Windows 11 is now enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission
neowin.net
neowin.net
I don't like leaving negative or hyperbolic comments on HN, but this was enraging and unacceptable to me. It's hard to convey without coming off as unhinged. I only ever boot into Windows nowadays when I need to compile and test a Windows build of software. I understand Microsoft has built up good will through efforts like VS Code, but it's all undone because of things like this. I avoid MS products, they cannot be trusted.
I almost wonder if this is by design. I genuinely had people look at me funny when I described relatively minor issues that eventually made me jump from Windows ( in my case I think it was dropping detailed descriptions from updates in Windows 7 ). I kept explaining that even the issues are not the actual issue. The issue is that I am unable to administer my machine as I see fit. I am not anti-tech, I tell people, but the tech has to work for me...
I don't think it can upload if you aren't logged in.
Have you tried installing Windows 11 without signing in to a Microsoft account? It's very difficult to do and the instructions online keep having to change as Microsoft makes it more and more difficult. What I'm finding now [0] involves using a hotkey to open command prompt at a certain part of the installation process and running a command to disable the internet before you proceed.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...
You're not wrong, but your initial comment made it sound like it was just a matter of not stepping in a single pile of dog poo. What Microsoft presents users with instead is an entire sewer with a great big EXIT sign pointing straight through the sewage. If you're in the know you can mutter a secret incantation and a ladder will drop down, allowing you to climb up onto a rickety catwalk with lots of warning signs telling you that you're going the wrong way. If you're brave enough to ignore the warning signs then eventually you'll get to the other side without touching the crap.
Needless to say, most people follow the path that Microsoft designed for them and end up interacting with at least some of the crap.
Notice that linux is not safe from that trend as well: you have to learn tech stuff to operate it in any capacity.
So there's no free lunch in this world, that much is obvious. I don't see where 'typical person' can reasonably survive intact in this tech climate so I also see no reason to bring them up.
Don't connect to the internet, press 1 hotkey and enter 1 line of text ("OOBE\bypassnro").
While it's absolutely stupid that it needs to be done at all, it's not "very difficult".
I don't need to disconnect from my network either. It just "work".
>While it's absolutely stupid that it needs to be done at all
If we want to be really pedantic, maybe I should have said "intentionally extremely obscure"—would that phrasing be satisfactory?
I've been a Linux user for decades through some dark days and some "hard" distros, and I would call that "very difficult". Part of the difficulty is knowing what you don't know, and that absolutely qualifies.
For a tech forum, I'm surprised at these responses. I have to Google shit all the time, including "can I do X in Y". I guess I'm the one out of touch, sorry.
I don't think anyone here is saying that they personally would have had difficulty installing Windows without a Microsoft account. I've done so myself.
What we're doing is empathizing with people who don't typically post on tech forums—people like my dad who install Windows on their own but don't regularly dig deep into the system internals. When I went through the process of installing Windows without setting up a Microsoft account I was appalled by how hard Microsoft is working to make sure that most people don't figure it out, and that was back in the days when all you had to do was not connect to Wi-Fi.
It's great that you'd be able to figure it out, but that's in spite of Microsoft's best efforts to hide the path.
I'm generally either at work or just done work when I'm on HN so I'm in "work mode". The next time I'm called on for family tech support on a Sunday, I'll think back to this thread and be in a better position to empathize with a non-techie view.
But yeah, I only use it for some horrible hardware that absolutely will not run on WINE and has proprietary drivers. The day my wife gives up crafts, will be a day of celebration.
Got it installed, added the family as users, tried to login to my young child's freshly minted account. Apart from taking forever, you then have to go through all the "let us copy all your data" and "we're going to advertise to you, so you may as well let us personalise the ads!" and so on ... and you have to do that for every member of the family ... it's an absolutely diabolical time suck.
And of course you can't, for goodness knows what reason, just point at the existing Win10 install to copy all the profiles and settings across.
It all sucks.
Won't work though if you're Already configured for wifi
I had to block the PC from accessing the Internet in my router settings to get the "I don't have an internet connection" button back.
Won't really help "regular" people since most off-the-shelf, i.e. Best Buy, computers come with Home but if you stick to business lines (ThinkPads, XPS, Latitude, Precision, EliteBook and ProBooks, etc.) you get Pro edition.
Well done to MS marketing I suppose.
Man. I have felt this way a whole lot lately.
I think some people see Linux users and genuinely can't fathom how or why they'd want to go through all of the trouble choosing to use Linux and doing real work on it. A lot of us look back just as puzzled, because when I switched to a Linux desktop for the first time in around 2004, it was definitely a choice, but it hasn't felt like a "choice" for a very long time.
Then installing apps, even with WingetUI it's far easier on Linux than trying to find and install apps on Windows... God help me, I hope Microsoft have learnt how to actually do window management this time to make all their crap worthwhile.
Since then I run Windows 10 + WSL and life is good.
Win10 support ends next year and I am at a complete loss at what to do.
