This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, "Why is my internet so slow? What's this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!"
Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn't set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn't even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.
I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, "Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we've added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?" But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.
There's a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that's making me think maybe it's time to ditch Windows for good.
While we're sucking up every single file, let's also do daily, non incremental backups
We'll hit the free storage limit it no time and then we can start sending DIRE messages about how the users data won't be PROPERLY backed up anymore.
Then we can upsell them in an outrageously priced storage plan that won't even last a year of these daily backups so we can start the process over again.
Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.
It'd be hilarious if they did that but your paid for space was too low so they had to cut you off but they had already taken the liberty to delete the files before they synched
Mean while on windows 10, they are forcing updates with a creepy splash screen when you boot up. Can't exit, can't stop it, basically held hostage. This was on my old surface pro 4. Then the update screwsed everything up and I had to do a system restore....shits bad 👎
Been running Windows 10 on my gaming desktop for a while now and refusing to "upgrade" to 11 because of how much worse it was. Going to be doing a hardware refresh in a couple months and when I do I'm installing Linux. Thanks to Valve and a few major open source projects Linux gaming has finally reached a point where I can tell MS to fuck off with their enshitification.
My computer doesn't support Win11, so I have that going for me. Transitioning to the Steam Deck for my gaming, which has been a slow but mostly positive process. Some of the games don't play well outside of Windows, but none of the ones I really want to play, and I can always switch to my computer if I do.
What’s the big deal? Microsoft security is top notch. They totally didn’t get p0vvN3d by russia basically twenty minutes ago and have their source code stolen.
It’s why the US gummit is so happy to use micro$quash services.
And y’know even then, who cares if all your data is stolen by state-sponsored cyber crime groups, y’know? M$ has spared no expense to ensure all that data is secured end-to-end with unbreakable encryption even microsoft can’t read! (snkk) Even if they wanted to!
It’s not like they’ve tricked everyone into being data cattle for their giant cloud-ranching operation, to shovel everything into AI and sell the results to anyone at the highest price possible. I mean. We’d have heard something about that if it was the case.
To be fair, the DOD uses a different version of Windows than you, me, or any average company, with a custom set of agreements with Microsoft, a bunch of debloating of Windows-specific apps and the addition of a bunch of military/government apps.
I don’t know that to be true, but if so why has the history of Windows been a continual string of vulnerabilities, hacks, and weak security such as their own cloud service being compromised and their codebase stolen?
That is, if there’s a DoD “version” that’s more secure, couldn’t they make more money selling that? I dunno, they’re dead to me but they’ve never been short of people who want to use them for whatever reason.
Because DoD isn't concerned with the regular internet or unclassified machines as much as with the classified computers - those set up by Information Technician ratings and the Security Managers to handle SIPR and JWICS access. The Admirals, Generals, and O-6s are also often tech illiterate old men, and those just beneath that, and the E-7+ crowd, are often just as tech illiterate. Microsoft also has a lot of multi decade DoD contracts, which they get billions for. Microsoft can't sell the secure version because that just lets foreign adversaries reverse engineer all the possible vulnerabilities. Microsoft only cares about security as far as they get paid for it and can get away with. In the consumer market, that's pretty much zero concern - not profitable enough.
I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn't even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.
I was having a conversation in another thread a few days ago about the legality of completely fictional AI child porn and how that may be a safer outlet for those individuals as it involves no harm.
It's legal in many countries, but also not legal in many countries.
In the USA, federal law says as long as its not obscene or has serious value its allowed, but really, good luck with those clauses. Then it says, it's also legal unless it's been transmitted by a common carrier, e.g mail, internet.
So, someone might be legally making their own CP so they don't need to cause any abuse, and then Windows without their permission, uploads it to OneDrive.
You know the person making fictional CP would be the one thrown in jail for transmitting it over a common carrier, but maybe we should throw Microsoft in jail for doing that without permission and fucking us all over, over and over and over again with all this bullshit
They're literally stealing your files. They're probably training their AI on anything uploaded to OneDrive. It's not like they even prompted you or gave you the ToS.
