Last night, my wife looks up from her computer, troubled. She tells me she can’t log into her computer running Windows 11, as every time she enters the PIN code to her account, the login screen throws up a cryptic error: “Your credentials could not be verified”. She’s using the correct PIN code, so that surely isn’t it. We opt for the gold standard in troubleshooting and perform a quick reboot, but that doesn’t fix it. My initial instinct is that since she’s using an online account instead of a local one, perhaps Microsoft is having some server issues? A quick check online indicates that no, Microsoft’s servers seem to be running fine, and to be honest, I don’t even know if that would have an effect on logging into Windows in the first place.
The Windows 11 login screen does give us a link to click in case you forget your PIN code. Despite the fact the PIN code she’s entering is correct, we try to go through this process to see if it goes anywhere. This is where things really start to get weird. A few dialogs flash in and out of existence, until it’s showing us a dialog telling us to insert a security USB key of some sort, which we don’t have. Dismissing it gives us an option to try other login methods, including a basic password login. This, too, doesn’t work; just like with the PIN code, Windows 11 claims the accurate, correct password my wife is entering is invalid (just to be safe, we tested it by logging into her Microsoft account on her phone, which works just fine).
In the account selection menu in the bottom-left, an ominous new account mysteriously appears: WsiAccount.
The next option we try is to actually change the PIN code. This doesn’t work either. Windows wants us to use a second factor using my wife’s phone number, but this throws up another weird error, this time claiming the SMS service to send the code isn’t working. A quick check online once again confirms the service seems to be working just fine for everybody else. I’m starting to get really stumped and frustrated.
Of course, during all of this, we’re both searching the web to find anything that might help us figure out what’s going on. None of our searches bring up anything useful, and none of our findings seem to be related to or match up with the issue we’re having. While she’s looking at her phone and I’m browsing on my Fedora/KDE PC next to hers, she quickly mentions she’s getting a notification that OneDrive is full, which is odd, since she doesn’t use OneDrive for anything.
We take this up as a quick sidequest, and we check up on her OneDrive account on her phone. As OneDrive loads, our jaws drop in amazement: a big banner warning is telling her she’s using over 5500% of her 5GB free account. We look at each other and burst out laughing. We exchange some confused words, and then we realise what is going on: my wife just got a brand new Samsung Galaxy S25, and Samsung has some sort of deal with Microsoft to integrate its services into Samsung’s variant of Android. Perhaps during the process of transferring data and applications from her old to her new phone, OneDrive syncing got turned on? A quick trip to the Samsung Gallery application confirms our suspicions: the phone is synchronising over 280GB of photos and videos to OneDrive.
My wife was never asked for consent to turn this feature on, so it must’ve been turned on by default. We quickly turn it off, delete the 280GB of photos and videos from OneDrive, and move on to the real issue at hand.
Since nothing seems to work, and none of what we find online brings us any closer to what’s going on with her Windows 11 installation, we figured it’s time to bring out the big guns. For the sake of brevity, let’s run through the things we tried. Booting into safe mode doesn’t work; we get the same login problems. Trying to uninstall the latest updates, an option in WinRE, doesn’t work, and throws up an unspecified error. We try to use a restore point, but despite knowing for 100% certain the feature to periodically create restore points is enabled, the only available restore point is from 2022, and is located on a drive other than her root drive (or “C:\” in Windows parlance). Using the reset option in WinRE doesn’t work either, as it also throws up an error, this time about not having enough free space. I also walk through a few more complex suggestions, like a few manual registry hacks related to the original error using cmd.exe in WinRE. None of it yields any results.
It’s now approaching midnight, and we need to get up early to drop the kids off at preschool, so I tell my wife I’ll reinstall her copy of Windows 11 tomorrow. We’re out of ideas.
The next day, I decide to give it one last go before opting for the trouble of going through a reinstallation. 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. It involves booting into WinRE, loading up cmd.exe, and replacing utilman.exe in system32 with cmd.exe:
move c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe c:\
copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\utilman.exeIf you then proceed to boot into Windows 11 and click on the Accessibility icon in the bottom-right, it will open “utilman.exe”, but since that’s just cmd.exe with the utilman.exe name, you get a command prompt to work with, right on the login screen. From here, you can launch regedit, find the correct key, change a REG_BINARY, save, and reboot. At the login screen, you’ll see a new “adminstrator” account with full access to your computer.
