>the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
More and more it seems people don't even find it necessary for that.
I'm "the Linux friend" for a lot of my friends, and over the last year-ish a surprising number of them have asked about advice for switching to Linux. I've helped four people attempt the switch, and three out of the four have stuck with Linux so far.
All the damn developers keep turning off online play for Linux users though... I play two games a lot currently, Apex Legends and Battlefield 6, both block Linux players from online play thanks to their shitty kernel rootkits not supporting Linux.
Apex Legends at least was running fine on Steam Deck prior to november 2024 when they instituted this change, and I can tell you from personal experience it had very little impact on cheaters, which was their excuse for the change (supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients).
yup i am too, steamdeck helped convert me fully. this year my goal is to move my main gaming desktop to linux with tiny spare ssd for windows to run the odd anticheat game on.
cachyos has been nearly flawless for a non-steam deck (gpd win mini 2). Upgrades broke my tv being set to the primary display under gamemode but that was an easy fix.
The other game changer (heh) was going all in on amd: cpu, integrated gpu, and discrete gpu via oculink.
Nvidia may be the best overall performance for gaming and ai workloads, it still doesn't play nice with linux gaming
I can't even be bothered to dual boot into Windows to game anymore. Wiped my Windows drive over the weekend so that it could be used as a snapshot drive. If the game doesn't work on Steam on Linux I'm not interested - simple as that.
Gaming is a smaller thing for me than the Adobe creative apps, especially Lightroom.
Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.
Unless you need compatibility with Adobe file formats, Free editing software works fine too. I've been using Darktable for about a decade. People bash on GIMP for not being able to do what Photoshop can, but it's because GIMP is built with the intent of being extended by the user. It can be extended to do what people complain that it cannot do. Kdenlive is good at filling the needs met by Premiere. I think the hardest Adobe application for me to recommend a portable alternative to is After Effects. Maybe Blender can be coaxed into filling some AE uses.
I do exactly the same as you. I wish that I didn't need windows for gaming, and things are getting better on that front, but my favorite game (AoE 2) works significantly better on windows than on wine :(
I get the joke, but I disagree. It mixed hardware with software in a weird way.
Macs are as much about the hardware than the software, and the OS is just another Unix variant. Much closer to Linux/BSD than Windows.
I like tech (no fear, I've been coding for 41 years at this point), but I don't like configuration, I'm a programmer, not IT, and also I heavily lean to getting shit done, so I prefer tools that don't get too much in my way.
I abandoned Linux on the desktop after I lost a battle with Linux audio. I can't freaking believe there's not a single thing that unifies everything, it's such a pain in the ass to setup right.
On notebooks it's a lost battle due to issues with power management that require way more fiddling that I'm willing to invest into.
> the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
even this has gone away for me, exited first with Bazzite and am now on CachyOS. Still got a debloated Windows11 on a different SSD for when friends want to play games with kernel-level anticheat or other bs.
feels good to be free of Microsoft. work on a Mac, game on Linux, phones run Android.
Love cachyos. Such a great OS. Wanted to love bazzite, but it's got too many opinionated takes and rpm-ostree is a PITA. pacman does have its pitfalls, but aside from upgrades, it's been appliance-level stable for a 100% gaming laptop docked to my tv
I mostly agree with you. Now with proton/steamos, the only games that need windows are multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat mechanisms (e.g., destiny 2).
Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, GTA5 online (and likely gta6 online).
Personally, only TFT is a blocker for me, and you can get an inferior version working on linux, but it only takes you playing one of those games for it to be a blocker.
It's not the "can't" necessarily, it's about friction, I could get it working on linux, but then I'd probably be just fiddling with settings way longer than I do today.
Current Windows gaming experience is almost like a console, just play and forget, (if you just use your machine for that).
Another potential issue is that I have games in all the major launchers (and a GamePass subscription), and the only one that works reasonably well on Linux is Steam.
I get ~weekly crashes using an Nvidia card with arch/hyprland, but honestly it's less problematic for me to deal with than windows updates. I can format and rebuild my machine from scratch in less time than windows takes to download and perform an update.
Flawless experience on non-nvidia hardware though.
Valve saw exactly this scenario, because you're right: Windows isn't good for stability any more. Windows isn't good for driver compatibility anymore. Windows isn't good for being easy to do your own thing. It's only good for gaming...
I mean, macOS is not a serious OS either. It has worse error management/reporting than Windows - Microsoft at least give you the courtesy of pretending they're trying to help you resolve the issue with an indecipherable hex code and badly localised error message, that you may, if you're very lucky, be able to Google.
Apple give you a middle finger with a "Something went wrong" or just spins forever. No information whatsoever on what the problem is and how you could possibly debug it. Compete lack of tooling to help with that too.
Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"? HA, FUCK YOU. I spent hours trying to debug this (so there is a tool that can give you power use per USB device, but it's a point in time one). In the end rewired everything because it was just impossible to discover what the hell was its problem. Another fun one was trying to extend my macOS screen to an iPad, where the button just wasn't there. Why? What was I missing? Who knows.
> Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"?
Another fun one: “Updates are available. Do you want to install them?” What updates? What software is getting updates? What do they fix? No information, just a notification asking you whether you want to install vague updates.
Ah I see, people don't remember the time where most games just released on console, because it was the biggest target group. This time will come back. Like it or not. People won't buy a pc for 2k.
I love OneDrive. I don't know why everyone hates it. I save things in OneDrive, and they are backed up to the cloud and synced with the other computers I use.
Some computers are shared by six family members, each with their own MS account and 1TB of storage. OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive but still give everyone ready access to their files by not storing them all on the hard drive.
If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder I create outside Onedrive. I've never had any problems.
The comments by people who hate make me wonder why my experience is so different than theirs.
If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder
My complaint is that MS has intentionally made it SO DIFFICULT to do that. There's a significant amount of extra clicking and thinking necessary to go through the steps to do it.
There is? Not at all. Whatever I save from my browser (Edge/Firefox/Chromium) is automatically saved to Downloads and Downloads is not automatically synced with OneDrive Backup. Backed up is Documents, Music, Videos, Desktop etc. but Downloads not AFAIK.
The windows Explorer and the save dialog make it pretty easy to save a file somewhere else. Also, there is just one folder which syncs with OneDrive but some many more which don’t sync with OneDrive.
MS actually made it harder to save stuff in OneDrive by basically hardcoding the folders it will backup unlike most other similar services that let you sync arbitrary folders on any drive.
I haven't had too many issues with it that I couldn't resolve myself, but I understood what it was and what it was doing on my system. I opted in. I wonder if most of the people who don't like OneDrive didn't know it was enabled.
> OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive
No, it's a 1TB storage account accessible via the Internet, and wholly dependent on a good Internet connection, especially if you actually use most of that 1TB. Non-tech people will take misrepresentations like this at face value, which further makes tech a disempowering force.
The "Files-On-Demand" feature of OneDrive makes it possible for everyone in the family to login into any computer with OneDrive and quickly access all their files (I have 500/500 fiber). Because some/most of the files are stored on the cloud and only downloaded when they are accessed, the hard drive of the computer can be smaller (1TB) than the total sum of all the files stored by all the users (6TB). It's very nice. I can also turn off Files-on-Demand and everything will be stored locally on my computer. It sounds like many people are bothered that Files-on-Demand is enabled by default.
The two main frustrations that I've seen encountered are:
1) Microsoft aggressively attempting to convince you to use OneDrive, no matter how many times you turn it off.
I've had a Dropbox subscription since before OneDrive became a common name, and it works for me, so I have no real use case for OneDrive. That doesn't stop Microsoft forcibly "helpfully" re-enabling the OneDrive app and embedded link in the quick access bar regularly...which leads to
2) Microsoft attempting to sync your user profile in OneDrive, and bugs that arise from how it implements that.
I've never enabled this, so I haven't dug into how it works, but the first time I ever encountered OneDrive discussion in tech or adjacent circles was people complaining about OneDrive syncing of user profile folders breaking some games.
I assume it's something like the comedy of errors that could come out of folder redirection and software not expecting multiple people touching it at once, or the comedy of conflict resolution on a filesystem layer that isn't expecting that for semantics, but I have heard more complaints about OneDrive in this context than I've heard anything else about it.
So I suspect that it works fine, if you use it as a Dropbox-alike.