"fictional AI CP" isn't a thing. AI is trained on existing data. It does not create new stuff. If you want AI to generate CP then you have to train it on CP.
AI can create faces and bodies that have never existed. From there it might just take a lot of prompt engineering, but to say you have to train it on CP is false.
Edit: Also that's only considering life like CP. There's the whole cartoon/manga side of things which IS purely fictional at all times but will get you sent to prison if transmitted over an open carrier.
Can create faces that have never existed, but can you guarantee that the child in a CP that it has created does not look identical to a child that already exists? after all it can very well produce something using children directly from or very similar to its training set.
yea well there is no way to guarantee that AI wont spew out CP where the child there looks exactly like a child that it has seen in its training set, i.e a child that really exists. so no go
Oh god, you reminded me. I had a run in with this recently because my parents got new laptops. 1TB hard drive, should be plenty right? NO! My mom had 15GB of files in her home folders and One Drive was whining constantly to pay them for more space.
It was about an hour of debugging to keep the files safe, extract One Drive from the home folder locations because it had dug in like a virus, and then (after 20 online searches and scouring forums) click the specific toggle in the specific menu to disable One Drive so it would use local files.
I paid for a 1TB computer, why are you forcing me to use your shitty online-only limited-space shit show. Fucks sake.
Its been their practice since the early 90s. Bundling and defaulting all their shitty apps, then making sure everything else has compatibility issues by design.
The worst thing to happen to Microsoft was the IETF. It shattered their walled garden and forced them to integrate with a host of other internationally developed and encoded systems through a uniform protocol. They've spent the last 30 years trying to claw their position of OS dominance back.
Same. They've always done this shit, but installing windows - and then uninstalling or disabling all the cooked-in bloat and spyware - has become so ridiculously tiresome that I just said fuck it and went Linux full-time.
Every update or service pack, it starts all over. There's no such thing as a clean windows install.
Nobara was up and running in like ten minutes with no fuckery at all, and it's no nice not having to fight my OS on everything.
What are you running? I tried Ubuntu as my daily driver and honestly found it's user experience pretty shitty. Lots of little buggy issues with the interface and running a few games on steam that support Linux wasn't great
I became a sysadmin, I like being able to learn to get around problems. But an outsider just sees someone spending all morning fiddling with winetricks when it 'just works' on windows.
not that big of a deal if you choose a distro with good defaults ootb. choosing the right distro is the biggest step imo if you don't want to debug your computer.
Really depends on your use case. Like @trougnouf said, casual users that use the OS as a browser and email client can use practically any distro. Users that do a bit more, like casual gaming on gold-rated Steam games, generally do fine with something like Pop!_OS or Linux Mint.
It's when you start going towards the more hardcore users, like really hardcore gamers that play obscure titles or have unsupported Windows-specific hardware, artists that need very specific unsupported programs for editing or recording, engineers who need to do CAD specifically in a Windows-specific proprietary software, or a tinkerer that's used to the Windows environment, that "become a sysadmin" starts being a reasonable complaint.
nvidia drivers are much less than ideal on linux, it causes all sorts of small issues on the desktop. depends on your setup though, some people run it fine.
nvidia doesnt follow the standards with their linux driver, its just the windows driver adapted to run on linux. its not bad for gaming ime, but causes all sorts of little issues on the desktop especially if you are running wayland instead of xorg.
its changing though, they opened the source code for it and are currently rewriting the driver with the community. long way to go still though.
It's an always-on AI that sits directly on your device inside a built-in Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, which takes screenshots every 5 seconds and scans the screenshots for information - including passwords, banking information, and other forms of PII. It then stores all of that information completely unencrypted, in a format that has been proven almost immediately after the beta preview to be able to be exfiltrated within seconds, easily, by a very simple piece of malware. The company claims that all the information is only stored locally, and after the backlash, that the AI would be opt-in only, but we've seen what Microsoft does with their "promises" before.
I did that and it was a mess, with warnings about being unable to backup that I couldn't get rid of. I had to reinstall to try to turn off syncing, then remove again. But it's so integrated that my desktop is still under a OneDrive subfolder and it's still referenced in various places.
