Separately from that, it drives me mad how warped the idea of "consent" is in Windows (and in tech in general). "Later" is not the opposite of "Yes" goddammit!

Imagine sexual consent was similarly warped: Hey Becky, you wanna have sex? You can only answer "Yes, right now!" or "Maybe later," and I'll keep asking you FOREVER. So, what will it be?

Unfortunately the tech literate of us are in the minority.

Almost all consumer tech is targeted to the lowest common denominator which is either Dorris, the 68 year old lady from you legal department who prints off emails to read them. Or Jessylyn the Zoomer thats only ever used an iPhone and cant learn anything that take longer than 10 seconds to teach.

Windows 7 was peak. Everything after that has been getting worse and worse every iteration.

My favorite was when my new Windows 11 laptop started automatically backing up my files to OneDrive without telling me, then STOPPED LETTING ME SEND AND RECEIVE EMAILS because my OneDrive was full. Full of stuff that I never wanted to back up.

So one of my main email accounts, which I've used within the free tier limits for 20ish years, suddenly went dark because I signed into Windows.

Of course while investigating, the UI offered helpful options like:

• Pay for more cloud storage

(Not depicted: "Free up some space," "Disable backups")

Epilogue: After several rounds of disabling backups, then deleting the stuff in OneDrive, then Windows deciding that I couldn't have wanted that and backing all my stuff up again anyway, I finally fixed it by deleting some key directories so the backup would just fail.

Obligatory "switch to Linux" comment.

Microsoft onedrive, 365 integration, teams and all of that is the most frustrating experience I've had with a computer in a very very very long time.

It's infuriating to try and save something. I have no fucking clue where it's going to go. There's like a one drive directory structure that's exactly the same as the local one, but also sometimes it just saves it in some temp directory or weird onedrive area??

No worries, I'll just open file explorer and it will be in the "recent files list", right? Just kidding." Fuck yourself, I'm windows and that file doesn't count as a recent file for some reason. Good luck finding it!"

You want to just save locally? Just change a setting buried deep in the menus. But fun surprise, this turns off cloud sync for all files--even ones that were shared to you for review. You have to manually pull updates and push yours. Can you guess what happens next? Overwrite party! Those figures Janet added to the doc just got over written when you synced your edits to a paragraph 4 pages away.

Oh and teams is another variable in the mix with a weird SharePoint backend (I think, who fucking knows anymore). It defaults to opening in a dumb teams WebView which is like the browser view of the stuff but somehow worse than that. You can change it to default to opening in the actual application, but see the syncing issues above(all because you want new docs saved locally and never on fucking one drive)

I'm like a god damned boomer with MS software these days. I hate every second working with it. Its always in the way.

The whole experience is user hostile.

I remember there was a folder for a Windows marketplace game that I spent a good couple of days trying to get rights to access so I could mod the single player game contained inside. But no, Microsoft had a folder on MY OWN computer locked down tougher than Fort Knox. That was Windows 10 iirc, I can't imagine how much worse it's gotten, I switched to Linux completely a couple years back.

Buying technology used to be like plucking a ripe apple from a tree. You see, you take, you enjoy.

Lately, I liken the process to gutting a fish. You now have to skillfully dispose of the unwanted bits, and it always comes with unwanted bits.

Edit: okay, you have to pay extra for the "professional" version to go back to a less encumbered experience. It's still bad though.

Bought new laptop recently as in the op picture and OneDrive 'integration' was the final straw for me. I used windows since 3.11 and whilst there's some stuff I don't like about Linux I had enough reasons to make a switch after few hours of worrying where the fuck my files went.

I haven't bought a new car since 2004. How fucked am I when I need a new one?

Heard about that yesterday from some folks, that it had uploaded all their documents and desktop files and replaced those folder paths with OneDrive paths. Without their knowledge.

Just what the fuck? They were from the US, so that probably isn't illegal there, but why even build such a """feature""", if you'd get sued to hell and back for it in any self-respecting country?

