Microsoft pulls OneDrive update that would quiz you before letting you quit | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft pulls OneDrive update that would quiz you before letting you quit

arstechnica.com

130 pointsstalfosknight102 comments

Discussed 3x yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38197715

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38208568

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38208473

What’s most frustrating to me is how slapdash One Drive is to this day. It is their easiest way to get consumers to start paying for services, yet the product still has embarrassing limitations.

Two that I hit on my corporate machine:

- struggles with too many files. Last I looked, official Microsoft documentation says to not exceed 100k files. Yet, $WORK wants to dump basically every file I touch inside there. My Teams folder alone is ~20k files.

- has a max file path limit which is less than the allowable on NTFS. I use some software with a heavily nested folder structure which One Drive cannot accommodate. A valid Windows file path cannot be backed up by their promoted solution.

I work at a private university that has gone all-in with MS. We have OneDrive and I believe custom BGP routes straight to Azure with 200G pipes.

This product is complete garbage. I try to upload/share large files to individuals within the institution. It constantly fails when upload or downloading anything over 5GB. The pipe to my desk is 1000/1000. What is the issue? Is OneDrive literally only meant to be used for documents yet we're told by central IT to use it for research data?

>What is the issue? Is OneDrive literally only meant to be used for documents yet we're told by central IT to use it for research data?

frankly yes

Long file paths in windows are a wreck as it is. I have no idea why it is not enabled by default in this day and age.

Yeah, windows is a hydra of weirdness, where some things fully support longpaths, but random things will come up that don’t, or fail to properly check and handle things, because no one ever got around to fixing it.

But even the linux kernel will quickly start having problems if one starts having long filenames with multi-bit unicode characters, that 255 bit size max can go fast. Many filesystems for linux actually support larger filenames than what the kernel does.

That’s excusable if the product is made by over burdened open source volunteers. One Drive is generating revenue for Microsoft, yet they still cannot be bothered to shore up a product in the spotlight.

Some of the grievances are highly reported for years, but nobody seems to care.

This is not just a Windows thing. Plenty of Unix software struggles with long paths as well.

Got bit by this(1) clown that decided to do a crazy long version number as a joke and release it in pypi. Broke a few local pypi caches. Breakdown in the github issue at (2). So ... pobody's nerfect.

1) https://pypi.org/project/uselesscapitalquiz/ 2) https://github.com/pypa/bandersnatch//issues/1200#issuecomme...

I’m pretty sure it also has additional limits of which characters are valid. I tried it long ago, and quickly dropped it because of that nonsense.

The last line of the article is just a stunningly good summary:

"But it's just one more annoying default you need to change to make sure that modern Windows stays out of your way."

Microsoft is constantly pushing the limit of what users will tolerate. I switched non-technical people to Linux OSes after hearing about this, and heard no complaints from them. It's almost like Microsoft wants to lose whatever footholds they have left.

I don't use windows at all, but for others (parents, s/o,..) i would install it as a 'default' (because every instruction anyone was written for windows)...

Then they added ads in the start menu, and I found it easier to deal with the "this is linux, not windows, to do this, you have to do that", than to constanty fix and change windows settings making stuff shittier by default.

Microsoft stated goal is to be cloud first, they want people to use their vertical integrated cloud services. Office, OneDrive, Teams, Azure, etc

If you are not a cloud customer they do not really care if you leave windows

At this point people should (and microsoft defacto does) considers Windows as a client for their cloud services, not a Operating system

The problem is, their cloud solutions suck.

Compared to what.... and what services.

Office is still king in the US business world, I bet they have close to 70%+ businesses in the US on Office 365 in some manner.

Compared to Google Apps I would prefer to use Office 365 every single day.

It sucks compared to every other available word processor/spread sheet/email and online ‘office’ service I’ve used, except OpenOffice. Literally even office desktop.

Super buggy, loses data, and steps on things, tons of bizarre formatting issues and out of sync problems, and slow to boot.

The only reason it’s so popular is because it’s been the ingrained monopoly ‘you don’t get fired for’ choice.

Actually using it is terrible.

Literally none of those things is true for the average person

Considering how many people I’ve heard say the same thing?

If you think that, you aren’t listening.

