I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC(extremetech.com) |
I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC(extremetech.com) |
I Will Never Click "I Consent" to the Popup We tailor your experience and understand how you and other visitors use this website by using cookies and other technologies. This means we are able to keep this site free-of-charge to use. Please click I Consent below to give us permission to do this and also to show adverts tailored to your interests and allow our third party partners to do the same.
I don't like this move either but you need an account to use a Mac, iPhone or Android and nobody seems to fuss about it.
So why only target Microsoft for doing what their competitors have been doing for a along time and why not protest against Apple and Google for making this practice the norm in the first place through their monopoly in the mobile space?
You can use Android without an account too. I have it set up that way on my phone, I use F-Droid and Aurora Store (in anonymous mode). I previously used MicroG which was amazing but I moved back to OxygenOS for other reasons. But even with full Play Services installed you can use them (and push notifications) without a Google account. It significantly cuts down on tracking doing that.
Android pushes a Google account heavily but it's not mandatory. You can't use paid apps then but the only paid Android apps I use (Nine Email and Cryptomator) provide a way to pay them directly and sideload it, using a license key. For which I thank them! It also shows that I'm not the only one wanting this, as they clearly see value in offering this option.
Only with iOS it's difficult as Apple is so difficult about sideloading. I don't use iOS as a result (except for work but only for testing).
And yes I protest against these practices.
How?
The initial boot makes this seem impossible.
I suppose one could avoid ads for AM by using some other music player, though.
> dir C:\Users\giantsfan123@yahoo.com\Downloads
Seems ridiculous to me.
The people who are MOST upset about this are the HN crowd. We're control freaks who are used to Linux, and the thought of Microsoft making us log into their filthy servers to run our own PCs maddens us.
So yeah, ReactOS may become a viable techie OS at some point. I encourage everyone to contribute to it if possible, as it is open-source.
My business depends a lot on Azure AD. A couple months ago, Azure AD went down for several hours worldwide. It was a wakeup call that SLAs can be broken and that the vendors are usually not transparent regarding the uptime of their platforms (the status pages are always green!).
One case in point would be: If that business happens to be located in the E.U. where GDPR prevents employers from exposing their employees to privacy liabilities of this sort. For example GDPR is already a major stumbling block to the adoption of Office 365 by european business, which is why many are using ancient versions of office, microsoft-alternatives, or are using Office 365 but without being able to really sleep all that soundly, hoping that employees won't sue and privacy regulators won't act. The legal position, however, is quite clear.
Using linux as HAL and Wine as a compatibility layer has a much greater chance of ever becoming mainstream.
There's a difference between "supported" and "possible." Add a layer of marketing and UI magic and you get a lot of confusion.
Edited to add: Just because it's a new OS, doesn't mean the guts of the thing went through huge changes. The ways you create an account is probably the same from 10 to 11. It's just the GUI which is changing.
Things are fine in here as long as you stay in line and stick to the rules.
- What happens if your Microsoft account gets blocked (rightfully or wrongfully)?
- What happens if the next Windows update, Microsoft "helpfully" activates onedrive sync of your folders by default and exfiltrates your data? (HTC did this to me before with their Sense UI).
- Maybe the latter leads to the folder if OneDrive syncs some copyrighted data to their service they think you're pirating?
That doesn't make sense and isn't how signing into windows with a microsoft account works now.
> What happens if your Microsoft account gets blocked (rightfully or wrongfully)?
A microsoft account that was created to set up a computer and then never touched again?
> What happens if the next Windows update, Microsoft "helpfully" activates onedrive sync of your folders by default and exfiltrates your data? (HTC did this to me before with their Sense UI).
> Maybe the latter leads to the folder if OneDrive syncs some copyrighted data to their service they think you're pirating?
Seems a little farfetched to me. I'd rate it on a similar level of risk to apple requiring me to create an id if I want to use any apps on my iphone.
... don't then. I thought I read Pro editions will still let you use a local account?
I manage hundreds of Macs at work, and Apple is always pushing us to use VPP (Volume Purchase Program). However, most of the apps we need are not in their store at all, so there is no point. And their 'federated' accounts don't work for us due to arbitrary limitations on Apple's side (Specifically: The UPN must be equal to email). I really don't want every user creating their own account which we don't manage. It's messy for support and the latest Macs lock themselves to the user's account so we can't recover it when it's returned (Activation lock). Also, because all those accounts have to be manually cleaned up if we ever do move to federated accounts. So I've set everything up to not use Apple accounts at all.
So yes my objections have been made clear to Apple. And this is on the work side even, in my personal scope I'm even more against this.
Not sure if "here" would help in any way, as when it comes to bigcorp-versus-small-guy, HN is basically an echo chamber.
Also, I've once heard that Apple employees are discouraged from reading internet forums. That's probably why we never see them here.
Kudos for complaining to Apple directly, though.
Well, I would never let my employer dictate what I do in my spare time. I'm sure they're here!
They're probably forbidden to reveal themselves as Apple employees though. Apple is really strict on that stuff. They love their NDAs.
But I don't think it affects Apple directly discussing about it here, no. Agreed.
People gets discouraged from working with these companies, meaning they have to raise wages meaning it is easier for others to compete :-)
Good for semi-anonymous browsing for instance, also because fingerprinting of the browser looks the same as a bunch of other iOS devices.
The current trend is making "personal computers" less personal.
I just can't imagine a team of smart techs cheering this on with "Great idea!"
What pressures transpire to induce really smart teams to make such extravagantly poor decisions? It's a mystery.
I.e. this runs counter to hardware makers goals.
At this point why not just make the OS free ? I actually like office 365, by far it's the easiest way to backup my data
lol... until they lose your data (like Canon cloud service), until they increase subscription cost heavily or block access to your account (e.g. due to "ToS violation".
Good luck
Some commenters report heavy dark patterns when trying to create a local account, but the experience is somewhat less burdensome on the “Pro” edition of Windows 10. If I recall correctly, I was immediately given the option to choose between an “online” vs “local” account after install. I opted for the local account and then immediately disabled all of the telemetry.
I have to recheck telemetry settings after updating to make sure they haven’t sneakily re-enabled it. I recall at least one time the existing settings were still disabled but they added a new telemetry setting which was enabled by default after an update.
For the average consumer it is likely that a MS account is a good path. No different from connecting your iPhone to the App Store and iCloud, which most consumers do.
For the average consumer such things as automatic updates and some degree of management is a good thing.
Profesional and enterprise users are a different matter. In this case what is being presented here is a nonexistent problem. If a professional or enterprise user can’t figure out how to install and run Windows with the degree of control they desire, well, they might not actually be pro users. Using Hone edition? Please.
This is not a problem.
Something to gripe about for fun and entertainment? Sure. Have a blast. A problem? Nope. Never has been and never will be. MS has always provided professional users with the flexibility they require. Not doing so would destroy their business.
The Windows 11 changes will enable this plan by tying every computer to a real identity and using that identity to watermark all content.
I'm switching to Linux.
You do it by serving corporations, owned by a few of the ultra wealthy, who have captured all the economic productivity gains that MS-like software has brought the world economy.
My fear is that Microsoft is going to wreck it all in a fit of mindlessness. I wrote them a letter when they were in danger of impulsively stealing TikTok. So many of us depend on their products that we’d be devastated if they destroyed their ecosystem for no good reason. (Someday Microsoft may need to pick a fight with the CCP, but it had better do so for a good reason.)
This is what free software people have been warning against for decades now, and yet governments and big structures still willingly give their hands to be tied instead of allocating some funds to the development of solutions that don't have this problem and would be far more cost-effective in the end.
When will the world wake up?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
That's nearly 25 years old. Fortunately we can still use Free operating systems on at least desktop and laptops, but if you choose to use proprietary software, you get what you get.
Like, what we also warn about the fact that a majority of people on earth directly or indirectly depend on projects like, I dunno, coreutils, openssh and what not which receive fuck-all funding.
Don't you think you are already devastated by that dependency?
This still does not work properly for me when mapping SharePoint drives. (Since going fully remote this is is the only type of mapped drive I use.) Every once in a while I need to open up the SharePoint URL in Internet Explorer in order to get the drives working.
They do try to encourage you to log in with an Apple account, but they don't seen to use dark patterns to do this. You can use a Mac without one but you will miss out on the store and any iCloud feature... but the machine still works fine.
There is an "allow your Apple account to unlock your local account" feature, but again no dark patterns. You can just uncheck it.
At the same time, I worry this might mean I may no longer be able to work from home, if my employer "upgrades" to Windows 11 and introduces some dependency on it. I guess if this happens I may need to accept commuting for two hours a day, again.
"Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified."
I guess this mining technology requires the mining user/body to be connected to the internet, hence this move by Microsoft to require an active online account facilitates to role out this patent technology.
[1] https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...
At work I’m constantly updating registry to take videos, pictures etc out of my explorer window. Fracking clueless. Why should any of this be in Windows Pro is beyond me.
Otherwise, I can't see, how this masquerade of pretended ownership may continue.
maybe its just a matter of time before the pendulum swings back and we get really cool hardware repatriated to homes / desktops offering features that would be suboptimal in a thin client setup (due to latency, privacy etc)
Gone are the days where you bought something from a shop with no stickiness other than good service brought you back. Now there are far too many Marketing Managers who see stickiness as a win, even though the win is only to the supplier and not to the customer.
