Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

https://www.osnews.com/story/143376/dark-patterns-killed-my-wifes-windows-11-installation/

by greatquux • 10 months ago

131 64 10 months ago

beering• 10 months ago

The past few years I’ve been hearing crazy stories of workarounds and scripts to deal with all these new features in Windows. Isn’t that what was preventing people from using Linux? Replacing utilman.exe with cmd.exe is not something a normal user would ever do.

Gigachad3• 10 months ago

Normal users in this situation either buy a new computer or take it in to a tech support business to have it fixed.

An average user will never install an OS manually so the only areas it’s succeeding are where it’s preinstalled like on the steam deck.

happymellon3• 10 months ago

buy a new computer

Which wouldn't fix this. The new computer will run out of space after it's finished downloading the backups

take it in to a tech support business

You think Geek Squads going to be able to fix this?

ipdashc• 10 months ago

I was thinking the same thing. Never thought I'd see a world where Arch has an installer (and, jokes aside, many Linux distros have very straightforward GUI installers) while people have to... "hit Shift+F10 to get a terminal, then enter start ms-cxh:localonly" to install Windows with a local account. Jeez.

jowea2• 10 months ago

The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store.

That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.

pavel_lishin• 10 months ago

No, but re-enabling OneDrive might qualify.

estimator72922• 10 months ago

If windows borks itself how many people will just give up and buy a new computer? That's Microsoft's entire game right now with obsoleting perfectly good hardware.

But yes, this one is most likely just plain incompetence

Gigachad3• 10 months ago

Microsoft destroying your computer with bugs is just as likely to make someone go buy a MacBook.

qalmakka• 10 months ago

Yeah QA is basically nonexistent at Microsoft, at least it hasn't been since the early Windows 10 days. At work we ended up getting rid of all of our Windows runners because we found out that running our tools on WINE got objectively more reliable and deterministic than having to deal with Microsoft's bullcrap

fuzzfactor4• 10 months ago

Sometimes it's a fairly fine difference between dark and merely dim.

TiredOfLife• 10 months ago

You have to explicitly add a Microsoft account and enable the photo synchronization on Samsung phone. It's not enabled by default.

Also by default OneDrive uses the cloud files where it downloads none of the files unless you specifically ask to do it.

hulitu2• 10 months ago

Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.

It gets your data.

jowea2• 10 months ago

That it picked up from the floor after it the disk overflowed? I'm not saying the rest of it isn't a dark pattern, but the final issue is just a couple of bugs.

superdevius• 10 months ago

Time to migrate to Linux.

Krssst2• 10 months ago

Protect yourself, use a local account. Windows 11 does not allow this but Rufus will help when you create your Windows installation media. And obviously never enter your Microsoft account credentials into any Microsoft app until you're certain it won't be linked to your local account.

p0w3n3d• 10 months ago

Sounds like just avoiding dark patterns at all cost to me

BatteryMountain3• 10 months ago

I have a machine with Windows 11 Enterprise LTSB and it did not ask me to login in with microsoft credentials after/during install. No Microsoft Store or other bloat, no One Drive necromancy.

Krssst2• 10 months ago

I'd like to use it but no way to buy it as a non-professional customer. Regular people have no choice if they need Windows-exclusive software or hardware.

akimbostrawman• 10 months ago

This is digital Stockholm syndrome. The only actual way to protect yourself from windows is never installing it in the first place and switch to a FOSS OS.

Lammy6• 10 months ago

The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account.

Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege level interactive user account :) https://security.stackexchange.com/a/66747

This garbage and more is the reason I did my Framework 12's installation of Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15) using this `unattend.xml` generator to disable internet requirement, disable mandatory Microsoft Account, disable intrusive spyware, disable disable disable: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

Sucks to have such an adversarial relationship with my own computer though. One shouldn't have to Know All The Tricks to avoid this shit.

type0• 10 months ago

Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15

Not sure if you are aware of this but dual booting can be broken with new Windows update if you're not using different disks.

Lammy6• 10 months ago

The BitLocker thing? I turned off the TPM and “““Secure””” Boot so it shouldn't do that.

bitwize• 10 months ago

The problem with Linux, they say, is that you have to fiddle with it endlessly to get it working; Windows, by contrast, Just Works Right Out of the Box.

Oh, but you don't actually want to use Windows as it comes out of the box, so they tell us you have to use a custom build, replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe, create an unattend.xml, don't connect it to the internet during the install procedure, run these commands, make these registry changes, apply these group policies, and install these aftermarket utilities and then you can FINALLY get a decent Windows experience.

Just don't use Windows Update, or it will all be reset again.

I'm glad I left that world behind.

mixmastamyk• 10 months ago

After that I’d still have to clear hundreds of gigabytes of disk space it hordes under \Windows.