During the various reboots, I do some more web searching, and I stumble upon a post on /r/WindowsHelp from 7 months ago. The user William6212 isn’t having the exact same issues and error messages we’re seeing, but it’s close enough that it warrants a look at the replies. The top reply by user lemonsandlimes30 contains just two words:
storage full
↫ lemonsandlimes30, the real MVP
And all of a sudden all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. I instantly figure out the course of events: my wife gets her new Galaxy S25, and transfers over the applications and data from her old phone. During this setup process, the option in the Samsung Gallery application to synchronise photos and videos to OneDrive is enabled without her consent and without informing her. The phone starts uploading the roughly 280GB of photos and videos from her phone to her 5GB OneDrive account, and she gets a warning notification that her OneDrive storage is a bit full.
And now her Windows 11 PC enters the scene. Despite me knowing with 100% certainty I deleted OneDrive completely off her Windows 11 PC, some recent update or whatever must’ve reinstalled it and enabled its synchronisation feature, which in turn, right as my wife’s new phone secretly started uploading her photos and videos to OneDrive, started downloading those same photos and videos to her Windows 11’s relatively small root drive. All 280GB of them.
Storage full.
The reboots were done, and indeed, the secret passwordless administrator account was now available on the login screen. I log in, wait for Windows 11’s stupid out-of-box-experience thing to run its course, immediately open Explorer, and there it is: her root drive is completely full, with a mere 25MB or so available. We go into her account’s folder, delete the OneDrive folder and its 280GB of photos and videos, and remove OneDrive from her computer once again. Hopefully this will do the trick.
It didn’t. We still can’t log in, as the original issue persists. I log back into the administrator account, open up compmgmt.msc, go to Users, and try to change my wife’s password. No luck – it’s an online account, and it turns out you can’t change the password of such an account using traditional user management tools; you have to log into your Microsoft account on the web, and change your password there. After we do this, we can finally log back into her Windows 11 account with the newly-set password.
We fixed it.
Darkest of patterns
My wife and I fell victim to a series of dark patterns that nearly rendered her Windows 11 installation unrecoverable. The first dark pattern is Samsung enabling the OneDrive synchronisation feature without my wife’s consent and without informing her. The second dark pattern is Microsoft reinstalling OneDrive onto my wife’s PC without my wife’s consent and without informing her. 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. The fifth and final dark pattern runs through all of this like a red thread: Microsoft’s insistence on forcefully converting every local Windows 11 user account to an online Microsoft account.
This tragedy of dark patterns then neatly cascaded into a catastrophic comedy of bugs, where a full root drive apparently corrupts online Microsoft accounts on Windows 11 so hard they become essentially unrecoverable. There were no warnings and no informational popups. Ominous user accounts started to appear on the login screen. Weird suggestions to use corporate-looking security USB keys pop up. Windows wrongfully tells my wife the PIN code and password she enters are incorrect. The suggestion to change the password or PIN code breaks completely. All the well-known rescue options any average user would turn to in WinRE throw up cryptic errors.
At this point, any reasonable person would assume their Windows 11 installation was unrecoverable, or worse, that some sort of malware had taken over their machine – ominous “WsiAccount” and demands for a security USB key and all. The only course of action most Windows users would take at this point is a full reinstallation. If it wasn’t for me having just enough knowledge to piece the puzzle together – thank you lemonsandlimes30 – we’d be doing a reinstallation today, possibly running into the issue again a few days or weeks later.
No sane person would go this deep to try and fix this problem.
This cost us hours and hours of our lives, causing especially my wife a significant amount of stress, during an already very difficult time in our lives (which I won’t get into). I’m seething with rage towards Microsoft and its utter incompetence and maliciousness. Let me, for once, not mince words here: Windows 11 is a travesty, a loose collection of dark patterns and incompetence, run by people who have zero interest in lovingly crafting an operating system they can be proud of. Windows has become a vessel for subscriptions and ads, and cannot reasonably be considered anything other than a massive pile of user-hostile dark patterns designed to extract data, ad time, and subscription money from its users.
