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Using Windows with a Microsoft account introduces all sorts of issues that only power users tend to come across, and power users are who Windows Pro is targeted

by amanzi 5y ago

Using Windows with a Microsoft account introduces all sorts of issues that only power users tend to come across, and power users are who Windows Pro is targeted for. For example, RDP'ing to a Windows Pro computer with a Microsoft account becomes a lot more difficult. Another example is that Windows still needs a local username and password, even if you've logged in with a Microsoft account, and this can get out of sync if you change your Microsoft account password online, meaning you now have a different local password to your online account. It's a frustration that power users don't need and this is probably going to force me to relegate Windows to a VM.

gilrain 5y ago
This is how I wound up becoming so annoyed that I finally switched to Linux. It’s been great. I haven’t even missed out on gaming.
- mark-r 5y ago
  I keep hoping Microsoft will go one step too far and everyone will be forced to switch. Hasn't happened yet.
  - Kye 5y ago
    Linux really doesn't have good alternatives for most of the tools I use, and none of it runs in Wine and similar, so I hope not.
    - flatiron 5y ago
      It’s hard to beat windows native office. MacOS version stinks and the web version is pretty slow on complicated stuff. That’s why I use windows on my work PC ans WSL for the dev stuff.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        It's not everyone's favorite answer, but LibreOffice works fine for me. I've set a number of documents with it (including my own resume) and it works perfectly fine. It's not the most intuitive program ever made, but it's nothing if not comprehensive.
        amanzi 5y ago
        You're not going to convince hardcore Office users (like me) that LibreOffice is good enough. I try it occasionally on my Linux laptop, and I have nothing good to say about it.
        Kaze404 5y ago
        That's interesting, I have the opposite perspective. I'm not a power user in the sense that I use it to write documents, but at work we generate docx files from code (not a good idea) and a significant amount of the time we have perfectly fine files that render as we expect on LibreOffice but break unexpectedly on Word. Sometimes it even renders fine on the web version, but still incorrectly in Word itself. Edit: I should clarify that I don't mean to contradict you. Just thought it would be an interesting perspective to read about.
        flatiron 5y ago
        Personally I deal with word templates and decades old xlsx files. OG office is my only go to and honestly it’s great. I don’t buy office for home so for kids projects it’s great. But not for payday stuff.
      - temac 5y ago
        > MacOS version stinks I have not tried it yet but was thinking I could need it one day; what particularly stinks about it?
        flatiron 5y ago
        They are two different animals. My old job had office documents to complex that windows vm with office performed better than native macOS.
    - amanzi 5y ago
      What are you missing out the most on Linux? For me, it's really just the Office apps, everything else I've found works just as well on Linux.
      - Kye 5y ago
        Pretty much everything. I've used both Linux and Windows extensively over the last decade plus and am very familiar with the available alternatives and find those that exist for what I use lacking. Trying to list them off just invites people to pick suggestions off whatever list they have ready without regard for the needs of the person they're suggesting at, and it gets tiresome.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    Frog boiling is an art.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I might get downvoted, but I like windows as an OS. I used it for years and it was pretty stable and easy to modify. Now that they are going the way of Google they really have nothing to keep me. Linux has been my main OS for years anyway. Windows I used for office, adobe products, and games. I guess I'll just keep a network gapped VM around for those on my linux and buy some extra memory to handle the VM.
  - amanzi 5y ago
    Most of my work life has been focused on Microsoft products, so I've been using Windows for a long time as my primary OS. I upgraded to Windows 11 as soon as I could and despite me creating a local account initially, I then linked it to a Microsoft Account which has caused me no end of pain. There have been lots of other niggly issues with Windows 11 that I've been living with, e.g. I prefer having my taskbar on the right-hand side of the screen but that feature went away with Windows 11; and the start menu search has been playing up recently where I couldn't just start typing after the menu coming up - although it seems to be better at the moment. I switched my laptop over to PopOS a while back and have really been enjoying that, although I miss not having the Office desktop apps available. I also purchased a OneDrive sync app for Linux which works very well.
    - rd07 5y ago
      You might want to try WinApps or something similar to run your MS Office in Linux. I haven't try it myself, but it seems a nice way to run Windows apps in Linux.
