Dark Patterns Killed My Wife's Windows 11 Installation

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

  PS C:\Windows\system32> irm "https://christitus.com/win" | iex

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

So um how many dark patterns was that ?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Time to migrate to Linux.

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.

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

This is absurd

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.

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?

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.