It is similar to those web sites who ask you whether you want "notifications" from them in your OS! Nope.
And the whole time you better give them accurate information because if they ever lock your account you'll be expected to send photo ID so they can verify it.
The next step is subscriptions. The entire point of forced logins is because that allows them to build future features as subscription only. Think about how online SaaS works and how everyone eventually switches to a subscription product by keeping, but abandoning the existing service and building all new features on a subscription model. With everyone forced to log in Windows is essentially a SaaS. They're just not charging for it. Yet!
Remember when you could get a free custom domain on Outlook.com or GMail? Anyone on those services was allowed to keep their stuff, but huge effort has been made to devalue and de-market those historical accounts. Microsoft shut down the entire admin side of things and Google excludes them from most new features.
Get out your wallet. Prices are going up.
It's my pet theory they just randomly lock accounts without ID on file so you have to upload ID to unlock it, which is apparently now required for new accounts. Because that's the only thing that worked because they have no support.
If you want this you can still have it, you just need to follow a simple rule:
Absolutely no non-free non community maintained software ever period.
Essentially, the problem is that the software is made to fit the developers needs, not the user needs. If they both have the same needs, that's great, if they don't most people are better off with a commercial solution.
Also keep in mind that in most major free software, the "community" is mostly for-profit companies that want the software to fit their own needs and they have no money to spend for anything else.
This is free software working as intended, and in some cases (like Linux), it works really great. But it is not a silver bullet and proprietary software still is the best answer in some cases.
---
Do you mint your own hardware as well? The problem with hard rules is there's numerous exceptions when it doesnt make sense to follow, invalidating the "rule" all together.
What’s different is the community pushes back on annoying examples where customers are mostly stuck with that they purchased and don’t have a say.
For example, using Apple Music was the default for the HomePod. Using any other music service was clunky (coincidentally or deliberately).
Another point is the Apple Watch. Switching to an Android phone would mean getting rid of two devices.
The reason it is wrong is the extreme power imbalance between you and the service provider. No matter how independent you are, or how much time you are willing to spend (another highly unequal resource), their ability to force others to use their system might also coerce you into using it as well.
Once Apple/Intel/Microsoft normalize requiring TPM-verified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module OS booting, this dark pattern will become even more oppressive.
Of course I will also not use a MS account to sign into my PC. Ridiculous thought.
It does not matter how many bad things a company can do, people simply doesn't care.
Around 1-2 years ago, I upgraded MS Office on my Windows laptop. It asked me for my username/password-- which I didnt think strange, as I assumed it needed it to upgrade.
And thats when I got a message "Good news! Your Windows machine now uses your Microsoft to login."
W.T.F.
I was never asked, never warned, just tricked into replacing my local login with an online one.
Took me 10-20 minutes of Googling to get my original setting back.
I have now turned off ALL updates for Windows-- it is my backup machine, for a few programs that only run on Windows.
Every update on Windows scared me (and still does), as I dont know what dark pattern they will try this time.
I have no reason to believe that Microsoft will not pull a Google and start spuriously locking people out of their accounts (as happens every few months on HN), which may then prevent me from logging in to my own computer.
In fact, I've already been locked out of my Microsoft account for "suspicious activity" (which was literally just purchasing Minecraft) and was required to enter a phone number to unlock it. Literal theft - I was compelled to either give up additional personal information or lose access to the software I paid for.
Got an answer to the question though, so thank you anonymous internet stranger. I wish I could confirm that your solution worked...
Product companies should take note, I'd probably own a few more electronics if they didn't require that consumers 'create an account' or associate an email address in order to use the thing.
Having used Microsoft OSes since DOS, this was the straw that finally broke the camel's back.
After dabbling in Linux for years, this was motivation to commit 100% to using Linux as my main OS. It was mildly painful at first, but after sticking with it, I would never go back.
I can understand from a company perspective that this kind of thing reduces piracy (and losses for a $2tn company), potentially improves the Windows upgrade route in future, and has minor benefits to some customers (cloud storage + 'take your account anywhere').
But there's exactly zero technical reasons to push this onto customers.
I mostly use Linux all the time now so it won't be a problem to completely ditch Windows, but it's a shame that it's come to this.
It feels like they just want that sweet recurring Office 365 and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate revenue, and they'll effectively give you Windows to get it.
Last I checked, you can still use an old used Windows 7 key to activate 10 on a brand new motherboard. They could stop it, but they don't make more than a token effort.
I guess data is the next billion dollar department in Microsoft, and this is them harvesting even more of it.
Yes, you will. Eventually. They'll continue to beat you down until you submit. Because, here's the secret. Even though you built the machine from the ground up, hand selecting all the parts, once you install Windows, the machine belongs to Microsoft. No, really, it does. They certainly think so. And they're a rich powerful organization, so it must be so.
And no, I am not going to remember that, or change it to something simpler. (Yes I know about entropy and correct horse battery staple!)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sign-in-to-your-...
I don't know the actual answer because I don't work for Microsoft but I'm lazy enough to assume it is about money. Its financially rewarding for Microsoft to have hordes of Home users online. That telemetry is valuable. Those eyeballs are valuable. That level of engagement is valuable. Its telling that Pro and Enterprise versions operate without the same level. Home users always online is worth Microsoft either enforcing or in the very least "encouraging" this state.
That is a sufficient theory for me. I might not have the full picture but its accurate enough to form opinions and predict Microsoft's future behavior. I'd expect multiple pathways around leveraging that online presence even further. You haven't seen anything yet. This is just the beginning.
Knowing every user is signed in and authenticated means they can develop new features as a (connected) subscription service. They can attribute usage and bill you for it. That's what it's about IMO. All new features, even ones that should be part of the core OS, will eventually be subscription services. I bet anyone using a free account will be getting their last feature update when they install Windows 11.
I've seen the exact scenario play out over and over with SaaS. Windows with forced logins is essentially SaaS and they can use the same dirty tactics to make you pay forever if you want a usable product.
It could backfire with an OS though. I'd be pretty excited for a version of Windows that doesn't get any new features or have any "online" features.
- Screen tearing. I Googled around and installed the Nvidia drivers for my laptop, but it never went away.
- No detection of tablet mode.
- No auto screen rotation.
- Slow Blender rendering. Probably a PEBKAC with my driver setup, but it just worked in Windows and it was easy to select Nvidia vs. integrated graphics.
- MS Teams shared my desktop as a giant blur.
- LibreOffice is still bad and incompatible with what my company does in Office, though that may matter less with Office Online.
Is there a distro that Just Works more so than Ubuntu? I'm sure I could have solved all of the above with enough time and effort, but I'm not in a good position to do that right now.
Short of not connecting to the internet first the only way I saw where it was possible to create an offline account was to first attempt to sign in using an incorrect password with a hotmail account. It was only after failing that where an option appeared to create a local account.
It doesn't stop there too. Now once in a while when they turn the machine on and reach the login screen, there's a big banner that says something along the lines of "Hey, you're missing out on very important features and are less secure by not registering an account with Microsoft..." with a call to action to link a MS account. This also hides the login screen by default and the only way to ignore that and get to the login screen is to click somewhere in the empty space but for a non-technical user this isn't intuitive. They always try to click the only thing that looks clickable. It's so shady.
Sadly I had to make a MS account for them in the end to unlock Windows "S" mode into a regular version of Windows 10 Home so I could install an app that wasn't in the app store on their machine. The only way to do that was to make a MS account for the Microsoft Store but fortunately you can still login to Windows itself with the offline account. It never ends.
Yes, these decisions annoy myself and most users on this site, but we are in the minority here. Most people do not care and just want to be up and running. They want security/configuration to be easy. They don't want to have to think about it. I think that a lot of this will be good in the long run for security.
This started as a very simple, creative game for kids, and now the only way to play is to enter through the gift-shop. Minecraft was already one of the best selling games of all time. Is it really necessary to constantly expose 8 year old kids to aggressive marketing to maximize profits?
In this case it was the Switch version of Minecraft.
No indication whatsoever that (what I consider to be) a totally unrelated signup would be needed to collaboratively play the (very expensive) Switch game.
In my case, a bunch of kids needed to wait while I attempted to create a Microsoft login with my private email address (yes I buckled - unfortunately explaining privacy to an expectant and impatient crowd of eight-year olds isn't realistic).
But then I found halfway through the process, that I'd somehow used the same email for Skype many years ago, and the password was naturally long-forgotten - blowing that signup attempt.
Not fun to need to create a new email account, and go through the whole signup and login flow all over again, just to play a game that's been sold as a self-contained entity for a totally different non-Microsoft platform.
What price do I set on my privacy and control? vs What price do I want to pay for inconveniences?
Privacy is a value (abstract) and inconvenience is a concrete experience (concrete). Many people find it easier to reason about concrete experiences then about abstract notions.
Edit: Thanks @yourusername, I had missed the part where it's only for the home edition. I'm glad there is still a way.