If you can switch away and ditch Windows, you should. The ship is burning, and there’s nobody left to put out the fires.
This reads like a Mark Russinovich investigation story. Well done!
In my own experience, there are few things in this galaxy(*) as flawed and obnoxious as MS SSO solutions. Trying f.e. to recover access to Office365 accounts is an exercise in black-belt level frustration management, with nothing working, error messages happily being completely out of whack, and suggestions on the support forums being useless to actively harmful.
* = possibly, the unholy communion of onedrive/sharepoint being one. And Teams. And come to think of it, most of Office365. Oh, well… Is it just me getting old, or were the windows bugs and warts of olde on a very small level, compared to the current clusterfucks?
> Is it just me getting old, or were the windows bugs and warts of olde on a very small level, compared to the current clusterfucks?
No, it isn’t just you getting old… warts of olde were less warty because the state of the system didn’t change WITHOUT YOUR EXPLICIT ACTION. Let alone changing state because a completely separate device was brought online. This is now a clusterfuck of untrackable interactions.
Not to mention the hoops needed to regain access to the system sitting right in front of you. WTF is that utilman.exe process just go access the system? Just gtfo.
Or. Why is the utilman.exe process even possible
What do you mean by “why”? Because what it is for – to help people with disabilities. Or when your keyboard not work.
I’ll never understand why the world continues to use software they don’t like. Why do people still use that MS crapware, where there are so many better alternatives? (Most of which can run Windows apps, with a few – diminishing few, caveats.)
Here to pop your echo chamber bubble as usual. Linux is not a realistic alternative, and tons of users still find out updating = something new breaking (so they stop running updates). That’s on top of most users having laptops, and Linux support for average laptops has gone really downhill over the past 10 years. You’re basically guaranteed to go down some rabbit hole of something not working. (e.g. the computer I’m using right now doesn’t have proper support for auto screen dimming on Linux without basically having to write your own script for the ambient light sensor). Mac exists, but the price premium and the lack of security updates 8 years after it was released (not purchased) don’t make it a palatable choice for most people. It is enshitification because they know they can get away with it due to a lack of real competition. Another anecdote. I was seeing how long I could get away with libreoffice, but it decided to irritate me enough by interpreting backspace as delete everything you just wrote from the field on this form. Only when Wine is perfected, will Linux be a reasonable alternative.
dark2,
I don’t see this behavior. Is that happening on windows or linux? Do other applications do this?
“xev” is a good debug tool to see what events get delivered by linux, I don’t know what it shows under wayland though.
I keep telling you linux isn’t for you, obviously. For many of us though it is better than windows. If windows works best for you, that’s great, to each their own!
You _might_ be right when it comes to old laptop with nvidia graphics like my son’s aging Zbook G1, I7-4th gen and nvidia K1100M. This card is mediocrely supported by nouveau drivers (it works, but not at 100% of its capabilities) and nvidia drivers still supporting it are too old to run on wayland, making this PC one of the corner cases that kinda sorta justifies X11’s existence.
Other than that, I installed Linux mint on it one year ago, updated it to Zara and had no issue whatsoever. Sound works, Bluetooth works, my Brother HL2120 gets recognised just fine, virtualbox works OK, streaming works ok. Until now, he hasn’t needed MSOffice, since school is OK with PDFs (and LOffice is better than MsOffice when it comes to producing PDF), so for now he doesn’t need MS stuff since school happily accepts PDFs.
Again, in my experience baseline linux OOBE is usually BETTER than baseline windows oobe: you’ve got your basic productivity suite already present, you don’t have to worry about the system phoning home or placing ads on your menu and IMHO most linux DE look way better than windows.
Windows still has the upper hand when it comes to graphics (Adobe and Affinity suite) and music production (a pet peeve of mine), but when it comes to the rest, it can be safely substituted by a mainstream Linux distro any day now.
To @alfman : wanted to reply to @dark2, obviously ^_____^;;;
I call BS.
