[sagacity]

I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account.

Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password because it was tied to the Microsoft account and you can't change the password locally.

I don't need Copilot managing my inbox through AI, nor do I need a more exciting widget experience.

I just want an OS where if something like the above happens there's a way to fix it without having to reinstall. It doesn't seem like much to ask.

Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)

[heresie-dabord]

> I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming.

I see a likely inversion of motives here: you earn your living coding or otherwise are deeply vested in Windows, so you are committed for survival to Windows and to fixing the absurd account problem that MSFT has inflicted on you.

The expression "muscle memory" here just means the cognitive load of working with a technology. MSFT has added a hard-blocking piece of stupidity to your cognitive load.

I am sure this is not the first time! Registry problems, update problems, and now for pity's sake account problems.

As a long-time user of both Linux and Windows, I'd say my OS cognitive load with Linux is almost entirely related to efficient actions, whereas with Windows I have a quiver of stupid arrows to shoot at all the problems that MSFT inflicts.

When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.

[noosphr]

My Ubuntu servers have been in an undefined state since canonical botched a regular upgrade to 26.04 LTS due to the ongoing DDOS. Their status page says everything works. A simple ping tells me nothing works.

Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world. All major Linux distros are hell bent on repeating the mistakes of Windows. Especially since the people in control of the stack (minus the kernel) are the rejects who couldn't make it in Microsoft and Apple in the 90s and 00s but really wanted to.

Meanwhile my small happy place with OpenBSD and Guix just works.

[codedokode]

Linux has lot of bugs and issues, but they are not caused by intention to make users' life worse.

[noosphr]

They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better.

To quote CS Lewis:

>Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

[gchamonlive]

> They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better.

If you know better just hack it your way. Linux is an open platform. Nothing prevents you from gutting Ubuntu and making it your own. You can't say the same for Windows though.

So I guess is not a matter of monopoly of idiocy, but whether you can do something about idiot decisions when they are made. This is why an open platform will always win. It's just architecturally better for the end user.

[fasterik]

>If you know better just hack it your way.

While this might be technically true, I also think it's a lazy argument that ignores practical reality. It's basically a way to avoid any kind of accountability or self-reflection on the part of developers. "Users aren't happy? If they don't want to make the change themselves, they can fuck off." This is a toxic attitude which I see a lot in discussions of free software.

In practice, 99% of the time it's not worth the time and effort to fork and maintain a large project. Even in a free ecosystem, users get locked into specific products and technologies. This is why sane technical leadership and responsiveness to user feedback are important, even (especially?) in open source projects.

[heresie-dabord]

> If you know better just hack it your way. Linux is an open platform.

The GP already knows about FOSS. He uses OpenBSD and Guix and in his own words this is his "small, happy place".

Guix in particular is an excellent example of FOSS innovation.

[joe_mamba]

>If you know better just hack it your way. ... It's just architecturally better for the end user.

As an end user I want the product/tool to serve me well out of the box, I don't have time to hack it to fix what I dislike about it on my own dime. That's what my job is for.

[zbentley]

Tangential, but how is

> The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated

Holding up in 2026? Pretty poorly, I’d say.

[smackeyacky]

How ironic. Reactionary old fart mostly known for writing moralistic children’s novels wants you not to listen to moralistic crusaders. I shall take his advice.

[kwertyoowiyop]

CS Lewis certainly got it wrong, if he believed that the greed of robber barons can ever be satisfied. I’ll take the moral busybodies, if I have to take either.

[luqtas]

CS Lewis: a prolific author of fantasy, science fiction, and Christian apologetics

[maleldil]

Does that mean what he says is less valuable?

> Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Said by a monster himself, but doesn't make it any less true.

[Scroll_Swe]

In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.

[red_admiral]

Intention or not, Gnome 3's "desktops are outdated" caused even Linus to switch away from it.

[tapoxi]

He actually still uses GNOME, at least as recently as 5 months ago.

I'm a KDE user but I get why people like it.

[snowpid]

and I am a GNOME user and I find it totally fine to use KDE. Thats the cool thing about open plattforms. Just some people having too much time to make a UI interface part of their personality rant too much on the internet about other UI interfaces.