Then also owned a macbook pro 2018 with mojave, that crashed every 2 days like ol' windows. switched to ubuntu for my thinkpad, still hibernate wasn't reliable. end up putting win 10 pro on the thinkpad, n stability from hibernation is amazing. it feels like the old os x.
so yeah, win 11 for me is a moot point - no need to upgrade
You created this problem. You kept buying Windows when they added telemetry, ads and other forms of privacy invasion, so you emboldened to go one step further. And when they are done with this they will invade your privacy more and more.
If Facebook can require Facebook login for the Oculus then Microsoft can require Microsoft Login for Windows. It works. You made it work.
If wolves accept the convenience of eating leftovers from human camps what is the worse that can happen? Yeah, they got domesticated. That just happened to you. By using a Microsoft account now you are living inside Microsoft's data farm as marked cattle.
It is not your computer anymore. You gave computing away by being complacent just like the wolves were.
Your decisions matter, and your decisions have consequences.
I bought a Dell Latitude E5450 for 350 eur about 2 years back. It was used but looked new. It came with Win 10 Pro, which sits on my NAS as a gzipped bit for bit copy now.
Everything works out of the box on Ubuntu 20.04 and will continue to work until it dies far from now. I can open the thing up and replace everything I would expect I could replace (inc battery). It's all I need speed-wise. If the kids drop it I won't cry. Fun fact: When I play MineCraft with my son (I do it from my work Win 10 computer), he has has booted, started MineCraft and dug a hole to bedrock before I even get to click on the MineCraft icon. The thing is fast and snappy and remains so.
I made accounts for both kids and they can do many things themselves, perhaps because the UI looks more like an iPad than Windows does (i.e., hit the menu and a grid of icons fly in to fill the screen.)
I'm dreading the day they ask for a local install of Office365 though... Or something like Adobe's tools. So far my oldest is 8 and it hasn't happened.
I googled something like "how to get more fps in minecraft" and the first result was a minecraft forum post to which the only response was "install Ubuntu". At the time, Ubuntu had a .exe installer, so I thought it was just like any other program and installed it to my C: drive along with everything else. I think I did have the concept of other OS since I'd used both Windows and MacOS previously, so I figured it out after the reboot. It did increase my minecraft FPS from ~15 to ~30 on average, so I didn't have any complaints.
I stuck with that laptop until high school, when I got a new laptop and started dual-booting Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else, which is where I'm at now.
While Mojang made efforts, the premise of the Java version was unrestricted server community and that remains the dominant paradigm.
Not everything should be for kids, not saying “think of the children” and use Win10 or iOS, just commenting on a less known value-add of a Microsoft Account for Minecraft parents:
How does Minecraft keep my child safe?
With the Better Together update now out on Windows 10, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, and recently Playstation 4, any parent or guardian can rest comfortably knowing that there are a few systems in place to keep their child safe. [And able to cross play with friends on any of those.]
If your child is playing the Java Edition of Minecraft then they're still being protected by all the great features Mojang has baked into the legendary game. However, the Java Edition of Minecraft does not require Xbox Live integration since it does not support crossplay with other devices, and therefore loses out on many of the parental control features parents enjoy elsewhere.
If your child is playing Minecraft on PC, it might be worth getting them the Windows 10 version instead. It's always on-par with every other platform for new features and updates, supports crossplay between platforms so your child can play with more of their friends, and can be moderated by Xbox Live and Microsoft Account parental controls. That's a win-win-win.
https://www.windowscentral.com/minecraft-guide-how-keep-your...
// Note that summer camps tend to require the Bedrock version and Microsoft account for this reason. It’s possible to get interop, unofficially, e.g.:
BedrockConnect: https://github.com/Pugmatt/BedrockConnect
Geyser: https://github.com/GeyserMC/Geyser/wiki/Supported-Hosting-Pr...
Probably not, unless you are a gamer.
I did something similar with my last linux laptop, and none of the workarounds to put the partitions back worked when I needed a quick windows test machine.
Source: built a new PC a few weeks ago and naively assumed they'd just give me a product key or ask how I wanted to receive it.
I forget what my last straw was, but I went full Linux for all of my home computers around 2012 or so. At the time it bricked a piece of novelty hardware for me which I later ended up selling anyway, and that was not a hard choice to make.
My life has been so much better.
I segregate my usage of Windows and Mac OSs to work. I enjoy my OS sanity when at home.
They were using S mode because it's impossible to disable without logging into a Microsoft account first.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...
My favorite thing about Linux is that it does what I tell it to, and that's all it does.
The "we'll protect you, but you need to login and install everything through our store" paradigm is an awful trade, in my opinion.
Updates could remove old Windows applications I had installed, change the default application association, or just break the installation. Every warning that I thoughtfully chose to dismiss came back with every update. Don't like to integrate your AV with the cloud? We will make sure you to warn you on every. single. update.
It felt like I didn't own the system nor that I was the administrator of it.
All this made me switch to Linux permanently. It made me take the steps from dualboot, VMs and experimentation.
For those few times per year when I need Windows, I connect a separate disk with Windows, boot it up and do my thing.
Usually the next time I come back to the computer, Windows has forcefully rebooted back to Linux. Thanks.
If Windows 11 requires an account, I guess I'll stick to my old Windows 10 installation until it stops working. Hopefully I won't need Windows for anything by then.
I would love to switch back in response to this. Unfortunately, I've since transitioned to working fully remote and I worry using Linux for my work might not be viable.
the last straw for me was one time when i had 10 minutes to kill before i headed out the door, so i sat down to do stuff on my computer, but when i turned out in it decided it wanted to update, and took most of the 10 minutes to do that. so dumb
using seamless mode in virtualBox is pretty neat too
Oh you don't know how good we have it. You just wait until Pluton comes out. Right now there is always a patch, a registry hack or some kind of modification that makes everything bearable. With Pluton you are 100% at the mercy of MS.
I won't be party to this BS, this isn't the future I wanted to facilitate.
However - you're right. Whenever I want to play a video game, there's a 90% chance I have to use Windows to do it. So now I keep two computers - one for gaming, one for everything else. Each time I log into the gaming computer I'm reminded how much Windows sucks.
I just feel really bad for the average computer user who knows intuitively this is wrong but doesn't know how to do things like install linux or have the money to purchase an Apple machine.
I think you're vastly overestimating the average computer user here :) Most will make no meaningful distinction between a local account and an online one. If they could sign into Windows with their Facebook account they probably would.
Being on KDE means I am ahead of Windows.
Using MS Teams in ungoogled chromium for maximum privacy works.
I have no experience with Nvidea drivers, but I see a lot of hits at disabling the Nouveau driver. But again, this might be solved with running a more recent kernel.
It's not as simple as Windows, but my time investment to read the release notices is minimal. An other benefit is that your system doesn´t slow as your os install ages.
Aside, don't expect switching OS-es to be a walk in the park. Most things will work as good as on windows. You'll probably have to do some custom configuration for your laptop. Tweaks for your specific laptop model will be documented on the arch wiki.
This is quite a bold statement. I'm not a developer and recently installed a number of linux distros to try which is best. Some of them were actually easier to install than Windows or MacOS. For example Linux Mint was a breeze, and I used full disk encryption and other 'advanced' settings.
I say this from the bottom of my heart as someone that loves Linux: If you have a laptop with Nvidia graphics - don't bother trying to run Linux. The experience is just miserable.
There are two major things in the way:
1) Nvidia's drivers themselves are not very good and present day-to-day problems (like screen tearing and other artifacting), especially when trying to use Wayland (the next generation window manager on Linux). This may be fixed soon, Nvidia has been finally laying the groundwork for better compatibility with Wayland desktop. Alternately, if all you need is X11, then go ahead and don't bother with Wayland, which sidesteps this problem nicely. But if you have a higher DPI display and want decent display scaling, or ever plug into an external display, unfortunately Wayland is a necessity, and currently, it's miserable with Nvidia.
2) Power management/graphics switching is a miserable experience. There is prime render offload, but it's not very intelligent. Which means you have to remember to start applications with a flag every time you want to use the Nvidia GPU, which introduces all kinds of bugs. Alternately, you can just leave the Nvidia GPU as default, but that introduces more bugs (for instance, on my XPS, it killed my audio because somehow the Nvidia GPU took over audio output and after months of trying, I still couldn't fix it). Furthermore, it completely drains your battery. This is something that is almost certainly not going to be fixed.
On desktop, Linux is 95%-99% usable. On an Intel or AMD laptop, it's the same way. But on a laptop with Nvidia graphics, it's just not worth the headache. There's no complete solution, there's only tradeoffs.
That said, I recommend openSUSE Leap as an OS, because I find it's the best of all the tradeoffs. It's very stable, there's a corporation behind it that needs to keep it running. The release cycle is nice for desktop. YaST makes things very easy to manage the PC. The only real "tradeoffs" are that you need to install AV codecs from a community repository, and Nvidia drivers from a community repository (both are easily enabled through YaST).
The trade of is that you have to love it or hate it because you can barely change anything, but it deserves to be loved. I'm back to Windows for an undetermined span of time but I'll gladly reinstall ElementaryOS as soon as I can probably pay for it.
I think it’s an excellent choice for a standard desktop or laptop.
However, moving from Ubuntu to Manjaro (KDE Plasma) based on recommendation from someone on HN, oh it almost /just works/ without issues. There's just little gotchas along the way but atleast it doesn't make me want to tear my hair out like Ubuntu flavours do.
