Why doesn't Windows have an "expert mode"? (2003)
devblogs.microsoft.com
devblogs.microsoft.com
Not hiding file extensions. The worst setting Windows ever had, ostensibly intended for the benefit of noobs but I never understood why.
Sounds like it's not the reverse for you. You and GP commenter both think hiding file extensions was a silly feature. And I agree.
E.g you can't remove these annoying "remind later" things (without disabling integrity protection and patching OS files), and they are everywhere. Enshittification of windows is going strong, there are more and more things you can't configure anymore
I remember fondly the days when I thought Windows was getting better all the time.
The thing that's funny about that is I suspect it's a different epoch for different people.
Why can't this just be something you can tab over to instead of that stupid blank startup screen with occasional disingenuous, ambiguous feel-good messages on it? Why do Windows crash dump and recovery screens have to be still largely stuck in the cryptic and unhelpfully threadbare state they were in 20 years ago when there is so much more memory available to store say, a scrollable stack trace or even a large text table of meaningful errors or exception states so you don't need to go Googling around for these or checking your notes at 4:08 am on a Monday?
The bane of anyone who's ever had to get a production system back up and running from a non-bootable state and you're sitting there staring at spinning circles and featureless colorblock screens sometimes for minutes on end, wondering just what the hell is going on.
ok. I want windows borders bigger than 1. Where can i configure this ?
Damn, if even Raymond Chen doesn’t understand AD…
He had set-up the AD himself and had no idea where it came from
< Contract your system administrator.
> I am the system administrator!
I guess there's also the "oh, right - sudo make me a sandwich", but that's less notable in my experience.
So, by not having an "expert" mode in Windows, Microsoft made Windows neither newbie-friendly nor expert-friendly.
TBH I wouldn't overly mind a version of Windows that really was just a terminal on top of the kernel, with the option to use the Windows shell or whatever other shell I want or build one if that's what I desired. Much like that most proselytized of Linux distros. It would still be Windows, but I would feel in control of it to some degree.
But it would have to be something other than PowerShell, and I think that's a nonstarter for Microsoft.
WinPE is literally that. A highly stripped-down version of Windows that boots to cmd.exe as a shell.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
That's the whole problem with GUIs in general. You're relying on the developer to expose every little thing to you as buttons and widgets. How many times have you been sitting there stuck because there just wasn't a button for the thing you wanted to do?
Also, you can't chain programs together with a GUI like you can with CLI. And your suggestion of using program-specific command lines ruins this as well.
Let's see, UAC is nice for your grandmother who might click on something that it shouldn't, yet, we, advanced users are constantly annoyed by those cof,cof "security" features who get in the way when doing something.
Yet, your grandmother will eventually get ransomware or malware despite the UAC and other features, so, what's the point!??!
At the moment I just remember UAC, but there are plenty of features that we want to turn off with a simple button and we can't, unless we play around with the registry or 3rd party apps.
And this is why power users love Linux, we can do whatever we want, if we break it, it's fine and we can learn with it. At this rate, your computer will no longer be "your" computer, Microsoft will own it and you will like it.
Even for us power users, we might hit some drive-by exploit, a friend might send us something that got wormed or whatever. And now, unless that malware comes with a UAC bypass/privilege escalation exploit which is worth millions of dollars, we get an unexpected UAC prompt and have a chance to stop a minute and actually notice that something is Not Right.
Phones get it right. The Facebook app on my phone can’t read Gmail’s data. And Gmail can’t access my photos without permission. On desktop any program can read or write to any of my files. And my files - photos, work, code - matter a lot more to me than anything my OS works hard to protect.
There’s no good technical reason, either. It’s a problem of pure inertia.
People like to hate on the permission dialog boxes on MacOS - but each app only needs to ask you once for permission. I don't think I've seen one of these dialog boxes for months. And they add a remarkably large amount of security to the overall system given how little they inconvenience users in the steady state of system execution.
But they're a very coarse brush. Once an application has permission to access some folder, it can do anything it wants there. And only certain folders and permissions are protected. (I think any app can read / write any data in ~/Library).
I think the desktop security environment would work extremely differently if it were designed today. I'd love to see more people experimenting with ideas.
It's worth noting that UAC is not a security boundary[1]. Sure, a safeguard mechanism, but not a security feature against stealth rootkits trying to escalate from non-privileged environment.
[1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/189491/microsof...
Do you disable sudo on your Linux box or run everything as root?
Where’s that login for windows for those who want that?
While you can't login as SYSTEM (since it's not really a user account), you can trivially open a shell under it's account (and you can do everything you need as an administrator anyway, so there's really no point).