[olyjohn]

What's your point? At least he was able to switch away from it and choose from any plethora of other options.

[deathanatos]

… Linux literally just had the age-verification outcry, and the "let's put AI in Ubuntu" thing, and that's just off the top of my head.

I want to toot the Linux horn too, and I do think MS is on another level here, but let's take a look in the mirror first.

[charcircuit]

There is plenty of elitism going on where everyday users' experience is intentionally made bad.

[ninjagoo]

> My Ubuntu servers have been in an undefined state since canonical botched a regular upgrade to 26.04 LTS due to the ongoing DDOS. Their status page says everything works. A simple ping tells me nothing works.

So is it the DDOS that's responsible, status page notwithstanding?

Anyway, heard about Timeshift for Ubuntu on here, might be worth taking a look at it: https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift

Doesn't require a GUI, so it can be used for servers/headless too. Please note that's it's not a backup solution, just an OS snapshot one, albeit with scheduling.

[Kamq]

> Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world.

Entirely fair, but let's not pretend the situation is symmetrical. Canonical doesn't have monopoly on the linux or broader *nix world the same way that Microsoft has on the Windows world.

[LocalH]

normalize coming up through slackware like many did in the 90s

[kelvinjps10]

You can download from a different mirror in linux and open source you always have another option

[naikrovek]

> When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.

They absolutely are not. Switching operating systems isn't like switching toothpaste. They are declaring, without evidence, that you don't need Windows, without knowing if you do or not. They are avoiding the problem that the person is having entirely and asking that the user replace their single problem with a whole new class of problems that the user has no idea how to solve. And there will be problems, because someone who has never used Linux before isn't going to know how to do anything in Linux. They aren't going to know what software to use to do anything, they aren't going to know how to install software or update it, they aren't going to know what to do when any problem comes up at all.

"Just switch to Linux" is a malevolent and self-serving recommendation, is absolutely not realistic, and is not ever intended to actually help the user needing help with a problem they are having.

[sagacity]

Yeah, so, to be clear: I'm fairly sure Linux will also have its fair share of issues that I occasionally would have to repair.

I don't necessarily even have a problem with Windows occasionally needing a bit of hand-holding, either. It sucks, but it's IT so meh, unfortunately it still comes with the territory.

What I'm mostly pissed off about is the fact that I have a perfectly useable machine but since I'm unable to login due to vague Microsoft nonsense and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it I need to reinstall. This seems wholly unnecessary.

Even having some sort of repair installation that doesn't blow away all installed applications would have been somewhat ok as a last resort, but that doesn't exist either.

[chinathrow]

> Yeah, so, to be clear: I'm fairly sure Linux will also have its fair share of issues that I occasionally would have to repair.

Issues with account, login and passwords would be none of them. Sure, there are other areas of common issues at times, but I have never, ever had issues logging into any of the linux OS I ran for the last 23years or so.

[charcircuit]

I've had PAM break due to distro's ridiculous policy of updating the system in place allowing for invalid combinations of files to exist. I've had Linux distros break the booting process countless times.

[Krasnol]

I don't know where you are but oobe/bypassnro worked for me just 2 weeks ago.

[sagacity]

I've reinstalled using this trick, so this issue won't bite me again in the future.

[deterministic]

> When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.

I am forced to use Linux at work and I dread updating anything because the result is usually a broken system. I never have that problem with Windows.

So YMMV is as always valid here.

[cbdevidal]

Also years of Windows muscle memory here, especially the keyboard shortcuts. I’ve used Windows since 1997. I’ve decided I’m done. A new PC arrives in a month. It’ll be running Ubuntu. I’m done.

Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to? Maybe test code in a VM? (Although that gets you right back into Win11.)

[theandrewbailey]

> Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to?

Yes: DirectX. Just make sure that it runs in Wine or Proton.

Nit: DirectX is a bunch of APIs and libraries, not a language. Same for Wine and Proton.

[w4rh4wk5]

DXVK works great for DirectX 11. However, it's rather annoying to debug through this intermediate layer. I wouldn't recommend this for development.