Is there a guide to completely removing this from Windows 11 cleanly?
You can disable so-called essential components and I believe it ships without almost any of the bloat. So essentially you could just take one drive out, or not have it in the first place. Or at least that's my hope
The bottom has dropped out of the OEM software licence market. Microsoft have to find a different way of making money.
Their loss-leading hardware sales have not borne fruit so they are getting desperate.
All they have left is services, which means that the only way the can actually make money is selling out their customers private information.
Remember what that landscape looked like. The only major players we know today that existed then are Microsoft and Apple, and Apple had just been bailed out by MS to get in front of antitrust issues. Amazon existed as a bookstore, Google was not around yet, Facebook would still be several years out ... MySpace wasn't yet around. AOL was still a behemoth. Adobe sold perpetual licenses.
Google was the first example I thought of, because they were founded in 1998, solidly before the dotcom crash. They survived because they hoarded data.
My point was that every company going into the bubble thought they had a product they could monetize, but virtually all of them failed in favor of just hoarding everyone's data. Amazon and eBay were competing for ecomerce supremacy, but now even they are just privacy violators for various reasons (amazon via AWS and Alexa, eBay in the interest of detecting malicious account behaviour).
MySpace is an example of another unsustainable social media model in the vein of many dotcom era services. They died out as soon as Facebook realized they could hoard everyone's data.
All roads lead to privacy nightmares. It's the fossil fuel of the internet, and enshitification is the climate change.
I could swear Google wasn't broadly a thing yet. The startup I worked at in 1999 had an elevator pitch for how we "could be the next Yahoo." Not a great thing to aspire to in retrospect, but Google wasn't on our radar.
They were there and they were superior to the alternatives almost out of the gate. I was working for a video game company at the time and me and the rest of the IT dept made the switch almost immediately because the results were clearly superior. Made me an advocate for them for years, probably far beyond where I should have given up. I am not sure which product cancellation finally changed my mind on them. Probably it was around the mess of Google Talk/Chat/Hangouts mess of apps.
You're right, they weren't a "household name" yet. But they were probably more than a little worried about surviving at the time. Turns out they picked the winning strategy.
Like every time windows is mentioned the Linux users come out to try to convert people. You guys are so fucking annoying. Just make a post about Linux. We dont want your shit ass OS. We need one which actually runs the software we use.
Guess the posts are good to block these annoying Linuxers
I see where you're coming from but you aren't really speaking for the majority on lemmy. We are more open to open source projects and linux around here.
Unfortunately, I also have to use windows for some things, but microsoft and windows 11 are hot garbage, just like your attitude.
Please try not to escalate comment threads that are already tense. Remember to be(e) nice. I think think it is understandable that someone might be frustrated with the regular, low effort responses to practically any mention of Windows or a number of other topics.
No worries. I don't think anybody in the comments here have crossed any lines yet; I'm just trying to defuse things before they get to that point. I'm finding that !technology is one of the communities where we're most likely to have to lock threads or remove comments, other than maybe !politics, and I'm trying to be more proactive about reminding folks to deescalate when things get tense.
This is one of the things I love about the Lemmy community.
No one wants to argue, every one can be passionate about their opinions, but still respect other people’s passion.
It's not helpful because it's not discussing content but attacking a person's character. This leads to emotions running high rather than letting your reasoning win the discussion.
When there's a post about privacy issues, expect alternatives with more privacy be mentioned. It's just that there are so many moments that big corporations violate user's privacy nowadays, so that's why you see it that often.
Hey, I totally get your frustration here, but in the future please keep in mind the primary ethos on Beehaw and try to be nice in your comments here. I sympathize with how irritating the constant barrage of "just install arch" as if that's a simple fix for every problem, and I think it would be valuable for users on this forum to think about this before they comment, but let's try to stay respectful and kind to other users. Thanks!
I used Linux back in the 90s as my primary OS. They were simpler times. Since then I have used BeOS, various versions of Windows and (primarily) MacOS.
I am seriously thinking of going over to Linux as my primary OS because of all the TechBro “AI” bullshit that Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Google are trying to ram down our throats.