I recently acquired a Lenovo T590. Nice little laptop. Stuck the current Ubuntu LTS on it (24.04) and EVERYTHING works. The function keys, the fingerprint reader, the wifi, everything. It even installed a firmware update utility that updated all the older firmwares on the system that had updates available. So the unsupported assertion that “Linux support for average laptops” is less than stellar has at least one large, Lenovo-shaped hole in it. And Lenovo makes a LOT of laptops.
I’ve handed Linux laptops to 80-year-olds and they’ve been quite happy with them. So usability is not a problem. And if you’re having problems with Libreoffice, could it be PEBKAC? There’s plenty of help on the InterTubes that will tell you to check the Tools-> Customize -> Keyboard, look under “Category = Edit” and scroll down to “Delete to start of line”. If there is a key for that, delete it.
I work for a small company. We are 9. And they insist to stay with the whole Microsoft Entra/Azure ordeal because “industry and security standards” and whatever, so I need to be aware about how Windows works.
And, personally, I can only leverage all the features of my photo scanner (an Epson V850) and my photo printer (a Canon PRO-1000) from Windows. They both work from a Windows VM, but I can’t get the color profiles to work correctly.
The most trouble-free computer experience for me has been my ThinkPad W530 with FreeBSD. Took me a while to get it up and running (including replacing the keyboard with the old classic ThinkPad keyboard), but now that it is all set, it is smooth sailing and the battery goes for 5h under FreeBSD, even though this battery is ancient and the laptop is very power hungry (4 populated RAM slots).
Otherwise, it is just pain. I was helping an older lady yesterday, my colleague. Her VPN wouldn’t connect. Entra authentication would return that her access doesn’t conform to the security features. Lots of digging later, I find out in Azure that her password had expired. WTF! Why not telling the user that?
And then… her password manager doesn’t work. “Click restart app to fix”. She clicks “restart app” and the window just blinks – it was not restarting. So I tell her to close it manually. Of course clicking the X icon does not close the application. The icon is in the notification area, but hidden. So she has to expand the area, right click, do exit, confirm on a modal dialogue.
And my grandfather HATES upgrades. His eyesight is declining and whenever an icon or button changes place, takes him a while to find them and then commit the changes to his muscle memory. So something like “where the F is the mute button now?” is the kind of stuff I hear often. =(
It is pain. Computers are evil.
Shiunbird,
I hear complaints about windows all the time. Users really hate change and unfortunately microsoft are often guilty of changing things for the worse.
Computers are tools. I wish OS product managers and C-level suit folks (for the for profit products) would treat them as such. I am most probably going to pay for the Windows 10 extended support because it took me such a long time to get rid of all the crapware, to fully remove Edge (even Windows help launches firefox here) and to disable all the telemetry and ads cancer from all the registry entries I could find.
Linux is not doing very well lately and I migrated to FreeBSD because I got very sick of things breaking randomly.
But what happens with operating systems and computers in general is… well, if your screwdriver would change shape every couple of months. I turn the computer to use a web browser, GIMP, run my scanner, write an email, not to use the operating system. The operating system should be as invisible as possible.
“Entra authentication would return that her access doesn’t conform to the security features. Lots of digging later, I find out in Azure that her password had expired. WTF! Why not telling the user that?”
Because microsoft sees authentication primarily as a means for user lock-in, not for security.
As another example of just how bad of an idea it is to trust microsoft’s authentication security, the 2fa usb keys for my significant other’s account were recently silently disabled. No warnings, no mails, no notifications. We found out because she suddenly could authenticate her mail account with only her password.
I agree with you. Can’t convince my bosses though.
Good luck playing most PC games (esp. AAA) on Linux.
sloth,
Many games work fine, but DRM is a culprit. Unfortunately that stuff is designed to break non-standard configurations.
I admit it’s not perfect. but compatibility is much higher than even just a few years ago. Titles that didn’t work for me then are working for me now. If your not picky about specific games, then IMHO gaming on linux is ok. I suspect it’s got more titles than macos.
I haven’t had any issues playing “Windows only” games on my Steam Deck so far. Granted I don’t do a lot of multiplayer games, but the ones I do play work fine on there, even World of Warcraft Classic, though for that one I have to connect a keyboard and mouse obviously.