[kajman]

Sure is nice as a user. I get better frames in some games than Windows users do!

[noosphr]

>It’ll be running Ubuntu. I’m done.

https://status.canonical.com/

You're in for a bad time. It's been three days and they still can't get updates to work.

Get Debian if you must. Use something sane like Guix and OpenBSD if you can.

[chihuahua]

I've been watching Linux from a safe distance for 25+ years. The one thing that remains constant over the decades is that whenever someone says "You're having this problem? Well what did you expect, you're using X distro. Obviously you should use Y distro, then all your problems will be solved" and then another person comes along and says "No, you idiot, Y distro is completely broken, any sane person would use Z distro!" And if you play that game long enough, you eventually complete the circle.

[pndy]

Haven't seen this specific "you're using wrong distro" so far. I'm more often bumping on a general rude attitude of people answering. As if asking questions, looking for solutions is not what all these distro forums were made for.

[Orygin]

It's always the exact same distro, and it has been for 10+ years. Nobody is recommending it anymore but users still come with issues due to that.

There are different distros for different taste/needs, but Ubuntu always has been the worst choice of all.

[chihuahua]

That's funny, because half of what I remember reading about Linux is people writing "Forget all these other distros, just go with Ubuntu, it just works!"

[Orygin]

When was that? I haven't seen Ubuntu recommended seriously for more than 10 years.

Mint or others have been the goto

[cbdevidal]

Zero issues with Lubuntu on my road laptop for over a year now. I’ve tested most of the apps I would install at home.

Not everyone hits the edge cases.

[cbdevidal]

I have no problem using Debian (I’m actually a Linux sysadmin by profession) so I have no problems later switching distros. But as of today, I’m happy with Ubuntu on my road laptop and I would no doubt be happy switching the home PC, too. (Actually the road lap is Lubuntu and it currently has zero visible AI influence.)

[suby]

To be fair, they're allegedly experiencing under attack by the Iranian government. I doubt Guix or OpenBSD would be able to sustain service under a similar attack, though granted there's a reason Cannonical is the target and not OpenBSD.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/05/ubuntu-infrastructu...

[cwel]

Quite the extrapolation from "A group sympathetic to the Iranian government" -> "the Iranian government" especially considering the source: "posts on Telegram and other social media".

[steve1977]

OpenBSD can be downloaded from a variety of mirror hosts (including ones hosted by Cloudflare).

So OpenBSD would probably be able to sustain service at least in terms of being able to download updates.

[renegade-otter]

Same. I used to develop Windows apps with Borland C++ once, that's how old I am. Last year, I finally installed a second Linux Mint boot - for Windows games!

The level of disregard for quality from MS is just obnoxious. We are really crossing some kind of line here, I think, where taking the pain of migrating once seems easier than dealing with all this nonsense.

(I had to clean install Windows after that infamous update with system check infinite loop at boot time).

[wolfi1]

Ubuntu will also introduce AI. Why not use pure Debian? (and the distribution flame war starts)

[cbdevidal]

I have no problem using Debian (I’m actually a Linux sysadmin by profession) so I have no problems later switching distros. But as of today, I’m happy with Ubuntu on my road laptop and I would no doubt be happy switching the home PC, too. (Actually the road lap is Lubuntu and it currently has zero visible AI influence.)

[wolfi1]

they want to start with 26.10, will be interesting if they include it with a long term release

[cheschire]

These suggestions are like telling someone that that is being harassed to maybe wear something different.

While it would, yes, likely avoid the problem happening again, it shifts the responsibility to the party that should not be at fault.

Meanwhile the harasser is like “what’s wrong? I took an anti-harassment class?”

[mort96]

It's more like telling someone in an abusive relationship to leave the abusive relationship.

[cbdevidal]

Do both. Insist that the authorities reform the abuser AND leave the relationship.

In a real life abusive relationship that would look like both calling the cops and leaving. In the case of software, demand reform and also switch OSes.

[lelanthran]

> These suggestions are like telling someone that that is being harassed to maybe wear something different.

Weird analogy - it's telling someone who is paying to be abused to simply stop paying...

