Mastodawn

megaspel Sep 19, 2025

Linux has plenty of its own problems and I am not the type to push it on even adventurous nontechnical people. But I feel confident in saying that a Linux system will never get this deeply toxically screwed up. To screw up this badly two trillion dollar corporations made a pact, and thousands of resultant engineering and UX decisions, in the belief their users are cattle who do not deserve even the most basic respect. Absolutely cooked company.
https://www.osnews.com/story/143376/dark-patterns-killed-my-wifes-windows-11-installation/

Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews

Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm Sep 19, 2025

Probably AI code. 😸

@jplebreton This is probably not super accurate, but I've been saying that when Linux breaks it's because I did something, and when Windows breaks it's because something was done to me.

Also the one time I found an actual (minor) bug in @kde the devs figured out the problem in a few days and added the fix to the next point release. Can't exactly call John Microsoft when your computer gets locked out because your phone is flooding your C: drive

narpoleptic Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton it's not conclusively involved here, but a whole _bunch_ of issues with Windows as a desktop OS over the last decade or so have proven to be easily explicable through the lens of "What if there were some nimrod of a middle manager somewhere whose bonus threshold is Get X% Of Users Upgraded To Windows 10/Using An Online MS Account/Using OneDrive/Syncing Their Phone To Their OneDrive/Etc?". Particularly when the worst changes get rolled back after user uproar.

apophis Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton i don't think any self-respecting rancher would treat their cattle this way

Ben S.Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton my latest laptop came with Windows 11, and by default some of my user folders were trapped inside of my OneDrive folder. I had to research how to wrestle them free so that I could rip OneDrive out of my system (because I feared this exact kind of thing happening).

Windows very much feels like a platform for selling other Microsoft products at this point, which is frustrating. Switching to Linux or Mac is a no-go for multiple reasons, but those reasons are eroding quickly.

narpoleptic Sep 19, 2025

@HunterZ @jplebreton a scummy trick MS has been using in recent builds of Win10 and Win11 is to check during the Out Of Box Experience stage (where you create a user account and choose some settings) if there is a network connection. If there is, they force you to create a "Microsoft" account (i.e. create a local account synced to a cloud account), which is auto-enrolled for OneDrive etc. It's getting increasingly difficult to bypass this railroad if you want a local account.

Kaito Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton may I suggest mentioning the name of the bad company in the post, I think it deserves more discredit. I thought this was another Linux = bad post

JP Sep 19, 2025

@kaito02 Let me make sure I'm understanding correctly. You started reading my post, thought "Wait a minute, this guy is badmouthing Linux!", but then by the end of it you understood what and who I was actually criticizing?

Alex Papageorgiou Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton As of last year and the push for Windows 11, I no longer set up Windows for friends and family, I put folks in Linux instead because it's so hopeless to navigate through a hostile computer. It's ironic that the year of Linux on the desktop is coming not because it got better, but because of how bad the Windows experience has become

christian mock Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton deep inside that story, there's probably also some code that writes to disk and doesn't check the return code, thereby corrupting some important file. That's a very sad thing give we're a quarter thru the 21st century, but it is common...

(And am I a bad son for giving my mom her first computer for her 70th birthday with Linux on it? 😃 )

JP Sep 19, 2025

@cm I've heard of many cases like that, younger technical folks giving their nontechnical parents a nice simple Linux system! I would absolutely do it if I understood their needs well enough to be sure they'd be covered by a good Linux setup.

christian mock Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton (That was basically a joke referring to your "not push linux on people", but anyways) Yes, she was a complete novice and said "mail, and web, and text processing", and she's happy with it and much less support effort than my dad, who at the time was still using windows, but followed her example and switched to Linux when WinXP was EOLd... but he still has a Windows VM under virtualbox there.

Kerplunk Sep 19, 2025

Linux has plenty of its own problems and I am not the type to push it on even adventurous nontechnical people

Really, youngest up to now who installed Linux without assistance was 7 years old.
Oldest I know is well over 80.

When I see such an open criticism I always wonder if it comes from an MS Employee.

I have done and assisted many Linux installations over a wide range of hardware.

Real problems with Linux are usually on Laptops, and result from missing Proprietary drivers.

JP Sep 19, 2025

@Kerplunk Read my post again and tell me what the focus of my actual criticism is.

Kerplunk Sep 20, 2025

I read your post, it started with a negative comment toward usage of Linux.

Quote: Linux has plenty of its own problems and I am not the type to push it on even adventurous nontechnical people.

My experience is with the right choice of distribution and a little help, either from a forum or a friend the move from windoze is usually easy.

Having used and discarded many linux distributions over many years I chose reliability + speed over flashy inefficiency.

antiX with ICEWM.

JP Sep 20, 2025

@Kerplunk Linux has been my primary home OS since 2006. I am well aware of its strengths and weaknesses. The best way to advance its adoption is to be honest about those and not be fragile towards criticism. If you derail my thread further you will be blocked.

Flipper 🐬🏳️‍🌈Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton It is possible to keep Windows 11 with a local account only, but it's a convoluted set of steps you need to follow when you install it. I had to research it and it's not something I'd expect a normal user to know about.

I have far fewer issues with Windows 11 than I read about online, and I suspect that not being connected to Microsoft is the reason.

J. "Henry" Waugh Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton related, the post from Ed Zitron this reminds me of:

> On November 21, I purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon — a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage [...] Affordable and under-powered, I’d consider this a fairly representative sample of how millions of people interact with the internet

The experience setting up Windows on that shocked even me

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Never Forgive Them

In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

xyhhx 🔻Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton holy shit lol

young_Mr_Hawthorn Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton
I'm starting to think that our beloved local PCs are becoming microsoft terminals..that's really grim !

Myphatself Sep 19, 2025

@jplebreton "If you can switch away and ditch Windows, you should. The ship is burning, and there’s nobody left to put out the fires." That's it.

Jack Zhang (📹🦝 Raccoon)Sep 20, 2025

@jplebreton The lengths some go to "assume" consent is scary. LG Channels "assumes" tuning to a channel on the channel list is automatic consent to download other applications in the background to "install support for viewing the current channel."

No clear and defined consent dialogues, just vague wording without an option to say "no" or "cancel." The only option for a popup is "yes."

Spencer Sep 20, 2025

@jplebreton @JackRacc This is the logic of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff writes. Use impossibly long Terms and Conditions to essentially render users completely subordinate, and treat consent as meaningless. Declare that it is the corporation's legal and moral right to subjugate ends users in order to capture their data and extract value.

It is not dissimilar to how land was captured and turned into "real estate" from which value could be extracted. Just that in this form of capitalism, we human beings are the raw material.

anna, a criticality incident at the gender accelerator Oct 7

@jplebreton the ridiculous series of events is worth a read so im not spoiling the real punchline, but lmao that windows 11 just loses its shit like this when it runs out of disk space. if anything i have a problem with most gnu+linux systems working TOO well when they run out of disk space on / because most things kind of work but everything is Off and you have a lot of strange problems until you figure out what's going on

@jplebreton wow i think something like this happened to my windows installation, i'm not really sure because i bought a $20 ssd, installed linux to it, and have just been using linux since