The Death of Windows 10

[Ron Texas]

The fact that you have to do an internet search to find a workaround for the dummy Microsoft account problem, to me, says it all. It should not be necessary. An option should come up to choose to setup with a local account only during the installation process.

Putting silly cartoon images in the search box, which then have to be removed by finding the right option to do that, having a compulsory news feed if you want the widgets that seem to be largely about Taylor Swift's latest activities, appears to me set to appeal to children rather than adults. The widgets are particularly irritating because if you could get rid of the news feed a weather widget, and maybe some of the others, may actually be useful.

Well, you found a way around it yourself. I'm sorry if you think a simple internet search is too much of a problem. If you think installation is bad, when you do updates it will ask you to sign in again. That's annoying. The workaround there was to back up a screen. If you can't stand any of it you can buy a Mac.

 

[Monster]

Well, you found a way around it yourself. I'm sorry if you think a simple internet search is too much of a problem. If you think installation is bad, when you do updates it will ask you to sign in again. That's annoying. The workaround there was to back up a screen. If you can't stand any of it you can buy a Mac.

The point I am trying to make is that in a proper, professional, well design OS it should not be necessary. I did indeed have to spend some hours searching the internet to find various hacks and workarounds from installing it on what Microsoft has arbitrarily decided is unsupported hardware, to actually getting it working in a business like manner suitable for adults. It really shouldn't be like this from a multi-billion dollar software company that is actually charging people real money for their product.

I have looked into buying a Mac but I find the idea paying twice as much money for the same level of functionality as a Windows or Linux machine a bit irksome.

I do thank you for your help with the Microsoft account hack, it may come in handy in the future if, for some reason, I choose to stick with Windows rather than switch to Linux next year. But, the more I think about it, sticking with Microsoft's way of doing things is becoming less and less attractive.

 

[Ron Texas]

@Monster I do find MSFT's efforts to force users to sign in to be annoying. It's possible to get an installation image which does not require a sign in. It's what company IT departments use. I bought my MAC about 6 months ago. It definitely does not cost twice what an equivalent Windows machine costs, but there is a price premium.

 

[pablolie]

@Monster I do find MSFT's efforts to force users to sign in to be annoying. It's possible to get an installation image which does not require a sign in. It's what company IT departments use. I bought my MAC about 6 months ago. It definitely does not cost twice what an equivalent Windows machine costs, but there is a price premium.

Since everything is connected to the 'net anyhow, I am no resistant to having such accounts - Google, Microsoft... many others. If you also use Office, it's actually pretty neat to have access to the stuff you're working on from any machine... and from Linux too, the browser versions of the Office apps are not as feature rich, but one can get a lot of stuff done.

Oh, and if you have an Office365 subscription, you don't need worry about next year's date for Win10 "expiration", Microsoft will keep issuing important updates. Not as many as they typically do, I'd hope.

 

[Monster]

@Monster I do find MSFT's efforts to force users to sign in to be annoying. It's possible to get an installation image which does not require a sign in. It's what company IT departments use. I bought my MAC about 6 months ago. It definitely does not cost twice what an equivalent Windows machine costs, but there is a price premium.

Maybe I should bite the bullet and buy a Mac, just to try. People who have them say they are very good and it's not as if I can't afford one. I agree that twice the price is a bit of an exaggeration, but when I last looked into it it was, realistically, about 50% more for a an equivalent Mac compared to a Windows machine.

Anyway, I have a year to think about the problem and things may have changed substantially by then.

 

[Monster]

Since everything is connected to the 'net anyhow, I am no resistant to having such accounts - Google, Microsoft... many others. If you also use Office, it's actually pretty neat to have access to the stuff you're working on from any machine... and from Linux too, the browser versions of the Office apps are not as feature rich, but one can get a lot of stuff done.

Oh, and if you have an Office365 subscription, you don't need worry about next year's date for Win10 "expiration", Microsoft will keep issuing important updates. Not as many as they typically do, I'd hope.

Personally, I find big tech trying to collect as much personal data from me as they possibly can quite insidious and I do my best to fragment my data across platforms and sites to try to hinder data aggregation. I know it's all a bit of a lost cause but I feel that I have to try.

I don't have Office365 as I find Libre Office does everything I need at a much lower cost.

 

[pseudoid]

Well, I've eventually forced an 'upgrade' to Windows11 Home onto an an old, unsupported Windows 10 laptop that was doing nothing on the shelf. It actually runs fine but other than that, my first impressions of it are not good.

