'd like to do things like, e.g., add some stuff in the file dialog for Gtk3. Though i'm not sure this is something most people would care about, so i didn't mention it (also i only have a vague idea that this is possible, i haven't actually tried it in practice).
I've been using Gentoo as my primary OS since 2007, along with gnome2 (now mate) as the desktop environment with the ancient compiz for fancy effects like wobbling windows and a desktop cube. Updates come pretty quickly. It's so nice having rolling releases, dist upgrades for other distros make me nervous and I've lost time to them -- and occasionally other software that certain distros decided to throw you into a curses terminal UI for configuration (or just mysteriously break and fail to install the package if you were using the desktop GUI). The custom patches thing is really nice and fairly straightforward. When you install a package its tarball gets saved in /var/cache/distfiles/ so you can just extract your package with the right version to a temp dir to work on. If you want to patch the package foo/bar you create a diff file /etc/portage/patches/foo/bar/patch-name (git format-patch can help, you just take the diff --git parts) and it gets auto-applied next time you build the package (or if it can't apply the diff, fails and tells you). I don't use this as often as I could, I only have a few patches at the moment (https://github.com/Jach/patches -- there's been a couple minor updates I should push), but it's pretty convenient to fix minor annoyances, take tiny fixes from upstream until they're fully released, or add custom features/text where you want.
With overlays to get packages outside of the core distro tree, a lot of software is just available, and even when it's not, you usually have the build tools or can easily install them so building whatever else from source isn't an obstacle. (I do sometimes have to use debian/ubuntu/mint (mint is on my travel laptop that I only use when traveling) and it still gets me sometimes having to make sure build-essential and various -dev packages are installed to do anything.) One downside is that your glibc will likely be newer than a lot of other systems out there, so that creates obstacles to shipping binaries around. You can also create your own packages in an overlay fairly easily as well, or keep some old ones around that have lost their maintainers and get removed from the tree.
There's also a somewhat annoying 'license' system (adding license names you accept to a configuration file) but with it the tooling can automatically fetch certain things for downloading (e.g. nvidia driver blobs) that some companies want people to get manually so they can harvest your data/force you to accept some EULA. I'm now remembering that 16 or 17 years ago, the last time I tried Fedora, I was testing it out by plugging in a flash drive (yay it auto mounted) but it failed to play an MP3 file and suggested I pay someone money to install codecs. It's left a sour impression on Fedora ever since, not to mention my lingering question why anyone would want a Red Hat derivative outside of a locked down office (and even then at my old BigCo job we devs got to use Ubuntu).
For casual use I still think Mint is probably the best distro at the moment. I tend to recommend the mate desktop environment since it's what I like and am used to but it's a poor distro if you can't easily install any DE of choice on it.
I used both Fedora and Ubuntu for years and couldn't point to the _better_ distribution.
Maybe one thing I had with Fedora: I had to trail one major distribution behind, because going for the most recent releases always ended up hurting me.
But that's just for work. I don't think I can move my gaming to Linux yet
Interestingly, I had the opposite experience.
With Ubuntu I kept running into bugs which had already been fixed upstream, or which were caused either by Debian's or Ubuntu's patches. And even filing regular bug reports was basically impossible: the Ubuntu packagers will almost certainly ignore it, the Debian packagers aren't interested in bugs happening in mutated versions of outdated packages in their unstable repo, and the upstream maintainers aren't interested in bug reports for weirdly-patched old releases.
After several attempts at getting bugs fixed (sometimes even sending complete patches) and getting no response for years I gave up on Ubuntu and switched to Fedora. Their policy is to ship the freshest upstream releases possible, with as few patches as possible. This means I can just directly file my bug reports at the upstream vendor, and a fix will usually land on my system fairly quickly.
I do notice that I am slowly using more and more Flatpak desktop apps: why bother with the middleman when you can trivially get the latest release directly from the upstream vendor?
I've been using the latest Fedora full-time for over two years without issue, and have been doing nearly all my gaming on it as well. The only gaming that doesn't work are games that deliberately use anti-cheat that doesn't support anything but Windows (typically the games run great in single player or offline, but multiplayer refuses to work). Of my Steam catalog, over 90% just works, and a large amount of that now has native Linux support thanks to the Steam Deck.
What particular issues were you experiencing?
