Comment by ggm
4 hours ago
I work with seniors, who use W11. Aspects of change from W10 confused them, but their primary requests are two quite different things
1) please stop making dark patterns preference onedrive backup and let us run a local file backup cleanly without needing to de-install software
2) please make the charming folded complex flower-like shape an alpha channel overlay so we can make it lie over a background colour of our own choosing, not the one(s) you pre-package
one of them is "stop innovating" and the other is "innovate more" -I think the union over them both is "be nicer"
There is a third one: work better with Apple so that outlook handles photos and icloud mail oauth sync better, but there is a blame game with two parties in that one. An amazingly high number of seniors seem to want apple devices (iphone, ipad) to work with Windows home compute, and no amount of me suggesting they get a mac makes them want to get a mac "office doesn't work properly" mainly the issue. (thats nonsense, but they believe what they believe)
You called them seniors? Like senior citizens?
I guess as a senior sysadmin before I got absorbed into cloud I'll say they're right! Legacy backup is found, I just discovered yesterday, in control panel I believe and it's called Windows 7 "File History and Restore".
Implying you're one thousand years old and using a legacy system if you don't use Onedrive.
Yes. Senior Citizens. Home users. Legacy backup is there, but MS both de-preference it, and use dark pattern labels on boxes to make it hard to stop one drive from nagging you about what MS want you to do.
And, if you did do a network attached install, your actual Document paths now lie UNDER the one drive anchor mount and so you have to un-do things, in order to be cleanly able to delete one drive: If you don't do this, your files can disappear because they are on local disk, under a one drive protected directory which will be wiped.
Oh, and it does registry edits to wire One drive into office, so there's all kinds of sneaky paths which make this visible. And these are >75yo, declining faculties people. It's hugely unfair.
(I volunteer for a local not-for-profit assisting seniors, older people, with their ICT burdens)
> and no amount of me suggesting they get a mac makes them want to get a mac "office doesn't work properly" mainly the issue. (thats nonsense, but they believe what they believe)
Do they use Office-Office (or Microslop Copilot 365 xXxQuickScoperz42069xXx or whatever it's called today)? Is there any reason they can't use Libreoffice and the like, or does that fail instantly when they try it for whatever reason? Or is the idea of using not-Office-Office rejected instantly and you can't even get them to the point of trying it?
My grandma's been on Libreoffice for 10+ years, since she doesn't use any of the fancy features of actual Word and Excel. In reality, she'd probably be fine on Wordpad (although she would need an actual spreadsheet program, but even Calc is overkill for her, and it works fine anyway), so I fail to see why seniors would complain about not being able to use an office program, assuming you can get them in front of a Mac running one.