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Comment by transcriptase | Hacker News Reader

Fun activity: install glasswire on windows for a day or 2, set it to prompt you before any connection is allowed, and watch as about 500 different windows components attempt connections with Microsoft as a result of any and every action. And how many onedrive exes randomly fire off throughout the day despite having never once used it. And how onedrive changes its version number every day when it realizes it can’t connect.

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You’re giving me ptsd of LittleSnitch + any Adobe (or microsoft) product.

You seriously can’t even use the machine without blanket, permanent approvals… the endless flood of network requests is paralyzing.

MS Office doesn't need permanent approval. I have Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Autoupdate and Update Assistant blocked from making any outgoing connection (on MacOS). That works for about a month, then I have to unblock briefly to let the licence check work. I don't use Adobe these days.

I got rid of both, not too long ago, but even trying to be careful about approving office chatter got me that read-only license check bar all the time. And getting rid of it meant clearing rules and blanket Approve for a time, or a flood of individual ones.

Also excising Adobe was not simple.

OneDrive is the most annoying of all the apps I never use that was installed alongside an app that I do use. Thankfully, I have now blocked it from notifying me that it can no longer connect to the mother ship.

Office apps no longer autosave unless you have OneDrive installed. So no autosave for me! Instead I save compulsively lie the days of floppy disk PCs.

(Meanwhile Emacs has had autosave since at least 1977)

Older office 2019 or 21 I think with massgrave.

Libreoffice.

I'm more and more relying less on office nowadays.

I remember when Adobe switched to default saving to your cloud profile rather than local. It took digging to get the default switched back to local. I know I'm old, but who wants to save large media files to a cloud like this? It's not like I'm working on a computer in one location, move to another computer entirely. Who sits at a computer to log out the cloud user just to login as yourself? You pop in a USB stick (or other storage) and use whatever account is logged in while saving back to the same storage medium. I know when you are a cloud SaaS, you want all the people to use all your things, but it always felt like a solution looking for a problem. That's a problem for me

Pack-in slopware and it's consequences have been a disaster for the desktop operating system duopoly.

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