Linux desktop never worked, never will, the incentives are not there. It's only free if you don't value your time. As I wrote before , your choices are Ubuntu where an OS upgrade shatters your entire system so throughly it takes days to get back to a working system or you can go with Arch where Bluetooth/multifunction device/etc might break every so often. But at least most of the system remains standing. And if you need to connect to some funny enterprise wifi or VPN, the IT department of the client will have Mac and Windows support but Linux? X Windows doesn't get new features, Wayland is not ready, and the package manager landscape is just getting worse https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/616/9...
Windows 11 is hot garbage. No other way to put it.
Send help.
You can now pick up a MacBook Air at Walmart for $700. Considering the inflation we’ve had, that’s actually reasonable. It will do the Unixy stuff well. My Mac is of this same class and I’m happy with it.
I do not think there's anything like it in the Mac world.
Untangling synced Docs and Desktop folders between multiple Macs, and trying to revert to something akin to a default and reconcile what is in various folders, not pleasant.
> Desktop & Documents Folders: Keep your Desktop & Documents Folder in sync with iCloud and access them from other devices and iCloud.com
But easily has issues reconciling files on different devices, and then, if you turn it off, things get messy and need a lot of moving things around.
That said, I just want to make it abundantly clear: I can barely even tolerate the macOS desktop for a fraction of my day. I hesitate to rant about every single thing that pisses me off about it, I think it's wasted time: the direction macOS is going in is not compatible with me and my computing needs and I don't think anyone has to worry about it. The point is, macOS is not the solution for everyone. I don't think I could have a stronger distaste for Apple and their philosophy if I tried, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
(This opinion is, unfortunately, up to date. I am currently using macOS in some capacity, regrettably.)
But I use my MBP without a mouse because the synergy between the OS and hardware is so nice. Window and desktop management in particular.
I have a dual-boot mid-tower running EndeavourOS (Arch Linux flavor) and the non-IoT version of Win 10 LTSC (support ends in 2027) with strict group policies around disabling of telemetry that's been humming along for several years now.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...
Instead of begging for help, why not be that help for someone else?
They would literally rather suffer with the kind of impressive surveillance and advertising that Microsoft heaps on them rather than change themselves and the tools they can/could use for the better.
It's the epitome of learned helplessness.
I have a friend from HS who had no interest in computers beyond using them as appliances until he asked me how to extend the life of a shitty laptop that he owned and I suggested that he install Linux on it.
This was about 20s ago now and between now and then he's become a distrohopping person who is quite knowledgeable in hardware with no impetus from me beyond the initial push.
I look at what rural farmers can do when push comes to shove in all kinds of domains and I wonder why not with the general public and computers.
If we had a Cuban embargo type scenario where westerners couldn't get modern hardware and the operating systems that run on it they'd figure out how to.make.die with the cheapest and most reliable software/hardware combo.
People don't grow to learn new skills because they aren't pressed to by circumstance not because they can't.
- Accept inability to use monitor color profiles (this is still WIP)
- Accept inability to use full-screen sharing (very likely to be broken, in theory fixable, in practice its unclear how to fix the portal mess)
- Forked libinput because it behaved unacceptable with my touchpad, and the original developers don't want to add the configuration options to fix this. (Well kind of - custom acceleration profiles may be available in later versions)
- Spent some time adding all the "use wayland" cli flags to everything electron based. In theory, ~/.config/thing-flags.conf is supposed to work, in practice it doesn't, so I have a bunch of wayland replacement clis for everything (wcode, wobsidian, etc)
- Spent some time looking up tool replacements (i3wm -> sway, dmenu -> rofi, xclip -> wl-copy, xprop -> ... its complicated etc)
Benefit: for the first time ever my Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen3 laptop (4K screen) outperforms my Android phone in graphics rendering performance and responsiveness, even just using the Intel card. Using it feels gloriously good. This includes the OEM Windows install as a comparison point, which is doing significantly worse, even with nvidia card enabled.
Replacing Xorg is an absolutely impossible task, with a long tail of broken things left in Wayland's wake. But I think it might finally be getting to the point where its worth it
So they unbox the computers every day, and they have to wait an hour or more, a team of 10 people, for windows update to finish and start the match. Windows update could not be cancelled by the user anyway.
I thought, if he doesn't trust software from other people, maybe he could carry with him an OS in a flash drive the size of a gum. Also, linux was not traditionally great for games, but a chess game can be supported even on a live boot.
[1] Kramnik vs Jospem chess match.
What trouble? Try to install Fedora and Win 11 and tell us which is faster and simpler.
No one can or should trust non-free software. Period.
You're not unhinged, there's been a fundamental change in internet culture and the early 2000s free internet people are considered loony now. Ive been laughed out of Discord groups(it's what the under 30s use these days instead of chats and forums, and is itself problematic) for talking about these things.
It turns out even the 2000s web 2.0 itself can have an Eternal September, who'd of thought?
I've been accused of holding "far right" views, or at best an overly paranoid nut, for some of my opinions on software and internet freedom, for promoting E2E encryption, and lamenting the loss of public forums to private, hidden from search, discord/Facebook groups, etc.
To be honest, it's difficult to sit by and watch the enshittification of everything tech while seeing the younger crowd be totally OK with it, and in a lot of cases even defend it.