Using it as a Folder Redirection/Roaming Profiles replacement, or trying to say "no" to Microsoft, is where the problems ensue.
My wife got into trouble whilst unknowingly using OneDrive. She had a lot of photos on her laptop and they were being uploaded to OneDrive until it hit a limit (1TB?) and then started nagging her to upgrade to more storage. I had to disable OneDrive and move the photos back to her computer to resolve it.
Wholeheartedly agreed. Also the OneDrive Backup feature is great - previously people had to rely on other services (Box, Dropbox) and remember to save stuff into those folders. Now your most important Documents folder is saved in the cloud. Great. Backup! I don't think that OneDrive pestering you about buying more storage after using up your free storage is a bad thing, somebody needs to pay for stuff.
I understand the point, that everything is a bit convoluted and badly explained and may even lead to bad stuff happening. When you disable OneDrive Backup (good feature) and OneDrive deleting all your files locally with a little shortcut to OneDrive in the Cloud with all your files? Yeah... that is bad practice, but an easy fix for MS. Besides that hickup I currently don't undestand what the fuss is about.
I prefer the Dropbox solution, and tend to configure OneDrive, Google Drive, etc the same... I like to be explicit about it... I don't want all my general docs sync'd, for that matter, most of my projects are in a git repo anyway.
I know my Documents/Pictures directory isn't sync'd, I don't want it to be... to me my workspace is far different than what I want backed up to the cloud... I also have a local nas that is also setup for cloud sync for my service accounts. I emphatically do NOT want system default workspace directories sync'd.
How does this work with multiple PC's? Does it just merge all files into the same Documents folder? What if apps are saving app data to these folders, and you have the same app on multiple computers?
Considering I've had multiple family members and friends tricked into syncing to OneDrive without meaning to, I'd say that's a big reason. My Dad's old neighbor lost the ability to send and receive email after a Windows update did that to her, since it filled up her free Microsoft account and then Hotmail stopped working so she couldn't use email anymore and she had no idea why.
When I see comment saying that onedrive confusing, and that people are having problems with it, I always wonder if the "hacker" crowd is really the "hacker" type they want to portrait themselves, or just inexperienced computer users bitching on Microsoft for internet points.
OneDrive is an easy and well integrated cloud drive. The principle of having a cloud drive is not new anymore, and I believe people should get over the fact that, indeed, the files on the cloud drive is... In the cloud; colour me surprised!
The problem is Microsoft shoving it down our throats and making saving to local FS as cumbersome as possible.
I wouldn't have minded Onedrive, in fact I would have used it a lot more, if it just showed up as an external mounted drive in Explorer where I could just paste files and folders I want shared or backed up. But nope, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom just have to sync up my entire home directory by default and have Office/365 only save docs and sheets to cloud by default. No thank you.
Agreed, I'd even be more inclined to use the Web versions, which are inherently tethered to OneDrive in Linux if the boundaries were better respected... I want an explicit spot backed up, maybe with the option to sync other directories. I don't want to be tricked or forced into it... or see a windows update change the configuration on me.
You clearly understand what’s happening better than most people. As someone who came back to Windows recently after 15 years away, the lengths to which the UI goes to hide the actual location of files and prevent you from directly addressing the filesystem is incredible. Thankfully I don’t have to use Windows for anything important. I would never recommend it to anyone else. (Not that the alternatives are much better.)
What’s mainly wrong with OneDrive is that it doesn’t work how most people expect, it’s on by default, and it deletes files from your local PC without asking. No matter how nice it is if you understand what’s going on, those details are enough to make it hate-worthy IMO.
It's about consent and respect for the user. If you build something awesome, you don't have to shove it down peoples' throats.
When more people Google "How to disable xyz" than "How to enable xyz," that would be a strong hint to most of us, but it doesn't mean anything to Microsoft's developers. ("Hey, at least they're engaging with the product," they tell each other.)
You can absolutely be mad at a lawnmower that cut your foot off as there isn't any scenario where your feet should be at risk during normal operation of a regular lawnmower. Unless I intentionally try to insert my foot into the blades somehow, such dangerous faults would be entirely on the manufacturer.
Now if you proceed with he same horrible lawnmower and cut off your other foot, then that might be on you.
While the analogy is being stretched, same applies here - if Microsoft makes terrible footguns, then that's on Microsoft even if the users should have stopped using Microsoft by now.
It's not on me, it's on my employer, which forces me to use a laptop with MS Windows installed. Sure, I ssh into a machine running Linux where I do real work, but still.
Also - lots of people are used to it and habits die hard, regardless of technical merit etc.
I use OneDrive at work for all of my documents and have never encountered the horror stories I frequently read. I read these stories often enough where I believe there genuinely is a problem. But I do wonder why there is a difference for some and not others. Perhaps I've conditioned myself to live with its faults?
I will say that the Microsoft Office OneDrive save experience is completely subpar. It behaves completely separate & unlike Windows Explorer and is just unpleasant to work with.
We weren't using OneDrive at work, then we had it imposed, and everyone went through a few days period where they had to find where their documents went and/or changing the hardcoded paths in various things to match the new location.
Using OneDrive is often fine. Having it imposed on you is a breaking change.
I didn't have a problem until I migrated to another Mac. Then I started having duplicate files. I think I fixed it by logging out of everything and deleting the duplicates but it was a couple hours wasted. Didn't have this problem with Dropbox in my career.
Definitely and still a happy paying Dropbox user, even though I'm well within my free limits (after several referral storage bumps). IT pretty much just works, but the Linux experience could use some updates.
My experience is exactly the same. I use OneDrive for easy replication of lots of stuff between my own devices, and to transfer files to friends. I've never had a lost-data problem.
On the other hand, UX for doing that sharing is clunky.
And I believe it's pretty well documented that the reason for the File-Save experience being so awful is that Microsoft is actively trying to deter us from using our own local storage, and coercing us to use their (subscription) cloud products.
The problem with this thinking is that you can never be sure these problems won’t happen to you.
I’m pretty sure it had worked just fine for the users in the article too, until it didn’t.
IMO they should clearly encourage users to keep backups elsewhere in case something happens, but they’re currently doing the exact opposite: encouraging users to back up (and on Windows even store) files exclusively on OneDrive.
I found out my mom was paying for OneDrive because her Android phone autosynced a bunch of her files and she ran out of 'space'. She had no idea what it was but the OS pushed it hard.
Could be worse, it could be syncing to Google Photos.
Oh, you want to download all photos so that you can free the cloud space? Too bad, you can only download them one by one. Or use Google Takeout and leave half of them undownloaded.
The article makes valid points about users misunderstanding how OneDrive works (and ascribing the misunderstanding to “dark patterns”), but I’ve been using Linux (first pop-os and now cachyos) for years, while at the same time shadowing most (not all) of my home directory to OneDrive[0] (I have an annual x365 subscription and that 2TB cloud storage is hard to ignore). I’ve had no issues whatsoever, though admittedly I’m not your average user (40 years in tech). I also make local backups of course, but tbh the utility of having my files available from anywhere is pretty useful to me. YMMV.
First thing I do on any Windows machine is uninstall OneDrive anywhere possible. It's caused me enough grief that I just avoid it entirely at this point.
To point out how shambloic it was it was originally called SkyDrive but they were forced to rename it thanks to a trademark lawsuit. I mean, they launch a product that is so important to them that they are willing to make us all miserable shoving it down our throats and they can't be bothered to spend a few $100 or $1000 on a trademark search.
I was working with Word and found that it defaulted to OneDrive which I could have lived with if it worked. Except it didn't work and when I tried to save documents I could not save.
Needless to say that was the last time I used OneDrive. Microsoft doesn't get it
Force somebody to use it -> It fails -> Somebody never uses it again
Third-party vendors like DropBox, Box and many others have made products that look like OneDrive but actually work and never make it so I can't save my work.
I have OneDrive completely disabled on my personal PC. I still found I couldn't find files that I had created with Word in the filesystem. Turns out even if you don't have the OneDrive service running on your PC, Office will store files in OneDrive directly through the API -- it's not hard to turn off (thanks Copilot!) but it's one more thing to be resentful about.
When I have to use Windows for work (which I 100% would prefer over Mac when I can't have Linux Desktop), I've found OneDrive works best if you give it one file. I gzip a tar file on Windows and let OneDrive sync that. As long as it's only one file, it does a good job.
