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Comment by jcalvinowens | Hacker News Reader

> When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.

This happened to me too! It's absolutely insane that a license I bought through my account can't be transferred somehow...

My newest NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy, and I can reinstall on it repeatedly while keeping the activation, so at least we've got that going for us.

But after Proton, all the machines in my house exclusively run Linux. I sincerely hope I never touch a windows machine again for the rest of my life :)

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I so wish I could move to Linux, but I extensively use Windows computers via RDP and the Linux RDP clients are just so bad on my eyes. I tried Remmina, rdesktop and FreeRDP. Maybe NX would be a good option but I can't install NX on all of the computers I use. I guess I should shut-up and try to contribute to those projects to make them better.

Have you looked into Rustdesk? The setup isn't complicated, it's basically TeamViewer but local. It provided me with a way better quality than anything VNC based on linux.

I use Remmina all the time. It did take some tinkering but if you play with compression and bit depth settings, you should be able to get it working better. I think even cuddling with the encryption settings helped as well.

RDP worked flawlessly for me back when TSClient was still supported. Remmina and KRDC are always hit or miss.

When did you last try Remmina (which uses FreeRDP as the backend btw)? Ever since FreeRDP got updated to V3, the RDP experience improved significantly. I use it every day for work stuff and it's been great - folder sharing works, clipboard works, so does audio forwarding and DPI scaling. Oh and RemoteApps too. Honestly I've got zero complaints with it.

A couple of weeks ago. My employer provided a new computer which I loaded with Fedora. I found the colors on Remmina really saturated and harsh. I loaded Win11 because I really disliked it. But, I will try Fedora again since I need to reinstall Win11 due to an account problem I can’t resolve.

Strange. I use remmina heavily for RDP to Windows machines and have never had a notable complaint.

> NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy

There's some form of "BIOS-attached license". Don't really know how it works, but I've seen this for many years. Basically all PCs that have the Windows logo have that, and you can install windows on them as many times as you like, without ever having to enter a license key (I suppose this is limited to the same edition level - I've only ever tried this on "enterprise-level" machines that came with windows pro).

This even works for machines that originally came with windows 8 to install 10, and 10 -> 11. I've never tried "forcing" a win11 install on any machine that came with win8.

Yep, device activated vs user activated. It makes sense to have the option in large environments but they really screw end users on this stuff. MS licensing is insane, I have to deal with it at work, and it's unbelievably complicated. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

I run Linux at home too. Its annoying, but I sometimes need to run Windows in a WM for Word, as the online version is crap on large complex documents where formatting matters, and interoperability with colleagues keeps me from using LibreOffice Write.

Have you checked out OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice)? It's MSO file format compatibility is vastly superior to LibreOffice, I use it work on files shared by colleagues using MSO and it works fine for the most part.

The only issue I faced is with embedded ActiveX/VBA, like forms in a Word doc that might use radio buttons will get converted to static images. If you don't have weird stuff like that in your docs then you should be fine.

I have. Its not bad at all. I also agree that it has better file compatibility. The main thing I came across is that not all the features that I expect are implemented yet, at least in their powerpoint/presentation application.

Another issue that I face is that it is increasingly expected that their would be a shared Word document in OneDrive that multiple people can be working on simultaneously. Its really hard to win sometimes when the infrastructure is all against it. :(

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