the most enraging thing i’ve ever experienced on windows was when they started automatically “off-loading” files on my drive because i was running out of space. what the fuck, fuck you, i needed that, die in a fire and never touch my drive again. if i need more space i will fucking make more space
Ah, but those aren’t really your files. You clicked “Agree” on the 10,000 page EULA so now Microsoft owns you body and soul and all of your offspring out to the 17th generation. They’re just moving around their contracted work product and if you don’t like it you can go pound sand, assuming you pay Microsoft $30/mo for the “Pound SandTM” account license.
“Your house, ahahah, nice one! By the way, rent is going up. How much was ‘your’ raise this year?”
My stupid ass phone keeps demanding me to be connected to the internet in order to view photos that I TOOK ON MY PHONE.
maybe change your gallery app to something else?
Do you have any recommendations? I’m tired of Google begging me to turn on cloud storage for my photos every time I open the photos app.
I use glimpse, which ships by default with lineage os. nit sure if it’s available anywhere. but this one semed pretty neat on a quick try:
https://github.com/IacobIonut01/Gallery
it’s free on fdroid, 2€ on google play which the developer asks to think as a donation
I’ve been using Aves for a while now, it’s pretty alright.
Aves Libre on F Droid
Do you by any chance take a lot of photos on a phone that doesn’t have the capacity to store them all locally?
There aren’t enough “got dangs” in this meme
Do I look like I know what a got dang is I just want a hotdog of a gribble. You tell me what about accessories and accessory because Alamo propane is like a got dang ladybird I tell you what
The moment a lawyer saves their medical records in a way that unintentionally and without their consent uploads them to OneDrive, they have a pretty solid case to charge Microsoft for a HIPAA violation.
HIPAA doesn’t even require encryption. It’s considered “addressable”. They just require access be “closed”. You can be HIPAA compliant with just Windows login, event viewer, and notepad.
(Also HIPAA applies to healthcare providers. Adobe doesn’t need to follow HIPAA data protection, though they probably do because it’s so lax, just because you uploaded a PDF of a medical bill to their cloud.)
HIPAA applies to whichever entity consciously chooses to move/store data.
Generally, after a patient downloads a healthcare-related item, they are that entity - and as the patient, they have full control/decisions about where it goes, so they can’t violate their own HIPAA agreement even if they print it and scatter it to the wind.
BUT, if your operating system “decides” to upload that document without the user’s involvement, then Microsoft is that entity - and having not received conscious permission from the patient, would be in violation. It’s an entirely different circumstance if the user is always going through clear prompts, but their more recent OneDrive Backup goal has been extremely forceful and easy to accidentally turn on - even to the point of being hard to disable. As you said, encryption has nothing to do with it.
No. Microsoft is not liable, at least when it applies to HIPAA.
The HIPAA Rules apply to covered entities and business associates.
Individuals, organizations, and agencies that meet the definition of a covered entity under HIPAA must comply with the Rules’ requirements to protect the privacy and security of health information and must provide individuals with certain rights with respect to their health information. If a covered entity engages a business associate to help it carry out its health care activities and functions, the covered entity must have a written business associate contract or other arrangement with the business associate that establishes specifically what the business associate has been engaged to do and requires the business associate to comply with the Rules’ requirements to protect the privacy and security of protected health information. In addition to these contractual obligations, business associates are directly liable for compliance with certain provisions of the HIPAA Rules.
If an entity does not meet the definition of a covered entity or business associate, it does not have to comply with the HIPAA Rules. See definitions of “business associate” and “covered entity” at 45 CFR 160.103.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities/index.html
LOL. You really think Microsoft doesn’t have an army of lawyers ensuring they comply with laws like HIPAA?
When they’re specifically writing business plans designed for hospitals, sure, they can likely account for it. But not when designing end user services that are laissez-faire about user data privacy - on the random things people put in “My Documents”. As with many organizations, it’s very possible the two parts of the corporation don’t talk to each other.
That’s not how it works. Microsoft knows Windows will be used in medical settings. They know “but it’s a product for home users” won’t be an effective defense if they cause a HIPAA violation.
They also should “know” that being forceful about backup prompts, AI features, and major version upgrades will irritate users into switching off their OS, and yet they’re doing it anyway. Logic is not driving their actions; greed for data is.
Microsoft makes is money by selling products and services. Your data is not nearly as valuable as you think it is.
It’s so funny watching people have this problem for a literal decade, and they’re still complaining instead of using FOSS.
if you think FOSS makes anything better for the average user, especially UX, I have a bridge to sell you.