Gosh trying to find the Open PDFs by default using anything other than Edge was a HUGE pain at work where I have to use Microsoft Shit...

It's nowhere in the settings, Edge straight up ignores the fact you set up a different PDF viewer app as a default, which takes way longer to load files than my other installed PDF readers.

You have to right click and have this option checked, smdh.

But don't you dare suggest Linux or else you'll be an obnoxious zealot. Better to just keep your head down and let Microsoft maintain their monopoly and steadily make the lives of everyone who uses a computer worse.

There's nothing quite like starting the configuration of a linux distro on top of shiny new hardware.

Life pro tip: Setup your computer as if you were from a European country, it solves most of the annoying issues.

Windows 11 has made me feel old.

wtf just popped up, whats it doing

Even on maybe 6 year old hardware and SSD some components like the news and weather, sometimes search just take so long to populate that its a question why anyone would use it, and I often don't intend to

wheres that setting

Still have control panel and settings, now we get two right click menus! (More options summons the old win10 styled right click context)

Wish I could stick to windows 7, it was comfortable and clean, people got in a tizzy when they decided to report when you logged on to a server. And look im sounding old

Windows XPsp1 was peak. No visual overhead, no surplus protection , nothing but plain interaction with a computer using only mouse

god i love linux. Shit just fucking breaks, doesn't tell you, leaves you confused, until you go and find out why. Dont want an application? Great, it didn't install to begin with, or you can just remove that shit.

Problem? Try something else. There's something you'll like eventually. I much prefer being treated as a schizo, to being treated like im a fucking deranged psychopath who likes floating windows, and nested settings menus for some reason. Please, take away my window arrangement freedoms, and give me something that does more, with less. I love it. It's great. You want to know the best part? If you don't want that, you just don't have to use it. Truly an incredible platform.

This is what trying to emulate Apple does to you. Fuck Windows 11.

These days it's easy to license Windows, but hard to stop telemetry.

Microsoft actually charge you for the software you use, how can they maintain the illusion that you're exchanging your data for access to the service?!

$50 per year, minimum. That's how much data collection costs you. In reality, it's far more, as that number makes various assumptions and does not include the value of the data Google, Facebook and Microsoft collect and keep to themselves - >$50 is just what's traded openly on the market.

Microsoft charge $99 per year for Office, one of the main tools they use to collect user data.

Youtube keeps locking up, crashing randomly. This is the official Google-published Youtube app, on iOS.

I’m a greybeard and another greybeard tried to ask me when it was that everything worked perfectly since it never had since the 1980s for him and I said like four years ago.

Until the last couple years, it hasn’t been normal for apps to just lock up, freeze, do weird shit, and crash. Not even little nobody apps in the app store, let alone the google core suite apps.

The car I have now, the screen locks up, does weird things.

This is a new cultural standard for shippable quality. A new, lower standard.

I just set up VFIO. I remember it being a total pain in the ass a few years ago, so I was expecting to spend a whole week debugging and tweaking. But, it was surprisingly easy. In just a couple hours I've got a windows 11 VM with it's own dedicated GPU up and running. And the next question that popped into my mind, that I'm yet to solve, is, "What now? What did I just do it for?". All the games I wanted to play now work on wine/proton, some even went out of their way to not work in a VM specifically. Yes, there are a couple pieces of ~~shit~~ software that I need windows for, but I'd rather keep trying and testing open source alternatives, maybe even participate in their development to the best of my ability, rather than maintaining a VM just for them.

Group policy settings are your friend...and Windows still messes with those too.

Computers, phones, cars, TVs, everything now is a vehicle to get you hooked on some subscription plan, the same way cigarettes are simply a delivery method for the real product being sold, nicotine. For computers, Linux is a fine alternative. You might have to tweak a bit but it's not the 2000s anymore, a lot of distros are easy to use. For cars though... My hope is that soon, these living rooms on wheels where everything you do needs a monthly subscription become annoying enough that some underdog car company sees a market and comes up with a dumb model that doesn't need to be connected to anything to work 100%. Or maybe I'm just getting old.