Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews
spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Let me, for once, not mince words here: Windows 11 is a travesty, a loose collection of dark patterns and incompetence, run by people who have zero interest in lovingly crafting an operating system they can be proud of. Windows has become a vessel for subscriptions and ads, and cannot reasonably be considered anything other than a massive pile of user-hostile dark patterns designed to extract data, ad time, and subscription money from its users.
I ran into the same type of problem trying to reset the forgotten MS password for a friend. In her case she could log in to her PC with a PIN but not her password, and her MS email was still accessible from the PC but not her phone.
Attempting to change the password resulted in an “SMS service not available” message 90% of the time over a period of days. The few times the service was available and it said we successfully changed the password, the new password would not work, even when we were positive it was entered correctly. The SSD wasn’t anywhere near full.
Microsoft then turned the days already wasted because of their incompetence into a week. As a last ditch effort we tried Microsoft’s 24 hour turn-around password reset questionnaire three times. The new password was still rejected both on her PC and phone every single time.
We eventually had to give up. If her PC or her Outlook app ever asks for a password she’ll lose all access and that’s apparently just fine with Microsoft. When she does buy a new PC it’ll be an Apple.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
an apple? Because of this? why? why is it not an option to use a computer without an online account?
spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Microsoft is making it impossible to use Windows PCs without an online account. Obviously there’s Linux, but I’m not willing to be her only source of tech support. That leaves Apple.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
in the consumer versions, yes. but more generally that will still remain an option for some time at least.
for now, there’s windows 10 LTSC, updates until 2032. I would get her this. after that she could still use windows 11 LTSC releases, which don’t receive surprise function changes because businesses use it for critical things.
massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
same site also has an open source forever activation tool
spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Not an option. A few years ago I helped a friend when her printer quit working on Windows 10. What started as occasional help turned into near daily phone calls and demands for tech support. Turned out her boyfriend was getting pissed off when he was playing a game and killing the PC with the power button on the PC.
I’m willing to help her occasionally but am not going further than that.
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 day ago
OS-X (they still use that, right? Not iOS desktop or somesuch nonsense, yet?) seemed pretty much a middle ground between Windows and Linux the last time I used it. Kinda slightly more polished and uniform presentation than Ubuntu-du-jour, a little less mysterious than Windows, but in the end: just as screwed up.
I tried enabling Home folder encryption. After about 3 days a hard power-off shutdown (needed due to a driver error in their walled-garden hardware MacBook Pro, it wouldn’t power off or restart any other way) then the encrypted home folder was toast, unretrievable - laptop wouldn’t boot. Tech support was very nice, reassuring that they knew what was going on, and their best solution? Reinstall the OS from physical media, start over fresh, your files are so secure that not you or anybody else on the planet will ever see them again.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
that’s ridiculous. not even linux is that secure, unless you only store the luks keys on ramdisk haha
MangoCats@feddit.it 23 hours ago
Well, the home folder was encrypted, and the hard shutdown had borked the headers in such a way that the decryption was failing. I suppose a few hundred hours of technical analysis might have retrieved the files, but luckily it was a new PC and I only had about 100 hours of work on it to start with.