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Posted by josephcsible 2 hours ago

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?(www.windowscentral.com)
44 points | 60 comments
wlesieutre 2 hours ago|
> I'm still a Windows guy, and I always will be.

And this is exactly why Microsoft can get away with a buggy mess of a user hostile operating system.

They only have an incentive to make a good OS if people are willing to leave when it’s a bad one.

BadBadJellyBean 1 hour ago||
I think saying "I'm a _______ guy" with any brand or company filling that blank can be a big problem. Most companies are there to make money and loyalty is often a one way street.

From my view it is more productive to find out what you like about something and always be open to maybe finding someone else who can deliver on that. And sometimes things that we thought were essential are not. You might even find something new to like.

wrs 2 hours ago|||
"I'm still a _______ guy, and I always will be."

No matter what trademark you put in the blank, this is not a healthy thing to say.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago||
Yeah, not sure how people form almost "relationships" with their tools and refuse sometimes to even explore options. I'm always open to switching almost anything. I never end up doing, because things are usually not better, but maybe 1/100 times something is better, and then I switch. Initially did that around Ubuntu 9.10 before, and I'll switch away from Arch in a heartbeat if anything better comes around.

Edit: I realize now that the article author, the person in the video and the quoted tweet are all the same person, and they seem to work/run windowscentral.com, so I guess that kind of explains the motivation.

expedition32 1 hour ago||
Honestly as a deeply antisocial person the Linux cult has always rubbed me the wrong way. Same reason why I don't have an iPhone.
john01dav 1 hour ago|||
Apple has an even bigger loyalty problem. For them and Microsoft it's arguably good, but it's bad for users, even the loyal ones. It might even be bad for Apple and Microsoft long term.
Aloha 8 minutes ago|||
Who is better?
lousken 2 hours ago|||
exactly, he's part of a problem
billy99k 1 hour ago||
I could also say the Linux desktop creators are the problem as well. It's so buggy, it makes it impossible for me to switch.
lousken 26 minutes ago|||
What desktop and which distro? In the past, there have been times where a bug showed up for me over the years, especially before 2018. Currently tho, Debian 13 + KDE - zero issues.
prmoustache 1 hour ago||||
This doesn't make any sense as there is not a linux desktop but multiples and the major ones have been less buggy than windows for the most part of the last 20 years.

Hardware support is where Linux used to struggle. Nowadays things aren't perfect but much better. Basically it means you need to figure out which hardware to buy based on available support, before making the purchase.

xigoi 15 minutes ago|||
Which “the” Linux desktop? GNOME? KDE? xfce? Cinnamon? COSMIC?
dist-epoch 1 hour ago||
Goes the other way around too: Linux will only have a good desktop environment when it's users will be willing to leave it.
xigoi 13 minutes ago||
I recently started using COSMIC and I would definitely call it good, even if it has a few rough edges due to just recently coming out of beta.
thot_experiment 1 hour ago||
I cannot see myself installing Windows 11, it's sad, I've been primarily a windows guy for my home computer since W95 and I'll miss it. Windows 10 (LTSC) has been the best operating system experience of my life, once I disabled updates and all the nag screens it's been rock solid for me for many years. It's so important to be able to trust that your computer works the same way tomorrow as it does today.

I hope that there's enough people like me that the combined community will keep it alive for a few years longer, but I know eventually something will force me to upgrade to Linux.

duxup 1 hour ago||
I was a windows guy for a long time. I went to macOS. Despite the complaints I've seen on the internet I've been very happy in macOS land. Someone mentioned that while macOS has "never been worse" the difference between windows and macOS "has never been greater".

Granted things like gaming might influence someone to not make that move.

baal80spam 1 hour ago||
Are you me?

Well, technically from 3.1 but everything else checks out.

smackeyacky 51 minutes ago||
There are two technologies propped up by having to earn a living: windows and the iPhone.

No matter the android phone, trying to get your MFA experience working with the umpteen stupid MFA apps is painful because all the dev work went into the iPhone versions. I hate it but yep I ended up buying an iPhone although I never buy them new.

Windows is the other one and again it’s security related. More and more places simply rely on Active Directory/Entra and try telling the bank you’re working for that you have to have a Linux notebook. You’ll get laughed right out of a job.