Recommend a simpler laptop that is well known to work well with Linux. There are resources out there to determine how well Linux will run on it before purchase.
Well, Microsoft are getting rid of tablet mode in Windows 11, so soon it will be at parity :p
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoi...
I use Ubuntu, but don't do anything heavy graphical, so don't have those issues you're mentioning and it works great for me.
zorin os is another one to check out. ui is more like windows and i think it has a tablet mode
it's supposed to be "ubuntu-based", but the usability difference between the two is night and day.
Forcing them to log in with a MS account allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices. For one thing, both those devices pretty much require an online account as well. And they contain far more sensitive data.
But more importantly, they also provide frictionless backups, syncing, and a whole host of online services as table stakes, and MS wants to do the same.
This. 100 times.
The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.
Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.
We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.
The online account option let's MS provide these services. Forcing the account prevents users from opting out. Even on iOS, it is possible to use an iPhone without an Apple account. An iPhone b without an Apple account is severely handicapped by the inability to sideload apps. On Android it is not hard to set up an account without logging in to Google.
MS could (and should) allow the same.
The objections are more abstract, as in "it's my bloody computer, allow me to do what I bloody want!" Well... Microsoft says no apparently.
I haven't looked particularly into the differences between 'normal' Windows 10 and the other tiers but in the past, 'professional' versions were actually missing things (codecs etc.) that you'd want on a general usage PC.
Microsoft ships Bitlocker with every OS and given the TPM requirements one can speculate that it will be turned on by default on every Windows 11 computer.
I've seen an increase of tech support posts where people boot up their computer after an update or motherboard change and they're asked for Bitlocker decryption keys and they don't know what those are. Their data is lost forever. Their computers are bricked.
The experience of working in IT and modding online tech communities has taught me that computer literacy is very poor even among those who use computers every day. They're just appliances to most people. And this is OK. The problem is that the people who can't figure out what a right click does will never figure out how to back up their full disk encryption keys or even what they are.
Forcing a Microsoft account on Home SKUs eliminates this problem.
Of course, people will create less-attributable accounts.
Teams seems like a big bet for Microsoft, so that's one reason.
What do you mean it does not makes sense? I am not using MS login myself but saying it doesn't make sense is ridiculous.
It's exactly same as what Apple does.
As for people who say it's required on Windows: It's not. You can create local account during setup, the link is there once you cancel your online login. It's hidden at first, but it's there. You don't even have to disconnect your internet or anything like that. Shit move by MS (dark UI pattern) but it is totally possible.
Same with their email service, where you can register an account without issues and after a few weeks of use I was presented with an unskippable input field for my phone number. Don't want to give MS your phone number? Too bad, better hope you don't need those emails anymore.
It's insane. Every I reinstall windows and try to download Firefox, the number of times Microsoft pleads to continue using Edge is increasing.
Like, look, I don't want or need to give you my phone number, capiche? Try Tinder and get off my case. Thanks.
Any of these possibilities would be nice:
* The market presents a kinder (and equally-affordable x86) solution and users follow.
* ReactOS lurches leaps and bounds ahead.
* Microsoft realises this trajectory is wrong and rows back.
* Everyone wakes up and realises that Stallman was right.
For the foreseeable, none are likely. What we really need is something to go horribly wrong that demonstrates practically why remote control and data collection of your own system is a bad idea. That will be the only way the point is driven home for the passive masses, unfortunately.
Non-technical users want a stable system that doesn't constantly change. Windows loves to hit you with popup notices or UI changes where if you take the "ok" route things about your system change, or you accidentally click a notification that comes up and suddenly your browser is changed or worse. They also don't want to turn on their machine and have to wait 30 minutes for an "important update". They just want to turn their machine on and have it be exactly how it was yesterday.
A non-technical person I know thought he was hacked and wanted to buy a new computer because a shortcut icon was moved from his desktop to his recycle bin and he thought someone wiped out his computer. Now in Microsoft's defense they didn't delete his shortcut, but that's the type of mindset non-technical folks have. The slightest change is a catastrophic event.
I'm joking but secretly hoping it happens.
* The FTC actually does its job and takes action against Microsoft for antitrust violations.
The web as an open platform is a dev manifesto; for everyone else it's just a glorified entertainment and information hub, and making it safer and easier for them is what the market wants. Not more openness, but less of it, because less openness means less cognitive mode. They don't want to think about 100 ways to do the same thing, each with a different license and complex venn diagram of incompatibilities. They just want to get on with their day.
"If something goes horribly wrong"... even in that case, the vendors are less likely to fuck up than most users. Google/Apple/Microsoft clouds are much better at keeping data safe against device failures and ransomware than local Windows installs managed by average users ever were or could be.
If anything the future is really dumb computing, where the internet is just another appliance not too different from your radio or the television. Apps with corporate content hubs, not open platforms.
Computing as an open platform was due to the industry by and large being created by engineers. Now with mass adoption, we're seeing a switch to producer vs consumers, with different paradigms/devices/needs for each, like the differences between magazine publishers and readers. Readers don't care what software was used to create a magazine, they just want to pick it off a newsstand and read it. Same with digital entertainment; the underlying stack shouldn't be their concern if their intended usage is simply content consumption. Windows adds only unnecessary complexity to their usage. Stallman is not an average user, and it would be a massive disservice to humanity to design for the average user as though they were Stallman.
Not all freedom is beneficial. Sometimes it's just yet another useless decision to have to make in a world already overflowing with excess information. The human brain did not evolve to make careful cost-benefit analyses for every trivial thing in a post-internet world.
Even devs are moving towards serverless. Content creation might eventually move to "OS"-less, where content creation is moderated by walled hubs like Adobe apps on the iPad and developer experiences happen in virtualized clouds with web-based IDEs. Bare metal appeals to engineers, but for everyday users and developers, again, it's just excess cognitive load. Please don't make people think about useless crap. There are already infinite upcoming crises -- of the global sort -- for anyone born in the last few generations. Computing trivia is just... trivia, no more inherently interesting than the proper type of lubricant to use on the machines in the factory that makes their toaster. Don't make them think without good reason.
I can't believe it's come to this...
This kind of advertising actually worked on me.
Then: "Disable secure boot, wipe SSD, reinstall Windows without connecting to the Internet".
You'll end up with a relatively bloat-free non-S Windows 10 install with a local account, no BitLocker (although it can be enabled later), and Windows will generally install all the hardware drivers for you.
Anything missing that you want can be grabbed from the manufacturer's website. Once everything's done, re-enable secure boot.
Once the setup is done and the O/S configured exactly the way I want it (which often takes me considerable time), I'll then mirror the drive.
I then progressively repeat the process in stages, first with essential utilities, text editors and maintenance tools and work up to bigger programs, word-processors etc. At the end of the process I'll end up with at least four mirrors. If anything goes wrong I can restore the image which typically takes me 7 to 10 minutes and I'm right to go.
Doing the job in multiple stages is good idea if you want to remove traces of a program that, say, won't allow easy re-installation for licensing reasons. All such program are relegated to a latter-stage image, so the process then is to restore the immediately preceding one that is 'clean'.
Only when I'm finished saving the last image and I'm totally happy with the installation do I connect the internet.
I would set it up without access to internet as the easiest way to force it. It is pretty awful this has to be done this way. Eventually I will just exclusively use Ubuntu and call it a day.
I have some issues with choices made in Haiku, but overall it has a clearly superior understanding of desktop and personal computing and it would be great if it could become a reasonable alternative for me within the next decade.
Absolute trash OS, sorry.
I found a way to revert it and make the account an offline account afterwards, but I was so furious about this crap.
That being said, I don't see the banner you mention.
More accounts equals less security. That's a fact. If Microsoft believes this, it's not worthy of our trust.
If it's just marketing hype, ditto. I don't trust companies that outright lie to me.
I just run installs offline if possible, for home use, and make sure any place I'm working has a WSUS server/etc I can point MDT to.
It is different with the "S" Home edition which is what comes with a lot of decently spec'd laptops for typical personal use.
I run Pro here and there's a secondary text link off to the side that you can click to make an offline account. That link doesn't exist with the Home edition (specifically the "S" edition, I don't know about the regular Home edition).
In all cases this is with the US version too, which might play a role in what's seen when people install Windows across the world.
Also, and to generalize - we need to stop judging these decisions based even on everyday single computer user's needs and consider the needs of the computing using _public_.
... and the public definitely does not need Microsoft to remotely control access to all Windows machines.
Surely us HN readers have the knowledge to definitively state this as fact.
But having only one secure login helps keep things simple(r), Microsoft can help keep associated devices secure and bad guys out, 2FA gets easier, and there is an easy way out in case of forgotten passwords and the like. For most people I guess that's pretty convenient and helpful.
Besides, I don't think there's need for a term like computing-using public – let's talk about the general public. There won't be a lot of people in the general public who aren't either using a computing device like a phone or somehow affected by others using computing devices to store photos and phone numbers and the like.
The general public is in dire need of very secure systems that can be used with a minimum of specialist knowledge, attention and maintenance effort, strongly resist being used insecurely, and that still look good and are reasonably fun to use and still allow for activities like software development to happen. That's immensely difficult and I'm not aware of any good definitive solution to this.