Someone in Microsoft should look into who is making these decisions, why these decisions are are being made, and why they are being received so negatively. Then they need to address them.
Even though I'm not much of a fan of Microsoft products, I get the impression that they have some excellent developers making excellent products that end up being undermined by business decisions. These are decisions that will probably end up undermining the business itself. We don't live in the 1990's anymore. Microsoft has plenty of competitors who are nibbling away at their edges.
>>Welcome to hell.
Have you read the Windows privacy policy any time in the last decade?
They don't need to change anything.
This MBAs job is to get as many copilot dailyvusers as possible and to do that they need your files in their data orbit.
Remember when dropbox had to tell everone their openai integration wad opt in.
Youre a few MBAs ahead, todays MBA just needs daily copilot users and thats onlyvfeasible with the cloud.
That's the Trojan Horse
Step 1: "Why do I need to run Linux? I already have it in Windows"
Step 2: "Oh, and now this software runs better on WSL or requires WSL to work properly"
IMO this is also something that the US should shut down hard for a very different reason: every time anyone complains about a vendor, usually Chinese, misusing American data, the US is implicitly making a comparison to American vendors, which are supposedly better. But here’s MS being every bit as bad, if not worse.
Foreign countries can, and should, stop using MS over this. Things like NDAA look pretty dumb in light of this behavior. The US’s technological dominance is somewhat at risk due to this crap.
Unfortunately, this problem somehow happened again on my current Windows installation. Maybe I forgot to remove OneDrive this time, or it was automatically reinstalled during some update.
[3] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/onedrive/how-to-disab... [6] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do...
Remember the thread from the other day in which someone asked how many video encoders Facebook should release before we forgive them for all the crap throughout the years?
> You're low on disk space. Storage Sense is freeing up space on your PC to help it run its best. Synced files that haven't been used recently will become cloud-only.
All of my family and friends get tricked by tactics like this. None of my family wants to use OneDrive or the cloud storage from Google / Apple for photos, etc., but their data always ends up synced to these nasty services.
How is it not considered predatory? Fine them a gazillion dollars and make the CEOs smash rocks with a children's hammer for the rest of their lives.
Edit: And how is that a "backup"? They're moving my files to their servers eventually. That's not a backup. That's theft.
You did nothing, and now it's all gone!
Luckily, google gives you the option to get all your data. So I asked for a download using Google Takeout, and as you might guess it's well hidden and makes it really hard to use - the backups can take days to be ready and I couldn't download the 150gb result in the first 5 tries, so I had to start all over (that's just random plain evil, as I didn't download 10mb even in those poor tries). But once I got it I felt safer. At least I would be able to access my mail in such an event.
Also, it's a really sobering experience. I went through the rabbi hole of checking every file and folder there. I wondered, what youtube video did I watch on 7.8.2014 at 3am?
This left me feeling empty realizing they kept every fart I did in the last 20 years. I know it's like this and everybody does that, but skimming through the data made it real. Like you know texting and driving is dangerous but when you see someone loses his life to this shit.. It's different.
The system is part of the problem not part of the solution.
Go re-write your own stack from the ground up to somehow end up with perfect social constructs, meanwhile I'll take advantage of the imperfect tools that can actually accomplish something today in the real world and not fall for the bs that I should scrap the 'good' because it's not 'perfect'.
Found ways to change it. Have no idea if I should. It's currently working and afaik OneDrive isn't slurping any data from it. There's no data to slurp other than savegames anyways.
But it still left a bad taste. I think my laptop is well supported by the major distros. I already know my favorite games work on Linux thanks to my Steam Deck. Having a strong urge to just abandon Windows for good.
I wake up all the time and find my windows laptop stuck at the boot screen because I’m not using the on-brand power supply. My lid is shut, but windows ignores that, and it installs updates anyway.
And then it asks you every time to sign in/up for MS bullshit. And the decline button is becoming harder to find.
Now if I try to reinstall OneDrive, it doesn't open when I try to launch it! I think it just gets trashed by all the changes I've made.
I guess I have to live with the OneDrive\Pictures and OneDrive\Documents folder forever, because they keep coming back when I delete them.
(I am somewhat loathe to reinstall Windows because just getting it installed on this laptop was a huge PITA in the first place, and it was extremely annoying getting all the ads & crap uninstalled)
e; actually wait, I may have been able to finish the job with the registry hack given here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do...
Bless you Rodrigo. Bless you
ee; this is another example of a phenomenon I see a LOT, which is that just complaining about something into the void is often a critical step to solving a problem.
I would recommend to only use Windows with a local account and without secure boot.
Fast forward 1 month later, we broke up, and I was still seeing her stuff popping on my computer, as "recently opened" in the file explorer, or "recommended" in the start menu. Since we recently broke up it was really affecting my mood to be constantly reminded of her.
I struggled for like 3 months to find the option to deactivate it. I even considered formating my computer. It really felt like a private space violation, like my computer wasn't even my own, and all that just with a naive email login followed buy a ton of implicit behaviors.
Imagine opening your file explorer and seeing the attached files of your ex's emails, updated live, it's a nightmare I swear.