I’d agree for a home computer Linux or macOS are the only sane choices now. But whatever is installed on my work provided computer is what I’m using and that’s windows.

wishfish 1 hour ago||
Author implies he was using a local account at the time of the error. Which answers an important question. I'd heard of people with Microsoft accounts getting locked out of their own computers, but that's a first I've heard of basic apps failing with a local account.
chrisjj 2 hours ago||
> I couldn't open Notepad ... an error (0x803f8001) with Microsoft Store's licensing service stopped me

I wonder if it works at all when no online connection to that store.

mysterydip 1 hour ago|
“But what if people used notepad without our permission?!” -dev/boss somewhere
lousken 2 hours ago||
Switch to linux, don't look back
trinix912 1 hour ago||
Unless you work a job where you're not in control of the OS you're using, which just happens to be most of the non-dev office jobs out there. Dismissing Windows problems with "just switch to Linux bro" doesn't really help.
xigoi 5 minutes ago|||
If you’re not in control of the OS, then you’re not responsible for problems caused by the choice of OS. Tell your boss that Windows is not allowing you to use basic features and let them choke on it.
compass_copium 29 minutes ago||||
I have to use Windows at work and I will never have weird cloud authentication issues because I'm required to use a work-provided MS account on the computer. The author says he's a Windows guy, and always will be. This article, and these types of complaints, are really only relevant if you're using it on your personal PC.
lousken 23 minutes ago||||
I did think about personal devices, but it is a valid point, though many companies I know do support at least windows+mac if not linux. Supporting Linux desktop for a company is more difficult due to lack of anything resembling GPOs (and no ansible-pull isn't that). It is definitely a thing systemd should implement.
hagbard_c 56 minutes ago|||
If you're in a Windows-only job and you've got proof that Windows is getting in the way of doing your job you might just be able to convince those who decided to make it a Windows-only workplace to change their stance.
drnick1 1 hour ago||
Came here to say this.
havaloc 1 hour ago||
I work in academia and I've gotten most of my people to switch to Macs and no, Linux is not an option here.

I have about eight Windows PCs against about sixty MacBook Airs and guess which platform causes me the most work? 1:20 issue ratio. Even simple things like SMB in Windows 11 are hopelessly broken.

leoedin 1 hour ago|
What makes Linux not an option? Is there specific apps you need to use? Or IT policies? Or something else?

The company I work for got bought by a big conglomerate, and I managed to stubbornly hold out using Linux for a really long time. It turns out if your workplace has adopted “Bring your own device” type policies, that often means you can auth with enough services that working on Linux is feasible.

trinix912 1 hour ago||
It's much harder for non-dev jobs where the management won't let you BYOD for whatever reasons, which could range from IT being too stubborn to allow you to keep company data on your own laptop that's not centrally managed, to everything including licenses for random 3rd party software the company is using being tied to the ActiveDirectory fleet of computers with centralized storage.

This is the reality of IT equipment in big parts of the non-dev world, and you'll have a hard time convincing the IT dept to take on extra hassle just for you to use Linux out of all hundreds of employees who're just fine with Windows.

jasoneckert 1 hour ago||
Imagine if Fedora locked you out of vi because your Red Hat account had an issue.

The unsettling part of stories like this isn’t “Microsoft bad,” it’s the growing assumption that local tools should be downstream of remote identity systems. A text editor is about as offline and fundamental as software gets, yet it’s now possible for account state, sync bugs, or policy enforcement to make it inaccessible on your own machine.

This is where non-macOS UNIX and Linux systems draw the line - if it’s installed locally and you have permission, it runs. Cloud services can enhance that experience (backups, sync, collaboration) but they don’t get veto power over whether vi opens.

When that boundary erodes, we start to see our systems as thin clients, instead of full local OSes, as the author mentions.

cadamsdotcom 28 minutes ago||
Microsoft is really shooting themselves in your foot.

It might be time to look at other options.

vhalan 2 hours ago|
I only use my windows machine because I can swap out parts stuff and is more hackable but macos is so much more beautifully designed.

Sometimes I prefer one machine over the other I rarely wish for anything other than sometimes being unable to transfer data between the two systems.

josephcsible 2 hours ago|
> I only use my windows machine because I can swap out parts stuff and is more hackable but macos is so much more beautifully designed.

That's definitely a good reason to use a PC instead of a Mac, but why not run Linux on it? Then you'd get the best of both worlds.

mh- 1 hour ago||
I would not describe the Linux desktop experience as the best of both Mac and Windows.

Let's go with different, a different world.

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