If only there was an alternative to windows somewhere!
In a corporate setting there usually isn’t
In a corporate setting you’re probably using Active Directory for authentication and don’t have a local account anyway.
My home workstation should never resemble a workstation in a corporate setting; especially not when I don’t intend to work at a company that I need to report to an office for.
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If you do, you don’t know what your doing
There is a local Administrator account in an AD environment (just like on all Windows systems), but that may be disabled.
As for the domain users, you have a locally created profile and because it caches your credentials you can sign in offline, but your account isn’t local in the sense that you could sign in offline (or without access to the domain) indefinitely. For on-prem AD, at least with 2012R2, 2012, and 2008R2 (the last versions I worked with, so can’t speak for newer) by default the length that clients held onto that cache was 30 days, but it was configurable in Group Policy. If your device was away from the domain for longer than that you would no longer be able to sign in.
Depending on how your domain is configured you might even have your profile redirected to a network share somewhere, making the account even less local.
Microsoft accounts on personal devices function in basically the same way. If they’re offline for too long you stop being able to logon, but you won’t lose data in your user folder (unless you’ve setup profile redirection to One Drive or an SMB share on a NAS).
In neither of those scenarios would I say your account is local, because a network connection is required for initial sign in and then periodically afterwards to be able to use the device with your account.
I use Linux on my desktop at work, and sometimes you might end up with an apple computer instead depending on the employer.
The monopoly is slipping.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Same. The Linux setup there is a fucking mess though… AD authentication freezes login for a minute or so if you switch networks at the wrong moment, puppet keeps messing with the system and recently they installed clamav as a live malware scanner on all machines, making them eat batteries for breakfast and slowing down even menial tasks. If you have admin rights, they refuse to add your user to sudoers but instead create a new admin user (another indicator that they’re just really coming from windows) which everybody just uses to add their original user to sudoers, which was a nice workaround but which they now noticed and want to prohibit via puppet or user rights or something. It’s just such a mess. I mean, still leagues ahead of using windows, but a corporate environment really is a machine that transforms time and money into a terrible experience for everybody.
IT departments will have to adapt, of course.
I mean they (actually we) usually have a bad time even transitioning from windows 10 to 11, Linux will 100% be a mess for a good while.
Oh we have a dedicated Linux service contract with a dedicated Linux support company that has technicians just to deal with Linux issues and provide the Linux setup. We’ve had time to adapt. I guess some bloke still decided that there just had to be a malware scanner and now we all have to eat shit. This is much less a lesson for it departments and much more a lesson that the people who manage stuff just have other goals than the people working with the tools that are managed, so you end up with somebody who wants to cover their ass in case something goes wrong in the future and makes it a terrible experience for everybody in the process but can sell it as a necessity to the people below and as action to the people above.
Why don’t they go with Microsoft Defender for Linux? I have never used it so don’t know if it’s still a battery hog…
I mean, scanning your download folder, if there is something new, could make sense in a high-risk environment. But only if.
They’ve tossed ClamAV on mine but it’s not on the AD, thankfully.
I used Linux at my old job, which was a start-up with no IT. But at my current job, which is a massive tech corporation with overbearing IT, they require us to use Windows. :(
Though I don’t have an option to use a local account on my work laptop anyway.
In a corporate setting it isn’t your computer though.
Yeah, corporate dystopia is a thing.
Redhat?
In tech jobs where you write code, everyone uses Linux or mac. :)
I had a ying yang work experience with two companies as a pupil.
One used Linux and I had unexpected skills making me solve and create a product/feature. The project manager was kind and a nerd like me. The chef was sweet kind.
The other company used Microsoft products in every corner like a hardcore football fan. The project manager was kinda toxic and it was hard to explain something to him as he pretended to have knowledge and the chef was rarely in a happy mood and often screaming at him. He didn’t knew many things about Microsoft products and browser itself, he just coded and didn’t understood its entirety back knowledge. He expected me to be some master student and graded me bad for skills no pupil had in our class as we just only learned Java in school, I could use all langauages they used and it still wasn’t enough.
Y u no program like senior engineer when you come out of school. We even pay you competitive ( minimum ) IT wage!
Code more for company in your own time so you can catch up.
1/5 performance review.
I wish that was the case. Also, I was being sarcastic. :)
I will soon have to use a windows PC for my next project. Also one of my previous clients was using only windows PCs for dev (as well as Gerrit instead of Github).
This is not true in my experience. My current employer requires us to use Windows.
Good evening
There are a few alternatives to Windows out there at this time, if you were to look into React OS and Great Tea OS to see what those are about.
I didnt check them in depth but if someone has to run windows apps they seem pretty interesting!
Except adobe there hardly seems to be anything that technically has to use windows though. Most apps and games run great on linux.
This is not new. Microsoft has been pushing users further into their SaaS ecosystem for years. Creating a local account on Windows 10 is more difficult than signing up for a Microsoft account. That’s by design. It just goes along with the transition of their core business away from desktop software and into hosted solutions and data processing. Annoying? A little. Surprising? Hardly.