Whatever you do, don't try to sync a git repo folder with OneDrive.
OneDrive is an absolute cancer. I teach Computer Science and my students are constantly accidentally checking their repos out onto onedrive which, of course, makes the performance absolutely atrocious to the point of unusability, and it often affects the weakest students who are most likely to get knocked out of CS by unrelated issues like this.
The UI in Windows is intentionally designed to confuse the issue so people unintentionally end up using One Drive, which is free until it isn't and then they can jam you with a subscription. Many of my students barely have an understanding of what a file system is and how it works now due to this horrible user-hostile UI.
MacOS is headed this direction as well. Congrats linux: you just need to continue to get worse at the relatively slow rate that you always have and you will be the best desktop/laptop OS within a few years.
I am pretty sure we'll see Desktop Linux in the US cross the 10% mark this year... however, I don't think it will get much higher without first party sales support from OEMs. Most people don't change their OS and just use what came with it, which today is mostly Windows or MacOS.
I'd really love if some vendors would license Pop from System76 for more, broader hardware support. I think it's just about the best out of the box experience in Linux for most users.
enshittification of the NET and now OS continues. The problem is that students nowadays have very little opportunity to learn this. My daughter does not understand what a pendrive is and when the data is on her phone and when on the SD card (meanwhile sd card slots are being sunsetted in all the brands).
This is cartel to remove the data ownership possibility from people. Recently Polish youtuber got his video blocked because he showed how to play locally stored mp3 files (accused of breaking yt policy on allegedly showing people how to download illegal files)
If we allow companies to put an equals mark between not storing your own data in cloud and piracy, this will finish the cartel's objective very fast.
This take is weird. Git and OneDrive in a sense both are version control systems. What do you think would happen if you created a Git repository and a SVN repository in the same folder, then proceeded to add files from .git to SVN and let SVN manipulate them? It is not OneDrive's fault that your students don't understand version control.
IMO, instruction should have had the users create a "src" directory under their profile/home directory to use for their repositories, and expressly mention the why's. That said, the fact that OneDrive slurps up Documents, etc. by default instead of an explicit directory, is part of the problem.
Agreed. Using one file management version-control system within another, is a surefire recipe for trouble and disaster.
But it isn't the students' fault, I guess they are still learning how to use computers.
This is purely an IT Administration fiasco. The IT admin should simply exclude the repository folders/paths from OneDrive. Or make everyone to save non-code documents to a separate shared network path, which is a storage drive that gets automatically backed up daily.
as part of that program, online communications and storage of all users of large US tech companies, including Microsoft, is made accessible to the NSA.
People are locked in. It's not easy to switch to another product. Even if someone is willing the pay the price for another system and pay to have the data moved and apps repurchased, they now have to learn a new OS.
But that’s the thing, why is it this way? Driving a Hyundai or a Toyota you wouldn’t notice the difference, but learning a new OS is so hard that people don’t do it.
I wish the ergonomics would be more standard so switching costs aren’t so high.
MS has been doing shit like this for decades. Every couple months I log into my dusty Windows account and lo and behold there's a bunch of weird shit like Candy Crush or Copilot or whatever that's just decided to reinstall itself for the nth time.
I just noticed yesterday that Copilot or OneDrive is pressuring me to set it up and my options are: Yes, Remind me in 1 week, or Remind me in 1 month. Like, what the fuck is that?
It is a testament to the power of tech policy momentum that a company can crank out absolute shit for decades and the corporate world just keeps on using their software because "that's what we've always used".
As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.
I've noticed that about Windows, that it has some sort of attachment disorder: the longer you're away from it, the more it freaks out and throws a tantrum about something the next time you boot it up. If it's been 3 or more months, you can absolutely forget about your settings staying as they were.
> As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.
The engineers can’t be completely to blame here, Microsoft is too consistently bad for that. It is a high-level strategy issue. Replace the Product Managers with LLMs maybe… a bunch of random matvecs couldn’t possibly be wrong so consistently, right?
Yeah I was in the minority that actually defended OneDrive but I'm facing my own issues with it recently. I'm aware of the windows default client behavior but on systems I have the storage on, I modify it to pull down everything. Bad UX on Microsoft's part but it's not related to what appears to be bigger issues under the hood.
Back in October I had issues with the Linux dlang Onedrive client deleting all the files shared with me. Unlike Microsoft, the developer actually acknowledged there could be a problem and we figured out the cause was new unintended behavior caused by an old config option, really long issue thread for it here: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/issues/3475 (TL:DR it was a very niche situation unlikely to have affected anyone else, I have more concise thoughts on it in the Gentoo bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/964370 )
So that was really bad, but we were able to restore all the deleted files from her OneDrive web using its recycle bin. That leaves me with the issue I'm facing now. Some of the files which I created and put in the share she shares with me have my ownership but OneDrive doesn't recognize I created it and she can't change the permissions to share back to me. So now I have to figure out how many files are affected here and I guess copy them on her side so the new files get her ownership and share back properly to me.
I do want to say as well, those files just don't show up at all on my side in OneDrive but they DO show up in my Office apps recent list. It just refuses to let me open them. She sees them though with my ownership and both the web and windows onedrive clients throw errors if she tries to change the permissions. Absolutely maddening.
Posting this here, hoping desperately for someone to give me an example proving I'm wrong:
It's insane to me that there isn't a simple, GUI-based app that provides this utility in a clean, straightforward way. Basically just "dropbox, but let me set the destination to another drive on my PC/network/VPN (or a 'repo', for 'advanced' users)".
Just a plain interface that shows me my files and allows me to say "I want this folder to be backed up to here, here, and here". I can do that manually for every folder I want backed up, but other users may opt to backup a whole drive or whatever, depending on need.
Seems like a slam dunk. Frustrating that I don't know enough about the footguns with backups (duplications, cpu limiting, etc) to just write the app myself, but I have been looking at what the eframe and rustic libraries can do together. Feels imminently do-able by someone who has a lot of experience with backups. But maybe it's even passable do-able by someone who just knows what he wants.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
The main question is who is in control not whether it is off or online. Microsoft obviously thinks that users are not, and it is Microsoft. We should have been more careful with embracing the walled gardens.
Tbh I don't understand why 'Microsoft thinks that users are not' maybe because my kids are not logged in to onedrive yet. Do I understand correctly that MS tricks the users somehow to synchronize folders with cloud?
For "off-line backups", I'm thinking air gapped. Or on a backup server running no MS software, and using a filesystem with frequent & reliable snapshots.
...and even if they suck it into onedrive, good luck finding it! Is it in my work onedrive, personal onedrive, a "teams" folder, or did they relabel it to a sharepoint folder? No idea! Everything is now saved on my downloads folder because my file system is so whacked with all these other virtual folder overlays....
Man, I wanted to like Teams folder mounts.. what a mess.
Aside: WTF isn't the Teams wiki using markdown files you can edit and sync locally? I mean if this has changed since I last tried, cool... but that's the single biggest thing I wanted from this. Now, I just put a _docs directory into my projects and have markdown files in there sync'd to the git repo... I've given up on files in teams for the most part.
Also with teams, splitting up chats and meating chats is a pain... the "activity" indicator doesn't tell you WTF subtab for chat something is in now. I used to at least halfway like teams if you avoided (over)using features, now it's just a craptastic mess.
It's interesting because on one hand there are posts like this were most people agree, and then there are posts about LLMs how they can one-shot a Windows application.
I think they're related. Software Engineering is about enumerating these edge cases and dealing with them. That requires skill.
Vibe-coding, or even prompting for larger chunks of code doesn't force you to enumerate these edge-cases.
And I firmly believe that reviewing the code for those edge-cases is harder than writing it yourself, as by nature you have to work backwards. You've arrived at a place, and you need to find out which routes were taken, and whether those routes are correct. Guardrails, snow-chain warnings, slope % warnings etc.
When you've arrived at the place it's easy to say: eh, whatever. We got here. Ship it. Especially with the push from above these days to go faster.
Happened to me 2 nights ago with a document my wife was editing on my laptop. I booted up Windows, which forced me to start some process while I was half paying attention. Windows booted normally but my Desktop was missing that critical file.
It was in my history? Check
Recent documents? Check
Visible in the file explorer? Check
Desktop? No dice
Try to open from the file dialog... error. The message? Can't get it from some URL.