This isn't just a question of being nice to grandma either, this is more about not leaving whole first-world economies vulnerable to highly sophisticated attacks with huge blast radii. We haven't seen much in the way of those, but who knows what we might have seen if platform security of the big targets hadn't kept up as well as it did?
This whole complex is something a lot of people deep in the tech bubble seem to not really get: There are millions of power users, true, but there are billions of people who just want to pay their bills in an app or play a game or message their friends. The latter cohort is not intrinsically motivated to become IT pros at all (more like scared of the complexity and very disinterested), and they're not getting paid to secure their home computer, so some buy anti-virus and that's it. People don't want insecure computers, but the learning curve, time and effort required, the extremely dry subject matter, the unclear benefits, the overall scariness, that just doesn't happen at scale. Humans are amazing at conserving energy, and this checks a lot of conserve-this-energy boxes.
iPhones are relatively hard to get into an insecure state; it's possibly, but the options to do so are limited and most aren't frictionless. I don't doubt most Windows home installs so far have been running with a passwordless admin account, with pretty much no restrictions on what to run and install, and many many footguns have been discharged as a consequence.
The saving grace, so far, has been that most of those billions who have started using privately-owned computers in earnest in the last decade or so have been using mobile platforms, which have been pretty well-secured from the get-go; but to keep their non-phone offers relevant to this huge market, Microsoft and Apple will have to pivot their general computing devices towards that audience a lot more. That involves making them much more secure by default and much more resilient security-wise to being configured and used "wrong". That may be bad news to professionals and enthusiasts, but so far Apple seems to keep macOS enthusiast-friendly enough by making dangerous choices scary and adding friction, and Microsoft still has other licenses than Home that I believe are more enthusiast/pro-friendly.
But seen in that light, requiring a Microsoft login makes a lot of sense, at least to me. Whether that's the main decision driver within MS, or the opportunity to gather even more data and engineer more stickiness and lock-in, I could only guess. They're surely not sad about another step towards a Microsoft Panopticon you can't get out of, but it's not like the security side is bogus, or not a big deal.
If this mindset was prevalent in other industries as well then all kitchen knives would come with a mandatory 2 hour long instruction video on how to keep your fingers away from the blade.
Spend the time to get acquainted, soon you will see you can do almost everything you need on linux (and more) that you can on Windows/macOS, but with less mental overhead (after you are used to linux, it really is simpler).
Also saving files in Debian is a bit of a pain. I think it keeps searching instead of actually typing the file name when you save a new word doc from libre office or another application.
Plus other services, like Netflix and Hulu, may not work out of the box. You’ll have to find a workaround but I think their official stance is still “Linux is not a supported platform”.
Don’t get me wrong Linux is great and it’s in a wonderful spot compared to 10 years ago. But it still does not have the polish or UX that users from windows and Mac expect in an operating system.
Nevertheless, my days of advocating for others to use it are over (I even used to frequent comp.linux.advocacy!). People that are used to Windows will have a very hard time moving away of it. No matter how easy the migration path, there will always be something painful. The path of least resistance will always be running Windows. And in addition even the most polished Linux versions have issues. I've run them all. They are nice, but once you get into an obscure singular case, the console dance start. Wifi, sound, bluethoot, video, media-keyboard or mouse, fingerprint reader. There's always something.
We People who have been using linux for years are already used to it: google for a couple of minutes, open the terminal and copy/paste a bunch of commands. Sometimes it works, other times we compromise by not using that feature that doesn't work.
For people used to Windows this is very painful.
Windows 10 was also not subject to this requirement, yet you're harassed when you try to keep your local login.
Imagine McDonald's applying such dark UI patterns: maybe forget part of your order, put your change on the table under a napkin so you don't notice it, only offer you the free ice cream the 3rd time you ask, etc. People would be up in arms!
But Microsoft?! Well, they are the darling of the tech world now so it must only be a prank no?
No evil to see here, sir!
The requirements doesn't list internet... and I was pretty sure my friend pressed some button or something that asked him for online login, when he tried to install Ubuntu for raspberry (because I'm not hardcore linux guy and I use Ubuntu and I will be able to assist him better in that OS), but after some googling around, it really turns out to be true - cant install without SSO login.
The solution for that guy? He just installed a different OS.
Also Canonical/Ubuntu seems just have a particular bad track record of stuff like this. Most Linux distorts are better.
The open source world actually needs to implement this + a decent offline alternative to Alexa or be left behind.
I will never want to use a Microsoft/whatever account either but other people will.
They can start doing their job without signing in with any accounts, one step fewer.
I was recently spurred to action by two things.
1. The forced news widget in my taskbar. 2. Being forced to sign into a Microsoft Account to setup my father's laptop. The onscreen prompts promised me that I could disable the account later if I wished.
We all see what's coming here. We're experiencing different levels of it all over the place.
My work machine (as in, the device I use to make my living with and the only device I can't actively "play with") is now running Arch.
I'm out. You guys can do what you want, but there is zero chance this nonsense doesn't continue and get worse.
If you force people to do it early in the process, you won't struggle to through that objection and difficulty when you want them to metaphorically pull out their wallets.
And to make advertising more targetted, again it's recurring revenue.
Not that you care, of course.
It was indeed a great pain to get the girls from next door to join with their Android tablets, it required multiple back and forths between me and their father... So that was why. To be honest it does annoy me that they had to give up so many private details to get the benefits of this "outsourced protection".
Well, my philosophy is to be there, check in on them, educate them about dangerous stuff but also to let them explore. I'll handle more difficult stuff through AdGuard when the time comes. The kid knows not to do weird things on their own. I regularly explain to them that the internet is like a jungle. Don't just wander off without me and my digital machete by your side, I tell them ;)
I personally cannot stand using Ubuntu and it seems I'm not alone in that regard. I hear nonstop issues with it from my friends who tried it and I attribute a lot of failed Linux converstions of people thanks to it.
I used Manjaro entirely because of its i3/bspwm DE versions. Ubuntu now has a good equivalent in the form of regolith. Avoid Manjaro if you care about long term system stability
I just worry about people swearing off Linux forever when they can't successfully install Linux on their Microsoft Duo Surface that just released a month ago, and then they post about the horrible time they had with Linux. In the past decade I have never had any troubles installing Ubuntu on any computer I've owned. It is plug and play most of the time! But nobody talks about when things work just fine :)
Maybe I'm just unlucky, but every time I've installed Linux something with the drivers always breaks - video playback is choppy, wireless drops randomly, audio breaks, the fingerprint reader doesn't work. Using WSL2 or a VM is much easier when I want Linux.
Microsoft uses dark patterns to actively bully the user into doing what they want you to do.
Also WSL2 is fine, but I have the feeling they are only doing this because Windows was becoming the 3rd class development platform behind Linux and Mac. For modern development you need to be able to speak *nix, so MS did not have much of a choice here but to come up with some kind of solution.
I also agree that the dark patterns garbage has to stop. If you want to shape my behavior, convince me it is in MY interest. If you are forcing my hand for your interests, I'll find someone better.
So, listing differences with Gnome would be like comparing Gnome & KDE.
There is zero-touch enterprise provisioning available, that requires you to be connected to a suitably configured local network (if learns about what it needs from dhcp tags), but this is not something that normal users need to be concerned about. For a non-MDM-managed mac, you can do everything offline just fine. Or you can be online, if you do not want to use iCloud account (I'm not using it either), you can finish the OOBE wizard and everything will be just like the user wants.
This is why I qualified open source with "community maintained." When there's a strong partition between the community and the developers then FOSS looks a lot like closed software.
I'm just going to come out and say that I think Gnome and Firefox are two of the worst offenders of this.
Firefox has a similar situation although I would argue it isn't quite as bad.
The first part may be true, but the second doesn't follow. In the case of software like Windows, etc, can you say it actually fits the user's needs? I mean sure, if Windows does what you expect and Linux / macOS don't, sure, it's great. But what if it doesn't?
I really hate non-resizable control windows, what can I do about it? I also hate the pure white interface that burns my eyes. How should I go about tweaking it? The list of ways Windows annoys me is extremely long, and I don't feel like I have any say in them. The same goes for macOS, though to a lesser degree.
This software seems to be made to benefit the "developers" (MS). People have been complaining about telemetry in Win10 and MS just ignores it.
You could argue that since I'm still using my 2013 MBP and basically only use Windows when I have no choice (gaming), I'm not really a client any more of either MS or Apple.
I guess in the case of bespoke software, or even in a case where each client is big enough for a company to listen to them, then they may steer the software's direction.
But for a random consumer OS? I really don't think so. My client is a fairly big European company, and they use Windows on their employees' desktops. There are ways in which Windows annoys them, but they have exactly 0 ways of changing this (other than dropping Windows).
I can't really think of anything missing from Pro.
But you are right, a time may come when they will want Windows. Although my wife's computer runs it (needs it as a teacher), so they may use that for Win only stuff. I'll deal with it when the time comes.
I could do a VM with GPU pass-through and Steam client... Although that may also turn out to be more than I'm willing to invest (and essentially you still run Windows). Or maybe I'll dual boot...