This is why Louis Rossman started describing these behaviors as a “rapist mentality” of tech companies. It’s a violation of consent, an exploitation of their anti-competitive size (yes just their size is inherently a problem that distorts the market).
And whatcha gonna do about it? Run to one of the 2 or 3 other pimps who treat their bitches with equal contempt?
While he was no saint, this was something Steve Jobs emphasized - Let the people know about it and make the decision themselves. Many would probably be happy to do it but don't just force it.
My parents laptop is on a very limited mobile connection in which they do all their photography stuff on. This move would just chew through a years worth of their internet data in one swift move. Just an outright idiotic move.
But the staff has turned over and nobody remembers it anymore, so here we go again. (see also: The rise of Fascism worldwide as WW2 veterans die off)
That said, a Web Browser was/is a disproportionately significant application for the OS, where preferential defaults and bundling raise anti-trust concerns. Not so with a cloud backup option. TBH, Apple has been/remains equally annoying with iCloud integration/upsells on both OSX and iOS. And nobody cares.
As for Apple, no. Literally I get asked once about stuff and then never again.
I have no idea why the EU isn't going after Microsoft with a heavy club for all the crap they're pulling lately.
Did someone get a O365 license reduction or a nice dinner out. MS rep used to take me out to dinner in the 90s to get us to use NT+Visual Basic. Free dinner with asshats - worth it. We used Solaris in the end and Sun only gave us hats.
How can you penalise Microsoft for pushing OneDrive by default but not penalise Apple for iCloud? Should multiple backup providers be suggested at startup for economic fairness? Or should backups be disabled by default (potentially annoying consumers of mobile devices)?
Not saying it’s impossible for a skilled regulator to build a PC specific theory of harm but it’s hard. Potentially might need entirely new legislation.
Also, with iCloud being at the heart of Apple's ecosystem, a simple bug may very well cause accidental sharing of sensitive data. Even if that never happens, it does not make me sleep better.
I wish I could use parts of iCloud without all the crap that entails. But at least I can choose not to use it all.
All of them had an option to skip iCloud login during setup.
Of course, you have to log in to iCloud to use the app store to get OS updates. Since I'm not an Apple user, I don't know if there are offline options available.
What actually happens is a cycle. Things rise, things fall, things die.
On the initial upswing things tend to get better while profit and growth are aggressively pursued. Once market dominance is achieved, things tend to get shitty thereafter until someone topples the stagnant product.
This is a legitimate opportunity for Linux + hardware partners, if someone can finally realize they need to build and market to average consumers, rather than expecting average consumers to skill-up / knowledge-up just to use their software.
But the terrible UI/UX? I guess they saw they had to entice users to move by changing the look and feel, but didn't give the programmers enough time, so it was mostly unfinished garbage when it was released, and maybe still is the case.
On that note, I have Win11 and Office version whatever at work. I really fucking hate new Outlook, it's a garbage web app, the whole "NEW" label on the icon makes me always think "Oh I've got some new emails. Oh no, it's just Microsoft being fuckwits". Also, the UI for modifying email signatures is a confusing maze of unfinished UI.
They do crap like UI mixing (old and new versions existing together) because backwards compatibility is what got them the marketshare they have in the enterprise (well that and anti-competitive practices). At some point, to improve their products, they are going to have to break compatibility and just push forward, and yet they can't because that would immediately alienate a significant portion of their enterprise customers that rely on that compatibility to run old software from vendors that no longer exist, that are critical to operating some niche equipment - hell, it's not uncommon for me to see air gapped windows XP machines still in production running some critical workload.
So they're stuck because they both simultaneously need to move forward but also can't break the old stuff without screwing over their customers.
98 good, ME - bad, XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 10 good. Par for the course, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a bunch of refinement, and some changes rolled back for Windows 12.
*shrug_emoji*
Because on Windows, the CLI is used to circumvent the highly smelly patterns that Microsoft puts in your way to force you to act in a way that is financially interesting for them, even though you've paid for their shitty OS already
On Linux, the CLI (in a similar scenario) is used to... install the software. And you can probably use a GUI package manager depending on your distro.
Do you really not see the difference?
They are different points of contention and I think both of your points are valid - though only really linked via "CLI dickery".
You are correct that MS is being annoying, stupid and pushy and causes me to resort to CLI-dickery/regedit/service-disable/google-what-fucking-tickbox-to-untick-now to make it calm the farm.
Linux doesn't try to mess with my farm. But I only get 80% - 90% of a farm to start with and have to google "How to do/fix [XYZ],[abc] and [123]" and the answer is always CLI dickery. Last night it was "Use Vim to edit [this] file." Great, then I had to google how to use Vim. But wait, I only want to edit a file so use any file editor! But now I need it to run under sudo...
Both OSs have their issues and CLI dickery isn't going away. But with MS, I paid them so I feel entitled to have expectations as to product behaviour - especially when it keeps trying to change from what I bought.
And on Linux you use CLI to investigate why the hell a modern distro (Rocky 9) hangs up if you run anything more complex than a ping. Or just hangs up if you don't touch it at all, just a bit later.