One of the first things MS did after buying Mojang was to slap Azure AD on it for account management; and it’s been a number of years now since they switched to that being the only way to authenticate to Minecraft.
This has definitely been the frog boiling strategy at Microsoft for a decade or so. It’s likely a big part of why Windows 11 exits, too.
The website forced to disable the ad blocker in order to see the content.
I complied and then the content was hidden in a sea of ads. Blocked again. Won’t comply again on XDA.
Ad free link: https://archive.is/438FJ
Let alone the cookie notification is not following the rules. There is no deny/reject option
Standard sh*tty behavior from AdmiralAnti-Adblock. I usually either disable JavaScript, or enter Reader mode
I wish that company would cease to exist tbh
Disable js in uBlock, no urging, no ads.
Huh, not getting that at all. Works just fine for me. Nevertheless, XDA really has gone downhill over time
The only urge I have is to ditch Windows.
The last windows I had on my home machine was Win95.
Embrace the penguin.
My kids didn’t have any problem figuring out how to do what they wanted to do on a Linux machine, it’s really not that hard to move.
For the first time in a long time I might stick seeing the state of Linux today, especially Plasma 6. I’m eyeing Fedora 40 or Bazzite, tried Kinoite and pretty much everything I need works out of the box, the only thing I need to figure out is OneDrive.
It really is that hard to move. Your kids didn’t have decades of experience to relearn.
Sorry, Linux is no competitor to Windows on the desktop. Wish it were, it just isn’t.
As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured it as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery.
There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people.
Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s of a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
Please:
My windows laptop does not want to conserve the battery, or use an 80% charge. It instead relies on a third party piece of software - typically the manufactures - that drags in all sorts of crap I do not want, with Eula’s I do not agree with. Linux doesnt do that, and properly preserves my battery. I don’t know whats wrong with your Mint install or laptop, but I have a laptop I put linux on 10 years ago, and it still works great and the battery is still within 95% of new, which frankly is amazing. Never had windows on it. And of course you can configure all of that with a GUI.
My other laptop had windows on it, and the intel driver would turn off features in my wifi card because I had not paid for that version. In linux it was a full feature wifi card.
My printer wont work with windows, even though it is supposed to be a windows printer. The drivers, which won’t install, even if they did will pull in a bunch of crap, and Eulas that I do not agree with. On my linux machine it just works. No drivers needed.
In Windows, it nearly bricked my Video card trying to update firmware from a driver update I did not ask for. Had to force a new driver, which in turn updated firmware. And once again, said driver adds a ton of crap and services and a Eula I do not want. On my Linux machine, it just works, AND does not require me to manage drivers at all. AMD.
I am not sure what you are trying to say about Excel, that is just a confusing sentence.
For me the world is the opposite. Linux is easy and just works. Windows is the pain in my ass and always does something annoying (exactly like this article is saying).
I daily drive Linux. Have for years. I choose to only remote into widows, and that is only if someone will pay me to do it. I have an MSDN and all MS software available to me, and even when it is free to me, I would rather not use it.
my laptop has better battery life on qubes than it did on windows.
f it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS
really dude? you think Linux can’t compete with ms-dos? REALLY?
At least be a little more reasonable and respectable of decades of effort from the FOSS community. Had you said that todays Linux would only be competitive with windows from 15 years ago I would understand and somewhat agree with that. Also, Windows has been degrading ever since 2012 and Linux keeps getting more appealing compared to the current Windows releases as time goes on.
It also doesn’t help that half of your anecdotes also blatantly happens on Windows. Yes, PCs and PC manufacturers sure suck, it’s only a bit better on Windows because manufactures sometimes test their half-assed stuff there and make giant piles of workarounds to make it sorta work.
you know ten years ago you might’ve had a point.
but windows is fucking unusable garbage now, and if theres a windows feature you can’t bear ti go without, your only option is hope somebody makes it on Linux, because its not sticking around on windows.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort.
I mean you have the same functionality in LibreOffice Calc, the automatic sorting and filtering is called AutoFilter and the table style is chosen from AutoFormat Styles.
I switched for the first time last year after using Windows exclusively for the past ~30 years, and have had no issues whatsoever. I understand I might be an outlier in that I always had a compulsion to dig as deep as possible into my Windows install to change little things I didn’t like about it, so maybe I just already had the base knowledge to more easily switch.
But I’ve been using EndeavourOS, and it’s been an absolute joy.
For your specific case, sure, but for that quote, I haven’t had those issues in years. I’m also running Mint, but on a desktop and have had zero issues. Mouse “just works,” extra monitors “just work,” and (most surprisingly to me), printer “just works,” games on Steam “just work” with all they’ve done with Proton. I switched to Google docs a long time ago, so at least for me the Office thing isn’t relevant. It natively supports discord, my password manager, Spotify, everything I’ve wanted. I switched my wife’s Mac to it years ago since it had gotten slow from bloat, and she’s been just fine despite not being very tech literate.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people.