My wife wakes up and starts crying. She's spent hours. What the fuck? I understand computers, and files don't just disappear.
"Were you editing it with Tritium?" (blames my product!)
Wait, a URL? I bet it's some OneDrive dark pattern.
Fix it by de-selecting "backup" multiple times and then clicking "submit". Files magically re-appear after I make sure to tell Microsoft to "keep my local copy".
What happened is exactly what it suggests. OneDrive migration doesn't just copy your files to a server. While the migration is occurring, the operating system is optimistically re-mapping them all to a cloud URL and/or deleting them entirely.
Halting the migration and disabling "backup" returned the mapping back to the local disk, and I was able to open the file as normal.
I know, it's as crazy as it sounds and your bet was my bet at first as well.
iCloud is trivial to set up for a family account. We're all on macs.
My company uses Dropbox which is windows and mac.
For some reason Microsoft gave me 40Gb of free storage on skydrive in their early days, and it was always a little off to use, mostly due to search. So it ended up being used to store misc files like software installers which I can always find elsewhere if OneDrive misbehaves.
Saw someone calling Microsoft "Microslop". Seems appropriate given their enthusiasm for AI, lack of software quality, and lack of regard for user experience.
Used to call that Windblows and Microsucks in my early 20s, I am not sure it was edgy back then and I am sure it isn't now. The UI/UX changes from ME > XP > Win8. At least you could keep the _classic_ look until Win10, I am not certain is the case with Win11 and what every Windows Copilot is coming next.
maybe I’m just getting old, but I’m really tired of these [super popular product tons of people use but EVERYONE hates it] posts and comments. just quickly checking the Apple App Store, the Onedrive app has 4.7 stars
Better question: who the hell is giving these apps (or really any apps) five stars?
I don’t rate the apps I use unless other than to give it 1 star for doing something I hate. My banking app’s transaction search doesn’t work at all, so it gets 1 star. But 1.9M ratings resulted in a 5 star average — who are the freaks giving their banking app 5 stars and why?
No doubt there's a lot of review spam as well. Apple has also gotten lazy with cracking down on review dark patterns. I noticed apps are getting away with the "pop up review dialog -> positive: go to OS level review window -> negative: go to in-app feedback form" pattern.
What I hate about it is that it's turned on automatically.
It's basically just holding your computer for ransom because guess what the 20 gigabyte they give you for free doesn't cut it lmao.
Don't call it a backup my SSD is 2 terrabyte and I ain't paying you anything.
Whelp browsing this on my phone was one way to remind me to put my VPN back on holy crap. In the middle of the article is an embedded TikTok video about the subject of the article while three different ads were overlapping my screen. Unbelievable.
It makes perfect sense to me. I rely on that feature. My monitor is big and it's much easier to use the big screen to sort vacation photos and delete the 90% which are garbage and not worth preserving. When I delete the garbage ones, of course I want to delete them everywhere. (And if I accidentally deleted the wrong photo, I can undelete within 30 days.)
Google's Photos application is intentionally designed in such a way to hold people's files hostage. It will ask to back your stuff up on startup without the user being able to permanently disable it, with only the classic "Not now, I'm sorry my digital overlords, ask me about it next week" option being available. What will happen is that people that don't know better accept it to get it out of their way, have all their personal pictures uploaded to Google's servers where they are abused in all sort of ways (including getting a father reported to police for CSAM and permanently blocking his account for taking a picture of his son to send a doctor), and because the free plan has a limited space available but won't be respected during upload, they'll start panic-bombing the user with "All your pictures are going to be deleted if you don't pay up or clean". This is all intentional, of course: Google and its developers know the vast majority of its Android users don't know or care about all of this and will exploit that. The Gallery app doesn't have the same Google Drive constant reminder and is what I usually install when I see the above repeatedly happen on other people's devices, which is well over a dozen times now, but Photos cannot be removed, of course.
I actually switched from using Google Photos to OneDrive because the latter keeps photos as files on my system and I can view them normally in explorer rather than forcing a bespoke cloud service.
One user's stupidity becomes Internet bait for something that's saved so, so much time.
I remember playing the backup & restore game when rebuilding my PC, which I just happened to do last night as I received a new SSD. I didn't have to worry about documents and thanks to a separate volume, redownloading my Steam library, either. That was a massive time save. And it didn't have to be OneDrive, it could have been any cloud sync service -- but OneDrive works just fine.
The user just fucked up and had a conniption fit on Tiktok.
OneDrive doesn't always work fine, though. I avoid it like the plague because a OneDrive screwup caused me loss of valuable data.
Was it user error? Maybe, maybe not, but that's irrelevant. If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
> If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them. In tech you are surrounded by footguns and bear traps. MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice but the logic that "dangerous things should be prohibited" is a perfectly good way to end up living in an environment where someone else curates what you can and cannot do. For your protection of course.
A tool isn't dangerous because you can make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake (you can make one with a kitchen knife and we still use them every day). It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations like OneDrive did.
The article is accompanied by a TikTok video I can't scrub through so I can't tell why it's not possible to go to OneDrive's recycle bin and recover the lost data.
Helping my mom recover from OneDrive's "cleanup" was the closest I've come to negotiating with terrorists.
As time marches on, Onedrive has actively continued to blur the difference between local file storage vs storage in their cloud.
No doubt this has gotten more "seamless" in recent years than it was at first.
The exact definition of "deceptive trade practices".
Windows is not for doing serious stuff anymore, the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC (if you turn off all the nags, it's pretty decent).
I work on a Mac, I run servers on Linux, I game on Windows.
>the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
More and more it seems people don't even find it necessary for that.
I'm "the Linux friend" for a lot of my friends, and over the last year-ish a surprising number of them have asked about advice for switching to Linux. I've helped four people attempt the switch, and three out of the four have stuck with Linux so far.
All the damn developers keep turning off online play for Linux users though... I play two games a lot currently, Apex Legends and Battlefield 6, both block Linux players from online play thanks to their shitty kernel rootkits not supporting Linux.
Apex Legends at least was running fine on Steam Deck prior to november 2024 when they instituted this change, and I can tell you from personal experience it had very little impact on cheaters, which was their excuse for the change (supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients).
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yup i am too, steamdeck helped convert me fully. this year my goal is to move my main gaming desktop to linux with tiny spare ssd for windows to run the odd anticheat game on.
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cachyos has been nearly flawless for a non-steam deck (gpd win mini 2). Upgrades broke my tv being set to the primary display under gamemode but that was an easy fix.
The other game changer (heh) was going all in on amd: cpu, integrated gpu, and discrete gpu via oculink.
Nvidia may be the best overall performance for gaming and ai workloads, it still doesn't play nice with linux gaming
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I can't even be bothered to dual boot into Windows to game anymore. Wiped my Windows drive over the weekend so that it could be used as a snapshot drive. If the game doesn't work on Steam on Linux I'm not interested - simple as that.
Gaming is a smaller thing for me than the Adobe creative apps, especially Lightroom.
Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.
Apple has a lot of failings recently. But macOS still has far more claim to “usability” than Windows!
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Unless you need compatibility with Adobe file formats, Free editing software works fine too. I've been using Darktable for about a decade. People bash on GIMP for not being able to do what Photoshop can, but it's because GIMP is built with the intent of being extended by the user. It can be extended to do what people complain that it cannot do. Kdenlive is good at filling the needs met by Premiere. I think the hardest Adobe application for me to recommend a portable alternative to is After Effects. Maybe Blender can be coaxed into filling some AE uses.
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I do exactly the same as you. I wish that I didn't need windows for gaming, and things are getting better on that front, but my favorite game (AoE 2) works significantly better on windows than on wine :(
This flowchart continues to be more or less accurate: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho...
Might need a little update to bring it up to date.
Disclosure: I fear technology and my daddy is not rich.
I get the joke, but I disagree. It mixed hardware with software in a weird way.
Macs are as much about the hardware than the software, and the OS is just another Unix variant. Much closer to Linux/BSD than Windows.
I like tech (no fear, I've been coding for 41 years at this point), but I don't like configuration, I'm a programmer, not IT, and also I heavily lean to getting shit done, so I prefer tools that don't get too much in my way.
I abandoned Linux on the desktop after I lost a battle with Linux audio. I can't freaking believe there's not a single thing that unifies everything, it's such a pain in the ass to setup right.
On notebooks it's a lost battle due to issues with power management that require way more fiddling that I'm willing to invest into.