I confess I'm not sure; I've trusted Valve with a very specific part of my life (buying games) for nearly 20 years now, and they've held up their end of the bargain the entire time. My trust in them has paid off (so far!)
The make of the computer is irrelevant to 90% of people.
https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04648973
It's unlikely that people with Windows Home have a password reset disk and there's likely only the one account on the machine. That leaves them with "have a computer repair service recover your local password" or "reset your computer". In my opinion, the majority of people would be better served by a Microsoft account, where Microsoft can handle the reset through their website, rather than a password reset disk or wiping their machine in desperation.
Also note how excited HP is to get out of the business of handling this very situation.
> HP recommends using a Microsoft account for signing into Windows. Using a Microsoft account offers many benefits, including easy password recovery. If you currently have a local user account, consider switching to a Microsoft account after recovering or changing your current password.
I keep hearing the line of MS's evil data collection to serve you ads and whatnot but I suspect the truth is much milder; they probably have mostly usage telemetry to drive their investment decisions and possibly perf / bugs because they fired their testing team.
1. It's not secure / doesn't keep things simpler: If you lose it, or it's get compromised, you're screwed on all your Windows machines, not just one.
2. It doesn't keep things simpler: If you lose it, or it's get compromised, you depend on Microsoft to access all of your Windows machines, not just one.
3. It's not "one login", unless Microsoft has gotten control over all websites, banks, ATMs, mobile phone apps and so on. It's just n-1 or n-2 sets of credentials instead of n.
4. Microsoft controls the authentication, so one could argue it's not secure.
---
> mobile platforms, which have been pretty well-secured from the get-go
Not sure how you figure that. More like the opposite.
Moreover, MS is inexorably moving stuff, utilities etc, that were once on its website to its store that requires login for, it seems, similar reasons. Clearly, knowing exactly who we are has financial benefits for Microsoft or otherwise it wouldn't bother.
Both times the machine was connected to the internet. One time with the standard Lenovo media, one time from a fresh Windows 10 Pro ISO.
Could there be a regional difference? (I am in the EU)
What sort of backups?
(My experience is that) NTFS filesystems mount just fine on other OSes, particular Linux.
I don't think it's true for most mainstream consumer-level stuff. For example, you're suggestion would mean I can't play console video games, stream movies, or even watch DVDs.
Then you have stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114194
It's rated Gold, and appears to work out of the box for some people, others have had to add an option to the command line that Steams uses to run it, and some people have seen some problems running it.
If you do end up going this route and try it, please file a report on protondb letting others know how it went.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_69huFZSLA
You may also want to check out PlayOnLinux which eases the creation of sandboxed installations for different Windows software (not just games), in which each one could use its own Wine version, libraries, modules etc.
I'm not saying anyone has to like it, but there's an inherent advantage in not having to support other hardware of varying degrees of quality. Honestly, I'll take that form of vendor lock-in over frequent pointless changes, having advertising shoved in my face, and being forced to have an online account. Perhaps my opinion will change if Apple follows suit (they won't), but for now it was pretty easy to set up my M1 Macbook Air without signing in with an Apple ID.
Is this a real question? Many of the edge cases, both high cost and low, would disappear for Apple.
Additionally, all the tech support will fall on them.
Lastly, any bad user experience (cheap device with crap battery, low quality hardware that doesn't match the software experience, etc) would have a negative effect on them as a brand.
I've been on both sides of the fence, worked for a Linux company for a few years, and I'm very happy in the walled garden.
The software component in a Mac or an iPhone is larger than in a microwave oven. There is still equally zero incentive to port it to third-party devices, because it's the devices that bring in the revenue; software is a cost center.
EDIT: maybe I'm wrong now, as other comment says they changed it a few months back. My last install was somewhere in Dec/2020
Dark patterns abound. It’s horrible, but there are ways around it. For reference, this is in the US (if it matters).
The Mac was connected to the Internet, I had to do a couple of clicks during the setup to create a local account but it was easy enough to do - I had not searched beforehand and I hadn't set up a Windows machine in the last five years or so.
Side note for fellow people willing to run W10 on Mac Pro's, two things: the multi-socket variants won't run on the Home edition, you need the Professional edition, and if you're using Opencore you will need to enable the OpenShell EFI shell as you'll need to run bootmgfw.efi once from the UEFI shell.
So yeah, I can imagine how people coming from windows might be frustrated with that.
* Plug in monitor 1
* Plug in monitor 2
just log in to your ms account on a new laptop and wait a few hours while everything syncs up via onedrive and its like every computer is your home computer
I wouldn't say this is a problem in the bad sense. That's Ok. Almost nobody (except low-level system engineers) really knew how the file system works ever. I always believed it's unreasonable to ask people to learn about file system internals.
What I really consider a problem which should never have happened and should be fixed ASAP is Windows hiding file name extensions by default.
And people having an idea of how a DOC file and a TXT file are different, what do TXT and HTML files have in common and why zipping MP4 videos doesn't save space feel a blessing for me to meet among non-devs.
> just log in to your ms account on a new laptop and wait a few hours while everything syncs up via onedrive and its like every computer is your home computer
And this is a convenience we have to reproduce. It almost is there - you can add a Microsoft account in Ubuntu but it still requires an extra step of setting a local user up and signing in with it first.
Google and Apple do it too and no one has complained. Why suddenly the up and arms when Microsoft does it? That doesn't sound like a darling of the tech world to me.
People complain about Google and Apple too.
Though, not even Apple applied such dark patterns to force you to create an account with them. There's still time though!
After login I have to reload https://mail.google.com to skip the form.
But rules aren't invalidated by exceptions ? The only thing that matters is, trying to follow the rule to the best of your abilities when it gives you enough benefit.
In the end what matters is each independent situation - the rules are only guidelines to get started.
FFS this was understood decades ago with the ISO 9001 revamp where they sanctuarized that obtaining quality products wasn't most efficiently achieved by following bullet point lists religiously, and even then it was already common sense.
Solving some problems is still better than solving no problems!
Yes it's a Dark UI pattern, but I have a feeling Apple do the same thing (I haven't set an apple laptop up for 8 years so my memory is vague)
Is that incorrect?
Not on Windows 11 Home, using an online account has become mandatory.
>Yes it's a Dark UI pattern, but I have a feeling Apple do the same thing
Skipping it is a little clearer in macOS.
Obviously with iOS this won't work, but then again, iOS devices aren't cheap enough for this to be a reasonable approach anyway.
Device #1: Buy the cheapest device you can. I give my friends specific recommendations. Invent a new burner gmail account for it. Install whatever you want off the Play Store - obviously, use all the normal caution to avoid any malware. Never put any personal info on it, so never put a SIM card in it, just connect over wifi.
Device #2: Buy a nice Android device. Never sign in. Put the SIM card in this one. Side load apps and update them by extracting the APK from device #1. Export your contacts from Google and load them manually (and save a backup). Access your email using IMAP from a third party app. Backup your photos using a third party app. The point is _not_ to use Google Pay, Google Assistant, and Google Cloud.
• Google Maps works without being signed in
• Google Play Store will update Google Maps (and the default apps on the device) without being signed in, but it does use dark patterns to try to get you to sign in
• Android OS updates will work without being signed in
It is more work, no question. It works for me. Your mileage may vary. Disclaimer that I'm posting in kind of a hurry, so I'll just admit the details here probably don't make sense.
Already, on Windows 10, all normal users used an MS account. The only way to get around it was to set up a computer without internet and then click some non obvious buttons while the computer begged for an MS account. If the goal was making it easy for normal users to have an MS account, Windows 10 succeeded.
The change here is that power users no longer have the choice to not use a cloud account. This change provides no benefit to the average user.
And going for a full circle. No more personal computers, just terminals connected to corporate systems, which have full control over data and usage.
This is the biggest feature for my relatives who no longer feel dependent on a "tech person" to help them out.
> The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.
(Smart)phones and tablets are not computing devices any more than a refrigerator. You cannot do any real work on them. Even finding a text editor, let alone editing, is a challenge. Other stuff like SW development or CAD/CAE is the same.
> Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.
Nothing to do with it. Just pure control and data collection.
> We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.
We are back in the 1960 with disabled user interfaces. When you need to search the internet to disable dark patterns is the same like reading the source code to check with which options to invoke the shell.
They force you to log in with a MS account during the initial setup then once you are in you can add a local admin account. Then you can log into it and remove the MS account. Its absolutely horrible.
I have been dealing with this a lot lately, had several laptops that were Home and could not get in to them without the MS account. Its a huge pain.
But today, Windows 10 Home only gives you the option to login with a local account if you are offline (no cable, no WiFi) or you fail to login to an MS account multiple times. Only in one of those cases do they give you a small, relatively hidden option to use the local account.
This is obviously and objectively untrue, and this attitude contributes to the exact problem that’s being pointed out above.
You can make a decent and convincing argument that consumer devices should be more open without trivialising the (very much real) work that many, many millions of users do with them.
Nonsense, of course you can. 'Real work' isn't just programming or whatever. Writers, painters and musicians do plenty of 'real work' on tablets and such.
I agree with the "get of my lawn" sentiment but that's not how the world uses computers anymore.