ANd it requires 9 hard resets (thankfully there WAS an option to do them, it wasn't some desktop class machine an ocean away) and digging and digging what is exactly happening, why it happens and what magik incantations needs to be CLI'ed on this exact version of the distro, because other versions are reporting what everything is correct... yet the machine still hangs.
Source: just spent 4 hours in CLI dickery for that great, stable and unkillable operating system.
But of course, if MS OS - it's 'CLI dickery' but if Linux - then the only time you touch CLI is to 'dnf install magic'
And yes, the real difference is what for the most part you don't need 'CLI dickery' on Windows, so when someone argues for the Linux-like OSes as an a better alternative to Windows it doesn't sounds good.
Here are the exact steps I used: https://pastebin.com/nDnLBYg2
Anyway, real documents are written in LaTeX.
Windows lives in this in-between space where it isn’t as easy Google/Apple stuff, but it isn’t as good as Linux. That gap is always closing.
Tell me you've never had a job in the real world without telling me you've never had a job in the real world
Anyway if you want to edit word documents properly you have to unzip them and then write XML (eww). So this is the easiest option.
It's a lot more than just Office that requires Windows.
The world has certifiably lost its mind if this or any of the workarounds mentioned by the parent are acceptable to the baseline UX of a major paid OS.
At least Gnome only gets screwed up once every decade or so.
The same applies; are just not accessible to non-technical people.
Makes it easier to do minor little things like drive encryption as well.
Just stay away from the more consumer oriented product lines
Clause 3. may seem to permit it, but the privacy statement it refers to at
https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement
states "When we ask you to provide personal data, you can decline."
In this case the way it is described, there was no request for the personal data, and no opportunity to decline.
I think you'd need a lawyer to look at it further.
CFAA (a)(2)(C)
In many cases, couldn't this be argued to exceed authorized access to a protected computer?
I did also have a 2011 Macbook Pro until last year, it was used daily until the entire thing just packed it in one day in a spectacular fashion. Plugged a tablet in and the entire power system just failed. It was already on its death bed before that.
But I genuinely cannot figure out what Microsoft's vision for Windows 11 is. Or if they even have one beyond "idk, shove crap in, meet OKR, get promotion... maybe?"
For a while, it seemed like they were focused on making sure that they could link as much of your activity on your computer to you, as a person - witness the ever-increasing challenge of an offline-only account, which means the value of knowing the email address of the signed in user is substantial. And then they embedded ad delivery as a first class participant in the platform - the sort of crap that used to be common from people who installed Bonzai Dancer Cursor Free or such is now literally part of the OS.
... and then it's just gone weird. AI with Copilot, Recall, etc. There doesn't appear to be a coherent vision of what it is, beyond a place to shovel crap, deliver unwanted applications (that they get paid to shove at people, presumably), and install lots of updates.
Linux has problems, but there are no shortage of distros that just run apps, without delivering all your behavioral surplus up for collection, and that's what (IMO) an OS should be. Windows 11, from the outside, doesn't look like it's serving me. Except in the sense that it's focused on "serving me to Microsoft for further subversion of my will."
... and apparently Windows will now orange screen? Last time someone offered to let me touch a Windows machine, it orange screened in protest before I could even touch anything. At least the feeling is mutual.
The only thing left to do is to tank Windows and get rid of that legacy support burden once and for all.
An operating system for the common man (and hopefully a subscription revenue inlet).
We need to acknowledge that cloud backups are a good thing for most people, we're talking people who otherwise never take backups no matter what and then cry when they inevitably lose their data.
The only problems here are OneDrive is absolute roasted garbage with how it actually executes the concept and Microsoft account integration is far too fucking obnoxious.
Therefore, I have the right and moral obligation to break into your computer and upload all of your data to my own servers without your knowledge or consent.
100% agreed
I can't figure out who MS's target audience is for Windows now. They're losing marketshare to Apple in the casual home user market. Heck, based on my last two jobs, even developers are switching to MacBook, though I acknowledge that that's confirmation bias.
Technical users are happily switching to Linux or Mac.
That leaves who else? Gamers? They're still stuck on Windows depending on the games they play. Anything written in a cross-platform like Unity is fine, and Proton is getting better and better, and now even many anti-cheat software has a native Linux client, but some major games with proprietary engines still struggle under Linux. Hopefully more games start getting native Steam Deck support, which ends up making them Linux native.
But like...how many customers is MS going to burn for short-term gains?
Never attribute to stupidity what can better be explained by malice. Hanlon's razor hangs a lot of weight on that "adequately".
We know how valuable bulk data collection is, so why would Microsoft ever not mine it?
I wondered that also, before WSL. After WSL I think they're squeezing every penny out of Windows while preparing to transition to a hybrid OS which over time could become more and more similar to Linux, except for some MS closed source sauce (module, library, driver, ...) that would make some very popular app developed under it not run, or run slower|crippled on real Linux.
Regarding Win 11, this looks like thinking towards the next quarters engagement metrics. Who knows what change will occur for the next quarter?
It's extremely obnoxious that they've made it this difficult.