Lammy6• 10 months ago

I'm not telling you to use Windows. I'm telling you I use Windows lol

It sucks a lot actually, and everything that's good about it is good despite what Microsoft do to it and not because of them. I love my Lunix too, but sometimes I just wanna click on some robot heads in MvM or make the cars go fast that both don't work so well on my OS of choice: https://old.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/1nkpkoo/burnout_...

subscribed2• 10 months ago

TBH I use both windows and Linux since ages and it's Linux that's painless and always works, but my main personal OS is still Windows (10) because I can't get all I need running well (or at all) on Linux.

And yes, the windows updates resettling all these little necessary settings is little infuriating.

hulitu2• 10 months ago

Windows, by contrast, Just Works Right Out of the Box.

Yes, it is after you install it on your box that it stops working. /s

MBCook• 10 months ago

Well that absolutely didn’t go the direction I thought it would.

euroderf• 10 months ago

Atteibuted to Ian Fleming: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

So um how many dark patterns was that ?

fuzzfactor4• 10 months ago

The 0th pattern was not enumerated, it is assumed you know it's the very existence of a Microsoft Account.

iqfareez• 10 months ago

This is absurd

com2kid• 10 months ago

This kind of shit used to be explicitly tested against. Get a Windows 7 install, fill up all but the last few bytes on the main HDD, it'll work fine, you'll be able to login and delete stuff.

Completely saturate memory, RAM full, swap full, the OS will still work. It'll be slow and messy, but you'll be able to navigate around enough to get shit ton.

Heck I suspect these scenarios would work even on Windows 10.

What kind of laughable tests doesn't even bother with the most obvious edge cases of "disk full"?

That isn't an uncommon scenario, quite the opposite, it is a very common scenario.

Gigachad3• 10 months ago

They moved all the resources in to shoveling copilot garbage in to everything.

deng2• 10 months ago

FYI: You can still install Win11 with a local account. When prompted for your account, hit Shift+F10 to get a terminal, then enter

start ms-cxh:localonly

and a window will pop up where you can create a local account and continue with the installation.

Yep, it's all insane. And before the "switch to Linux" replies: yes, I am using Linux, but Friends&Family still rely on Windows software. The big elephant in the room is of course Office, and I mean the REAL Office, not the MickeyMouse version that runs in the browser. No, LibreOffice will not do, neither will running Office in a Windows VM, nor running a 20year old Office version in Wine.

echoangle• 10 months ago

If you use Rufus to burn the iso to the boot drive, you can also chose to create an offline account there (and also disable some other installation requirements like TPM).

greazy• 10 months ago

I think this exact reason why MS will fight to the death to keep Office off Linux machines.

It's the last hurdle before 'normies' moving to Linux.

em-bee2• 10 months ago

why will libreoffice not do? just the difference of the UI, or incompatibility worries?

in my opinion these are just transition issues. iaw. it's not a problem with libreoffice but the problem is that there is a transition.

same with a windows VM. just the issues with interaction with documents outside the VM, or that using a VM is not really solving the problem of getting rid of windows?

bombcar• 10 months ago

Interoperability is still an issue, and people who are already suspicious of you messing with their shit really do not want a “different office” at home than at work.

deng2• 10 months ago

By far the biggest problem is interoperability with people using MS Office. I'm fully aware that Microsoft is essentially sabotaging this by making their format deliberately obtuse, but here we are.

The VM thing is tedious to set up, requires more resources and, as you say, does not really solve the problem. Also, there's the problem of Windows activation in VMs, which - at least officially - requires an expensive retail key.

kotaKat• 10 months ago

Until the day the machine has been UEFI-flagged to require online connectivity regardless. Yes, that's a thing, and the flag's been lurking in the UEFI since Windows 10 1809, even. Intune/Windows Autopilot leverages it for out-of-the-box MDM enforcement.

https://oofhours.com/2019/08/17/requiring-a-network-connecti...

Wowfunhappy• 10 months ago

I'm a school teacher nowadays, but both my current and previous school have used Google Docs for everything. When I was in graduate school getting my teaching degree, everyone used Google Docs. All of our students use Google Docs.

Is this reliance on Office an enterprise thing?

BatteryMountain3• 10 months ago

I had a similar issue earlier this year with my laptop. I use my own laptop for work and created a dedicated account (a Standard account, not Admin) for my work stuff. I signed in with our EntraID/Office365/Azure credentials. Worked fine for about a month. Then we added 2FA to everything and resetted passwords company wide (via our 3rd party IT "partner"). Half the the staff's email/outlook got cooked really good and but my machine in particular, one morning I turned it on and I could no longer log into windows. Not even with my local-only Admin account. Not with the Standard/Microsoft account that has hijacked MY system.

I had to reinstall windows completely and lost about 2 days total + couple of days worth of code/work, nevermind my own data.