I'm listening to the market the thousands of users that interact with at my company (and previous companies that I've worked for) and my 20 plus years of IT administration experience as well as people that I tend conferences and meetups and other places with so I have plenty of reference points to draw from

While there are weaknesses for sure and there are many many problems with the office 365 platform as a whole I think your statements are a huge exaggeration

Of all of the online office suites out there when you compare it to say Zoho or Google or even libre office

The feature set when it comes to using it in an enterprise setting Microsoft hands down is the best option

I suspect that you are limited in your your scope of inquiry probably to an open source and probably to a technology heavy user base not a generalized business user/consumer user base

If you went into I would say probably at least 80% of the companies in the US and told the accounting department that you're taking away Excel and giving them Google sheets instead they would scream bloody murder

MSCE? Or purchasing officer/CTO?

Office 365 is garbage. We had to ban people opening documents in share point through the web because absolutely destroyed the formatting of templated documents.

Office 365 is more than just the web versions of the office components so stating that the entire platform is garbage because you have a specific issue with a specific feature of a specific part of the platform is ridiculous

The web versions of the office applications are the weakest due the nature of browser-based applications that does not however prove the OP comment that the entire platform is "garbage"

I started using Kubuntu and I absolutely loved it. Leagues ahead of Windows 11 in terms of user experience, customization, and speed.

However, I had to switch back. I just can't get by without Adobe apps and other specific productivity apps and video games that I couldn't get to run on Ubuntu. Maybe some day!

Gimp, figma, Kdenlive, etc

I'm as pro-Linux and anti-Windows (and anti-Adobe for that matter) as it gets but even I'll admit that Gimp and Kdenlive are not in the same league as Photoshop and Premiere.

That’s just technical capacity too. Usability is…. Rough.

Because they'e just looking at the metrics in isolation and the people who are responsible for it couldn't care less about long term viability.

The only reason I have Windows is for seamless device driver support. Most things work and don’t break with a system update. I don’t want to spend a single minute debugging issues on a forum, resorting to OS reinstall due to something being broken, or twiddling with buggy display or wireless settings. I love the Linux desktop. I wish I could pay someone to deliver this experience. But, I don’t believe that I can. I wish I could strip the display off Windows and run it as a hypervisor with a nice hardware abstraction layer for another OS.

I've been using Linux exclusively at home for going on five years now (with the only exception being for Android rooting apps, which is infrequent).

It has been moderately painful, but for a while now I consider it less painful than dealing with Microsoft's MBA-team's multi-year long stream of howlers.

I use Pop!OS as my primary desktop, Debian for servers, and have a separate Ubuntu machine for gaming that very rarely gets used unfortunately. I also think that Pop would do the job for gaming.

I use popos as well but I haven't had sound for weeks

The volume can be pretty low by default - maybe you've got sound it's just super quiet. I've made that mistake before...

I have to put the volume up via buttons on the physical speakers themselves.

I mean, it’s worth giving Linux another go. I’ve had far more problems with Windows machines over the years than I have with Fedora since I started driving it (since 2019).

Same for my parent’s and family’s computers. Updates have been non-events.

I keep telling myself like that. The general fragility hasn't changed much in the past 20 years, but I keep trying.

Between a family of 8 and owning a business with 12 employees, I can tell you conclusively:

Least fuss: * ChromeOS

* Kubuntu or Neon Linux

* MacOS

* Windows Enterprise

* Windows

Most Fuss

ChromeOS is great with kids and people who don't need to code or do heavy design work. It's getting better for designers. It's solution for developers is a built in linux container.

Kubuntu & Neon are solid. At this point, there are so few sharp edges. For development, aside MacOS and Windows only software... It's great.

MacOS is great, but upgrades and Windows Vista like security features make family members call Dad too much.

Windows is a PITA that is only tolerable for gaming and even then, makes the kids and the sales team call me way too much. Also, the privacy story is good on one and only one of the above OSes.

> OS reinstall due to something being broken, or twiddling with buggy display or wireless settings

Odd, my only windows laptop somehow got its partitions wrong the other day for whatever reason, when i connect my oled display it flickers (same cable works just fine on linux), wireless and ethernet are slower and i lose a couple fps in games.