If Windows was actually free, as in download a copy and use it as you wish, then sure, maybe you might have a (very tiny) point, but it's not like that at all.

[cheschire]

Many legit users have a license applied to their Microsoft account that predates the current situation. That is to say, a license carried over from windows 10 and possibly as far back as windows 7, since there was a time where Microsoft was offering free license transfers. Many people see windows 7 as being not shitty and abusive.

[noisem4ker]

> there was a time where Microsoft was offering free license transfers

I don't think they ever stopped. Maybe they ceased advertising it, but installing Windows 10 over 7 or 8 would silently inherit the license far past the original terms. The time-limited offer was just a FOMO-inducing marketing scam.

[Krssst]

You don't choose to use Windows. You have to. Because it's the only OS that supports whatever tool you need for your work. Windows is mandatory in many situations, which is why it can afford being obnoxious.

[gosub100]

your analogy would be fitting for a jurisdiction that had no sexual assault laws or way for victims to defend themselves. In which case "Don't provoke an attack" is sound advice.

in other industries, you can sue product manufacturers if their defects cause you inordinate grief, lost wages, or excessive repair costs.

[lelanthran]

> Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)

Understood. However, your choices are:

1. Keep complaining while paying $$$ for the privilege of complaining.

2. Switch to something else.

My tolerance level is much lower than yours (I switched my daily driver around 1998), obviously...

[orphea]

  paying $$$

There arrr the ways (depending on one's moral compass)

[forsalebypwner]

`irm https://get.activated.win | iex` lives in my head rent-free

[sigseg1v]

I used Windows since my first PC on 3.1. But recently it just became too much. Switched over to Mint for just over a year now and loving it. No issues at all for development or gaming. The machine just works. No lag at the lock screen, typing in your password and hitting enter has the desktop loaded instantly. It just works the way you expect and with the performance you expect. I used to defend Windows but I cannot say the same about it anymore.

[Schiendelman]

Hello fellow DirectX programmer! I gave up and got a Mac. I made myself get used to the defaults. I can't go back. I tried putting together a gaming pc a couple years ago and Windows annoyed me too much. It's better here!

And yeah - I gave up on DirectX programming to do it. I do like Metal...

[ezoe]

As Windows more and more difficult to use at very basic, after passing certain threshold, just developing on Linux is more practical. Even for DirectX.

[pseudohadamard]

That's one thing that struck me in TFA, almost everything mentioned was stuff I never asked for and never wanted: CoPilot in my inbox, some Insider Program bumf, widgets and feeds, the sole thing in there that means anything is that updates are slightly less annoying.

So TFA is really "we've spent the last two months monkeying with the crap that no-one asked for or wants, and Update is mildly less annoying". That's not really much of an announcement.

[alaudet]

Have you considered Linux on bare metal and a Windows VM for your coding? Two monitor setup and you can have Windows on one side when working then all your other daily stuff is in Linux. Shared drives and clipboards make things pretty easy.

Also just debloat the Windows install, why are you suffering with Co-Pilot? I have a VM running on Proxmox and I rdp to it from Linux when needed, but daily use, no way and honestly there really is no reason to put all your eggs in the Windows basket in this day and age.

[will4274]

> I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account

Not sure what's so confusing here... When Windows is online, it checks your password against the cloud and updates the local store. When Windows is offline, it checks your password against a local store. By previous password, Windows just means the password you used on the last successful login for the user on that machine.

[sagacity]

Clearly if that was the actual issue I would've been able to get it working :)

The thing is, I was online, I had a working internet connection (and confirmed this by doing the 'utilman' hang to get a command prompt and getting a working ping command). It was just that Windows corrupted some kind of internal Microsoft Account connection and was locking me out.

[irishcoffee]

The day I can’t make a local-only account on windows (for personal use, work is a different matter unfortunately) is the day I stop using windows.

It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts. I can skip it, which is nice, but just don’t show the screen. If you’re installing linux you either know what you’re doing or you don’t: if you do you know it’s possible and don’t need it jammed in your face, and if you don’t you’re probably not quite tall enough to understand it isn’t needed and you probably don’t want it anyways.