Wine and Proton have come a long way especially since the release of the Deck, you should give it a shot on your own Linux PC.
I know it’s anecdotal, but Civilization VII came out pirated on Linux and macOS first rather than on Windows…
Linux is an option; those who don’t want to see it like that should keep complaining about Windows.
Not an hardcore gamer, but Tabletop Simulator runs better on Steam on Linux than on Windows (performance is equal, but laptop gets less hot)
A few months ago, I decided a few months ago to “upgrade” my last Windows desktop computer which is on version 10 to 11. This computer is solely used for web browsing, email and gaming.
After going through hoops to make the boot UEFI compliant (resizing partitions, rebooting into nothing several times, recovering with Linux), I managed to install 11. It forced me to use a web account for the first time and I allowed it as I thought it contained an electronic license key I could re-apply.
After 2 hours it started prompting me for an Activation key but I was unable to apply any of my existing Windows keys as the verisons were not compatible (Pro/Home problem).
Fed up with Windows anyway, I installed Bazzite and 98 percent of my Steam collection (300+ games) plays smoothly with zero effort beyond installing Bazzite.
So don’t worry about games not playing, it will play your Windows games and very smoothly as well!
https://bazzite.gg/
Because although there are things that Windows does badly, there are also things that it does very, very well.
For instance:
1) Every member of my family can have a user account on every one of our machines without me having to set those accounts up individually. On first login, it takes a couple minutes for their account preferences software, etc. to be automatically set up, and this can happen without my direct intervention.
2) My kids’ permission to access e.g. websites, as well as screen time limitations, can be remotely applied across all of their laptops and desktops, as well as their accounts on my and my wife’s laptops and desktops (should they need to use ours). Just about anything they do on their computers can be whitelisted/blacklisted from a web interface and instantaneously applied across every desktop or laptop computer in our home.
3) I can get a weekly, unified report on how long my kids use their laptops/desktops, what software they run, and which websites they visit.
For all three of these — which are pretty much necessary if you want to be a responsible parent and also allow your kids to use a computer — Linux is just not an option. The best you can do is set up some parental controls for e.g. individual users on individual machines or block websites at the network level like it’s 1995.
Brainworm,
Granted I’m not familiar with the controls on windows, but what’s wrong network solutions? I use a squid proxy and not only is it effective, it works cross platform.
Well,
1) Network-level solutions affect all users on the network, and each user of our network has different needs. Some need to access YouTube and some definitely should not, for example.
2) Filtering needs to happen at the user level, not the device level i.e. network permissions need to be different depending on which user is logged in to a specific device, not depending on the device’s MAC address or device IP. This is important because KIDS. What I need are e.g. eight or nine basically-interchangeable laptops or desktops that any of six people can log on to and start using under the correct configuration.
3) Filtering needs to work regardless of which network the kids are on. They have laptops. These get used at home, at school, at the library, at friends’ houses, at the local coffee shop, and on public networks that e.g. kid A uses to do their homework while kid B is at rehearsal.
4) Kids are clever. I need a system that makes sure that e.g. four kids are not logged on to the oldest child’s user account (or my wife’s) on four different machines simultaneously.
And, you know, none of this excludes network-level solutions. You need those, too. Kids’ friends can always bring their laptops and tablets over and you need to account for that.
That said, there are always going to be ways around whatever system I set up, but getting around it ought to force them to learn something useful. Like, if they want to get to PornHub they’re gonna have to figure out how to install a VPN on a locked-down windows machine, which skill will serve them well both at school and in the workplace.
Brainworm,
I appreciate that normal households rely on turnkey and maybe even commercial solutions. The DIY approach may not be within reach, however it’s definitely doable with FOSS. For example you can use ip tables, or segment the network using vlans, subnets, or mac address. A poor man’s hostfile can be an effective blacklisting tool. IIRC some dns services let you filter by hosts.
To achieve user based filtering, you could use containers, iptables, or even just a different browser profile with a different proxy setting.
iptables lets you do user/group based packet routing/filtering…
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/iptables-extensions.8.html
I understand some people ONLY want a turnkey product, in which case we’d have to look at what features they offer. I’m not too familiar with them.