As a counter anecdote, on my Windows installation I routinely run into "WTF" moments, such as BitLocker randomly deciding I need to enter recovery codes, the constant nagware that is OneDrive and friends, plus when I search for the same binary exe I've launched a dozen times Windows still displays "web results" first - fooling me just about every time.
In addition, and there are a few of these floating around but this is my devloater of choice, may I suggest https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat ?
Despite the fact that it mostly runs in powershell, it still has a better UX then the majority of Microsoft apps. (Except for the confusion about their only GUI pop-up window, you put a check mark next to the built-in apps you want removed, which was led me to reread the instructions to make sure I had it right the first time I used it).
It has both built-in sane default for people who just want to debloat Windows 10/11, along with a "custom" option which takes less than 60 seconds to get through but gives you all the customizability you need.
(No connection with the author except mad respect.)
—sent from my Linux desktop, but alas..
The only reason I use Windows is for playing some old games (primarily Age of Empires II: DE) that only work well on Windows. In the AoE2 case, I also need CaptureAge that only works on Windows.
The point is that even though I have 95% de-Microsoftized my life for the past 2 decades, I still need to run Windows for a few specific flows, and I run into the same issues as the article author here.
AoE2 runs great on Linux[1]
CaptureAge does not, however.
I don’t use it myself, but this recently updated gist seems to have it working: https://gist.github.com/Kjir/dadb0a2bc1a71aa265cfdbecaf7569b...
I use Linux for almost all my machines, but I have too many games that can only run on windows.
The best solution is Windows IoT LTSC. It has none of this crap and you also don't have to deal with Linux's crap.
Do they train their models on what’s uploaded to onedrive?
Where I work we start using OneDrive for backup, even on macOS. It hijacks your Documents folders, as well as a few others. I suspect most people don't even realize they're using OneDrive.
I've had to tell dozens of people to move their git repos to folders that aren't managed by OneDrive. I've seen where someone will change branches and OneDrive will start pulling files back down from the old branch. It's quite the mess.
This stuff is increasingly normalized across platforms.
I'd say "vote with your wallet", but when all the tech platforms are doing it, there's not much choice. PCs / laptops are probably the last hold out: Just switch to Linux (but be careful which distro you pick) or MacOS (for now).
The political pendulum is going to swing far left in the US given the disasters that are playing out in DC. Hopefully this sort of crap will be banned when that happens.
IMHO Linux Mint keeps being the strongest option to recommend when the intention is a clean transition with the least amount of fiddling. It just works, it is reliable, and it doesn't play games with changes of basic technologies that can only cause confusion (e.g. none of the Ubuntu shenanigans like their confusing desktop or their non-Debian packaging)
I like Mint. I just wanted something simple that looks like Win7 I can use for work, email, browsing, and it delivers.
Agreed. For people coming from Windows Linux Mint is the one I recommend. Simple, stable, minimal hassle.
I wouldn't recommend Mint. Better use something with recent KDE Plasma and recent kernel and Mesa for best Wayland experience.
Especially speaking of playing games, I periodically see newcomer Linux gamers hitting problems due to Mint being outdated and not having good Wayland support. Especially for any kind of recent hardware.
For me it's the exact opposite, I had problems with Steam games on Wayland and I switched back to X11.
You probably used Nvidia and some outdated distro with a bad DE on top. Not something you should be using. Using X11 is DOA anyway, so you can figure out what was wrong in your case and use better options.
No, AMD. I had issues on the latest Debian, released this summer, with KDE. X11 works perfectly fine. I would be happy with wayland too, if it worked. And in fact I use it on my other device.
What kind of issues though with what GPU? I'm using Debian testing, it all works fine with AMD and KDE Plasma Wayland session.
With AMD, always make sure to use latest kernel, Mesa and amdgpu firmware.
The Steam main window did not open, although Steam itself did load in the background. I could work around this by disabling smooth scrolling on web view and some other GPU-related option (I forgot exactly).
But then there was a strange glitch on every single game (both native and Proton-based). Periodically (e.g. every ~10 seconds on some 3D games, on every screen reload on some other) the screen turned black for about 2 seconds.
Then I remembered that I had some issue when I first installed Debian 12 two years, though I forgot which issues exactly, and that I solved them by switching from Wayland to X11.
What DE? And that's with all the latest components as above? I wouldn't use Debian stable for gaming purposes, since it falls behind very quickly. Debian testing / unstable is a better idea, and even then you'd want to install latest amdgpu firmware manually potentially.