      - amanzi 5y ago
        Thanks for the tip about WinApps. Looks like it might work for me but will try it out to confirm.
  - worewood 5y ago
    Technically speaking it is nice. I like NT as an OS too. The user experience is being eroded by marketing.
55873445216111 5y ago
I could never get my RDP to work until I switched to using a local account. Now I know why I was pulling my hair out trying to get it working.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Terry_Roll 5y ago
The main problem with a MS account is if you have alot of documents and you log onto a new machine, you better have good internet speed otherwise you will be waiting hours for the documents to come down. Its not so noticeable with windows server (at least since server 2000) and workstations because office network speeds are good but if you also had exchange, then local copies of exchange mailboxes also tied up office networks for ages especially if users had exchange/outlook mailboxes in excess of a several Gb in size. Usually at least 10/100 speed but usually faster, you dont get that over the internet hardly anywhere.
- antsar 5y ago
  Logging in with a MS account automatically uploads your documents to their cloud? Cool…
  - gruez 5y ago
    I doubt it, considering that Microsoft only gives you 5GB of storage for free. Anyone with non-trivial amounts of documents will quickly blow through this. What the parent poster is talking about is probably the onedrive folder, which probably gets automatically set up when you sign in with your microsoft account.
    - ryan29 5y ago
      They have some dirty tricks they use to “convince” users to put all their files in OneDrive. The main one is making it seem like a backup or something the user forgot to set up (“protect your files”), so a lot of users fall for it. Files on demand is a way to make people dependent and the low quota is to get them onto a subscription.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      And everything defaults to saving files in that folder. Saving locally is made intentionally difficult, and the setting is regularly reset to one drive after updates. So yeah, Microsoft basically saves all your documents to the cloud, even after trying very hard to disable that possibility. Windows 11 is the proverbial straw for my camel. It's hostile and aggressive, and I don't need to fight with my computer.
neighborlynook 5y ago
I am convinced Power Users are not the target market for Windows 11 (or maybe even windows). I mistakenly updated to it and have regretted it. Did you know they turned off animations when using Virtual Desktops [1]? A power-user feature on all the other OS' that took Microsoft till 2019 to adopt was crippled in little over 2 years after release. [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/report-an-issue/windows11-no-animation-when-switching-between-virtual-desktops/m-p/2719065 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/report-an-issue/windo...
- pxx 5y ago
  Color me confused. Why would I ever want animations when I change virtual desktops? I know what keys I pressed. I pressed them for a reason. The animation just gets in the way. In general, animations don't seem like a "power user" feature at all. Animations hint at new users ("hey, where did that window go when I minimized it") but aren't useful once you understand the abstraction.
  - dmonitor 5y ago
    There should be some feedback to something so drastic as a desktop context change
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    When going "two to the right" over empty desktops it is nice to see it was triggered two times maybe? I have a habit of putting the same stuff on the same virtual desktop number, so the other are ofen empty.
  - throwamon 5y ago
    Maybe I just have exceptional cognitive and motor skills issues, but even though I spend pretty much all my time in front of a screen and consider myself to be a power user, I press wrong keys by mistake very often, and I do appreciate (fast) animations for feedback. There definitely should be at the very least a toggle though.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
ryan29 5y ago
I use multiple non-admin profiles for different activities and I think this will ruin my strategy. I always make the first user a local account and never use it for anything but adding normal user profiles. I log in with my personal Microsoft account on one profile. I use a local account for a work profile that also has a MS365 account added to it (to avoid being joined to the domain). I have a second MS account for a side project. I have a second local account for a second job that uses Google Workspace. I use Windows over Linux because it’s more convenient. Although that’s only because I’m forced into Office for work. I could probably switch to Linux for 80% of my stuff. I have a Linux install for development, but rebooting to do a quick task is a pain. I think the government needs to break up big tech. The anti-consumer behavior they’re engaged in because they have no competition is crazy. IT costs for small businesses have skyrocketed in the last decade. Everything is a subscription and costs 3-10x what it used to.
- jenscow 5y ago
