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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"To Access the old devices and printer use the run prompt and type the following:

shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}"

And people complain about Linux.

That's something I've noticed over the years. More and more of Windows debugging and configuration is happening on the (various) command line terminals. You're even starting to see it with official Microsoft installers.

It has tiers these days. You might need the new settings thingy (is it still called a “charm”? I hope not) or the control panel or MSC (which you might need to start from Win+R or the command line) or actually the command line. There seems to be no a priori way to figure out where a seething is.

It's where developers are learning. Most of my learning was done on a (Linux) command line. Making things usable on the command line makes sense to people like me.

They changed things to hide 'less common' actions when you right click. To disable that you need to hand edit a registry key.

The most bizarre thing in my experience is that they removed "Refresh" from that context menu, yet Explorer will a) not update when an application writes a new file, and b) when you rename a file, it does not get automatically sorted.

Reminds me, recently removed a folder and explorer showed it still being there and you could click on it and see the files.

I'm suspicious that they're trying to move to 'one drive' for the whole file system and so need to cache everything for reasons. Performance and also the files on your drive might actually be only in the cloud. IE your hard drive is for local caching not for storing data long term. Means perhaps if you save a file to disk. And then later pull the drive and put it on another machine those files won't actually be there.

If true this bodes very poorly.

I installed Windows 11 three days ago because I need to make Windows builds for software, this was my first serious attempt at using Windows since 2017. I thought I unchecked everything I possibly could regarding telemetry / cloud services, but I either missed something or they, without permission, uploaded all data in my users folder to their server. It was at almost 2 gigabytes of stuff on their cloud before I realized what was happening. Completely unacceptable to me, and a reminder for why I left Windows in the first place.

Imagine when your HD is just local cache for their cloud services. Oh yes you have a terabyte drive but you can't actually use more than 50 GB of it for storage without paying them.

You know this is what they are up to.

shrug You can just create a 'god mode' folder and access it from there.

https://www.howtogeek.com/402458/enable-god-mode-in-windows-...

But why would you want to? There's a "new" (Windows 8? so 10 years?) area in Settings.

As explained in the article, the "new" area lacks critical functionality that's needed to fix certain kinds of problems.

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