Also my high end 2023 laptop’s touchpad, wireless, ethernet are not supported without drivers, so when i installed windows i had to plugin an external mouse and a usb stick with drivers. Naturally these all work in linux (mint, pop, manjaro, kubuntu, old and new kernels).

The linux experience has really improved (heck i am on nvidia and both hdmi and thunderbolt work flawlessly in kde).

When building your next PC stick to a motherboard that uses Intel for everything (or as many things as possible).

When selecting a laptop choose one that provides Linux support out of the box, eg Dell XPS 13.

I've done the above and never once had a driver issue on Linux.

I have a new 17 inch xps and I haven't had sound work for almost a month now.

Are you running Ubuntu LTS? If so HWE or original kernel? I've only had one instance on my XPS where the HWE kernel broke something so I rolled back to the original kernel for a month or so.

I'm using popos that's based on 22.04, although it's at work so I can't check right now. I tried the steps here and also ones listed on stackexchange: https://support.system76.com/articles/audio/

It's on pipewire. I only get a dummy audio device appearing. It does work when I use an external Bluetooth headset, and it actually did work previously -- I think there may have been a kernel update of some sort, and I tried to start up with an older kernel but no dice.

In general, pop os has been a pretty good experience, and I have used it on another work dell laptop (different job) and my Lenovo t480 since I stopped having the inclination to take care of Arch Linux (I might go back at some point, but I don't have much time to mess around anymore).

I'm with you. Love the idea of using Linux, but couldn't have stated the drawbacks more elegantly. I look at the OS reinstall more like an insurance company totaled your car vice it being at the bottom of a lake: You can always bring a Linux install back to life through a correct combination of CLI incantations in a fallback console, but at a point, it's easier to do a clean install.

You really only chroot from a live usb stick to your linux root and grub install to recover your boot process, it’s really not that hard. But i agree, would be nice to have a little gui tool - i at least have become too lazy given linux’s recent ease of use.

I agree to an extent.

If you are in tech the Linux process shouldn’t be too bad.

Installing Arch is a good lesson in learning what you’re doing. Totally doable but you’re spoken to like an adult.

I think it’s pretty contrary to most expectations of tech today though.

I doubt a casual user has a better experience with windows. Actually, it may be worse with windows and it's more likely they will lose data.

I haven’t installed Windows outside of DosBox since XP but there is a similar problem with MacOS occasionally.

I know its easier with other distros but I would wager that the vast majority of humans on Earth would give up before they finished installing Arch.

Inconsistent driver quality, some signed, some not, some maintained, some not, is why I left Windows for macOS.

I have never ever had to think about or care about drivers on macOS. I would say that is the most seamless driver experience of all.

OneDrive syncing, plus whatever "enhancements" Microsoft have made to Windows Explorer, makes my current directory navigation and file management slower than it was 10+ years ago.

I've started working out of a separate directory structure so that OneDrive stays out of the way, and then move the files manually into OneDrive's field-of-view once I'm finished. This is not good practise for backups, but it's good practise for time efficiency and minimal frustration.

I don't know how people can be productive using Windows as their main work OS, and how they can retain their mental health.

If you need to install it, one thing that helps a little bit is to use offline accounts only. Never give Windows an email address because then it will force OneDrive down your throat, and your user folders will be a weird mix of online and not online folders that is a total mess to understand.

Is it possible to delete OneDrive from Windows 11? Apple doesn't let you delete the News app, or Safari from Macs.

I'm hoping the EU does something similar to iPhones and USB-C and slams the hammer down on forced apps on various platforms.

You want O&O ShutUp10++[1], which is an excellent app for disabling tons of Windows features including OneDrive.

[1] https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

you can remove OneDrive, but you cant remove Edge.

I don't understand why people invite an adversarial entity onto their computer just for the convenience of syncing files.

Unison+ssh+Tailscale (or alternatively Syncthing for a slightly more hands-off approach) accomplishes the same with much less overhead and fewer annoyances.

>I don't understand why people invite an adversarial entity onto their computer just for the convenience of syncing files.

Most dont invite it. MS sneaks it in the backdoor

I recently bought a new PC and only found out it was syncing my desktop and user files to OneDrive (which I never signed up for) unbeknownst to me when it started having problems.