I don't see how this can work either but it seems it does and shows no signs of returning to sane Xerox-park derivatives I prefer.
There are power users and their needs are catered for but in terms of market share expert users are a diminutive niche.
AFAIK leaving the ethernet unplugged is the only way to do it now.
This obviously failed as a legitimate Microsoft login, but it did, very handily, offer the option to create a local account instead.
Hey, stop plagiarizing me! ;-)
Yes, of couse 2FA is theoretically better. Until facebooks leaks half a billion phone numbers + account information. That is a vastly more serious threat.
I don't know a single case where TLS was compromised from an IMAP client. Perhaps if it is 15 years old? I hate this industry so damn much. People should be homeless, not security advisers...
You're thinking of the wrong threat model. They're not concerned about passwords being stolen being in transit, but rather using the IMAP endpoint for credential stuffing attempts. An IMAP login attempt contains very little zero metadata, so it's very hard to judge whether it's legitimate or not. With a web login you can get tons of stuff to judge the authenticity of the user, eg. fingerprinting.
I want the same benefit as the desktop PC, specifically that I own it, control it, and don't have to sign in to use it.
Sent from my OnePlus 6T running LineageOS.
If I am going to go with a different OS than Android, I'll get a Librem so I'm paying the company that made the hardware AND software, with incentives aligned for me to be a supported, acknowledged user.
Also, once you've done all this you can download APKs from Google Play Store without needing a burner phone. They've had extensions that do this for some time. Might as well just do it from the computer and or use an alternative app store.
If you really don't want someone to sign in to Google services, then there are ROMs made specifically for that. Have them use CardDav and CalDav. Use email with IMAP, etc. The route you've chose seems way too convoluted for no purpose other than the illusion that you're somehow unidentifiable.
By purchasing a burner phone, I am definitely traceable by law enforcement. You want to be untraceable after a crime - I'm not solving that problem.
Your other suggestions are fine ideas, there's not a specific right or wrong way to do it.
It was hard, thankfully pine64 exists and it's no longer any more difficult than following on the desktop.
I believe the idea is that anything with blobs can be hardware disabled.
I don't know when you last layed your eyes on a "competitive" android os spinoff, but I'm honestly shaken every time I see what other people have to endure on their mobile computers. It's a disgrace.
Home edition is for non-commercial use. I don't know if that's in the EULA or not, but that's the use case that Home is meant for.
Pro and higher are for work use cases, and features add on as you go up the line. Pro for Workstations and Enterprise support slightly different feature sets, IIRC. Creating new ReFS filesystems is only available on Pro for Workstations, for example.
Fun story: I once had an issue where I couldn't do anything with my btrfs volume because it ran out of metadata space and I couldn't even tell it to allocate more. The solution wsa to grab a usb drive, format it with btrfs, make a volume group so more metadata space would be available to the filesystem, then make it allocate more space on the normal ssd. Everything was fine after removing the flashdrive from the volume group. It was a scary evening.
It's a safe pick if you ask me. Still, I would go for ext4 if you don't specifically want or need things like storage pools, snapshots and such advanced (ZFS-like) features.
I still get screen tearing.
I am running on a laptop, but I typically keep it plugged in as often as possible to save the battery so I haven't noticed if it's good or bad.
It's still a good trade IMO.
...Alright Bob, you're the boss.
The same irony goes for the Windows 11 CPU support, the next version of macOS supports machines twice as old as Windows 11 supports. Microsoft embraces alt payment methods in the store and supports regulation, Apple doesn't and is the monopoly. The world is upside down in such strange ways in 2021.
... but you are similarly prompted and dark-patterned to create one anyway. It is just marginally easier to skip the choice, if you don't mind being nagged or diving into the buried option you need to switch it all off. And without an account, loads of features like family Screen Time don't even work.
Apple paved the way, while MS was being cautious because of the browser-related legal challenges. They made all this socially acceptable, so at one point the guys in Redmond rightly went "why can't we do the same?" and here we are.
Fingerprints, as far as most readers are concerned, aren't too difficult to duplicate sufficiently.
You can obtain someone's fingerprints from photos, as the German defence minister found out years ago[1]. Also you leave them everywhere and your laptop is likely covered in them. You can't effectively change or revoke them.
You can reproduce them with varying levels of success with photoshop, a laser printer, gelatin and some home PCB etching gear.
And unlike passwords, there's no 5th amendment right covering them for Yanks. (The latter is debatable for passwords, but is absolutely not for fingerprints.)
They may be "good enough" security, depending on your threat model. But they're pretty shit for security, all things considered.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/polit...
And there are still multiple issues: For instance with X11 you can select a specific window. I have not found a way to do this in with a wayland compositor yet.
Good point, thank you.
For the specific case here, about my laptop: for instance, I can't simply hand the notebook to my dad, _telling_ him the password and he's good to go. This is the downside where I can't simply share a (biometric) login, even if I want to. Which also means that every access automatically implies that it's really me, and not someone else I just gave quick access to without reconfiguring the system.
On a side note, I was thinking about using both - password/PIN (something I know and must be conscious to provide) AND a fingerprint. Sadly, Windows Hello can't be configured this way.
Of course there may be one or two titles that tie you to Windows, or perhaps multiplayer specific gaming related software, but if you are flexible in that regard gaming on Linux is just… good.
I know the wine guys have been doing great work trying to get anticheats working in wine/proton. Hopefully that progresses well. Getting anticheat to work in wine would really be the best.
Basically you bind the graphics card to the vfio driver by writing the PCI ID to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id and then you can use it in qemu with -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0.
If you have sane IOMMU groups and have an extra GPU for the host it should work with just those two steps. You still have to decide about how you handle input and output, but that's very user specific. Virtual input over the qemu GUI works well enough, there's also an evdev thing that lets you switch by pressing both Ctrl keys, or pass an entire USB controller. For audio I recommend scream[1] for the lowest latency (I get 2ms VM->PA->Speaker with MuQSS scheduler) with full 7.1 audio and if you don't want a dedicated monitor or switch monitor inputs there is Looking Glass[2] which captures frames and shuffles them to the host over shared memory. It also handles input via spice.
It's still a bit of work, but for me that's mostly on the Windows side rather than the passthrough stuff itself.
[1]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream [2]: https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass
I ran Manjaro for about half a year recently, including using it for gaming. Very few games actually worked out of the box for me, including games with so called "native" Linux support.
I ran into multiple games with "official" Linux support that were simply broken or became broken by an update. Some of those that weren't broken had significant performance issues (that Windows on the same machine didn't have).
Is it possible to game on Linux? Yes. But at the very least it requires fiddling. As much as I love Linux, gaming is just a lot easier on Windows.
Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games, ...
Admittedly I now dual-boot to Windows to play videogames, but that's not because of faults in native Linux games, just the reduced selection.
There used to be a way to run Proton outside of Steam but i think it is now discouraged.
1. Download gog install files into the same directory
2. Add the install executable as a non-steam game, and enable proton compatibility before starting it up.
3. Run the installer and complete the installation. Gog installers typically give the option to run the game from the installer, but that will only work once.
4. Find the path of the installed game, and the working directory of that executable by searching in ~/.steam
5. Edit the entry created from 2. with this exec path and working dir, and look up possible args from protondb.com
It's how I run my GOG games on Pop OS.
Well, it really depends on how you buy it and where you use it. Yes, they can locate your phone based on triangulation. However, you can buy a prepaid burner phone outside of your area and then use it to create a Google account and then make sure you are using a VPN when connecting from a residential location. However, I don't really see the use in buying a burner phone just to download APKs from. You can do the same without one. I agree, that it does work to accomplish what you mentioned but I was just trying to explain that there is a much easier route without the additional burden.
You seem to have missed the biggest part of why I recommend this to some people - never, ever put a SIM in the burner phone. It's just for that burner gmail address you use to get into the Google Walled Garden.
...and you're recommending Linux Desktop for that? An operating system famous for breaking compatibility with itself every 2 years or so? Not to mention between distros. I mean, I suppose you can just leave them on some arbitrary un-updated version of Ubuntu forever, but the same could be said for Windows 2000.
Privacy and freedom of speech are dead, long live the constitution.
Despite paying lip service to privacy, many people here still work on privacy-eroding companies and services.
How many people here work Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or LinkedIn, Palantir, etc... (not to mention less well-known names that still erode privacy).. probably a lot.
Many founders (another group heavily represented on HN) are just after their pot of gold at the end of the IPO, and will gleefully walk over as many users' backs as it takes.
In some ways worse, though, are the people who are intimately familiar with technology, and who are enabling the people at the top. These people all have a choice of who to work for and what to do. No one's holding a gun to their head making them work on tracking and spyware and user-disempowerment, and yet they do.
You can at least do yourself a mild favor and don't tell your phone number to all those brick n mortar companies who ask for it. "we'll never call you" -- of course they don't, they just want your individual identity to track you.
They share it with "trusted partners." Which means data brokers. It's like money laundering, but for information. Look for the word "partners" in the small text of anything you commit to from signing up for e-mail to installing software to buying a car.
Certain programs they run won't work on old operating systems like Windows 7 or 2000 but they work on Windows 10 and Linux. Running an unmaintained old copy of Windows 7 would be pretty bad for someone non-technical because if they decide to ever go-to a questionable site of their choosing, chances are they will get themselves in trouble with a virus / malware.