[GeneralMaximus]

I don't even want a local account, I just want to be able to set a custom username for my account instead of some autogenerated jumble of letters.

My Microsoft Account email is "contact@<my-domain-name>". If I set up a new Windows 11 computer using this account, Windows picks the first 4 letters of my email address and sets that as the username. So my username becomes "conta", and the path to my user directory becomes "C:\Users\conta".

I know this is a really small thing, but I find it incredibly irritating. I can't be typing that into the terminal all day long! It's not the end of the world, but it speaks to a lack of polish and care across the whole product, not to mention a disrespect for their users' intelligence.

I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. Maybe there's a secret keycombo I can press during install? Or some unrelated checkbox that I can toggle that will do the magic? I just know that I login via my iCloud account on all my Macs, and Apple has always allowed me to choose my own username and home directory.

I don't think this is high on their list of issues to fix so I'm not very hopeful that this will ever get addressed. Maybe I should just change my legal name to Conta?

[bavell]

> I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue.

5ish years back I used to have a PCI passthrough via OVMF [0] setup for my GPU and my windows VM (Arch host) so I could game on windows.

Then I realized Proton/wine had gotten good enough to play all my games (I don't play AAA competitive shooters) and I dropped the VM and never looked back.

I would encourage everyone to give Steam/Proton on Linux a shot if you haven't recently and see if you're able to drop windows for good. These days, I don't even look at compatibility - 95% of games work OOTB and the other 5% work by changing the proton version (i.e. proton-ge). YMMV of course but I've been much happier without windows on my system.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

[irishcoffee]

Yes, just a username.

“ To create an offline (local) account during Windows 11 setup, disconnect from the internet, then use the command OOBE\BYPASSNRO in the command prompt (Shift+F10) to enable a "I don't have internet" ”

This is what I do. I have heard this has been patched out. My work gives me an MSDN account, and so far I’ve been able to still do this. When this goes away forever and I lose all my ISO’s/access to ISO’s that allow this, I’ll be done with windows forever.

[steve1977]

My account email is info@<domain-name>.com.

I feel you.

And what I do is create a local account and then add the Microsoft account to it after creation.

[II2II]

> It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts.

I don't quite understand what you are saying here. If you're talking about setting up an account to use the system, it's the same idea as setting up a local account on Windows.

If you're talking about online accounts, I believe you are referring to a convenience feature offered during setup. Ironically, it was put there to guide people who are coming to Linux from Windows.

[dmd]

What are you suggesting here? Everyone who runs linux should log in and run everything as root all the time?

[irishcoffee]

No, I guess I didn’t explain it, though I thought I had. Don’t ask me to turn on location settings, don’t ask me to connect my email/online accounts, during a gui install. I can turn those on myself if I want to. Someone else up-thread pointed out that this probably exists to help windows uses transition over to a Linux install in a way that feels more familiar, and that makes sense. I don’t like it, but I can accept that.

I’ll still grumble when I see that screen though.

[dmd]

Oh. I thought you were talking about making a user account.

I've never seen anything like that on any linux install I've ever done. But then I've been pretty much Debian-only since I started using Linux over 30 years ago.

[irishcoffee]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW7Z892bsG4

At about 1:15.

[cwel]

You also attributed this to "Linux", instead of whatever guided installer/desktop environment you chose. I have never encountered the screens you are lamenting.

[irishcoffee]

That's fair, its mostly "mainstream" distros. Here is an example:

https://d3t0tbmlie281e.cloudfront.net/igi/framework/q6Yb16Bq...

Linux was too broad a term.

[ThrowawayB7]

The funny thing is I actually had Windows 11 reliably black-screen on me after creating a local account. On a recent Surface Pro device, no less.

I blame Nadella. Gates or Ballmer had their own deficiencies but they would never have tolerated the absolute bullshit going on at Microsoft today.

[8note]

on a similar vein, it deleted all my mfa tokens without telling me, as part of an update that also disabled the built-in finger reader as a token source.

woulda been nice to know before hand that it was going to do that, so i could make sure those other accounts werent so reliant on that finger reader working

[Scroll_Swe]

I run Windows 11 on my gaming PC powerful desktop and a good work laptop. No issues.