Don't connect to the internet -> Shift + F10 to bring up CLI -> OOBE\bypassnro
The out-of-box experience will restart, and you will have a button to set up with a local account.
You can also (or at least could, it's been a bit since I've tried this method) use a banned e-mail account when it asks for your Microsoft account.
[1] - https://rufus.ie/en/
It's not possible to install a local account any more. Apparently all the loopholes have been closed. It just loops you back to the "oops looks like you lost internet access" page.
I made a new account - installer<date>@outlook.com with no@thankyou.com as the backup email (which you have to give). Microsoft didn't like that, so it made me go through 10 minutes of captchas (captcas in the OS install - wtf)
Then it forced me to give it my birth date, ostensibly to check if I'm of age. Could just ask "are you older than 13" but then you don't get that sweet data.
Finally I booted into the OS, and I made a local account.
I spent 30 minutes going through the awful menus trying and probably failing to disable all the crap that sends all my data to Microsoft. Some of which can't be disabled in the Home edition.
Then I tried to delete my "installer" account. Oops, sorry, we have to "verify" who you are by sending an email to no@thankyou.com. Oh, you don't have that? No worries, just give us your real email address and we'll allow you to log you in after 30 days.
Then later I check my real name gmail account and there's a Microsoft email with a login code. I never gave MS this email address. What the hell??
This simply isn't true, I did a computer with Windows 11 Home 3 days ago with local accounts.
OOBE\bypassnro still works as expected.
When dozens of people say it still works and one says it doesn't, chances are the one person did it incorrectly.
It works.
It tried it, it didn't work.
I even disabled wifi in bios.
I didn't connect to Wi-Fi, I did OOBE\bypassnro, and I created my local account. Nice and simple. There are other people in this very thread who also had the same experience as me.
Sorry it didn't work for you. But it still works.
They said "It's not possible to install a local account any more.".
I'm sure you can understand why my own memories of just recently doing the apparently impossible thing will hold more weight -- to me at least -- than a comment saying the thing I just did is impossible.
That might not be super convincing to an outside reader, but for me the alternative is to conclude that I'm having a multi-day hallucination.
It'd be hard for me to pretend like the anecdotal evidence is equal in this situation.
Or that you didn't consider all relevant factors, like if you used the latest image like the other use did, as they asked?
That aside, the point is there are a ton of possibilities why it worked for you and not another user. Just because it worked for you and the other people reporting it did (and dare I point out some confirmation bias for you dismissing the other people saying it didn't) doesn't mean it still works universally or in newer/older or even different regional versions of an image.
You can take the win here, I probably used an obscure regional version from 1998 or something. To quote the OP: It's not possible to install a local account any more
FWIW, I don't doubt at all that you could create a local account. I have yet to move to 11 from 10 for my VM setup and want to avoid doing so as long as possible, so I've been sort of tracking the issue, as that they may remove it permanently is a slight concern and interest to me.
Forgot what it was (not Ms for once) which started discriminating against 124 year old people since you could not enter 01/01/1900 as a birthdate. Usually it's cut at 100 (I always say I'm born on 01/01/1900, there is no legal reason other than the "are you an adult" question)
If you use Rufus to create a usb disk from iso, one of the options is to create a local account automatically during install.
I was with you until that part - everything else seemed plausible and likely true. This one is a lie, I don't know why you felt the need to include it.
No idea how they associated it - possibly taken from my chrome login on previous install and then tied it with some combination of licence key, hardware id and IP.
I certainly never gave it to MS nor did I request the reset, nor did I log in to gmail on the new install.
Sure it could be random but come on, this is the first time I got it and it was just after I installed W11.
So we can just buy Pro and know we're getting an OS that we can configure instead of an OS that gets hijacked by Microsoft every single windows update cycle.
It seems like microsoft can do whatever they want to windows, and treat the users with as little disregard as they please - and there will be no consequences. Their users will either allow it, or jump through the config registry to disable the latest unwanted behavior.
[1] Read: "can be" [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescripti...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/i-wan...
Very, very frustrating for non-technical family members who can't find files in Documents or some other local hard drive location.
Is it possible to have an Apple account for apps and security updates, without iCloud? On iOS, the default login panel in Settings will sign into both iCloud and App Store. To avoid iCloud, one must use the App Store app to sign into "Media and Purchases", rather than using Settings.
I have a home desktop as well, and I don't find the work one much harder to use.
m$ finds a way to bring together the worst of everything together.
I'm not missing anything. I've got the newest Nvidia drivers and kernel which were all very easy to install and one search away to find instructions on how to do it. Everything is rock solid. No surprise dark patterns, no enabling/disabling of issues. I keep Timeshift backups of the last 2 days and one for last week and month. If whatever I am playing with on the system goes haywire, I just restore my system with Timeshift.
I've also been giving up on modern gaming, too much enshittification (loot boxes, engagement driven gameplay, messages for modern audiences, etc.) happening lately, but everything I've thrown at Proton ran great. I've been rediscovering the great libraries of retro gaming consoles, especially the DS and 3DS so my computer is actually a workhorse now and my gaming is single player retro bliss.