Then I had to find and wade through a few pathetic prompts to disable it. "are you suuure you want to disable cloud backup?" "Are you suure you want to delete your tax filings and financial docs we copied without asking?"

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

Comment is about Dropbox back then. And yet criticism is very relevant today. Yes, you you could your own FTP looks definitely better that OndeDrive in this case.

Syncthing is so good. I wish more people would use it. Onboarding is certainly more complex than just using Onedrive or installing Dropbox, but once it's set up it just stays out of the way and works.

Unless you go out of your way, it's not invited in, it was already inside. Most people who don't live in o365 don't know or care what OneDrive even is due to how much it sucks.

This is more user hostile tactics to force acceptance of the eventual subscription fees for everything Windows.

My company switched off of perfectly working SMB shares to OneDrive + SharePoint about a year ago and it has been the singlehanded biggest generator of helpdesk tickets since. I'm trying to get corporate to let me use rclone since I can at least tell it to push/pull a specific file instead of waiting for OneDrive to finish "syncing changes".

I only use OneDrive for the auto save and versioning feature in Excel. Before giving in, I'd frequently come back to a computer that had restarted itself in the night (?) and I'd have to figure out if I needed to preserve the auto save files of things I only had open for reference.

LibreOffice Calc is becoming a better option though. I like the new array functions in Excel but I don't think anyone else I'd share a spreadsheet to understands them. Meanwhile, Excel makes it hard to work with Unicode CSV, no longer has the option to bring up the text import wizard when opening a CSV, silently changes your date formats, etc. For my uses it's become frustrating. Libre has kept working like I expect.

Windows 11 more or less forces OneDrive onto the machine. It takes active work to get rid of it.

By "people" do you mean all people or just a few here on this forum? I would never use OneDrive, and I can tell you why people would use it: it's easy, and for the most part it just works. Most people don't care or consider it "adversarial". There are over a billion Windows computers.

Learned helplessness, especially when it comes to tech, is a societal problem in the making.

Onedrive is one of the most cancerous products Microsoft has created in crescent years. I don’t want drive yet it is difficult to uninstall and somehow integrates with office, including outlook web.

It’s a clear moneygrab trying to shift user behaviour into cloud storage, I assume because it’s difficult or rare for users to switch storage providers.

I wish the Microsoft quality team reigned in all the dark patterns the marketing and retention team were forcing onto people, and I truly wish this whole thing backfires and costs them revenue in the long run.

What happens when you have a company that doesn’t understand user experience and have close to a monopoly

Oh but bill gates thinks you wont need this type of user experience because once they’ve sucked all your data without your consent you will just talk to your pc or whatever they’ll call it. All according to plan - break the ui, degrade the ux, provide a magic “ai” solution.

PSA for those using windows at home: someone else has already done all the work removing spyware / unnecessary junk / mandatory login, etc.

https://github.com/topics/windows-11-debloat

I think I used this guide https://christitus.com/windows-11-perfect-install/

If you have to "debloat", you've already lost.

What's your winning strategy?

Thank you Jesus.

At some moment, my Windows 11 started to launch 2 instances of OneDrive for some reason, I have to close one of it every time the machine reboots (likely weekly due to OS updates) and it was annoying already having have to close it but it was about to make me mad for asking why I have to quit it... Windows, what a joke. Only keeping it to play games, never for work.

This is an unforced error on Microsoft's part. The latest in a long line. But I'm not even surprised these days, just disappointed.

I must have just had rose-tinted glasses when I was young, but I totally believed the 'force augmentation' PR Microsoft offered with their Windows XP tour and their SkyDrive initial offering and their Office 2010 ribbon. I was young enough to not get why people complained so much about those switches. Grow up, toolbars are old and boring, this is cool, life is change, yada yada.

Now? After the confusing Windows 8, the killing of WP7, the spyware of W10, the forced updates of W10, the loss of fundamental human interface guideline compliance and look & feel by new-age UX designers who have forgotten the lessons of the past searching to be the next not-Apple of W11, (I could go on) I've grown so sick of Microsoft's current direction that I've apparently clipped over to the other side of the screen.

