No I Don't Want to Turn on Windows Backup with One Drive

Even with this and OneDrive enabled, I managed to lose years of family photos when trying to free up space thinking "oh I've got this backed up" and then thinking the same when freeing up space when deleting my backup. I wish Windows could be less confusing...

Changing the win11 UI to something more usable with StartAllBack is also recommended. $5 one-time fee.

Neither GNOME nor KDE get anywhere near as bad. It's really only these commercial "holier than thou" operating systems that think they know best.

Reminder that Apple's revenue from ads is in the billions and climbing at an accelerating pace. The enshittification comes for all. They don't need to be good, they just need to be better than Microsoft.

They need a "F*ck off forever" option.

For the first 5 years, the processes would be swapped, and set in stone. So, you'd need to call a number, sit on hold and be disconnected a few times to get a mailing address. Then you'd buy some stamps and an envelope if you want to submit a "Please sell my personal information" form. Grocery stores would charge you more if you used a loyalty card, and so on.

Of course, a better approach would make the collection, sale, querying, possession of, and engaging in transactions involving consumer marketing databases illegal. (All those protections are needed since Google redefined "sell personal information" to not include any of their revenue streams.)

It's clear they want to remove local accounts and tie everything to O365.

My mom (68 yo) recently got a Windows update that then prompted her to backup her stuff. I had disabled all this and used Win11 debloat previously. OneDrive only had 5gb of storage and prompted her to upgrade.

She thought she got hacked because it was asking for money. Then when I went to turn it off it warned me that I might suffer data loss disabling one drive. Which is a story that we have seen play out many times.

Sure enough I backed everything up to an external drive, and when I disabled OneDrive the files were totally gone.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5309251/...

https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1ef8pgr/one_dr...

https://www.elevenforum.com/t/i-tried-to-disable-onedrive-lo...

So sure, you can get around it, but there are going to be hundreds of millions of other people who won't.

- Davinci Resolve

- Adobe suite

- AutoHotkey scripts, lots of them

- Microsoft Office, mainly PowerPoint, Excel and Word for creating and interacting with other companies' docs. Libre/OpenOffice mangled them/were missing features I depend on

- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.) last time I tried to switch, and rabbit holes that I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)

That said, I would love to switch back. I loved rofi [0] last time, for example.

Can anyone speak to the above? What's the status of running Windows apps like Adobe, Resolve, Office, for instance? Or AutoHotkey or equivalent?

0: https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

It's very similar to Bazzite, which you listed, but not gamer focused. You get an easy install, auto updates (without reboots), and a bulletproof, immutable OS that is nearly impossible to break.

If you want bling and tiling, Omarchy is the new hotness: https://omarchy.org/

The point is that even though I have 95% de-Microsoftized my life for the past 2 decades, I still need to run Windows for a few specific flows, and I run into the same issues as the article author here.

Despite the fact that it mostly runs in powershell, it still has a better UX then the majority of Microsoft apps. (Except for the confusion about their only GUI pop-up window, you put a check mark next to the built-in apps you want removed, which was led me to reread the instructions to make sure I had it right the first time I used it).

It has both built-in sane default for people who just want to debloat Windows 10/11, along with a "custom" option which takes less than 60 seconds to get through but gives you all the customizability you need.

(No connection with the author except mad respect.)

—sent from my Linux desktop, but alas..

Microsoft even touted Windows 10 as last version of Windows.

But it was typical bait-and-switch gambit by Micro$oft, and support for Windows 10 is ending in Oct 2025 (rejecting the pleas from thousands of companies worldwide to extend its Win10 support for longer while), because M$ thinks everyone will migrate to Windows 11 (not free).

However, many Win10 users will remain on Win10 for years (just as they had stuck around with Win7/Win8 for years), and many will migrate to Linux or MacOS instead.

Microsoft will out find the hard way that people can be as stubborn as it can be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_(architecture)

(I've had it turned on for so long that I honestly don't know what they do.)

Microsoft is using all the levers at their disposal to force users to use online Microsoft accounts to log onto their local computer and even turn on formerly optional features like One Drive.

My assumption is that Microsoft is using their access to user data to build up everyone's advertising profile, and forcing you to be logged on through a Microsoft account makes sure that the data they collect is linked to a specific person.

Windows Recall is another example of a "feature" they wanted to force on users that can be used to fill out everyone's advertising profile.

Also it should not be locked to a single online storage provider but use some sort of standardized protocol (or at least some pluggable mechanism) to allow any online storage provider - including using self-hosted options - to work with it.

This is how you make something that works for your users instead of taking advantage of them.

I just wish the Affinity suite would be available for Linux too.