I still don't like being forced to log in with a Microsoft account as part of the set-up. I prefer to log in locally, and then incrementally turn on the cloud features. But I've voted with my wallet and have moved to Linux and macOS for day-to-day desktop computing. I still keep a Windows 10 VM around for when I need it, but am doing all I can to avoid the "modern" Windows desktop experience.
Whatever happened to just, I dunno, asking what to do?
> But I've voted with my wallet and have moved to Linux and macOS for day-to-day desktop computing
As did I about 7 years ago. Still have to use Windows servers at work, but I’m even supplanting many of those with Linux servers as and when I can
The whole issue lies within this assumption. Microsoft does not want you to use a local account, and they make it extremely difficult to setup your Windows machine without one.
Fun fact: The machine actually supports up to 96GB (2x CT48G56C46S5).
It doesn't mean, do not do the good thing - it means consider how to prevent the bad thing at the same time.
If you hate the design, don't let your arguments rely on a bad implementation of what you hate. Make them work with a perfect one.
I'm all in for automated backups, but let the user know that their entire user folder is gonna get synced and give an option to disable it (opt-out) on the OOBE. Make this optional and explicit.
I agree in general though, there are plenty of documents that really shouldn't be suddenly dumped to the cloud
Microsoft has all of the apis available to monitor changes on its own file system. Why does their solution seemingly run naive file comparisons to detect changes? What is it doing burning all of that computation time? Why does it struggle with tracking 100k files? A bubble sort written in Ruby should be able to handle 100k anything in seconds.
It's 300,000 file limit means pretty much no developer would risk it considering the thousands of files in a typical app.
Believe me when OneDrive lost a heap of my files this year I was not impressed to learn of this serious limitation. To be fair GoogleDrive and DropBox also have similar limitations.
Azure Storage on the other hand doesn't have the limitation, is much cheaper and much faster. It's UI sux though.
I'm still searching for a reasonable cloud backup solution. Until then cheap external drives are the answer.
So it looks like I’m in it for another Windows-issued flogging at least.
Mean time, they got all your personal files to train their AI on, didn't they?
This is basically the same. They want your files to start doing copilot in the cloud for you'
It doesnt work to keep your data even if you acceptbthe premise that they wont keep yourbdata.
The only issues I had were the version check of the Oculus installer (praise the soul on reddit who described how to bypass it with dnSpy), and some COD game refused to work on it too (too old, maybe it wanted a newer feature update).
That's it. For me, that's [unfortunately] the only "realistic" alternative out there, if one wouldn't mind the extra bucks, is somehow dependent on Windows environment and/or has no time to keep hacking and experiencing with Linux desktops.
I've grown to love Linux as a wonderful server OS, and as an occasional Desktop OS to play with on a VM. Unless you're a hacker (at both work and in your free time), it's hard to keep using Linux as a main daily Desktop OS.
Hey, Microsoft: If you want to turn Windows into a bigger cash cow, how about charging a yearly fee for security patches, but then leaving Windows just the way it is (ideally at around the Windows 7 or Windows 10 mark), instead of encouraging your most loyal users to despise your product and start fantasizing about otherwise-uncomfortable alternatives? In any case, it's now increasingly likely that I won't follow you onto Windows 11. But go ahead, feel free to jump off the cliff by yourself, if you insist.
I was desperate until I found an excellent multiplatform open source project for backups called Kopia!
Highly recommended, even entry level users can work with it.
I'd like to believe that we still can found politicians, govt officials eager to work for the public interest and against wealth of the corporations, their monopolies. But it seems almost impossible considering lack of significant and damaging to the monopolies antitrust proceedings in last 20 years. I'd assume there are deals behind public eye where govts turn, well, a blind eye - perhaps getting something valuable in return.
Is this really true? Does it never get reinstalled or enabled by a cumulative update?
# I am probably missing some. Hope they are not hard coded.
cat /etc/unbound/override/onedrive.conf
local-zone: "storage.live.com" always_nxdomain
local-zone: "onedrive.com" always_nxdomain
local-zone: "1drv.com" always_nxdomain
local-zone: "skyapi.live.net" always_nxdomain
local-zone: "onedrive.live.com" always_nxdomain
local-zone: "docs.live.net" always_nxdomain
local-zone: "odwebp.svc.ms" always_nxdomainEnshitification ensues.
I think there would need to be a concerted effort at a grass-roots level, say from r/buildapc, to get new PC gamers onto an alternative for there to be a considerable shift away from Windows.
Have you tried Steam on Linux? It works amazingly well, either with native Linux support in games or through Proton support (their Windows emulation layer). Quite a few people I know have gone that route and are shocked at just how well it works in practice.
* Go to app store (flatpak) and install Steam
* Launch and login to Steam
* Install Helldivers 2
* Launch the game. Done! Everything "just works"
A non-technical friend got a steam deck, when I asked what OS he’d used I got a response along the lines of “oh, I guess it must be Linux.” It the thought about what OS hadn’t even occurred.
The future is cool.
