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Microsoft pulls OneDrive update that would quiz you before letting you quit
- input_sh 3y agoDiscussed 3x yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38197715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38197715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38208568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38208568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38208473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38208473
- amlozano 3y agoThe last line of the article is just a stunningly good summary: "But it's just one more annoying default you need to change to make sure that modern Windows stays out of your way." Microsoft is constantly pushing the limit of what users will tolerate. I switched non-technical people to Linux OSes after hearing about this, and heard no complaints from them. It's almost like Microsoft wants to lose whatever footholds they have left.
- tornato7 3y agoI started using Kubuntu and I absolutely loved it. Leagues ahead of Windows 11 in terms of user experience, customization, and speed. However, I had to switch back. I just can't get by without Adobe apps and other specific productivity apps and video games that I couldn't get to run on Ubuntu. Maybe some day!
- cdelsolar 3y agoGimp, figma, Kdenlive, etc
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoI don't use windows at all, but for others (parents, s/o,..) i would install it as a 'default' (because every instruction anyone was written for windows)... Then they added ads in the start menu, and I found it easier to deal with the "this is linux, not windows, to do this, you have to do that", than to constanty fix and change windows settings making stuff shittier by default.
- lessbergstein 3y agoBecause they'e just looking at the metrics in isolation and the people who are responsible for it couldn't care less about long term viability.
- phpisthebest 3y agoMicrosoft stated goal is to be cloud first, they want people to use their vertical integrated cloud services. Office, OneDrive, Teams, Azure, etc If you are not a cloud customer they do not really care if you leave windows At this point people should (and microsoft defacto does) considers Windows as a client for their cloud services, not a Operating system
- lazide 3y agoThe problem is, their cloud solutions suck.
- phpisthebest 3y agoCompared to what.... and what services. Office is still king in the US business world, I bet they have close to 70%+ businesses in the US on Office 365 in some manner. Compared to Google Apps I would prefer to use Office 365 every single day.
- lazide 3y agoIt sucks compared to every other available word processor/spread sheet/email and online ‘office’ service I’ve used, except OpenOffice. Literally even office desktop. Super buggy, loses data, and steps on things, tons of bizarre formatting issues and out of sync problems, and slow to boot. The only reason it’s so popular is because it’s been the ingrained monopoly ‘you don’t get fired for’ choice. Actually using it is terrible.
- phpisthebest 3y agoLiterally none of those things is true for the average person
- lazide 3y agoConsidering how many people I’ve heard say the same thing? If you think that, you aren’t listening.
- Multicomp 3y agoThis is an unforced error on Microsoft's part. The latest in a long line. But I'm not even surprised these days, just disappointed. I must have just had rose-tinted glasses when I was young, but I totally believed the 'force augmentation' PR Microsoft offered with their Windows XP tour and their SkyDrive initial offering and their Office 2010 ribbon. I was young enough to not get why people complained so much about those switches. Grow up, toolbars are old and boring, this is cool, life is change, yada yada. Now? After the confusing Windows 8, the killing of WP7, the spyware of W10, the forced updates of W10, the loss of fundamental human interface guideline compliance and look & feel by new-age UX designers who have forgotten the lessons of the past searching to be the next not-Apple of W11, (I could go on) I've grown so sick of Microsoft's current direction that I've apparently clipped over to the other side of the screen. Now, I don't care. I miss what I see and saw as good. I let my inertia keeping me using Onenote and familiar tools. But I'm not in love with MS like I used to be, I had to let go of MS fanboyism to hang on to "fight for the users" fanboyism. Luckily the Year of the Linux Desktop will arrive shortly, any second now, and we will be fine (EDIT: /s). In the meantime, I've had to treat my computers as tools, not hobby projects...it's too depressing otherwise.
- deafpolygon 3y ago> Year of the Linux Desktop will arrive shortly I think we've been saying this since at least 1990.
- jamespo 3y agoWe have tablets and phones now all running unix variants
- ziddoap 3y ago>Year of the Linux _Desktop_ will arrive shortly I don't consider my phone nor my tablet to be a "desktop".
- threePointFive 3y ago
- hkchad 3y agoIt wouldn't let me login the other day until I completed my signup for "hello" whatever the f-that is. I had to pull the ethernet cable THEN I could login to windows. I promptly disabled any signup that had "hello" in the description. I have exactly 1 windows machine in my house and I am pretty close to making it 0. I was careful to setup that machine before connecting it to the internet so I could create a local account. The hoops people have to jump through just to use something they've paid for is getting pretty outlandish.