I got a new laptop at work and everything, every file I worked in, was creating a second copy of itself on OneDrive. It was so annoying and took awhile but I found instructions on deleting the duplicates.
It took all the files off my local machine and left the ones on OneDrive.
Yeah, it did this to me a few months back. Got the files back local eventually but it was a big pain in my arse. If I had time to learn another os I'd already be gone. Seems like Microsoft is determined to asset-strip whatever good reputation their product had left.
Microsoft is on a fuck up their product speedrun, ain't it?
I've been reading " Windows 11 does this and that without asking your permission." Almost daily now. I wonder when Windows 11 will fingerbang my SO without permission next.
Microsoft is on a fuck up their product speedrun, ain’t it?
I think at this point it's clear they have a core base of users who (for one reason or another) aren't going anywhere no matter how much abuse they pile on top. It's MS's version of that 38% or whatever of people who are clearly going to vote Trump even if he reveals himself to be the literal devil.
Fucking up their product? Why yes, each and every year they give me a new object lesson in how grateful I am to have ejected them from my life (except when paid to use Windows) in 2007. But will the company come to harm from it? I don't think so.
Linux nerds kind of lost the public relations war, the long-time antagonism towards "normie" users has created a lingering notion that linux is a pain in the ass and unaccomodating, even as some devs have tried to make it more inviting. It's a difficult hump to overcome I think.
What is this "public consciousness" you are talking about? Like, tech writers? And that's a genuine question...
Because if I tell my elderly father "hey dad, I'll install Linux on your machine," he won't say "ah, Linux, yes, I've been reading for the past 15 years that it's a difficult operating system, right?" He will say "what the hell is Linux?!"
I'd argue that searching around a slew of webpages to find a download button (without clicking an ad that imitates a download button), then running the .exe while making sure to uncheck the 4 or 5 pieces of adware they try to slip in without you noticing, then having to remember to update it manually now and then, is much more of a sketchy pain in the ass than running a single command to install everything from your kernel, to your web browser, all of which is tightly vetted and comes from a monitored set of servers.
Also, if you really want a "click to install" most DE's have a software store that either acts as a frontend for your package manager, or just uses flatpaks.
I'd argue this is just what people are used to, and Windows has taught people that terminal=scary/hacky.
The point is that a lot of people will never ever use a terminal. EVER. And if they have to do that just to install a program, that's already asking too much. They're used to pointing, clicking, double-clicking and typing for communication.
Imagine if you're used to driving cars and filling up the gas tank, well, the usual way. Now there's this new tinkerer's car that everyone is raving about. And your dad asks "how do I fill up the gas tank?" (or recharge the battery, or whatever), and someone says "oh, just go under the car and plug the cable into the orange slot right behind the left back axle. It's that easy!"
Okay. Everyone is different.
If they can point, click and type they can open a terminal and type something simple.
I have to say your car analogy is more difficult.
It's just a matter of explaining a different process than what they are familiar with to install something. It's not hard at all after you show/explain. Just different and in my opinion easier than an exe.
If you can open an app you can open the terminal. It's not a daunting task.
The analogy showing a difficult task is the point. "It's more difficult." Yeah, to you. Opening a terminal and typing a command for something you don't do often feels like second nature to you, because you're an expert. You're already using Linux. Try teaching that to a thousand grampas. Good luck retaining your sanity.
Windows: Search the Web for some software. Visit webpage. Download executable. Run it. Go through a install wizard. (One month later) Update? Some do it themselves, some just let you know there is a newer version, and a lot of bigger players have a program dedicated to just updating some other program.
Compared to (for example): paru -S <something>
That's it. Updating aaaalll the software in your whole system, including the OS, and you don't have to restart, or even close any of the programs you are updating? paru
Give it a go, it was surprisingly not as big an issue as I thought it would be, even for gaming (though not perfect for gaming, I've been able to get things working without too much headache at least)
Been using Mint for about a month now on my daily laptop. It's nice, not having to deal with windows' bullshit, but on the other hand I've had a number of issues with it; most recently, it sort of reboots itself every so often randomly. That, and issues with not being able to hear high fidelity audio on a bluetooth headset while also using the headset's mic (there's a codec that let's me use both mic and audio, but the audio is low quality).