  > I use multiple non-admin profiles for different activities Well, shit me. I've not used Windows since 8 came out. However, I would have loved to have had that workflow for a multiple desktop type thing. Why didn't I think of that 20 years ago? (for a long time, windows has internally supported multiple desktops, but it's not quite the same)
  - shawnz 5y ago
    Windows now exposes the multiple desktops feature in the shell.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    Highly recommended way to use any flavor of windows going back to way back when - give your admin account a long fancy password and then just rarely logon as that account. Your daily driver is an account with normal priviliges. Also good for Grandma so she can't install a bunch of spyware
    - chj 5y ago
vel0city 5y ago
> For example, RDP'ing to a Windows Pro computer with a Microsoft account becomes a lot more difficult. I'm of the exact opposite persuasion. RDP'ing into a computer with your Microsoft account is easier, along with file and folder permissions across network shares and other account related things. I used to have to manage an AD domain to have the same set of accounts across all my various Windows machines. Now that I can sign in with my Windows account, its the same account across all my machines. Permissions are easier on network shares, its the same account. Friends that come over and want to use my machines can log in with their own account. Sharing files with them is then just granting access to their Microsoft account. Its pretty much entirely replaced the desire to run AD at home, which IMO makes things loads easier. As for your password being out of sync, I've only experienced an out of sync password in cases where the device could not have an internet connection. Once the device was able to get an internet connection, it prompted for me to refresh the current device credentials (lock and log back in), and it then authenticated against the cloud Microsoft account. In the 10 years and ~30 different machines used I've yet to experience a single real frustration of the online account and local account getting out of sync for more than a single password change when literally in the wilderness. In which case, it was just the last password I used to log in to the machine, and then updated when it got network connectivity again.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > RDP'ing into a computer with your Microsoft account is easier Only if you use the same account on both computers. What means the GP will have to use his work account on his personal computer just to jump into another machine.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    I'm confused about your hypothetical. Why would they have to do that? Could you explain that issue more?
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      ... because they're at home without their work machine and need to check something at work? Because their colleague wants to let them drive? Because my sister wants some help installing a program? There are so many situations where using a computer doesn't involve strict security protocols and heirarchies. Sometimes MS gets a little too caught up in their corporate environments.
judge2020 5y ago
The RDP issue is only a problem because the UI doesn't make it clear that you need to have password sign-in enabled to RDP, when setting up a PIN during initial setup disables password sign-in.
freeflight 5y ago
> Another example is that Windows still needs a local username and password, even if you've logged in with a Microsoft account, and this can get out of sync if you change your Microsoft account password online, meaning you now have a different local password to your online account. I tripped over this when I first started using Windows 10. It felt so unbelievably frustrating to be locked out of a local system because I couldn't remember my MS account password anymore. As a reward for that, I discovered MS was indexing the contents of all my hard-drives, could suddenly look at my local hard drives just by logging into my MS account from any other device. Even tho I went out of my way to disable as much of the home-phone functionality as possible; Just takes one auto-update to default a lot of these settings without ever informing the user about it.
asabla 5y ago
This is exactly what happened to me. I just had enough with all the anti-patterns emerging for each larger update or Windows iteration. I now do all work which require windows in a VM, and using PopOS as host and couldn't be happier. If it weren't for specific .Net framework parts and my hate/love relationship with Visual Studio I would have probably moved on from Windows a long time ago
hedora 5y ago
Wow, this comment just crossed 50 replies. I think the fundamental issue is that Microsoft platforms have never maintained the invariant that knowing your username and password is enough to log in. Oh well. Minecraft and an Xbox 360 are my remaining use cases for my Microsoft account. I've long left that ecosystem. I do miss my windows phone though.
lasereyes136 5y ago
> and power users are who Windows Pro is targeted for. Nope, Windows Pro is targeted to businesses. I agree that this will be a frustration point some power users don't need and while make some relegate Windows to a VM. Many power users have already done this and I don't see them changing direction based on this news.