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For me it's Autocad. Although I heard people managed to run it to Linux and don't complain.
> the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
even this has gone away for me, exited first with Bazzite and am now on CachyOS. Still got a debloated Windows11 on a different SSD for when friends want to play games with kernel-level anticheat or other bs.
feels good to be free of Microsoft. work on a Mac, game on Linux, phones run Android.
Love cachyos. Such a great OS. Wanted to love bazzite, but it's got too many opinionated takes and rpm-ostree is a PITA. pacman does have its pitfalls, but aside from upgrades, it's been appliance-level stable for a 100% gaming laptop docked to my tv
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I mostly agree with you. Now with proton/steamos, the only games that need windows are multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat mechanisms (e.g., destiny 2).
Otherwise, spot-on to my MO
How many games do you use on Windows that you can not use on Linux?
Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, GTA5 online (and likely gta6 online).
Personally, only TFT is a blocker for me, and you can get an inferior version working on linux, but it only takes you playing one of those games for it to be a blocker.
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It's not the "can't" necessarily, it's about friction, I could get it working on linux, but then I'd probably be just fiddling with settings way longer than I do today.
Current Windows gaming experience is almost like a console, just play and forget, (if you just use your machine for that).
Another potential issue is that I have games in all the major launchers (and a GamePass subscription), and the only one that works reasonably well on Linux is Steam.
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Set my teenage son up to dual boot his gaming rig with SteamOS this Christmas. He hasn't rebooted to Windows since...
> the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
Amiga users have been here before.
GPU drivers are legit easier on Linux than they are on windows at this point.
I get ~weekly crashes using an Nvidia card with arch/hyprland, but honestly it's less problematic for me to deal with than windows updates. I can format and rebuild my machine from scratch in less time than windows takes to download and perform an update.
Flawless experience on non-nvidia hardware though.
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I haven't had any issues with NVidia's on the latest machine I built (like nothing).
It's just an optional update whenever I remember to check for one.
Ha... Ha haha haha... Ha!
Valve saw exactly this scenario, because you're right: Windows isn't good for stability any more. Windows isn't good for driver compatibility anymore. Windows isn't good for being easy to do your own thing. It's only good for gaming...
So: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
I mean, macOS is not a serious OS either. It has worse error management/reporting than Windows - Microsoft at least give you the courtesy of pretending they're trying to help you resolve the issue with an indecipherable hex code and badly localised error message, that you may, if you're very lucky, be able to Google.
Apple give you a middle finger with a "Something went wrong" or just spins forever. No information whatsoever on what the problem is and how you could possibly debug it. Compete lack of tooling to help with that too.
Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"? HA, FUCK YOU. I spent hours trying to debug this (so there is a tool that can give you power use per USB device, but it's a point in time one). In the end rewired everything because it was just impossible to discover what the hell was its problem. Another fun one was trying to extend my macOS screen to an iPad, where the button just wasn't there. Why? What was I missing? Who knows.
> Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"?
Another fun one: “Updates are available. Do you want to install them?” What updates? What software is getting updates? What do they fix? No information, just a notification asking you whether you want to install vague updates.
[dead]
Gaming will be dead soon too... Thanks to hardware shortages..
Ah I see, people don't remember the time where most games just released on console, because it was the biggest target group. This time will come back. Like it or not. People won't buy a pc for 2k.
I love OneDrive. I don't know why everyone hates it. I save things in OneDrive, and they are backed up to the cloud and synced with the other computers I use.
Some computers are shared by six family members, each with their own MS account and 1TB of storage. OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive but still give everyone ready access to their files by not storing them all on the hard drive.
If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder I create outside Onedrive. I've never had any problems.
The comments by people who hate make me wonder why my experience is so different than theirs.
I agree here, but...
If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder
My complaint is that MS has intentionally made it SO DIFFICULT to do that. There's a significant amount of extra clicking and thinking necessary to go through the steps to do it.
There is? Not at all. Whatever I save from my browser (Edge/Firefox/Chromium) is automatically saved to Downloads and Downloads is not automatically synced with OneDrive Backup. Backed up is Documents, Music, Videos, Desktop etc. but Downloads not AFAIK.
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The windows Explorer and the save dialog make it pretty easy to save a file somewhere else. Also, there is just one folder which syncs with OneDrive but some many more which don’t sync with OneDrive.
MS actually made it harder to save stuff in OneDrive by basically hardcoding the folders it will backup unlike most other similar services that let you sync arbitrary folders on any drive.
I haven't had too many issues with it that I couldn't resolve myself, but I understood what it was and what it was doing on my system. I opted in. I wonder if most of the people who don't like OneDrive didn't know it was enabled.
> OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive
No, it's a 1TB storage account accessible via the Internet, and wholly dependent on a good Internet connection, especially if you actually use most of that 1TB. Non-tech people will take misrepresentations like this at face value, which further makes tech a disempowering force.
The "Files-On-Demand" feature of OneDrive makes it possible for everyone in the family to login into any computer with OneDrive and quickly access all their files (I have 500/500 fiber). Because some/most of the files are stored on the cloud and only downloaded when they are accessed, the hard drive of the computer can be smaller (1TB) than the total sum of all the files stored by all the users (6TB). It's very nice. I can also turn off Files-on-Demand and everything will be stored locally on my computer. It sounds like many people are bothered that Files-on-Demand is enabled by default.
That's because you're using it.
The problem comes when people who don't want to use it are tricked,.manipulated, fooled and dark patterned into using it against their understanding.
The two main frustrations that I've seen encountered are:
1) Microsoft aggressively attempting to convince you to use OneDrive, no matter how many times you turn it off.
I've had a Dropbox subscription since before OneDrive became a common name, and it works for me, so I have no real use case for OneDrive. That doesn't stop Microsoft forcibly "helpfully" re-enabling the OneDrive app and embedded link in the quick access bar regularly...which leads to
2) Microsoft attempting to sync your user profile in OneDrive, and bugs that arise from how it implements that.
I've never enabled this, so I haven't dug into how it works, but the first time I ever encountered OneDrive discussion in tech or adjacent circles was people complaining about OneDrive syncing of user profile folders breaking some games.
I assume it's something like the comedy of errors that could come out of folder redirection and software not expecting multiple people touching it at once, or the comedy of conflict resolution on a filesystem layer that isn't expecting that for semantics, but I have heard more complaints about OneDrive in this context than I've heard anything else about it.
So I suspect that it works fine, if you use it as a Dropbox-alike.
Using it as a Folder Redirection/Roaming Profiles replacement, or trying to say "no" to Microsoft, is where the problems ensue.
The problem isn't using OneDrive. The problem is not using it. If you try to not use it, the dark patterns the article references appear.
My wife got into trouble whilst unknowingly using OneDrive. She had a lot of photos on her laptop and they were being uploaded to OneDrive until it hit a limit (1TB?) and then started nagging her to upgrade to more storage. I had to disable OneDrive and move the photos back to her computer to resolve it.
Wholeheartedly agreed. Also the OneDrive Backup feature is great - previously people had to rely on other services (Box, Dropbox) and remember to save stuff into those folders. Now your most important Documents folder is saved in the cloud. Great. Backup! I don't think that OneDrive pestering you about buying more storage after using up your free storage is a bad thing, somebody needs to pay for stuff.
I understand the point, that everything is a bit convoluted and badly explained and may even lead to bad stuff happening. When you disable OneDrive Backup (good feature) and OneDrive deleting all your files locally with a little shortcut to OneDrive in the Cloud with all your files? Yeah... that is bad practice, but an easy fix for MS. Besides that hickup I currently don't undestand what the fuss is about.
I prefer the Dropbox solution, and tend to configure OneDrive, Google Drive, etc the same... I like to be explicit about it... I don't want all my general docs sync'd, for that matter, most of my projects are in a git repo anyway.
I know my Documents/Pictures directory isn't sync'd, I don't want it to be... to me my workspace is far different than what I want backed up to the cloud... I also have a local nas that is also setup for cloud sync for my service accounts. I emphatically do NOT want system default workspace directories sync'd.
None of this is new. They haven’t fixed it for years. At this point it’s not an oversight or mistake, but fully intentional behavior.
How does this work with multiple PC's? Does it just merge all files into the same Documents folder? What if apps are saving app data to these folders, and you have the same app on multiple computers?