Oh you can take a look at LibreOffice instead which is open source and open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in LibreOffice Calc and see how it is there.
No GUI power settings? You mean like this menu https://jeroenverhoeckx.com/gnome-power-settings.html You mentioned alot of Distros but didn’t mention a single Linux Desktop Experience. Gnome/KDE could easily compete with Windows Desktop .
Can they just fuck off already? I sign into windows like once every 2 months and every time it’s different and a worse experience. All my customizations using built in menus get messed up too and the shit that just shows up without asking. “We put the search back on the start bar!” Like fucking actually why?!
While I am using AtlasOS (Windows with bloat stripped off), it still kinda behaves like windows in someway compared to Ameliorated which doesn’t have Microsoft tracking and updates anymore.
I woke up in the night and stared at my PC at around 3:00am and suddenly my PC starts from the suspend. I assume this is a way to update Windows secretely but I never asked for it and it damaged me emotionally because my devices behave in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
I learned to always shutdown.
Atlas is an insecure mess, not a real solution for Windows problems. Consider a Windows alternative.
I am visiting this mess only to play Half Life alyx and some other VR games.
I am full time Linux everywhere. Even on my Chromebook which doesnt have ChromeOS anymore.
I’ve never heard of AtlasOS until this comment. I read the documentation and it’s interesting that they need you to install it using a fresh Windows ISO. I wonder what they are doing that can’t be accomplished on an existing Windows installation with a bunch of Powershell scripts?
Well, it wipes things. You can do and risk it but this approach is more dynamic and free than the old approach. Distributing an ISO, which counted as illegal too.
I used atlas for a while but there are a number of issues. If I want to flash reverse engineered firmware to proprietary hardware it often requires patched windows tools leaked from the manufacturer and I haven’t had that work any other way than stock windows. Capitalism with no real consumer protections has fucked us in so many ways.
This sucks heavily
This sucks heavily
This sucks heavily
I sign into windows
Ah, there’s your problem.
Microsoft urges me to use a different operating system
i ditched the local account along with the whole dumb operating system.
That’s the way to go
They can pry my local account from my cold dead hands
And even then good luck! For I will have glued it to my cold dead hands.
It’s been more than a year since every decision Microsoft has made has gone against the consumer. What is the target ? Sinking the company ?
Where will the average consumer go? They can do this, because they are basically a monopoly.
Hopefully in a year years Linux gets more support and becomes a viable alternative
Edit: for me it is and I’ve been using Linux for years, but some people need certain software
How about I just ditch all acounts.
In a family and SOHO setting there is an easy way around it,even without alternative media creating tools and Win11:
Active directory. Yeah. Microsoft. But not really.
Samba can be used as an AD server for ages now, it’s free,cheap and can run on a Pi or some NAS. These days it’s fairly easy to set up as long as you only use it for Identification services and basic networking. And Microsoft won’t bother you with their shit ever, as they don’t dare to push corporate clients too much.
I can recommend it very much. There are also full GUI distributions available,e.g. univention.
Man, having to setup GPO to stop a lot of stupid horseshit is definitely not consumer friendly, and I don’t wanna do it. Microsoft should just stop.
There are templates for that. And yes,of course it is bullshit that we have to do that.
But it’s less work this way compared to installing Linux and (-the worse part-) teach it to the more technologically disadvantaged relatives who used Windows for 30 years before their retirement. Or to kids who just want to use the same stuff they use at school.
I absolutely would wish that Microsoft would stop their bullshit (it wasn’t even out of the possible options for them to make AD cloud only - but a lot of government customers complained). But I wanted to show people that there is a middle ground between submitting to that fucking cloud account and ditching linux all- together.
Windows 12 being in the cloud may probably not be too crazy. I’m betting most people won’t care and just blindly create a microsoft account.
You mean it will be just like chromeOS or whatever that is called?
Maybe but it might have a full virtualized option where your local is just a client to stream the virtualized cloud env.
App-V was the start of this in about 2008.
Hey Microsoft, listen clearly…
GO
FUCK
YOURSELFI will now urge Microsoft to suck my balls.
Don’t underestimate the power of nerds. Computer nerds influence tech purchasing decisions, both at home and on the job. The less tech savvy often ask “the computer person” what they recommend. Nerds have actually been astonishingly patient with MS, for decades. But the worse MS makes Windows, the less and less likely they’re going to go with the default, “just buy Windows” answer.
I agree. I’m the guy who picks, buys, assembles, and installs the OS and programs for like everyone around me. I enjoy doing it, they enjoy getting awesome PCs for good prices.
My next build for them will absolutely not be Microsoft. The average person can get away with an iPad running iOS for their computing needs. So it’ll be a user friendly Linux distro going forward.
A Windows update broke my wife’s install earlier this week. Her laptop has Manjaro on it now.