Surprising that you were able to shoe-horn Windows11 into an 'old laptop', since many users were rightfully pssed-off because their few years-old PC hardware were removed from WHQL/HCL listings (as was mine) and could not install Windows11 and were forced to buy new hardware.

The fact that you have to do an internet search to find a workaround for the dummy Microsoft account problem, to me, says it all. It should not be necessary. An option should come up to choose to setup with a local account only during the installation process.

Creating a Microsoft/outlook user account is not such a bad idea - as a fall-back account log-in - even if you plan to rarely use it.
Is/was the difficulty in creating a local-account (during your Windows11 installation) possibly due to selecting the "Home" version of Win11 rather than the "Pro" version?
I've always detested doing a new/fresh WinOS installs. Thus, my upgrade regimen (since ~Win98) always starts with burning an image of the current OS (of C:\ drive) and then, proceeding to the upgrade that allows previous user-account settings to remain as they have been previously set in the prior WinOS. It further helps to NOT use that same OS installation drive for any user/account generated data; so that the upgrade installation does NOT try to migrate mangle them during the new WinOS install.

I give Kudos to Microsoft/Win11Pro for not making networking any worse than it was in Win10Pro.

 

[Brian Hall]

I converted my PCs to Linux. Good riddance to Windows since I no longer need it for work.

 

[pseudoid]

I don't have Office365

I don't mind paying for Microsoft Office as 'we' grew up together. But I avoid any purchase that is Software-as-a-Service, like the Office365.

 

[Monster]

Surprising that you were able to shoe-horn Windows11 into an 'old laptop', since many users were rightfully pssed-off because their few years-old PC hardware were removed from WHQL/HCL listings (as was mine) and could not install Windows11 and were forced to buy new hardware.

Creating a Microsoft/outlook user account is not such a bad idea - as a fall-back account log-in - even if you plan to rarely use it.
Is/was the difficulty in creating a local-account (during your Windows11 installation) possibly due to selecting the "Home" version of Win11 rather than the "Pro" version?
I've always detested doing a new/fresh WinOS installs. Thus, my upgrade regimen (since ~Win98) always starts with burning an image of the current OS (of C:\ drive) and then, proceeding to the upgrade that allows previous user-account settings to remain as they have been previously set in the prior WinOS. It further helps to NOT use that same OS installation drive for any user/account generated data; so that the upgrade installation does NOT try to migrate mangle them during the new WinOS install.

I give Kudos to Microsoft/Win11Pro for not making networking any worse than it was in Win10Pro.

I used this method to force Win 11 to install on my 13 year old laptop. This method was supposed to also bypass the requirements for an online Microsoft account but that bit didn't work for me. As the machine had a clean install of Win 10 on it I chose the install option of 'keep nothing' for the Win 11 'upgrade' which is what may have re-triggered the requirement to have a MS online account. There are other methods available, one of which is an officially supported registry hack for some hardware. As I have said in my earlier posts, you really shouldn't have to be doing this sort of stuff with a product that is sold commercially.

I used the Win 11 ISO which detects which version of Win 10 is already installed on the computer. It then installs the equivalent version of Win 11 so that the software licence for that version is maintained. In this case, the laptop had Win 10 Home installed and it has been 'upgraded' to Win 11 Home. I too always take a disk image before embarking on these things so that there is always a route back to where I started if it all goes horribly wrong.

I agree, that once configured, Win 11 does not seem appreciably worse than Win 10 but that's hardly a step forward. To me, Win 11 is the new Windows Vista.

 

[kemmler3D]

I'm 500 posts late to this thread, but if the beef is that MSFT is requiring this or that, and Apple isn't on the table, just bite the bullet and go to linux, right? Yeah, you lose access to some apps, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

 

[Monster]

I'm 500 posts late to this thread, but if the beef is that MSFT is requiring this or that, and Apple isn't on the table, just bite the bullet and go to linux, right? Yeah, you lose access to some apps, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

That may well be the final outcome. I do have one very old Asus netbook running Zorin OS Core and it's OK.

 

[restorer-john]

I don't mind paying for Microsoft Office as 'we' grew up together. But I avoid any purchase that is Software-as-a-Service, like the Office365.

What version of Office are you using these days?

 

[Blumlein 88]

I'm 500 posts late to this thread, but if the beef is that MSFT is requiring this or that, and Apple isn't on the table, just bite the bullet and go to linux, right? Yeah, you lose access to some apps, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Yes, I recently put Linux on a Macbook Pro that Apple not longer approves of having the up to date MacOS. Works better than ever.