by amanzi 5y ago

gilrain 5y ago

This is how I wound up becoming so annoyed that I finally switched to Linux. It’s been great. I haven’t even missed out on gaming.

mark-r 5y ago
I keep hoping Microsoft will go one step too far and everyone will be forced to switch. Hasn't happened yet.
- Kye 5y ago
  Linux really doesn't have good alternatives for most of the tools I use, and none of it runs in Wine and similar, so I hope not.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    It’s hard to beat windows native office. MacOS version stinks and the web version is pretty slow on complicated stuff. That’s why I use windows on my work PC ans WSL for the dev stuff.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      It's not everyone's favorite answer, but LibreOffice works fine for me. I've set a number of documents with it (including my own resume) and it works perfectly fine. It's not the most intuitive program ever made, but it's nothing if not comprehensive.
      - amanzi 5y ago
        You're not going to convince hardcore Office users (like me) that LibreOffice is good enough. I try it occasionally on my Linux laptop, and I have nothing good to say about it.
        Kaze404 5y ago
        That's interesting, I have the opposite perspective. I'm not a power user in the sense that I use it to write documents, but at work we generate docx files from code (not a good idea) and a significant amount of the time we have perfectly fine files that render as we expect on LibreOffice but break unexpectedly on Word. Sometimes it even renders fine on the web version, but still incorrectly in Word itself. Edit: I should clarify that I don't mean to contradict you. Just thought it would be an interesting perspective to read about.
        flatiron 5y ago
        Personally I deal with word templates and decades old xlsx files. OG office is my only go to and honestly it’s great. I don’t buy office for home so for kids projects it’s great. But not for payday stuff.
    - temac 5y ago
      > MacOS version stinks I have not tried it yet but was thinking I could need it one day; what particularly stinks about it?
      - flatiron 5y ago
        They are two different animals. My old job had office documents to complex that windows vm with office performed better than native macOS.
  - amanzi 5y ago
    What are you missing out the most on Linux? For me, it's really just the Office apps, everything else I've found works just as well on Linux.
    - Kye 5y ago
      Pretty much everything. I've used both Linux and Windows extensively over the last decade plus and am very familiar with the available alternatives and find those that exist for what I use lacking. Trying to list them off just invites people to pick suggestions off whatever list they have ready without regard for the needs of the person they're suggesting at, and it gets tiresome.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  Frog boiling is an art.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I might get downvoted, but I like windows as an OS. I used it for years and it was pretty stable and easy to modify. Now that they are going the way of Google they really have nothing to keep me. Linux has been my main OS for years anyway. Windows I used for office, adobe products, and games. I guess I'll just keep a network gapped VM around for those on my linux and buy some extra memory to handle the VM.
- amanzi 5y ago
  Most of my work life has been focused on Microsoft products, so I've been using Windows for a long time as my primary OS. I upgraded to Windows 11 as soon as I could and despite me creating a local account initially, I then linked it to a Microsoft Account which has caused me no end of pain. There have been lots of other niggly issues with Windows 11 that I've been living with, e.g. I prefer having my taskbar on the right-hand side of the screen but that feature went away with Windows 11; and the start menu search has been playing up recently where I couldn't just start typing after the menu coming up - although it seems to be better at the moment. I switched my laptop over to PopOS a while back and have really been enjoying that, although I miss not having the Office desktop apps available. I also purchased a OneDrive sync app for Linux which works very well.
  - rd07 5y ago
    You might want to try WinApps or something similar to run your MS Office in Linux. I haven't try it myself, but it seems a nice way to run Windows apps in Linux.
    - amanzi 5y ago
      Thanks for the tip about WinApps. Looks like it might work for me but will try it out to confirm.
- worewood 5y ago
  Technically speaking it is nice. I like NT as an OS too. The user experience is being eroded by marketing.

