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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

You know I used to follow Windows news rabidly. The new features were incredible, I looked forward to every release. Somewhere around the time Microsoft added a lock screen to a desktop computer without going "only joking, haha", I started dreading every update.

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I'm sorry, what? Why wouldn't you want a Lock Screen? That's a basic security measure, without a lock screen Windows would be a non-starter for any secure enterprise.

A lock screen without full disk encryption is security by obscurity. Change my mind.

Windows can definitely also do full disk encryption via BitLocker...

It couldn't when a lock screen was introduced in the 90s. Bitlocker being enabled by default is a pretty recent thing.

It's a different type of security:

I leave my email, jira, slack, and other services logged in while I am working. When I step out of my computer I lock my screen to prevent other people in the room from using my account in those services.

I am aware that they can grab the hard drive and get whatever crap I've got there, but they cannot login into my email, bank, and other services. That's why the lock screen is useful for me.

A lock screen is not the same as a login screen. A lock screen is the functionless screen you have to dismiss before being presented with the login screen.

So the last "good" Windows was what then, 3.1? Modern lock screens are essentially just glorified login prompts and we had that in 3.11 I believe.

I'm talking about the pointless screen you have to dismiss to get to the login screen. The one that was introduced with windows 10 to make it look more like a smartphone.

This seems incredibly out of touch with reality.

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