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You are conveniently ignoring the crux of the matter - that onedrive was forced on people without their knowledge or consent.
I enjoy my car, but I would dislike if someone took it without my consent and signed me up for uber instead.
Considering I've had multiple family members and friends tricked into syncing to OneDrive without meaning to, I'd say that's a big reason. My Dad's old neighbor lost the ability to send and receive email after a Windows update did that to her, since it filled up her free Microsoft account and then Hotmail stopped working so she couldn't use email anymore and she had no idea why.
When I see comment saying that onedrive confusing, and that people are having problems with it, I always wonder if the "hacker" crowd is really the "hacker" type they want to portrait themselves, or just inexperienced computer users bitching on Microsoft for internet points.
OneDrive is an easy and well integrated cloud drive. The principle of having a cloud drive is not new anymore, and I believe people should get over the fact that, indeed, the files on the cloud drive is... In the cloud; colour me surprised!
OneDrive on Windows with 6 users is probably fine.
Try adding Teams, Sharepoint and 9000 more people in the mix.
Oh and MS Office that will try to force it on you.
The problem is Microsoft shoving it down our throats and making saving to local FS as cumbersome as possible.
I wouldn't have minded Onedrive, in fact I would have used it a lot more, if it just showed up as an external mounted drive in Explorer where I could just paste files and folders I want shared or backed up. But nope, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom just have to sync up my entire home directory by default and have Office/365 only save docs and sheets to cloud by default. No thank you.
Agreed, I'd even be more inclined to use the Web versions, which are inherently tethered to OneDrive in Linux if the boundaries were better respected... I want an explicit spot backed up, maybe with the option to sync other directories. I don't want to be tricked or forced into it... or see a windows update change the configuration on me.
You clearly understand what’s happening better than most people. As someone who came back to Windows recently after 15 years away, the lengths to which the UI goes to hide the actual location of files and prevent you from directly addressing the filesystem is incredible. Thankfully I don’t have to use Windows for anything important. I would never recommend it to anyone else. (Not that the alternatives are much better.)
What’s mainly wrong with OneDrive is that it doesn’t work how most people expect, it’s on by default, and it deletes files from your local PC without asking. No matter how nice it is if you understand what’s going on, those details are enough to make it hate-worthy IMO.
It's about consent and respect for the user. If you build something awesome, you don't have to shove it down peoples' throats.
When more people Google "How to disable xyz" than "How to enable xyz," that would be a strong hint to most of us, but it doesn't mean anything to Microsoft's developers. ("Hey, at least they're engaging with the product," they tell each other.)
If you're using Microsoft in 2026, that's on you. You can't be mad at the lawnmower that cut your foot off, it's just doing what it does.
You can absolutely be mad at a lawnmower that cut your foot off as there isn't any scenario where your feet should be at risk during normal operation of a regular lawnmower. Unless I intentionally try to insert my foot into the blades somehow, such dangerous faults would be entirely on the manufacturer.
Now if you proceed with he same horrible lawnmower and cut off your other foot, then that might be on you.
While the analogy is being stretched, same applies here - if Microsoft makes terrible footguns, then that's on Microsoft even if the users should have stopped using Microsoft by now.
> If you're using Microsoft in 2026, that's on you.
Not necessarily. I don't use Microsoft on my personal machines, but my employer forces me to use it at work.
Microsoft is staffed by highly educated adults. They have agency to do better and actually serve their paying customers well. They choose not to.
No, Microsoft is staffed by over-educated conformists who were specifically hired to maintain that empire.
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It's not on me, it's on my employer, which forces me to use a laptop with MS Windows installed. Sure, I ssh into a machine running Linux where I do real work, but still.
Also - lots of people are used to it and habits die hard, regardless of technical merit etc.
I use OneDrive at work for all of my documents and have never encountered the horror stories I frequently read. I read these stories often enough where I believe there genuinely is a problem. But I do wonder why there is a difference for some and not others. Perhaps I've conditioned myself to live with its faults?
I will say that the Microsoft Office OneDrive save experience is completely subpar. It behaves completely separate & unlike Windows Explorer and is just unpleasant to work with.
We weren't using OneDrive at work, then we had it imposed, and everyone went through a few days period where they had to find where their documents went and/or changing the hardcoded paths in various things to match the new location.
Using OneDrive is often fine. Having it imposed on you is a breaking change.
I didn't have a problem until I migrated to another Mac. Then I started having duplicate files. I think I fixed it by logging out of everything and deleting the duplicates but it was a couple hours wasted. Didn't have this problem with Dropbox in my career.
Definitely and still a happy paying Dropbox user, even though I'm well within my free limits (after several referral storage bumps). IT pretty much just works, but the Linux experience could use some updates.
My experience is exactly the same. I use OneDrive for easy replication of lots of stuff between my own devices, and to transfer files to friends. I've never had a lost-data problem.
On the other hand, UX for doing that sharing is clunky.
And I believe it's pretty well documented that the reason for the File-Save experience being so awful is that Microsoft is actively trying to deter us from using our own local storage, and coercing us to use their (subscription) cloud products.
The problem with this thinking is that you can never be sure these problems won’t happen to you.
I’m pretty sure it had worked just fine for the users in the article too, until it didn’t.
IMO they should clearly encourage users to keep backups elsewhere in case something happens, but they’re currently doing the exact opposite: encouraging users to back up (and on Windows even store) files exclusively on OneDrive.
I found out my mom was paying for OneDrive because her Android phone autosynced a bunch of her files and she ran out of 'space'. She had no idea what it was but the OS pushed it hard.
Microsoft gets their tendrils everywhere.
Could be worse, it could be syncing to Google Photos.
Oh, you want to download all photos so that you can free the cloud space? Too bad, you can only download them one by one. Or use Google Takeout and leave half of them undownloaded.
The article makes valid points about users misunderstanding how OneDrive works (and ascribing the misunderstanding to “dark patterns”), but I’ve been using Linux (first pop-os and now cachyos) for years, while at the same time shadowing most (not all) of my home directory to OneDrive[0] (I have an annual x365 subscription and that 2TB cloud storage is hard to ignore). I’ve had no issues whatsoever, though admittedly I’m not your average user (40 years in tech). I also make local backups of course, but tbh the utility of having my files available from anywhere is pretty useful to me. YMMV.
[0]. A huge shoutout to the folks behind the amazingly solid https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive
First thing I do on any Windows machine is uninstall OneDrive anywhere possible. It's caused me enough grief that I just avoid it entirely at this point.
I quit using OneDrive early in the Win 8 era.
To point out how shambloic it was it was originally called SkyDrive but they were forced to rename it thanks to a trademark lawsuit. I mean, they launch a product that is so important to them that they are willing to make us all miserable shoving it down our throats and they can't be bothered to spend a few $100 or $1000 on a trademark search.
I was working with Word and found that it defaulted to OneDrive which I could have lived with if it worked. Except it didn't work and when I tried to save documents I could not save.
Needless to say that was the last time I used OneDrive. Microsoft doesn't get it
Third-party vendors like DropBox, Box and many others have made products that look like OneDrive but actually work and never make it so I can't save my work.
I have OneDrive completely disabled on my personal PC. I still found I couldn't find files that I had created with Word in the filesystem. Turns out even if you don't have the OneDrive service running on your PC, Office will store files in OneDrive directly through the API -- it's not hard to turn off (thanks Copilot!) but it's one more thing to be resentful about.
When I have to use Windows for work (which I 100% would prefer over Mac when I can't have Linux Desktop), I've found OneDrive works best if you give it one file. I gzip a tar file on Windows and let OneDrive sync that. As long as it's only one file, it does a good job.
Whatever you do, don't try to sync a git repo folder with OneDrive.
Just curious why you would consider syncing a repo already under git? (assuming it's sync'd to github/azure/gitlab etc)
OneDrive is an absolute cancer. I teach Computer Science and my students are constantly accidentally checking their repos out onto onedrive which, of course, makes the performance absolutely atrocious to the point of unusability, and it often affects the weakest students who are most likely to get knocked out of CS by unrelated issues like this.
The UI in Windows is intentionally designed to confuse the issue so people unintentionally end up using One Drive, which is free until it isn't and then they can jam you with a subscription. Many of my students barely have an understanding of what a file system is and how it works now due to this horrible user-hostile UI.