- itronitron 3y agoIt used to be that once the accumulated Windows updates had fully bogged down one of our computers we would uninstall Windows and install Ubuntu. These days we just uninstall Windows on any new system we get.
- slig 3y agoWhy can't they figure out a paid version for Professionals without any BS? WSL2 works fine, docker, Steam, multiple monitors, etc. Just remove the BS.
- CamperBob2 3y agoThey have (Enterprise LTSC). You can't have it. Also, you are now subscribed to OneDriveFacts(tm).
- taspeotis 3y agoYou can buy a grey market CD key cheaply or subscribe to whichever Microsoft 365 tier gives you Enterprise. The subscription model is somewhat expensive but if you’re able to make it a business expense for Windows + email hosting + the Office apps it’s not totally egregious.
- jacooper 3y agoThe issue with LTSC is it (afaik) sucks fkr gaming, with a lot of missing stuff for dx12 and so on.
- 38 3y agomaybe I am on an old version, but I dont get that at all. here is my info: OneDrive version: Build 23.214.1015.0001 (64-bit) if I try to close, I get: Are you sure you want to close OneDrive? If you close OneDrive, files in your OneDrive folder won't sync with your files online. [Close OneDrive][Cancel]
- ziddoap 3y ago>Change affected a "small subset" of users and has (thankfully) been reverted. From the top of the article. The quiz was not a ubiquitous roll-out.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoI don't understand why people invite an adversarial entity onto their computer just for the convenience of syncing files. Unison+ssh+Tailscale (or alternatively Syncthing for a slightly more hands-off approach) accomplishes the same with much less overhead and fewer annoyances.
- jprete 3y agoWindows 11 more or less forces OneDrive onto the machine. It takes active work to get rid of it.
- threePointFive 3y agoMy company switched off of perfectly working SMB shares to OneDrive + SharePoint about a year ago and it has been the singlehanded biggest generator of helpdesk tickets since. I'm trying to get corporate to let me use rclone since I can at least tell it to push/pull a specific file instead of waiting for OneDrive to finish "syncing changes".
- Xiol32 3y agoSyncthing is so good. I wish more people would use it. Onboarding is certainly more complex than just using Onedrive or installing Dropbox, but once it's set up it just stays out of the way and works.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago>I don't understand why people invite an adversarial entity onto their computer just for the convenience of syncing files. Most dont invite it. MS sneaks it in the backdoor I recently bought a new PC and only found out it was syncing my desktop and user files to OneDrive (which I never signed up for) unbeknownst to me when it started having problems. Then I had to find and wade through a few pathetic prompts to disable it. "are you suuure you want to disable cloud backup?" "Are you suure you want to delete your tax filings and financial docs we copied without asking?"
- yetanotherloss 3y agoUnless you go out of your way, it's not invited in, it was already inside. Most people who don't live in o365 don't know or care what OneDrive even is due to how much it sucks. This is more user hostile tactics to force acceptance of the eventual subscription fees for everything Windows.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion and updates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38197715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38197715
- _Algernon_ 3y agoThis is about them pulling the update which is a new development.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoNah, the Verge article is also updated to mention that development. There's a ton of discussion over there.
- accoil 3y agoTry [related]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoWhat’s most frustrating to me is how slapdash One Drive is to this day. It is their easiest way to get consumers to start paying for services, yet the product still has embarrassing limitations. Two that I hit on my corporate machine: - struggles with too many files. Last I looked, official Microsoft documentation says to not exceed 100k files. Yet, $WORK wants to dump basically every file I touch inside there. My Teams folder alone is ~20k files. - has a max file path limit which is less than the allowable on NTFS. I use some software with a heavily nested folder structure which One Drive cannot accommodate. A valid Windows file path cannot be backed up by their promoted solution.
- pixl97 3y agoLong file paths in windows are a wreck as it is. I have no idea why it is not enabled by default in this day and age.
- turminal 3y agoThis is not just a Windows thing. Plenty of Unix software struggles with long paths as well.
- natebc 3y agoGot bit by this(1) clown that decided to do a crazy long version number as a joke and release it in pypi. Broke a few local pypi caches. Breakdown in the github issue at (2). So ... pobody's nerfect. 1) https://pypi.org/project/uselesscapitalquiz/ https://pypi.org/project/uselesscapitalquiz/ 2) https://github.com/pypa/bandersnatch//issues/1200#issuecomment-1236429375 https://github.com/pypa/bandersnatch//issues/1200#issuecomme...