You can run Xubuntu 20.04 LTS for a few years with unattended updates turned on so they get automated non-UI breaking security patches. Then when it goes EOL upgrade to the next LTS, or even turn on unattended upgrades too with a stipulation that something might change once every few years instead of twice a week. It's a really good environment IMO.
One could have installed mint mate 16 in 2013 and painlessly updated between versions without huge difference between then and now.
Linux isn't a product like windows it's an ecosystem use whatever works for you.
I say this as a sysadmin responsible for maintaining a small fleet, the majority of which are Linux boxes. I've wasted far more hours helping end users with OS-level problems on Windows and, to a lesser extent, macOS. This is in spite of the fact that, again, the majority of the machines I manage run Linux, and all of these users are similar in technical capability.
Give it a try yourself. I'm sure a lot has changed since you last used it. Oh, and make sure you pick something that holds your hand a bit like Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Mint, or EndeavourOS.
And you might have been slightly more persuasive by not being a condescending ass, but that's asking a lot of a Linux Desktop evangelist in my experience.
That's not what users aged about 80 think. From direct observation, a print icon moving or a menu bar disappearing are just enough to make them crazy.
I know someone who keeps the old computer from 2008 around because "I prefer how Gimp is organized there".
That's what everyone working in IT should understand. No, you can't "always push an update". Always treat your every single release like your last one because there will be many people who will stick with that version.
It's an ouroboros of Google.
Windows 11 breaks the bar here and requires internet now. It's not a dark pattern or skippable like you are implying here and it's not on remotely the same level as Apple or Google. Microsoft clearly is being the worst of anyone here.
> it's not on remotely the same level as Apple or Google
Oh, it absolutely is. "The healthier one is a leper", as they (used to) say where I'm from .
i would also like more granular control. like a pin+fingerprint when im connected to my home network and full passphrase when not, ie when im travelling or whatever. if i know I'm going to be home for the evening and nobody else is around it would be nice to not have to use anything at all
(I'm all ears on how to solve that file picker problem though, that is mildly annoying).
Use the for long time available patch for GTK file chooser, use an XDG portal to open KDE file chooser instead of the GTK one, or use a Qt-based (KDE or Deepin) rather a GTK-based environment. And for any interested programmers, a maintainer recently has outlined some steps[0] to introduce that functionality in a way that probably GNOME devs will accept.
[0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233#note_1106706
Next time I'm on a graphical linux system I'll muck around with XDG to get PCManFM or whatever as default. Thanks.
Obviously this varies from person to person but I have verified already a more than a decade ago that it worked very well with ordinary users as long as they didn't need MS Office or anything like it.
And true: Netflix doesn't work but for that I use my phone/tablet that I cast to my TV.
You may say: not everyone has a PC and a phone but as far as I can see the overwhelming majority who has a PC also seems to have a smartphone.
Like, yes, most things have a learning curve. I have yet to encounter any evidence that Windows having a particularly easy one for anything is more than propaganda
I've got rid of my Netflix account; between Sky, Youtube and Freesat, there's more stuff to watch than I have time in the day.
You only have a directory file tree, that is often not in the right directory, where the application was launched from. No really way to directly jump to a directory via a path, that you copied from a open Explorer, which you might have open next to it, because you started the .exe from there. So you have to click your way through.
That one: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d...
Graphic designers, digital art types, and musicians are all fringe and mostly on Mac anyway. PC gamers are a fringe crowd. Practically all productivity software has migrated to the cloud. Desktop Linux usability seemed to meet the standard of Windows XP and Windows 7 years ago.
Is the problem really that you still have to grapple with graphics drivers on the CLI? Or is it just that Best Buy and CostCo still don't have motivation to put shiny Linux machines on the shelves?
and yeah I know all about the various shady Gates/Ballmer-era OEM deals… I just can't believe that not one OEM has snapped by now.
Something like Looking Glass looks cool. I definitely disliked having to switch monitor inputs back and forth every time, though that was just more of an annoyance than anything else, of course.
https://libredd.it/r/LineageOS/comments/nnccvr/google_locati...
https://www.azmirror.com/2021/05/24/newly-unredacted-documen...
Plenty of people on protondb reported zero issues with the same games on their Manjaro/Arch boxes.
> Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games
Maybe it's the type of games I play, but this is extremely rare in my experience. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle with anything outside the game's own settings despite having a multi-monitor setup.
TBH i do not think things are completely unsolvable, it is just that i wish Proton, etc wasn't tied to Steam.
That's also an excellent way to ensure the user juridiction based on the IP address and phone number country code for 99% of users.
That does not bother me or probably most of us on HN much, but for most people it’s like periodically needing to muck around under the hood of their car. It’s too much, they just want to drive and take the vehicle in to get oil and brake changes every once in a fairly long while. Anything more is tedious overhead.
The situation with proprietary drivers still kinda stinks too. The distros I’ve seen handle it best are Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers control panel and pop!_OS which just sidesteps the issue altogether for Nvidia hardware by shipping an ISO with non-free Nvidia drivers included, but the rest just leave you with a package manager, terminal, and whatever you can scrounge up on the internet. Yeah it’s technically the responsibility of Nvidia, etc to fix that, but it’s negatively impacting adoption nonetheless.
This is ridiculous. Not only does Ubuntu LTS work just fine for my incredibly non-technical wife and children, but my wife prefers it to Mac OS.
Linux with a basic Gnome desktop has been perfectly usable for well over a DECADE now for non-technical users.
This particular bit of FUD has been wildly inaccurate at least since Fedora Core 3.
I've setup Linux on all machines I own or maintain, for all users including my wife. The frequency of hickups is not higher than it was with Windows and It's easy to roll back to a known good configuration, much easier than with Windows. I never looked back.
Edited to add: The last machine I bought was a Purism laptop. The first machine which did not have Windows pre-installed.
Bullshit on distros like Solus OS.
Sure, if 1.5 Billion people are a "fringe crowd"
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/314009-3-billion-people-w...
“The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.
As far as Linux on ________, Let's look at where we're at now.
Supercomputer. Linux runs the entire Top 500.
https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/
Severs/Websites. 75% are Linux or variants.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system
Mobile. 72% is Android alone, which counts for Linux IMNSHO.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
ChromeOS now exceeds MacOS market share. Apple had already been making (painful) attempts to move away from the Desktop.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-mo...
And, of course, there's the Linux Subsystem for Windows.
Linux won. It's over. Windows might be holding onto a majority if you only count desktops, but given even Microsoft has moved towards supporting Linux directly on their own OS... and moving towards Cloud As a Service and hosting, yep, Linux on Azure... Even Microsoft knows that Windows has found itself facing the once unthinkable: support Linux or find yourself increasingly irrelevant. Windows on ARM failed. Twice. Windows Mobile in all of its variants are dead now. Microsoft released an Android device. So given everything that we use today, something that ISN'T running a *ix type kernel is, in fact, the minority.
Microsoft is grasping harder with Windows 11... and in their shortsightedness, they ended up excluding huge chunks of systems that were still being sold even as recently as 3 years ago. It's quite unthinkable to me because the one and ONLY one major killing feature of Windows in general was that you could install it on decade-old hardware. Win10 ran pretty decently on my Phenom II x4 desktop which had 16GB Ram. Why shouldn't it?
And now Win11 is looking to exclude first gen Ryzen.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/324157-windows-11-may-...
The tighter the grip, the more that will slip in between their fingers...
At this point, it's becoming easier and easier to support Linux... thanks to Proton on Steam, more native binaries (BlackMagic, for example, with DaVinci Resolve), more apps becoming webapps and only needing a web browser. At this point, I think what we're waiting for is for legacy companies like Adobe to shit the bed and render themselves irrelevant. (And boy have they gotten close.)
Yeah. The year of Linux on the Desktop is a meme... but should it actually happen... the concept of 'desktop' won't matter anymore, IMHO.
Due to heat and therefore power constraints an ipad shaped device will remain sub par compared to a PC shaped device.
Also, laptops.
People have been able to do without full-fledged desktops quite well for a while now.
It looks like there's no proof either way. Are you testing without a SIM card?
Which major commercial OS has a realistic expectation today of getting security updates for so long without being forced to change other parts of your system that you like as they are? Windows did, if you go back to the days when Microsoft published product lifecycle information many years into the future, before 10 deliberately broke that whole model and the stability that came with it.
>Who needs a big machine with a monitor when you can do just about everything on a Chromebook or iPad
You did say we didn't need laptops or monitors.
People having been able to do without full fledged desktops doesn't imply the format is either dead or without merit.
It remains the best tool for the job for many many tasks especially if you have a merely average amount of funds or need above average performance.
I agree that the Linux desktop has its shortcomings, but I still feel that it would be a great option for plenty of people who default to windows today. Especially if they spend most of their time in the browser as it is.
I’ve been a happy Ubuntu user for several years now and I’m not a tinkerer or anything, though I am more technical than the group we have been talking about.
It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y."
If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead.
It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.
Most fragmentation is actually entirely different software with the same end goal as opposed to actual forks and it's not really clear that the developer of foo would have joined forces with the developer of bar had he not started his own project.
