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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Onedrive started out as a pretty useful tool but has turned into a deceptive trojan that tries to force whatever growth metric MSFT managers are currently chasing through a combination of dark patterns (like hiding true file paths from view) and also simply refusing to operate in obviously useful ways which many users want and expect (like not having a built-in way to back up only specific sub-folders on different drives (forcing paying users to trick it by using junctions)).

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There used to be no option to uninstall it - now there is.

You will still get it reinstalled during a major OS update, but at least it can easily be removed. Before it was a chore to clean up.

I would speculate there is even some way to prevent it from reinstalling during those major updates. That seems like the kind of capability they would build in because a huge Windows customer complained (i.e. realistically, the major check against dark patterns in Windows).

Not quite what you are describing, but you can prevent any specific executable from ever running by configuring a "debugger" for it in Image File Execution options (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options). You add a key with the executable name and then add a "debugger" value, then point that debugger at C:\Windows\system32\systray.exe. Every time the named executable tries to launch, Windows will try to "debug" it with systray, which immediately exits so the program never actually runs. After uninstalling OneDrive this can be set to prevent OneDriveSetup.exe from ever running for example.

You can also define software restriction policies to do similar things.

It id what SRP's are for (but yes, I would not put it past them to disable anything targeting OneDrive).

> I would speculate there is even some way to prevent it from reinstalling during those major updates.

The one positive about Windows is their need to cater to their enterprise IT fleet management base. So, as long as you have a Pro version of Windows, there is usually a way to lock down most things like this via Computer Policy settings. It's just not easy to discover nor time-efficient if you're managing a personal "fleet" of three PCs.

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