- Modified3019 3y agoYeah, windows is a hydra of weirdness, where some things fully support longpaths, but random things will come up that don’t, or fail to properly check and handle things, because no one ever got around to fixing it. But even the linux kernel will quickly start having problems if one starts having long filenames with multi-bit unicode characters, that 255 bit size max can go fast. Many filesystems for linux actually support larger filenames than what the kernel does.
- gailees 3y agowtf
- m3kw9 3y agoWhat happens when you have a company that doesn’t understand user experience and have close to a monopoly
- gumballindie 3y agoOh but bill gates thinks you wont need this type of user experience because once they’ve sucked all your data without your consent you will just talk to your pc or whatever they’ll call it. All according to plan - break the ui, degrade the ux, provide a magic “ai” solution.
- TriangleEdge 3y agoIs it possible to delete OneDrive from Windows 11? Apple doesn't let you delete the News app, or Safari from Macs. I'm hoping the EU does something similar to iPhones and USB-C and slams the hammer down on forced apps on various platforms.
- soroushmo 3y agoyou can remove OneDrive, but you cant remove Edge.
- nathanaldensr 3y agoYou want O&O ShutUp10++[1], which is an excellent app for disabling tons of Windows features including OneDrive. [1] https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
- tcbawo 3y agoThe only reason I have Windows is for seamless device driver support. Most things work and don’t break with a system update. I don’t want to spend a single minute debugging issues on a forum, resorting to OS reinstall due to something being broken, or twiddling with buggy display or wireless settings. I love the Linux desktop. I wish I could pay someone to deliver this experience. But, I don’t believe that I can. I wish I could strip the display off Windows and run it as a hypervisor with a nice hardware abstraction layer for another OS.
- the__alchemist 3y agoI'm with you. Love the idea of using Linux, but couldn't have stated the drawbacks more elegantly. I look at the OS reinstall more like an insurance company totaled your car vice it being at the bottom of a lake: You can always bring a Linux install back to life through a correct combination of CLI incantations in a fallback console, but at a point, it's easier to do a clean install.
- gumballindie 3y agoYou really only chroot from a live usb stick to your linux root and grub install to recover your boot process, it’s really not that hard. But i agree, would be nice to have a little gui tool - i at least have become too lazy given linux’s recent ease of use.
- Affric 3y agoI agree to an extent. If you are in tech the Linux process shouldn’t be too bad. Installing Arch is a good lesson in learning what you’re doing. Totally doable but you’re spoken to like an adult. I think it’s pretty contrary to most expectations of tech today though.
- gumballindie 3y agoI doubt a casual user has a better experience with windows. Actually, it may be worse with windows and it's more likely they will lose data.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoOneDrive syncing, plus whatever "enhancements" Microsoft have made to Windows Explorer, makes my current directory navigation and file management slower than it was 10+ years ago. I've started working out of a separate directory structure so that OneDrive stays out of the way, and then move the files manually into OneDrive's field-of-view once I'm finished. This is not good practise for backups, but it's good practise for time efficiency and minimal frustration.
- spider-mario 3y agoWindows RG was supposed to be parody, not a wishlist.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoOnedrive is one of the most cancerous products Microsoft has created in crescent years. I don’t want drive yet it is difficult to uninstall and somehow integrates with office, including outlook web. It’s a clear moneygrab trying to shift user behaviour into cloud storage, I assume because it’s difficult or rare for users to switch storage providers. I wish the Microsoft quality team reigned in all the dark patterns the marketing and retention team were forcing onto people, and I truly wish this whole thing backfires and costs them revenue in the long run.
- insulanus 3y agoPSA for those using windows at home: someone else has already done all the work removing spyware / unnecessary junk / mandatory login, etc. https://github.com/topics/windows-11-debloat https://github.com/topics/windows-11-debloat I think I used this guide https://christitus.com/windows-11-perfect-install/ https://christitus.com/windows-11-perfect-install/
- TacticalCoder 3y agoIf you have to "debloat", you've already lost.
- mekster 3y agoWhat's your winning strategy?
- diego_sandoval 3y agoI don't know how people can be productive using Windows as their main work OS, and how they can retain their mental health. If you need to install it, one thing that helps a little bit is to use offline accounts only. Never give Windows an email address because then it will force OneDrive down your throat, and your user folders will be a weird mix of online and not online folders that is a total mess to understand.
- sitzkrieg 3y agogoing back to LTSC is much easier than linux :-)
- mekster 3y agoThank you Jesus. At some moment, my Windows 11 started to launch 2 instances of OneDrive for some reason, I have to close one of it every time the machine reboots (likely weekly due to OS updates) and it was annoying already having have to close it but it was about to make me mad for asking why I have to quit it... Windows, what a joke. Only keeping it to play games, never for work.