Whenever I get to use windows and I face their byzantine directory structure, I wonder how people put up with that shit.
The average windows user is tech illiterate. They don’t know what a directory is. I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function. She does not comprehend how or where files are stored.
This is one of the biggest issues with corporate operating systems. Back in the day you booted up a computer and you got a black screen with a terminal. You had to know how things worked if you wanted to use the computer.
Today, you boot a computer and it’s simple enough that anyone with eyes and fingers can operate it. People hand iPads to babies, and even they can figure out how to navigate YouTube.
People have convinced themselves that this is “using a computer”, rather than being given a dumbed-down entertainment device designed specifically to exploit them.
People respond negatively when you suggest switching to Linux, because they fear they might actually have to learn something about how the Computer works, and never stop to understand that their illiteracy is the reason that the corporate operating systems they use suck so much.
If you exercise no power to change anything, they can shove as many ads as they want down your throat.
I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function
Unironically one of MS Word (and Google Docs)'s better features. Its easy to lose track of where you save a file when you’ve got a bunch of them open at once, and the ability to recall recently opened files and search by file name is a lifesaver.
People don’t know what files and folders are anymore.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.
People blindly using their computer with zero understand of what they are doing absolutely matters. A computer is a powerful tool. I take the same attitude boomers take with their cars: If you can’t tell me how it works, you have no business using it.
Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.
The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.
At least with Linux the distro-specific packages install software where it should go.
On Windows you end up with 32-bit binaries in the 64-bit Program Files folder, and vise versa. You end up with files saved arbitrarily to three different application data directories, and sometimes your Documents folder, so sometimes the registry, why not? Should we put several folders full of drivers directly on the root of the C drive? Of course, where else would they go?
At least with Linux the distro-specific packages install software where it should go.
I keep explaining this to my grandmother but she just stares at me and says “When I was your age, we wrote things down in our Trapper Keepers”
Mostly for user files.
For system files it’s not too bad. At least there’s some logic to it.
Well going to .local/share/… Isn’t very Intuitive either. Try asking someone who’s new to find their Steam Directory.
Do you have any specific notable examples? In my experience, FOSS tends to take a more no-nonsense approach to things.
How does a product that defaults to its own proprietary for-profit offerings providing a better user experience?
The argument I hear most of is that people are just used to what they’ve used in the past, and having difficulty moving to an alternative because of that isn’t indicative of the alternative offering worse UX, but rather an unwillingness to learn anything by the user.
unwillingness to learn
If you try to get a professional Photoshop or After Effects or Resolve or Solidworks or Quickbooks etc etc. user to use a FOSS equivalent you will be laughed out of the building.
It’s not that they won’t learn, it’s that the alternatives literally can’t do so much of what people need it to do. And at the same time they most often look worse, are harder to use, and are sometimes less stable.
A prime example myself, I have tried to use kdenlive for YEARS to do simple subtitling. Every few years I try the latest version. Without fail it ALWAYS crashes within 20 minutes.
Same for Audacity. 5 minutes into clipping some audio… crash. 3 times in a row. And it looks dog ugly enough to turn me off to even wanting to try it in the first place.
Or GIMP, it can’t do non-destructive editing, this makes it completely unusable for many professionals.
It’s not just one or two things here or there in these apps, it’s huge sweeping problems across the entire FOSS landscape, almost none of the options are comparable for professional users.
So I’ll counter an anecdote with an anecdote, my dad is a draftsman by trade and was an engineering technologist for decades, he’s looked at Freecad back and forth and is now seriously looking at it over solidworks for his personal projects now that he’s retired, I also flipped from solidworks which I used professionally for about 5 years before changing roles. Does it have quirks, yeah it does, but so do other cad packages, and lets not pretend that solidworks is a beacon of stability, there’s a reason it was drilled into us in uni to save frequently and why it has autosaving. The UI is relatively simple, there’s plugins to customise it and it has substantially improved over the last decade when I first gave it a try, way better than my memories of using solid edge (and I personally disliked fusion, just didn’t click with me, at least freecad has a near identical workflow to SW). Am I more accepting of jankiness with Foss solutions, straightup yes, it’s provided for free without restrictions on its usage vs solidworks where if you have a maker license for example, only other maker licenses can open the sldprt file.
Another example, I’d wager it’s why you see a lot more r and python usage in statistical spaces where SPSS and SAS were used because those tools are extremely expensive for licenses (I recall a colleague talking about it costing 10s of thousanda at leaat, maybe more, company was always looking into ways they can get off of it) cost alone makes the Foss solutions more accessible.