IME Wine is still hit and miss for applications in general, even old ones. Games are just a particularly good fit here—they rarely care how well your COM marshalling or shell namespace or transactional NTFS or weird SQL-like inside Windows Installer is implemented. Not to imply that getting games to work is a simple task, just that the API surface is much less spread out, and any emulation improvements for a single game are more likely to improve support for a wider range of other games.
My comments not really about whether it works, as we know it does, it's about how we go about getting the word out there.
VR works now. Screensharing and everything you expect with other operating systems works perfectly as well.
- someone hacks into Microsoft and accesses their files from onedrive (for passwords/blackmail-info I guess?)
- Microsoft looks at their files in onedrive and does something bad (not sure what)
- someone hacks into their computer and accesses their files. Or someone does so by causing the user to download something bad
- the user’s ssd fails or is corrupted because they have consumer grade hardware that is not treated particularly well, taking all their documents with it.
- the user accidentally deletes some important document (or eg drag-and-drops the contents of their document somewhere else and autosaves the now blank document, or they lose it some other way)
I think the benefits outweigh the risks for a lot of users for this change. I don’t know how onedrive works but one could imagine it working in a reasonably secure way by encrypting data at rest (secure keys on device would be nice but bad UX; key-derivation function probably better). IMO the real problem with the feature is typical big-company lack of coordination (the amount of free storage isn’t enough for how much people typically need, even right away) and lack of incentives to fix it (the increase in paying customers is probably worth a lot more to whoever caused this change than the increase in annoyed users due to drive-full warnings) and the idea that that people might pay Microsoft for more storage (that you can’t easily pay for remote reliable automatic backup storage when you set the OS up does not feel like a particularly big advantage of free software to me).
I think there are things not to like about this but it doesn’t seem to me to be the obviously terrible thing your comment suggests. Certainly it seems less bad than lots of other recent windows changes.
I don’t understand the point about users explicitly opting out (and that being switched?). I would chalk such a thing down to the kind of big company systematic nefariousness you get (no one needs to say ‘make it ignore the opt out’, they just implement a default wrong and don’t notice/fix/investigate the bug because KPIs increase)
This is the giveaway that you aren't saying anything in good faith.
> but I think you or I would probably consider such an action to be more deliberate than the average user doing that
Nice appeal to our superiority or whatever you want to call it, but this is irrelevant. The "average user" is no less deserving of the choice and naturally it's up to them to make the right one for them, not Microsoft.
Your whole argument is just diminishing the value of peoples consent.
For a new computer I think it looks something like:
1. Set up with your Microsoft account which you may need to create
2. Now, if you were already using onedrive, your files are synced from the internet. If you weren’t then the default contents (ie empty/trivial) are being synced.
I don’t really see that as the user making any explicit choice not to use onedrive and the default doesn’t seem very bad. It doesn’t feel terribly different from other defaults like windows defender or scanning for nearby WiFi networks.
But maybe there are alternatives that do feel more like the user making an explicit choice which the OS overriding that? Eg if you upgrade an existing installation or go through some ‘transfer from other computer’ process so that the directories being synced aren’t trivial. The OP didn’t mention such scenarios so I’m reading between the lines/guessing here.
Do you have some scenario where the user clicks some ‘don’t use onedrive’ button and has their choice overridden?
The problem isn't that cloud sync/backup is (or isn't) useful. It's that Microsoft isn't respecting users' agency to adopt it or not. If the product is indeed useful on its merits, then there's no need to turn it on by default or continually nag users who say "no thanks." And it's not like Microsoft doesn't have a history of underhanded moves to capture users into its ecosystem; see what happens when you search for Chrome or Firefox in Edge https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...
I think the big advantage of backups is that they’ll have been on for ages by the time you need them. That is, their main failure modes are:
- not backing things up because of some misconfiguration
- not backing things up because of running out of money/quota/having a card on file expire
- not having been set up
- deleting files you later want to retrieve
I think it’s actually somewhat hard to protect users from cases 2 and 3 without also ‘nagging’ other users. Causing a user to set things up could be a lot better for them than not setting it up because they quickly clicked through some screen during installation. There is some balance to be had and I think that as tech-savvy / high-literacy users, we should expect to feel like it is more on the nagging end of the scale than we would like.
Some of us use documents that should not just end up 'in the cloud' for various reasons including legal, regulatory or just 'I don't want Redmont to have copies of my kids pictures'. It does not even have to be that they do something bad to it. It is merely that the act of taking it without user permission is a major violation of trust.
And why do I need Candy Crush on my computer? Who knows better than me what I want my machine to do?
I think the bigger risk to people comes not from the consequences of actions like this but from this attitude. Who is in the center? Who has the freedom? The same goes for countries as well.
Is the complaint just that windows comes with a feature you don’t want? (Does this all come from being strongly pushed towards / requiring having a non-local account?) I think that’s a reasonable opinion to hold but it feels somewhat different from disliking candy crush being installed.
Perhaps I’m too stupid to be able to think about the abstract power-balance consequences of turning on onedrive by default, or of similar things.
Although US intelligence is probably happy about this.
Not saying it's a good or bad thing, but it's certainly an easy way to gather it.
I can understand them doing it.