About a month after that something else broke my dev tools again and I switched to Fedora/KDE (as all my dev tools works fine there too). It's been fairly smooth sailing since then. Install updates frequently, my system is so nice fine tuned to my needs it's awesome. I'm not a linux noob but the first time a linux install lasted more than 6 months for me without breaking itself. Also run multiple user accounts on it to seperate home/work life. Fully encrypted, fingerprint reader works, webcam/mic works. Haven't had the urge to install windows again on this machine, nor another linux distro.

BatteryMountain3• 10 months ago

If you buy a Samsung phone, after initial setup (be sure to Opt-out of all the extra ToS), install all the google equivalent app (calc, calendar, contacts, phone, etc) enable developer mode and remove all the samsung variants via adb. Takes an hour but well worth it. Some packages/apps can only be removed via adb. On a brand new samsung, there are three Meta/facebook packages installed in android as hidden even if you have Facebook app uninstalled. Most of the samsung bloat, including One Drive can be properly removed like this. Phone runs silky smooth & battery lasts longer too after this process. My phone has very little left of samsung, but I do unfortunately have to use google's apps, which works great for what it is.

Don't try to remove the Samsung Gallery, as it will break the camera.

Don't remove all the Knox packages, as they will break NFC/Wallet apps.

You can remove all the AR/VR Emoji shit, half of them use the internet...

You can remove the "Weather" package. This is supposedly a widget.. right.

You can remove Hiya spyware package."spam call detection" straight from china .

You can remove netflix, youtube, instagram, snapchat, spotify, microsoft apps and other preinstalls this way too (instead of just disabling some of them). You can always install from the store again if needed.

I hate what modern tech/software ecosystem has become.

chii• 10 months ago

This is what it means to let someone else own the platform for your computing needs.

Stallman was right, and nobody ever listens until it's too late.

Kim_Bruning• 10 months ago

After fighting with it for half a day; I returned the last Samsung I tried and got a Fairphone 4 with E/OS instead.

Which... actually runs a lot of software out of the normal google app store anyway. But it also has a tracking blocker installed by default, and nothing is mandatory.

Couldn't be happier.

avdelazeri• 10 months ago

I abandoned Windows over 10 years ago, when a mandatory Windows 10 update rewrote by UEFI partition and messed up my dual boot setup. It took me an entire evening to fix, at which point I swore that no machine owned by me would ever run Windows again.

The more I hear about Windows 11 makes me think I really dodged a bullet there.

nubinetwork• 10 months ago

Windows has been doing this since forever.

beng-nl• 10 months ago

Can confirm this has been happening since the simple BIOS+MBR days - after install Windows would just write MBR code to boot into the windows partition.

codeduck• 10 months ago

oh good, another reason to keep refusing a windows 10 -> windows 11 upgrade.

fuzzfactor4• 10 months ago

Looks like the major monthly "update" Tuesday this week reverted the setting in Edge under Profiles where if you haven't been actively signing in, you are signed into Edge automatically using credentials it may be able to find elsewhere, without any action from you, or apparently without any notification. Among other things.

Update turned it back ON by default.

Even if you found it and turned it off manually, another Edge update came in a couple days later and turned it back on again.

Just in case you intentionally turned it off, "somebody" probably doesn't want you to know if or when it comes back on. But in the author's case you can't help but notice anyway due to complete malfunction with no clues given as to why.

But that's not the first thing I noticed.

This time, beyond a doubt, nobody is getting updated faster than it was under Windows 98 dial-up, where we had download speeds and processor speeds orders of magnitude slower.

That's been looking pretty iffy a lot of times for a year or two, but now I think no matter how fast your fiber and how blazingly overclocked your processor, there are so many shipped defects needing correction that you're in for major delays like never before. It's just not as advanced in UX compared to when people were more advanced by comparison relative to the technology at their disposal.

There's also the factor of how busy your SSD and network have become, more & more occupied at all times with tasks useless to your own particular efforts, whoever thought piling a 3GB+ "update" on top of that was a good idea?

rekabis• 10 months ago

As a security professional and Windows user of over 35 years, I always do everything within my power to steer people away from using Microsoft accounts in favour of using local accounts.

99.9999% of all users benefit exclusively from local accounts and the stability they bring. Microsoft accounts are a headache and a security/stability risk in virtually 100% of all implementations that I would not want to inflict on anyone.

retrochameleon• 10 months ago

I installed Windows 11 LTSC for a work project recently. The experience left me shocked. The installer was shortened and brief, and upon first logging into the new OS, it was a thing of beauty. Clean desktop, empty start menu, no bloatware. Just a true clean slate to start from.

I hate Windows and Microsoft and switched to Linux years ago with no regrets. I can't help but wonder the goodwill they would garner if this was the typical user experience with Windows. If I had some path to using Windows like this, and was able to use GPOs as a home user, I might not have left in the first place.

It's a convoluted pain in the ass to get licenses for LTSC as a business, and it's basically a nonstarter as an individual. There is a 5 license minimum.

I'm tired of companies being determined to make everything shitty in the name of value extraction from customers.

Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation

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