I’ll be also fair that both of my anecdotal examples we’re using for personal projects but the point is that professional users aren’t a monolith.
This is one reason I’m still paying my monthly Microsoft dues. I’m an advanced [I guess] Excel user and none of the other spreadsheet programs out there can do everything Excel can do. At least not easily.
A lot of people are also just dumb. FOSS won’t fix dumb.
I had to run an alias every time I wanted to change the brightness on my laptop, and it defaulted to max brightness every time it was restarted.
I get that if I was a better person I could just pull myself by my bootstraps and teach myself to sync the brightness buttons on the keyboard to work again but I’m not. On windows it just worked.
This. Straight up this. Just fucking use Linux, it’s ready for casual everyday use.
Yawn. Yelling at people to just use Linux is ineffective and it comes across as really condescending. It also does nothing to address the issue if how disruptive it is to switch operating systems, especially for less technical users.
No, it isn’t.
Linux on a laptop can’t even reliably wake the system when you close then open a laptop lid. There are some basic things that need to work 100% of the time before Linux can be considered ready for casual everyday use.
LOL it absolutely is not. Not even close.
In what way is it not? It has a desktop, a browser, free app for a word processor. For the CASUAL user it’s fine. Just don’t go into the terminal, like you wouldn’t for the command prompt.
Hardware compatibility. I have one machine that won’t boot any Linux installer at all. Another with constant gpu driver problems. Another where Bluetooth doesn’t work at all. Another where wifi firmware crashes all the time. It never ends.
Hell, even if you do go into the command prompt it’s pretty easy if you’re on something Debian based, apt is really easy to get a hang of.
“Why does my .docx document look all mess up on my computer?”
I can open .docx just fine with LibreOffice.
Bro I actively challenge you to install Mint and have problems with it. It’s nearly impossible. Worst case you’ll need to wineskin some niche Windows-only game or program, but honestly even that isn’t necessary all that often in my experience. You’re going to have a no-stress install finished in a quarter the time that a windows install would be, and a robust OS that apes the windows environment to such a degree that average non-technical users won’t have any idea they’re even using Linux.
Barring some sort of hardware incompatibility that I haven’t experienced personally, I’ve installed Mint on around a half dozen machines in the past several years and have yet to recieve a complaint from the end users. It just works.
Seriously. I’m pretty sure my housemate hasn’t noticed the difference between Mint and Windows. At least they haven’t asked me to help them with anything in over a month, and they would have, if they needed help.
I’ve been daily driving Mint at work for a few months and I love it. It was painless to install, and I like all the GUI/DE stuff better than windows. It also has better multi-monitor support than when I boot into windows.
But it’s still Linux so all the techy development shit works great too. I’m always in the terminal, etc.
the problem is always hardware incompatibility.
Mint installer does not boot on any machine I have.
I acquired an ewaste laptop with a 5+ year old Celeron, 4GM of RAM and a spinning rust drive. I tossed mint on there after fighting with Windows update to try to apply 3 years worth of updates and while the installer took 2 hours to complete, it actually is a bit more usable and once it’s booted it’s amusingly chirpy with random slowdowns whenever it has to hit the disc for data.
I might set it up as my daughter’s first computer. She’s getting to that age already so it’s about time to do it
My mother and aunt picked up on it just fine, they’re actually enjoying it more because there aren’t full screen ads that confuse them and it made their computers faster.
Tell me you haven’t used Linux recently without telling me you haven’t used Linux recently.
I use it every day across many machines. Still continue to have serious hardware compatibility problems with a wide range of devices. It’s extremely frustrating.
I realize not everyone’s experience is the same, but it can still be a really bad time for some people. Maybe the same can be said about Windows too but I still think it’s not as bad.
I want to save to the share drive that looks like a regular folder path.
Is that not how it works? I could have sworn I had it working that way the last time I used it in 2017. Had it rigged up as the location for Da Vinci Resolve database saves and also as a backup location for an Avid project that automatically copied to that folder every day. Wasn’t a fan of OneDrive as I had dropbox personally and didn’t want another cloud service where I stored all my data as one was probably bad enough, however the production I was working on had no IT infrastructure and no money and the computer we rented for the production for some reason seemed to offer oneDrive for free with the machine. (Maybe it was something to do with the 365 subscription it had?). On that basis since it was already there I used it and it actually ended up saving our asses later on after some other backup procedures didn’t end up being followed as they should have and the piece of shit rental machine totally and catastrophically broke. Still haven’t used it since, but I was pretty happy with it at the time and was only able to do all that because it was indeed a regular folder location on the machine that happened to sync with the cloud.