MacOS is headed this direction as well. Congrats linux: you just need to continue to get worse at the relatively slow rate that you always have and you will be the best desktop/laptop OS within a few years.
> and you will be the best desktop/laptop OS within a few years.
Arguably it's already the best desktop/laptop OS. Hopefully within a few years it can be the most popular desktop OS.
Then again... maybe this year is the year of the linux desktop...
I am pretty sure we'll see Desktop Linux in the US cross the 10% mark this year... however, I don't think it will get much higher without first party sales support from OEMs. Most people don't change their OS and just use what came with it, which today is mostly Windows or MacOS.
I'd really love if some vendors would license Pop from System76 for more, broader hardware support. I think it's just about the best out of the box experience in Linux for most users.
It's really sad if you think about that delivering the best desktop UX is all about just not actively sabotaging it on purpose.
Win the game by doing nothing while the competition drives themselves into the ground via enshittification.
After 40 years of computing this is the best we can do? No wonder we can't have nice things.
Maybe the Windows users should be called "victims" at this point.
enshittification of the NET and now OS continues. The problem is that students nowadays have very little opportunity to learn this. My daughter does not understand what a pendrive is and when the data is on her phone and when on the SD card (meanwhile sd card slots are being sunsetted in all the brands).
This is cartel to remove the data ownership possibility from people. Recently Polish youtuber got his video blocked because he showed how to play locally stored mp3 files (accused of breaking yt policy on allegedly showing people how to download illegal files)
If we allow companies to put an equals mark between not storing your own data in cloud and piracy, this will finish the cartel's objective very fast.
This take is weird. Git and OneDrive in a sense both are version control systems. What do you think would happen if you created a Git repository and a SVN repository in the same folder, then proceeded to add files from .git to SVN and let SVN manipulate them? It is not OneDrive's fault that your students don't understand version control.
IMO, instruction should have had the users create a "src" directory under their profile/home directory to use for their repositories, and expressly mention the why's. That said, the fact that OneDrive slurps up Documents, etc. by default instead of an explicit directory, is part of the problem.
Agreed. Using one file management version-control system within another, is a surefire recipe for trouble and disaster.
But it isn't the students' fault, I guess they are still learning how to use computers.
This is purely an IT Administration fiasco. The IT admin should simply exclude the repository folders/paths from OneDrive. Or make everyone to save non-code documents to a separate shared network path, which is a storage drive that gets automatically backed up daily.
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-remove-a-folder-from-o...
I’ve used OneDrive for like 8 years without issues. It works great for me.
Well, if "great" agrees with sharing all your data with the US government, then maybe.
This happens as part of the PRISM program, whose existence was leaked by Edward Snowden last decade:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
as part of that program, online communications and storage of all users of large US tech companies, including Microsoft, is made accessible to the NSA.
In a healthy market with viable competition this would either not happen or be swiftly corrected by a massive drop in market share.
So what’s gone wrong?
People are locked in. It's not easy to switch to another product. Even if someone is willing the pay the price for another system and pay to have the data moved and apps repurchased, they now have to learn a new OS.
But that’s the thing, why is it this way? Driving a Hyundai or a Toyota you wouldn’t notice the difference, but learning a new OS is so hard that people don’t do it.
I wish the ergonomics would be more standard so switching costs aren’t so high.
Every time I need to add my file and send it out I manually download it first.
The shenanigans that happen when you 'link' to files, or not, from Teams to Outlook to Sharepoint is beyond me.
They also constantly sneak it into Word. If you don't pay close attention they suddenly save your local file to some Cloud Desktop folder.
MS has been doing shit like this for decades. Every couple months I log into my dusty Windows account and lo and behold there's a bunch of weird shit like Candy Crush or Copilot or whatever that's just decided to reinstall itself for the nth time.
I just noticed yesterday that Copilot or OneDrive is pressuring me to set it up and my options are: Yes, Remind me in 1 week, or Remind me in 1 month. Like, what the fuck is that?
It is a testament to the power of tech policy momentum that a company can crank out absolute shit for decades and the corporate world just keeps on using their software because "that's what we've always used".
As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.
I've noticed that about Windows, that it has some sort of attachment disorder: the longer you're away from it, the more it freaks out and throws a tantrum about something the next time you boot it up. If it's been 3 or more months, you can absolutely forget about your settings staying as they were.
> As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.
The engineers can’t be completely to blame here, Microsoft is too consistently bad for that. It is a high-level strategy issue. Replace the Product Managers with LLMs maybe… a bunch of random matvecs couldn’t possibly be wrong so consistently, right?
The engineers must share partial blame. They’re developing the actual software after all!
I have had to turn off One Drive after a series of incidents where it deleted or rendered files unrecoverable. It's basically malware to me.
I support an environment with well over 20k devices across windows, android and ios that use one drive.
no major issues here. sure its got the occasional bug, and is missing some features i think it should have... but all in all its very usable.
Yeah I was in the minority that actually defended OneDrive but I'm facing my own issues with it recently. I'm aware of the windows default client behavior but on systems I have the storage on, I modify it to pull down everything. Bad UX on Microsoft's part but it's not related to what appears to be bigger issues under the hood.
Back in October I had issues with the Linux dlang Onedrive client deleting all the files shared with me. Unlike Microsoft, the developer actually acknowledged there could be a problem and we figured out the cause was new unintended behavior caused by an old config option, really long issue thread for it here: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/issues/3475 (TL:DR it was a very niche situation unlikely to have affected anyone else, I have more concise thoughts on it in the Gentoo bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/964370 )
So that was really bad, but we were able to restore all the deleted files from her OneDrive web using its recycle bin. That leaves me with the issue I'm facing now. Some of the files which I created and put in the share she shares with me have my ownership but OneDrive doesn't recognize I created it and she can't change the permissions to share back to me. So now I have to figure out how many files are affected here and I guess copy them on her side so the new files get her ownership and share back properly to me.
I do want to say as well, those files just don't show up at all on my side in OneDrive but they DO show up in my Office apps recent list. It just refuses to let me open them. She sees them though with my ownership and both the web and windows onedrive clients throw errors if she tries to change the permissions. Absolutely maddening.
Maintaining local, off-line backups is an endless PITA.
But consider the alternative... :(
Posting this here, hoping desperately for someone to give me an example proving I'm wrong:
It's insane to me that there isn't a simple, GUI-based app that provides this utility in a clean, straightforward way. Basically just "dropbox, but let me set the destination to another drive on my PC/network/VPN (or a 'repo', for 'advanced' users)".
Just a plain interface that shows me my files and allows me to say "I want this folder to be backed up to here, here, and here". I can do that manually for every folder I want backed up, but other users may opt to backup a whole drive or whatever, depending on need.
Seems like a slam dunk. Frustrating that I don't know enough about the footguns with backups (duplications, cpu limiting, etc) to just write the app myself, but I have been looking at what the eframe and rustic libraries can do together. Feels imminently do-able by someone who has a lot of experience with backups. But maybe it's even passable do-able by someone who just knows what he wants.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
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You want Time Machine and a WD Passport.
Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.
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Would Syncthing fulfill your requirements?
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The main question is who is in control not whether it is off or online. Microsoft obviously thinks that users are not, and it is Microsoft. We should have been more careful with embracing the walled gardens.
Tbh I don't understand why 'Microsoft thinks that users are not' maybe because my kids are not logged in to onedrive yet. Do I understand correctly that MS tricks the users somehow to synchronize folders with cloud?
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For "off-line backups", I'm thinking air gapped. Or on a backup server running no MS software, and using a filesystem with frequent & reliable snapshots.
...and even if they suck it into onedrive, good luck finding it! Is it in my work onedrive, personal onedrive, a "teams" folder, or did they relabel it to a sharepoint folder? No idea! Everything is now saved on my downloads folder because my file system is so whacked with all these other virtual folder overlays....
Man, I wanted to like Teams folder mounts.. what a mess.
Aside: WTF isn't the Teams wiki using markdown files you can edit and sync locally? I mean if this has changed since I last tried, cool... but that's the single biggest thing I wanted from this. Now, I just put a _docs directory into my projects and have markdown files in there sync'd to the git repo... I've given up on files in teams for the most part.
Also with teams, splitting up chats and meating chats is a pain... the "activity" indicator doesn't tell you WTF subtab for chat something is in now. I used to at least halfway like teams if you avoided (over)using features, now it's just a craptastic mess.
