Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts(theregister.com) |
Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts(theregister.com) |
You know how Skype accounts got merged with Microsoft accounts way back? Well, that apparently broke the link as my Microsoft account and my Skype account now had separate e-mail addresses, so now silently a new Skype account was created (and I assume a new Microsoft account?)
The credit got added to the newly created account, so I now have two accounts to manage (one with credit and one with my Skype contacts).
I went through some similar ordeal twice before, once with Skype when they introduced the link and once with Azure (which rendered the account unusable, luckily I was just evaluating still). Both of those times I spent several hours spread over several days trying to resolve it with support, both times unsuccessfully. Truly Kafkaesque experiences.
This time I gave up after 30min and now have to juggle two Skype accounts until my credit runs out.
It's like no one ever considered that there can be exceptions to "the happy path".
It's the nature of the beast.
Here it seems that the built-in feature to change the primary e-mail address of one of the biggest VoIP services in the world was never actually tested properly and breaks your account by default. It’s bizarre how broken Microsoft’s account system is.
I’m actually surprised I haven’t yet heard of people having their GH/MS accounts break in unexpected ways due to linking them.
I had a very similar issue with Minecraft and Family accounts where the credit went to the wrong account. Microsoft just wouldn’t support this issue so I ended paying for something twice.
This is the nature of MS
It might seems obvious, but that seriously taught me something.
Another convenient way is to user the browser profile. Chrome, Edge and Firefox all support them. For some apps (Slack, Teams) there's not much difference if you are running it inside browser or a the separate client app.
In general the issue likely exists, not because companies are stupid, but because resources are limited and multi-profile support is not likely top priority for the most important customers (large organizations).
"just setup". Try explaining how to do that to my parents so that they can share files with each other.
An OS must dovetail with our lives. If we reject the ambition of a computer as an intelligent agent that cooperates with us, and demand that it take no action without explicit command, we limit its potential and make a lot of inconvenience for ourselves.
They have. I use a work profile and a personal profile all the time. There's also a guest profile. OK, profiles take whole windows rather than individual tabs, but I don't find that a problem.
The biggest problem is that although I can right click and open a link in another profile, there doesn't seem to be a good way to reopen the page I am already on. I have to copy the URL, select the other profile, press new tab, then paste. Sometimes it would be nice to easily add tabs to a block list so that if I try to open e.g. facebook in work mode, I get a "You can't do that, click here to open in personal mode" screen instead of a facebook login page.
This made my day ;-)
firefox supports this with the tab container extension
I'm probably missing something, but Microsoft makes it reasonably easy to switch from personal account to work account _even with the same email address_ -- in Microsoft Edge in the same profile, in the mobile Outlook & OneDrive apps, and so forth.
Sure it could be better, but the simple workaround is to just create a browser profile (which is pretty easy to do in Chrome and indeed in Edge) per family member, set up distinctive themes for each profile, and so on.
Of course this is also possible with Firefox.
about:profiles
in the address bar to find those.
So they went ahead and used pre-release (not even alpha) software that is explicitly not for folks who want stability to give it a "fair chance". Sounds like great judgement from OP.
Think Docker, but for desktop operating systems and not as complicated as Docker.
Microsoft bought the granddaddy - SoftGrid - SoftGrid's technology is the underpinnings of App-V, which is a great solution for Windows software deployment for enterprise Microsoft shops.
There are a few other solutions - one of the more promising is Sandboxie: https://sandboxie-plus.com Well worth looking into if you are having issues like the OP was raising.
Yes, you probably shouldn't have to resort to solutions like this - but at least there are potential options even if they are sub-optimal!
Question: I have some automated testing software I wrote which uses user32.dll to perform mouse clicks, so is there a way to make that work on Linux? It's the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux permanently.
It's source-included, so you can figure out the method they use.
Just search for xtest + your favorite programming language and you are likely to find a binding.
Most utilities use this behind the scenes (e.g. xdotool).
I think the alternative for the author could be to just install the android APK for teams for his personal account
> In education, Google has no infrastructure – and where it does make an impact via Chromebooks, they are dedicated to the student as a student, not home/life chimeras.
... is not true at all in my experience (American University/grad student). The two universities I've been at both use gsuite for everything but video calls, where we use zoom. Emails run by Gmail, docs with Google docs, sharing with Google drive. As a remote TA I've used Jam board for in gsuite as a collaborative whiteboard.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pro...
If you are a Microsoft Enterprise customer App-V is pretty amazing (technology they got when they acquired Softgrid)
Slack handles multiple IDs flawlessly IMO
Edit to clarify that I do not have to use Teams, thank goodness. That garbage is awful.
I would really appreciate it if you could maybe share your workflow for using containers.
For email, I used multiple instances of Mozilla Thunderbird with multiple profiles. The existence of the multi-profile capability is not well advertised and not user friendly, as I need to create desktop shortcut with command-line arguments. But it works: i now have two different office 365 ID and they don't step of each other's toes.
(Yes, they do need to be completely separate processes. Tab would not work. OTOH, I find it soothingly reassuring hat they are separate processes. I feel the risk of the program have a subtle bug and starting to mix the two ID much, much lower in this way. It would need to be quite a severe bug.)
I did set each Thunderbird profile to use a different theme so that I can try to avoid confusing them.
So say you are at your desk but not working on the computer with Teams on it (and it is reasonable to be responsive to incoming messages).
As much as we like to think that Microsoft has infinite resources to re-write everything, they really don't. They have the same problems the rest of us have. Now I have to get back to figuring out why a half dozen users from our HR system are failing to import.
EDIT: Those users failed to import because the vendor changed an internal column name last week that is exposed in the export (and now it even has a typo). Ah, The joys of software development.
Then beyond that there's just a lot of "reopen this site in...."
Also sometimes I just leave certain tabs open for days at a time that are in the right containers, so that helps a lot too.
I use Ctrl+Alt+J to open up my first container, Ctrl+Alt+H for second container, etc. Once I did that it became very easy to open up a container seamlessly and I started getting more mileage out of containers.
As a disclaimer I also consider it a workflow failure if I have to leave the keyboard to reach for the mouse so YMMV.
I also have mapped CapsLock to Ctrl.
EDIT:
Forgot to mention the containers I have are - Work - Work Test Users - Work Admin Accounts - Personal - School - Professional Social Media - Online Gaming
Based on the fact that I now have the worst ad suggestions in Facebook of all the people I know (yes, we discuss this subject) I am pretty sure this works.
1. Change the shortcut from firefox.exe to "firefox.exe" -ProfileManager
2. Uncheck the "use the selected profile without asking at startup"
3. Create as many profiles you want. And these will be really containerized, not like the simili container tab feature.