55873445216111 5y ago

I could never get my RDP to work until I switched to using a local account. Now I know why I was pulling my hair out trying to get it working.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Terry_Roll 5y ago

The main problem with a MS account is if you have alot of documents and you log onto a new machine, you better have good internet speed otherwise you will be waiting hours for the documents to come down. Its not so noticeable with windows server (at least since server 2000) and workstations because office network speeds are good but if you also had exchange, then local copies of exchange mailboxes also tied up office networks for ages especially if users had exchange/outlook mailboxes in excess of a several Gb in size. Usually at least 10/100 speed but usually faster, you dont get that over the internet hardly anywhere.

antsar 5y ago
Logging in with a MS account automatically uploads your documents to their cloud? Cool…
- gruez 5y ago
  I doubt it, considering that Microsoft only gives you 5GB of storage for free. Anyone with non-trivial amounts of documents will quickly blow through this. What the parent poster is talking about is probably the onedrive folder, which probably gets automatically set up when you sign in with your microsoft account.
  - ryan29 5y ago
    They have some dirty tricks they use to “convince” users to put all their files in OneDrive. The main one is making it seem like a backup or something the user forgot to set up (“protect your files”), so a lot of users fall for it. Files on demand is a way to make people dependent and the low quota is to get them onto a subscription.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    And everything defaults to saving files in that folder. Saving locally is made intentionally difficult, and the setting is regularly reset to one drive after updates. So yeah, Microsoft basically saves all your documents to the cloud, even after trying very hard to disable that possibility. Windows 11 is the proverbial straw for my camel. It's hostile and aggressive, and I don't need to fight with my computer.

neighborlynook 5y ago

I am convinced Power Users are not the target market for Windows 11 (or maybe even windows). I mistakenly updated to it and have regretted it. Did you know they turned off animations when using Virtual Desktops [1]? A power-user feature on all the other OS' that took Microsoft till 2019 to adopt was crippled in little over 2 years after release. [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/report-an-issue/windows11-no-animation-when-switching-between-virtual-desktops/m-p/2719065 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/report-an-issue/windo...

pxx 5y ago
Color me confused. Why would I ever want animations when I change virtual desktops? I know what keys I pressed. I pressed them for a reason. The animation just gets in the way. In general, animations don't seem like a "power user" feature at all. Animations hint at new users ("hey, where did that window go when I minimized it") but aren't useful once you understand the abstraction.
- dmonitor 5y ago
  There should be some feedback to something so drastic as a desktop context change
- rightbyte 5y ago
  When going "two to the right" over empty desktops it is nice to see it was triggered two times maybe? I have a habit of putting the same stuff on the same virtual desktop number, so the other are ofen empty.
- throwamon 5y ago
  Maybe I just have exceptional cognitive and motor skills issues, but even though I spend pretty much all my time in front of a screen and consider myself to be a power user, I press wrong keys by mistake very often, and I do appreciate (fast) animations for feedback. There definitely should be at the very least a toggle though.
- marcosdumay 5y ago

ryan29 5y ago

I use multiple non-admin profiles for different activities and I think this will ruin my strategy. I always make the first user a local account and never use it for anything but adding normal user profiles. I log in with my personal Microsoft account on one profile. I use a local account for a work profile that also has a MS365 account added to it (to avoid being joined to the domain). I have a second MS account for a side project. I have a second local account for a second job that uses Google Workspace. I use Windows over Linux because it’s more convenient. Although that’s only because I’m forced into Office for work. I could probably switch to Linux for 80% of my stuff. I have a Linux install for development, but rebooting to do a quick task is a pain. I think the government needs to break up big tech. The anti-consumer behavior they’re engaged in because they have no competition is crazy. IT costs for small businesses have skyrocketed in the last decade. Everything is a subscription and costs 3-10x what it used to.