It's interesting because on one hand there are posts like this were most people agree, and then there are posts about LLMs how they can one-shot a Windows application.
I think they're related. Software Engineering is about enumerating these edge cases and dealing with them. That requires skill.
Vibe-coding, or even prompting for larger chunks of code doesn't force you to enumerate these edge-cases.
And I firmly believe that reviewing the code for those edge-cases is harder than writing it yourself, as by nature you have to work backwards. You've arrived at a place, and you need to find out which routes were taken, and whether those routes are correct. Guardrails, snow-chain warnings, slope % warnings etc.
When you've arrived at the place it's easy to say: eh, whatever. We got here. Ship it. Especially with the push from above these days to go faster.
F* OneDrive
Happened to me 2 nights ago with a document my wife was editing on my laptop. I booted up Windows, which forced me to start some process while I was half paying attention. Windows booted normally but my Desktop was missing that critical file.
It was in my history? Check
Recent documents? Check
Visible in the file explorer? Check
Desktop? No dice
Try to open from the file dialog... error. The message? Can't get it from some URL.
My wife wakes up and starts crying. She's spent hours. What the fuck? I understand computers, and files don't just disappear.
"Were you editing it with Tritium?" (blames my product!)
Wait, a URL? I bet it's some OneDrive dark pattern.
Fix it by de-selecting "backup" multiple times and then clicking "submit". Files magically re-appear after I make sure to tell Microsoft to "keep my local copy".
This story is very unclear on what exactly happened and what caused files to be "deleted". I bet on user error.
Read the article.
What happened is exactly what it suggests. OneDrive migration doesn't just copy your files to a server. While the migration is occurring, the operating system is optimistically re-mapping them all to a cloud URL and/or deleting them entirely.
Halting the migration and disabling "backup" returned the mapping back to the local disk, and I was able to open the file as normal.
I know, it's as crazy as it sounds and your bet was my bet at first as well.
This being Microsoft, the null hypothesis is "user error induced by intentionally evil UX".
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I use iCloud, Dropbox and OneDrive for family, professional use and junk files respectively.
Works out really well. They all work perfectly for their intended uses.
> uses
Are you implying each one's intended uses are different? What are the differences?
iCloud is trivial to set up for a family account. We're all on macs.
My company uses Dropbox which is windows and mac.
For some reason Microsoft gave me 40Gb of free storage on skydrive in their early days, and it was always a little off to use, mostly due to search. So it ended up being used to store misc files like software installers which I can always find elsewhere if OneDrive misbehaves.
[dupe]
OneDrive just deleted all of my files
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493506
Saw someone calling Microsoft "Microslop". Seems appropriate given their enthusiasm for AI, lack of software quality, and lack of regard for user experience.
Used to call that Windblows and Microsucks in my early 20s, I am not sure it was edgy back then and I am sure it isn't now. The UI/UX changes from ME > XP > Win8. At least you could keep the _classic_ look until Win10, I am not certain is the case with Win11 and what every Windows Copilot is coming next.
maybe I’m just getting old, but I’m really tired of these [super popular product tons of people use but EVERYONE hates it] posts and comments. just quickly checking the Apple App Store, the Onedrive app has 4.7 stars
does everyone hate it?
Better question: who the hell is giving these apps (or really any apps) five stars?
I don’t rate the apps I use unless other than to give it 1 star for doing something I hate. My banking app’s transaction search doesn’t work at all, so it gets 1 star. But 1.9M ratings resulted in a 5 star average — who are the freaks giving their banking app 5 stars and why?
looks like about 400,000 people for Onedrive rating 5 stars
looks like millions for my banking app (Chase) rating 5 stars
do you really not understand why people might do things different from you?
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The kind of people willing to leave stars on an app store are already a biased sample.
Yeah, for lower ratings. People leave reviews because they’re pissed, not mildly happy.
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How does this translate to apps with low ratings, or something in the middle?
Mcafee for iPhone has 5 stars. iBeer has 5 stars. Every app in a search of “DMV” has five stars. Every “gpt” ai clone app has 5 stars.
No doubt there's a lot of review spam as well. Apple has also gotten lazy with cracking down on review dark patterns. I noticed apps are getting away with the "pop up review dialog -> positive: go to OS level review window -> negative: go to in-app feedback form" pattern.
onedrive app doesn't come preinstalled on your phone, or aggressively try to trick you into using it.
[dead]
What I hate about it is that it's turned on automatically.
It's basically just holding your computer for ransom because guess what the 20 gigabyte they give you for free doesn't cut it lmao. Don't call it a backup my SSD is 2 terrabyte and I ain't paying you anything.
Whelp browsing this on my phone was one way to remind me to put my VPN back on holy crap. In the middle of the article is an embedded TikTok video about the subject of the article while three different ads were overlapping my screen. Unbelievable.
Privacy Badger for Firefox blocks the TikTok. I assume there is a PB for Chrome?
>remind me to put my VPN back on
don't you mean adblock?
VPN can do that too!
Any VPN worth its price has built in malware/ad blocking
Boingboing used to be brilliant, I got into Doctorow through it. Absolute trash now, so sad.
Duck browser ftw
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Please don't fulminate or post ragey flamebait on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah, I agree. Google Photos is super confusing.
Why would anybody ever want their pictures to disappear from their phone if they delete them on the web? It doesn't make any sense.
> It doesn't make any sense.
It makes perfect sense to me. I rely on that feature. My monitor is big and it's much easier to use the big screen to sort vacation photos and delete the 90% which are garbage and not worth preserving. When I delete the garbage ones, of course I want to delete them everywhere. (And if I accidentally deleted the wrong photo, I can undelete within 30 days.)
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And if you don’t pay the subscription they hold your gmail hostage.
I put the effort in to move off gmail, was worth it. Now gmail is just my spam inbox
Google's Photos application is intentionally designed in such a way to hold people's files hostage. It will ask to back your stuff up on startup without the user being able to permanently disable it, with only the classic "Not now, I'm sorry my digital overlords, ask me about it next week" option being available. What will happen is that people that don't know better accept it to get it out of their way, have all their personal pictures uploaded to Google's servers where they are abused in all sort of ways (including getting a father reported to police for CSAM and permanently blocking his account for taking a picture of his son to send a doctor), and because the free plan has a limited space available but won't be respected during upload, they'll start panic-bombing the user with "All your pictures are going to be deleted if you don't pay up or clean". This is all intentional, of course: Google and its developers know the vast majority of its Android users don't know or care about all of this and will exploit that. The Gallery app doesn't have the same Google Drive constant reminder and is what I usually install when I see the above repeatedly happen on other people's devices, which is well over a dozen times now, but Photos cannot be removed, of course.
I actually switched from using Google Photos to OneDrive because the latter keeps photos as files on my system and I can view them normally in explorer rather than forcing a bespoke cloud service.
One user's stupidity becomes Internet bait for something that's saved so, so much time.
I remember playing the backup & restore game when rebuilding my PC, which I just happened to do last night as I received a new SSD. I didn't have to worry about documents and thanks to a separate volume, redownloading my Steam library, either. That was a massive time save. And it didn't have to be OneDrive, it could have been any cloud sync service -- but OneDrive works just fine.
The user just fucked up and had a conniption fit on Tiktok.
Keeping things in onedrive is fine if you want. What was not fine was moving files there without user informed consent.
There are plenty of prompts, nay, ads, about OneDrive before this ever happens. OneDrive also has a long file history.
The user fucked up. Sadly HN even gobbles this shit up with no thought.
OneDrive doesn't always work fine, though. I avoid it like the plague because a OneDrive screwup caused me loss of valuable data.
Was it user error? Maybe, maybe not, but that's irrelevant. If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
How do you lose data on OneDrive? It has a 30 day (if not longer) file history.
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> If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them. In tech you are surrounded by footguns and bear traps. MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice but the logic that "dangerous things should be prohibited" is a perfectly good way to end up living in an environment where someone else curates what you can and cannot do. For your protection of course.
A tool isn't dangerous because you can make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake (you can make one with a kitchen knife and we still use them every day). It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations like OneDrive did.
The article is accompanied by a TikTok video I can't scrub through so I can't tell why it's not possible to go to OneDrive's recycle bin and recover the lost data.
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Just subscribe to this expensive service!
How about no. I dropped some important documents on a few flash drives that I have lying around.