 

[Berwhale]

I managed to bork Ubuntu on my Lenovo X390 Yoga last night...

I wanted enable the fingerprint reader for privilege elevation (it was already enabled for logon). So I Googled and found out I need to enable the fingerprint module using 'pam-auth-update'. So I enabled fingerprint, but accidentally enabled smartcard authentication as well (it was late!). Now I get prompted to plug in a smartcard when logging on or elevating with sudo, etc. I have no smartcard or smartcard reader

The smartcard prompt seems to time out on logon and i'm able to use a fingerprint or password, but I can't sudo or su to undo the changes because I can't past the smartcard prompt at the command line.

I can't see how I can fix this without the ability to elevate (I hadn't set a root password or enabled root logon), so i've wiped the laptop and i'm doing a fresh install of 24.04 - this only takes 10 minutes when booting from an NVMe drive in an external USB-C enclosure with Ventoy installed and the Ubuntu ISO copied to it.

35 years in IT and still learning (by breaking things)

*update* Ubuntu re-installed, fingerprint enabled in PAM and working for sudo -i

 

[Brian Hall]

I'm 500 posts late to this thread, but if the beef is that MSFT is requiring this or that, and Apple isn't on the table, just bite the bullet and go to linux, right? Yeah, you lose access to some apps, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

I'm not finding many apps that are missing or without good alternatives.

 

[pseudoid]

What version of Office are you using these days?

It's hard to track, as I've probably owned most every version, ever released. Without digging too deep, it appears, I've had the top offerings of Office2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and now 2021. In most older Office versions, Visio was also included. During upgrade to Win11Pro, the installer prompted me that my Visio (part of 2016 package and installed in Win10Pro) was NFG (no longer compatible).
Also accused me of having an "illegitimate" ProductKey. There are 3 PCs in the house that use Office!
I asked myself if it was worth my time to prove how wrong Microsoft bureaucracy was. Instead, I have decided to go full vigilante on Microsoft and brute-force installed the my paid version of Visio 2016, which I had in hand.

I fully rely on Office OneNote - for over a decade - so that I don't have to store stuff in my head and in case I get hit with Alzheimer's!

Point: I don't log into my *Microsoft account, I don't use *Microsoft cloud-services and only *rely on local storage.

 

[Berwhale]

View attachment 375356
It's hard to track, as I've probably owned most every version, ever released. Without digging too deep, it appears, I've had the top offerings of Office2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and now 2021. In most older Office versions, Visio was also included. During upgrade to Win11Pro, the installer prompted me that my Visio (part of 2016 package and installed in Win10Pro) was NFG (no longer compatible).
Also accused me of having an "illegitimate" ProductKey. There are 3 PCs in the house that use Office!
I asked myself if it was worth my time to prove how wrong Microsoft bureaucracy was. Instead, I have decided to go full vigilante on Microsoft and brute-force installed the my paid version of Visio 2016, which I had in hand.

I fully rely on Office OneNote - for over a decade - so that I don't have to store stuff in my head and in case I get hit with Alzheimer's!

Point: I don't log into my *Microsoft account, I don't use *Microsoft cloud-services and only *rely on local storage.

As far as im aware, Visio has never been included in the MS Office suite and i've been using and supporting Office professionally since the early 90's (i.e. Word 2.0, Excel 4.0, etc.).

However, Visio (and MS Project) do share the same installation platform now and the versioning and licensing can get confusing. For example, I have Office 2019, but Visio 2021 (both purchased via Microsoft's corporate Home Usage Programme)...

Note that the 'The product contains' lines are completely different, but the Version 2405 and the Build of the Click-to-run installer are the same.

If you have a digital copy of VIsio like me, you have to be careful to use the installer .exe. you download for the product from Microsoft when you purchased it, not the generic installer which will give you the license activation error you encountered.

Just to make things more complicated, I think MS have changed where the products are downloaded from - IIRC, my 2019 installer is from their Digital River site, but Visio, which i purchased last year, is associated with my personal MS account and is downloadable from my order history there. It's best to check the e-mails you got when you purchased the products for the install link.

 

[phofman]

I can't see how I can fix this without the ability to elevate (I hadn't set a root password or enabled root logon), so i've wiped the laptop and i'm doing a fresh install of 24.04

Having already booted the ubuntu installation medium, would just mounting the root partition with incorrect configuration and fixing the configuration help?

 

[mhardy6647]

I've got some ancient version of Linux Mint running on my "music server" upstairs. Since that's an IBM Thinkpad R60, I am kind of loath to try to move to a Linux variant that's actually still supported.