jenscow 5y ago
> I use multiple non-admin profiles for different activities Well, shit me. I've not used Windows since 8 came out. However, I would have loved to have had that workflow for a multiple desktop type thing. Why didn't I think of that 20 years ago? (for a long time, windows has internally supported multiple desktops, but it's not quite the same)
- shawnz 5y ago
  Windows now exposes the multiple desktops feature in the shell.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Highly recommended way to use any flavor of windows going back to way back when - give your admin account a long fancy password and then just rarely logon as that account. Your daily driver is an account with normal priviliges. Also good for Grandma so she can't install a bunch of spyware
  - chj 5y ago

vel0city 5y ago

> For example, RDP'ing to a Windows Pro computer with a Microsoft account becomes a lot more difficult. I'm of the exact opposite persuasion. RDP'ing into a computer with your Microsoft account is easier, along with file and folder permissions across network shares and other account related things. I used to have to manage an AD domain to have the same set of accounts across all my various Windows machines. Now that I can sign in with my Windows account, its the same account across all my machines. Permissions are easier on network shares, its the same account. Friends that come over and want to use my machines can log in with their own account. Sharing files with them is then just granting access to their Microsoft account. Its pretty much entirely replaced the desire to run AD at home, which IMO makes things loads easier. As for your password being out of sync, I've only experienced an out of sync password in cases where the device could not have an internet connection. Once the device was able to get an internet connection, it prompted for me to refresh the current device credentials (lock and log back in), and it then authenticated against the cloud Microsoft account. In the 10 years and ~30 different machines used I've yet to experience a single real frustration of the online account and local account getting out of sync for more than a single password change when literally in the wilderness. In which case, it was just the last password I used to log in to the machine, and then updated when it got network connectivity again.

marcosdumay 5y ago
> RDP'ing into a computer with your Microsoft account is easier Only if you use the same account on both computers. What means the GP will have to use his work account on his personal computer just to jump into another machine.
- vel0city 5y ago
  I'm confused about your hypothetical. Why would they have to do that? Could you explain that issue more?
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    ... because they're at home without their work machine and need to check something at work? Because their colleague wants to let them drive? Because my sister wants some help installing a program? There are so many situations where using a computer doesn't involve strict security protocols and heirarchies. Sometimes MS gets a little too caught up in their corporate environments.

judge2020 5y ago

The RDP issue is only a problem because the UI doesn't make it clear that you need to have password sign-in enabled to RDP, when setting up a PIN during initial setup disables password sign-in.

freeflight 5y ago

> Another example is that Windows still needs a local username and password, even if you've logged in with a Microsoft account, and this can get out of sync if you change your Microsoft account password online, meaning you now have a different local password to your online account. I tripped over this when I first started using Windows 10. It felt so unbelievably frustrating to be locked out of a local system because I couldn't remember my MS account password anymore. As a reward for that, I discovered MS was indexing the contents of all my hard-drives, could suddenly look at my local hard drives just by logging into my MS account from any other device. Even tho I went out of my way to disable as much of the home-phone functionality as possible; Just takes one auto-update to default a lot of these settings without ever informing the user about it.

asabla 5y ago

This is exactly what happened to me. I just had enough with all the anti-patterns emerging for each larger update or Windows iteration. I now do all work which require windows in a VM, and using PopOS as host and couldn't be happier. If it weren't for specific .Net framework parts and my hate/love relationship with Visual Studio I would have probably moved on from Windows a long time ago

hedora 5y ago

Wow, this comment just crossed 50 replies. I think the fundamental issue is that Microsoft platforms have never maintained the invariant that knowing your username and password is enough to log in. Oh well. Minecraft and an Xbox 360 are my remaining use cases for my Microsoft account. I've long left that ecosystem. I do miss my windows phone though.

lasereyes136 5y ago

> and power users are who Windows Pro is targeted for. Nope, Windows Pro is targeted to businesses. I agree that this will be a frustration point some power users don't need and while make some relegate Windows to a VM. Many power users have already done this and I don't see them changing direction based on this news.