Usually though issues get fixed with an update, just gotta check the update manager often.
I work with Linux for a living and am finding the transition frustrating myself. It feels like every new is just revealing more stuff I have to configure before it works, then usually get hit with the backend of the solution as well. Be sure to check /var/log/anythingrelevant for the system reboots for logs. My display driver kept crashing.
I made the transition last summer and there was definitely growing pains. Over time it will become second nature like everything else. The advice I would give would be to be patient and accept that you have used a different operating system probably for over a decade, so there will be a learning curve initially.
Also, artificial intelligence models (especially Claude) are very useful for troubleshooting.
Just a heads up, Windows 11 IoT LTSC is out, and it has none of M$'s bullshit you read about weekly. It can be tricky to find the .iso, so it would be a real shame if people wasted their time looking for it @ massgrave.dev
It's probably hard to keep up with lol. I'll try my best. It has Edge and Defender ONLY. No cortana, copilot, recall, candy crush bloat or anything similar, .net, vcredist, edgeview/runtime, TPM requirement, online account, secure boot, store, xbox, one drive, winget, nor widgets.
You finish the install and it is BARE. All I do post install is, in regex and gpedit, turn off telemetry.
For my use, Steam installs all the .net and vcredist as needed.
Store and Xbox and the like are available to install via power shell or downloads, but fair warning. Once you do store or M$ account sign in, copilot and recall might find a way to sneak in via updates. None of them work, and error out when you open them, but the fact they install and exist makes me uneasy.
Edit: If you don't even want Defender, nor Edge, look up Windows X-Lite. That man is a wizard at figuring out the bare minimum needed for an .iso.
Didn't know these customized windows os's were still a thing. I thought they did out in the windows 7 age
But like back then, how do we know these are safe and don't have some kind of password stealing malware? Excluding Defender specifically makes it a bit sus
There's a custom OS forum where I found it originally a year ago. Everything got scanned from virus total when uploaded and showed the report. And the guy had an excellent reputation there as well. I decided to go for it until 11 LTSC came out, and daily drove it for 2+ years issue free.
In the end, it's up to you if you want to trust it.
I think reputation is better than the virus total scan, since it wouldn't catch malware broken up in different parts that are integrated into the OS.
I will definitely keep this in mind. Have you had any issues with the OS not having Edge? I thought it wasn't easily possible without causing some issues.
One of the things for X-Lite I would do post install, is install Edge WebView2 along with the other runtimes available on X-Lites website. Not sure if I ever needed it or not, but never had issues with no Edge.
This was a decent OS, came about in BeOS 5 when they started to run on intel. Just lacked apps. at least OS/4 Warp could run Windows apps, this was just a brand new OS with nothing yet. Shame it died out, but you can run an inspired version of it called Haiku.
Yep. I ran it on my 450MHz Pentium III back in the day - was incredibly fast and felt so ahead of it's time, especially it's multimedia and multitasking performance, as well as the fast boot speeds. It was my second favorite OS back then.
As it was explained to me, it could do full-motion video almost 30 years ago, it could switch around analog signals like cable TV and put them on screen in an app, it had ports for hardware hacking that you could control more low-level and directly. It was just better, by quite a lot. And Microsoft and network effects conspired to kill it before it got rooted and so it got thrown out with the trash.
Not only could it do full motion video, but it could, on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, rotate an OpenGL cube on any axis with a different video running on all six sides, and do so smoothly and without any lag or video stuttering. It was incredible what they were able to do back then. Hell I'm not entirely convinced Windows could pull that off now!
When I rebuilt mine a few months back, I got two drives so I could put windows on one of them, and mounted my old drives for the same reason... I've barely touched the old data and the second SSD has not even been formatted yet, and when I do it'll probably be to give my current system more space
I installed Fedora as a dual boot 2 months ago, and I haven't once booted up Windows in that time. Everything just worked. Now that I feel a bit more confident I'm going to wipe the entire drive and try Fedora Atomic.
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