OneDrive decided to kick on after an overnight update and uploaded some projects and vst plugins to the cloud. Apparently, the files weren’t accessible except via the cloud, so I lost a few hours re-downloading my folders before I could do anything. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more furious over technology that I theoretically owned.
I got a PC in order to eventually go back to Linux, where at least I know that when something goes wrong, it’s generally my own fault and somewhat easy to troubleshoot. Unfortunately, the plugins I’ve been using only have Windows and Mac versions. If I had done a bit more research, I probably would have just gone with an apple device.
Always hated how MS forces you to use their shit … I mean I get it, most wouldn’t chose to use them as they are indeed shit
I have OneDrive limited to a single swap meat folder aptly called “dumpster” and it still fucks it up weekly
You can disable it in the registry. H key local machine, software, policy, microsoft, windows, OneDrive, disable sync value change from 0 to 1 and it will turn it off. I may be a little off this was just from memory.
you can remove it. use ReviOS with Windows. removes onedrive, co-pilot, edge, ads, and a bunch of other bloatware. also prevents tracking.
That’s just an NTLite build, if you want to uninstall those things do it yourself (either with NTLite and an ISO or through command prompt like any other software)
But, cyborg Bill Gates needs your data to survive. You do want him to survive, don’t you?
Oh man, the memories… it wasn’t so long after “Best of Both Worlds” aired for the first time, that the Bill Gates of Borg meme was going viral on BBSs and Usenet. Oh how we laughed… and cried, for it was funny but true.
Bill Gates doesn’t really do anything at Microsoft anymore
Nah man I’m pretty sure mecha-cyborg Bill Gates is running things there.
Damn you’re dense.
I’ve commented on this meme before. All I’m going to say this time is that OneDrive has redeeming qualities. The way that Microsoft pushes it, like many things Microsoft has pushed lately, is pretty shitty.
Quickly: good examples of shitty Microsoft pushes for what they want you to use: persistent pop-ups about upgrading to Windows 10/11 from earlier versions, making the default browser setting in Outlook/office/teams/whatever, to be separate from the system default, and that default is always edge, OneDrive… I don’t need to say more about the push to OneDrive, considering it’s the point of the post.
Regarding OneDrive specifically, you can change the default save locations for MS apps to be not OneDrive. However, OneDrive does offer benefits that are great for the less technically savvy, specifically syncing user data (mainly desktop/documents/pictures)… If you don’t need a crazy amount of storage for your images/documents, etc, then having the OneDrive backup/sync enabled is a good backup solution. The only thing you need to keep on top of is that OneDrive is actually still connected to the service (logged in) and working as intended. OneDrive seems to have this tendency to logout or expire your connection, so checking on it monthly just to ensure its still backing up is the best practice.
The benefit to this backup is that it’s built into Windows, and almost entirely transparent to the user. “Saving to OneDrive” is just putting the information into a dedicated OneDrive sync folder (usually under "C:\users(username)\OneDrive - (account name)" ) which saves locally, then syncs to OneDrive in the background using something similar to the “BITS” service (background intelligent transfer service, also part of Windows).
Since this is normally very transparent to the user, it’s good for less tech savvy people, in case they suffer a failure like a hard drive loss, system crash/failure/corruption, lost/stolen/destroyed hardware, etc. All their files are synced/saved to OneDrive and they lose nothing, all they need is a Microsoft account (Hotmail/outlook.com/live.com), and to take the 30s or so to set it up. Then use the computer pretty much normally and their data is safe from loss.
There’s an absolute shit ton of alternatives, not just from cloud storage providers. I personally use both OneDrive (personal, on a Hotmail account - free tier, which IIRC is 100G), Google drive, and my Synology. OneDrive on my PC backs up documents/pictures mainly, which I use as a sync to my laptop, and I use “Synology drive” to back up my entire C:\users\username folder to my local NAS. Google drive is exclusively used on-cloud, mainly for shared documents that I collaborate with others on; mainly financial records (no credit/debit/bank info, just costs, etc), and other tracking type documents and stuff I need to share with others.
I won’t get into other alternatives just due to the sheer number of them. Needless to say, I’m very contentious of my data and losing it. I am aware that my free/public account data might be anonymised and used to train some AI somewhere, so I tend to be careful about putting any password/account data/confidential data on a service that may have access to something I don’t want it to. I use a password manager, so I don’t generally keep login info anywhere except there.