You could technically limit the traffic to a VPN and continue to filter it remotely. I have encountered some corporate laptops set up this way, although I feel this is overkill here. You’d probably be better off with local filtering solutions, and in principal linux can do that too.
Honestly if they’re using someone else’s privileged account, that’s kind of the fault of the privileged person for letting that happen.
If your kids are knowledgeable and determined, they can usually find a way around restrictions. A usb boot stick can provide an unrestricted desktop environment bypassing any local restrictions you’ve configured in linux or windows. You can’t really stop them from accessing the web on a friend’s device. There’s only so much you can do. Obviously the discussion is about technical feasibility, which is fine, but obviously parenting requires we do more than rely on technological fixes.
If these disgusting dark patterns are not enough, we have here the tradicional show of lack of even basic QA by Microsoft.
Looks like they have better things to do than testing their own software features properly, including the anti-features, like… privacy violating data mining and AI crap.
I have an enterprise windows laptop for work We occasionally experience software activation issues where multiple employees get locked out of “local” software (excel/outlook/visual studio/etc), which these days are tethered to microsoft subscription servers. It’s only happened three or four times in the past five years, so not “often”, but still these microsoft bugs & outages are extremely disruptive to normal business. Employees can’t do much because the local software is waiting for permission from the mothership before it will run, so we’re dead in the water.
Our project manager discovered that removing and re-adding users to the domain fixed the issue for him without needing to wait for microsoft to fix it, so if it happens again hopefully it doesn’t waste as much time.
Obviously it’s bad that it doesn’t work 100%, but even if it did this idea that our local technology is so locked down and dependent on remote servers feels extremely wrong to me. Tech companies are doing this on purpose and I think technology is become worse off because of it.
You could blame Google for coming up with this model, though I kind of like Chromebooks. It seems they were developed with a lot of care and attention to detail. It’s the perfect laptop for parents (I got my dad one), though definitely not for me.
I think online accounts can be done right (don’t know Chromebooks well enough to know if they do), just probably not by MS. It does have disadvantages, but also obvious advantages. Account/device syncing on Android, in Chrome, and wow, look at what Apple’s done.
This…
Traditional computers are geek toys, they are simply too complex for average users. Most users are much better off with appliance like devices – tv sets, phones, tablets, chromebooks, games consoles.
That’s why the vast majority of people buy a pre-assembled car, and pay someone else to service it. Very few people want to assemble their own kit car.
bert64,
People used to service hardware themselves a lot more, including their cars. I think DIY culture dies when internals become less accessible to the public though. Now you need more proprietary tools than ever.
> That’s why the vast majority of people buy a pre-assembled car, and pay someone else to service it
You can’t even change wheels* on modern cars by yourself, thanks to tire pressure sensors: you need to re-pair the pressure sensor to the car’s central computer, and for that you need authorized tools.
The point being that at this point it isn’t a matter of “want” , but “can’t” or “aren’t allowed”
*Many people around here have 2 sets of wheels (yes, wheels, not just tires) to swap between summer/winter. Some in my street still do that change themselves (pre-2015 cars).
This is why i don’t enable any integrations and online accounts with BigTech and only use local ones and my own sync solutions…
.wojtek,
I agree with this. However we ought to be mindful that not everyone’s choices are unencumbered. Network effects put a ton of pressure on people. And big tech is working double time making it ever harder to untether. If you are willing and able to use an alternative FOSS platform, by all means do. I think FOSS platforms are going to be the last refuge for those who want control over their devices.
Enshittification is slowly rendering big tech nearly useless to those of us that actually care what happens to, and with, our data.
Windows 11 is a sad parody of itself from a time when it was actually useful., and I felt that I was actually in control of the OS and my data. I’ve been migrating systems to LMDE for a while now and am also thinking seriously of setting up my own local storage and ditching OneDrive and Google Drive for good. I know that can be fraught with its own issues but I’m OK with spending a little money and time on it.
Preach it, brother!
Why would MS want you to put ALL your data on THEIR servers to the point where the “storage” is pretty well free? Are they (good) that magnanimous and benevolent, or are they (evil) making your data available for data mining and AI training?