Now, I don't care. I miss what I see and saw as good. I let my inertia keeping me using Onenote and familiar tools. But I'm not in love with MS like I used to be, I had to let go of MS fanboyism to hang on to "fight for the users" fanboyism.

Luckily the Year of the Linux Desktop will arrive shortly, any second now, and we will be fine (EDIT: /s). In the meantime, I've had to treat my computers as tools, not hobby projects...it's too depressing otherwise.

> Year of the Linux Desktop will arrive shortly

I think we've been saying this since at least 1990.

We have tablets and phones now all running unix variants

>Year of the Linux _Desktop_ will arrive shortly

I don't consider my phone nor my tablet to be a "desktop".

In my circles, personal Windows PCs have gone almost entirely away. Chromebooks are massively popular, but most people do everything on a phone/tablet. In the PC market, gaming is the only thing keeping Windows relevant, and each Proton update shrinks that market segment.

Sure, lots more people (maybe most? I don't know) use phones/tablets in place of a desktop. I still don't call my phone a desktop.

As for what is keeping Windows relevant, I would bet gaming is just a blip on the radar. Corporations, especially larger ones not in the tech market, like to use Windows for user machines (also applies to governments).

Too right. Almost all of the software I need for work runs only Windows.

It's bound to happen eventually.

Sorry, I should have included a /s, my bad!

But yes, i'm not holding my breath.

maybe I am on an old version, but I dont get that at all. here is my info:

    OneDrive version: Build 23.214.1015.0001 (64-bit)

if I try to close, I get:

    Are you sure you want to close OneDrive?
    If you close OneDrive, files in your OneDrive folder won't sync with your
    files online.
    [Close OneDrive][Cancel]

>Change affected a "small subset" of users and has (thankfully) been reverted.

From the top of the article. The quiz was not a ubiquitous roll-out.

Windows RG was supposed to be parody, not a wishlist.

[dupe]

More discussion and updates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38197715

This is about them pulling the update which is a new development.

Nah, the Verge article is also updated to mention that development. There's a ton of discussion over there.

Try [related]

going back to LTSC is much easier than linux :-)

wtf

It wouldn't let me login the other day until I completed my signup for "hello" whatever the f-that is. I had to pull the ethernet cable THEN I could login to windows. I promptly disabled any signup that had "hello" in the description. I have exactly 1 windows machine in my house and I am pretty close to making it 0. I was careful to setup that machine before connecting it to the internet so I could create a local account. The hoops people have to jump through just to use something they've paid for is getting pretty outlandish.

It used to be that once the accumulated Windows updates had fully bogged down one of our computers we would uninstall Windows and install Ubuntu. These days we just uninstall Windows on any new system we get.

Why can't they figure out a paid version for Professionals without any BS? WSL2 works fine, docker, Steam, multiple monitors, etc. Just remove the BS.

They have (Enterprise LTSC). You can't have it.

Also, you are now subscribed to OneDriveFacts(tm).

You can buy a grey market CD key cheaply or subscribe to whichever Microsoft 365 tier gives you Enterprise.

The subscription model is somewhat expensive but if you’re able to make it a business expense for Windows + email hosting + the Office apps it’s not totally egregious.

> You can't have it.

There is https://massgrave.dev GitHub repo has ~54k stars https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

Microsoft seemingly does not really care I guess, otherwise they would've taken it down (GitHub is owned by Microsoft)

The issue with LTSC is it (afaik) sucks fkr gaming, with a lot of missing stuff for dx12 and so on.

I've been running it on my gaming machine for several years and I have not had a single problem with it

I do have DX12 support in Win10 LTSC IoT, according to dxdiag. But I haven't tried to run any high-end games on this machine yet, so who knows if it would actually work.

You mean Windows 11 Enterprise?

Yes, but for Professionals. I do not want to run it illegally.

Then pay for it?

You basically can't. It's a "contact sales" kind of sale. It's for businesses.

I have a Microsoft 365 tenant for hosting my personal emails ... I can just buy Microsoft 365 E3 which includes Windows 11 Enterprise. I talked to no sales person.

https://imgur.com/a/C9JTdRK

Thanks, did not know it was possible.

Dunno about Windows, but sadly, a lot of "professional" software also has this BS in abundance. Even when it's expensive.

Anything with a modicum of respect for end-users is niche today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com