Anyways, enough about me, I want to hear what people use for their backups!
The main thing people are upset about isn’t that OneDrive exists or that Microsoft is pushing it. It’s that updates have made it so that OneDrive folder backup is automatically enabled without user permission. Backing up files to OneDrive without being asked to. That is a privacy nightmare.
I personally host my own copy of Nextcloud and use that for anything I need to sync or back up. I have a regular back up job that snapshots the Ceph cluster it uses for storage and copies it to my own NAS box here in the house, which is automatically replicated via a Nebula network (like TailScale or Zerotier but fully self-managed) to an identical NAS at my parents’ house across town.
It does ask, but often the Yay, thanks for changing my setting that I didn’t ask you to change button is much more prominent than the Wtf I didn’t ask for this put it back how it was button, so people think they’re being told rather than asked and just confirm it without realising they had a choice. Also, a lot of people just click the Next/OK button without reading and are surprised by the consequences. It’s not a major difference than just changing the setting of people don’t realise they’re being asked to opt in and can therefore opt out, but it is a bit of a difference.
New installations of windows do not ask, and simply enable it
Hostile UX design. The “yes, make this change I don’t want” is often highlighted in a brightly colored button, meanwhile the “no thanks” is often grey or a simple link looking option, not dissimilar to what you would find for help.
They make it seem like you don’t have a choice when you absolutely do.
Having a choice in what software does is actually a big highlight for me with Windows, apart from being aggressively persuasive in getting people to do whatever they want you to do, in the end, you are given a choice.
They’re slowly eroding this away though, starting with local accounts, and I’m sure much, much more will follow.
With Linux, the only option you get is to customize your experience. Often defaults are either not apparent or not given, so you kind of stumble around trying to figure out what to do, unless you really know what you want, it can be a terrible experience.
Mac is customizable… With one big asterisk on that. You basically need to be a very advanced user to really customize anything beyond whatever the mighty blue Apple wants you to be able to do. You’re given a short list of “options” and if you want anything beyond whatever is sanctioned by Apple, here’s the command prompt, good luck 👍
Windows has been in this middle ground for a very long time. Not as free as Linux, with recommended settings across pretty much every piece of software, and defaults that generally work and provide a good experience in general. They might not be optimal, but they work. You have the option of basically doing whatever the hell you want, within reason, without having to get a PhD in computer science to do it.
With Mac, you either fit into the Apple ecosystem box, or we’ll make you fit.
Linux has no box. No walls, no limits, no rules, not even a guideline. Figure it out yourself.
… At least, that’s my take on it. I’ve used all three to some extent for various purposes. Mac is awesome when doing everyday things, a lot of what you need is abstracted away and “just works” ™, so thinking is at an all time low. Windows is very meh, it does what you want, but it’s like a moody teenager at times. It’ll just go to hell and you’ll be left to figure out wtf is going to fix it. I use Linux mainly for servers, but the UI/UX for it is essentially the aesthetic of Windows 9x/2000, but after you’ve taken LSD. When you need to get anything fixed, here’s your console, good luck. Don’t forget to sudo.
“All I’m going to say this time is that OneDrive has redeeming qualities.” Proceeds to say several more paragraphs.
All are related to the original statement.
Automated backups and synch is all fine… The way MS does it super inconsistently and unpredictably sucks
ah time for horror stories with sparky:
I know of people who work in IT and use onedrive as a shitty version of github for sharing and version controlling code… If I was them, I’d alteast use syncthing
My cousin sister lost all her files to a malicious script on her pendrive, and I am fixing it right now (at the time of writing this). The unreliable pile of crap called OneDrive didn’t even back up properly, and well, Windows has gone so bad, it’s terrible,laggy and slow on a Ryzen 5800U with 8GB of RAM. I wish she was open to learning Linux desktop environments.
I wish more people were open to learning how to properly configure Windows for family members who will likely never switch to Linux.
That shit situation sounds entirely avoidable.
I set up my 90 year old grandmother with Ubuntu; she was extremely open to learning. If somebody’s got to learn something, then why not the more useful skill? That’s better for the user, the teacher, and society at large.
Even a lot of young people are simply unwilling to learn something different if there’s any way to avoid it. Your grandmother is not at all typical.
In my family we make fun of those people
Somewhere, a Genie is howling with laughter at the magnitude of that wasted wish.