Evil will always win, because good is dumb.
JohnnyS777,
In case somebody doesn’t get the reference…
“Space balls good is dumb”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty5bXad0dZI
Great movie! Hard to believe they’re rebooting it after all this time.
And THIS is exactly why my gaming PC will remain Win10 for as long as it will boot and games will install and run. Same as before with Win7, same as before with XP, same as before with ’95. How so many smart people at such a wealthy and mighty company can collectively be so stupid is completely beyond me. Every ant colony does better in aggregating individual intelligence.
Thank God gaming is the only thing one still kind-of needs Windows (or MacOS) for, at all.
IMO, gaming via Proton (installed through Steam, but can be used to play non-Steam games) it works great. Even Starfield at launch.
I moved my main computer over to Linux a year ago. Almost all the applications I use either run on Linux or have a usable equivalent. I did install virtual machine and Windows 10 for one program that would not run on Linux and is no longer in support. I have one other program that was written for Windows and Mac, and the vendor does not seem interested in porting to Linux. It is an audio app that will not run from the Windows emulation. For that program I continue to use a Windows 11 laptop. So, transitioning to Linux is doable, but not 100%.
This may go a way towards explaining the situation:
https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/
Microsoft gets almost 3x more money from Azure than from Windows. Azure revenue is growing, Windows revenue is shrinking. And in fact, cloud and office stuff combined make up more than half their revenue… as of three years ago. The disparity is probably even bigger now.
And like clockwork, Windows is an appalling hackjob, while Azure is first class among cloud services. They’re focusing on their cash cows.
In other words, Tuesday.
Fascinating read.
I myself jumped off of Windows during early 2000’s and I never looked back. I honestly never had any need to run it for any reason after that. Maybe just to check “how things are going now on the other side” (I’m Senior IT admin / DevOPs), and it was always going downhill. I liked Windows 2000 quite a lot, it had everything it needed to have, minus instability (see: Win98 SE which I started with).
I truly think that today there is absolutely no excuse to stay on Windows for any reason. Back when I was switching to Linux and BSDs, there were plenty of reasons to go back, and Linux was really unstable, but now? man, it’s smooth sailing, and if something doesn’t work, it can be easily fixed either by reverting back to previous state (BTRFS, ZFS), or applying workaround.
Even my 86 year old Grandma and my 8 year old son know how to use Linux and use it just like any other OS, minus stupid issues, online accounts or other complete and utter nonsense.
marc_dimarco,
It really depends on where you work. Windows has clearly fallen out of favor for internet/hosting, and the IT roles at these companies might never have to touch windows. But a lot of companies are still windows-centric and IT and software developers have to support them. In my own experience nearly all hosting is done on linux, meanwhile nearly all office staff use windows computers & software (I have yet to see an office running linux desktops). While a lot of my work leans on the hosting side, although I also maintain windows based software. I’ll use whichever the customer demands, I’m not in a great economic position to decline work over my own operating system preferences.
For the most part I agree, things keep improving. Not that long ago boot failures under nvidia’s proprietary drivers installed by the user were a regular occurrence. I believe this issue is behind us now that nvidia’s stable ABI got committed into the linux kernel. I haven’t experienced this issue since. Installing software is way too difficult, even professionals should concede that installing out of repo software is just painful on linux, which has tarnished the linux on desktop for decades. Now flatpak/appimage are helping to fill this gap. While I still would like to see more improvement, this has gotten much better in recent years.
Many windows users are frustrated by windows. There is a visceral reaction from camp linux “use linux instead”. But whether they have a positive experience on linux or not depends on their needs and expectations. If they’re focused on the web, then they probably won’t even notice they’re on linux. I wouldn’t recommend linux to someone who still intends to use a lot of windows software though. Windows users who are accustomed to hardware manufacturers providing windows support may have to learn the hard way that linux doesn’t have that – unfortunately vendor support tends to be a con for niche operating systems. For example my kids got toys as gifts that required windows to program them. There’s still a lot of windows bias in the software world.
I had hoped for a happy ending. This pattern of frantic LLM and search fueled problem solving for WIndows 11 is endemic and does not always succeed.