No idea what you guys are doing.

I can also now run and install over cmd powershlle with choco, scoop and winget.

Get Firefox, VLC, MPV and all that.

Get Powertoys.

Run Christitustech utlity for tweaks.

So even less usage for Linux imo.

[stodor89]

> No idea what you guys are doing.

A friend of mine has been running the same Arch install since 2009. Does this mean Linux is problem-free and people who struggle with it are doing something wrong? No, it doesn't. Same with Windows.

[frogperson]

Doctor, it hurts when i put this screwdriver in my eye, please help!!

[xxs]

there are (will be) lots of calls on the muscle memory slacking off. I can't think of anything that is not reproducible on Mint.

I have tons of Windows experience (starting off by manually installing windows w/o installation floppies and manually editing win/system.ini, through win32 to current day nonsense), yet I find the command line interface of linux a lot more powerful.

I am not aware of the exact use of directX, it should be possible to run Windows through virtualization just for this task. (unless wine is sufficient)

[jms703]

This exact problem was the last straw for me and pushed me to Linux on my desktop. Haven't looked back.

[fuzzfactor]

Well for decades Windows was adequate-to-excellent for small business and individual consumer use in major ways that Windows 11 is recently continuing to disrespect more and more, as it migrates away from how worthwhile Windows formerly used to be.

All this fluff about the insider program seems to be very ignorantly missing the point.

What's needed more than ever is No BS instead of more BS.

Namely get Microsoft Accounts back out of the picture unless opted in.

Along with curtailing Bitlocker, One Drive, Copilot, and things like that.

Now to make it really good again, there needs to be no further disk activity after Windows has booted, other than user-initiated saving & loading. Plus of course no network traffic other than user-directed bandwidth usage.

Along those lines I think it goes without saying that as soon as Microsoft has any legitimate commitment to open-source efforts, we'll know by the way they document & release everything they know about NTFS.

[ray023]

M$ account is not strictly "mandatory" as you claim. There are ways to work around this. I NEVER in my life had an M$ account, I have a GitHub Account, but that is still separate AFAIK. Rufus can mod the ISO for it, and there is another way around it during install. They just want you to use one so they can spy in you better. It's on you to have an OS account to an online service in the first place. Then entire concept is utterly retarded, I do not care who it is M$ or some of the best champions of Open Source and ethical Linux distro, I will not use any fucking account of them to log into my LOCAL PRIVATE OS, it makes ZERO sense and its pathetic how that managed to lure so many morons onto doing this.

I remember first seeing this during a Win install and instantly looked for a way around it, I think they even have removed a workaround to make it even harder for people to work around this BS.

[trashface]

FWIW I've done some d3d9 and d3d11 tinkering and my stuff looks like it works pretty good under proton.

[shevy-java]

> Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)

The computer on my left uses Windows (Win10) so I still use Microsoft-related software. I switched to Linux in late 2004 or so. Linux kind of spoiled me here; every time I transfer files on Windows and notice how slow it is, I wonder what the heck Microslop is doing here. Why does it waste my time and my computer's resources so much? That's one example of so many more. It would be kind of great to be able to abandon Windows completely. For that Linux has to improve a lot, so that Average Joe also is able to use it just fine.

[k4rnaj1k]

There are ways of changing a lot of the shortcuts on Linux to be the same. And a lot of the default KDE shortcuts are similar to windows' ones iirc.

[MiddleEndian]

Yeah I've found modern KDE's shortcuts are not only similar to the best parts of Windows, but also slightly better (Win arrow keys reposition without doing minimize/maximize, only win pgdn/pgup minimize/maximize) so I can move shit around more fearlessly.

[fuckinpuppers]

Same, I had to use some hack to trigger sticky keys on the login screen to launch cmd.exe, then I could run the few elevated commands I needed to get back in.

At least notepad has rich text, AI, tabs! /s

[ppknsp]

you just can't keep supporting that adware with operating system functionality and keep hoping they'll make it more convenient for you