And give MS the finger?

At the moment, it seems that everything that they do is guaranteed to piss off users... big time.

Come on people, vote with your feet and give them the old heave ho.

You know that you want to... The time is now isn't it?

Proudly windows free since Sept 30, 2016.

Didn't you know clicky-clicky is the main ingredient of the "user experience" ;) They love it!

> And give MS the finger?

Yea... great. But what are the options?

If only there were more versions of Linux from which to choose...

An optical drive with a DVD-RW.

Of course, that means you need to work a bit.

It also means that, once that DVD is closed, you have upwards of 20 years of data security. All you need to do is remember where that DVD is.

Microsoft are just on one long seemingly endless drive to grab customers' data and make them cash slaves to Redmond.

Seemingly?

Understatement of the century.

Pinky Promise not to mine it and train AI on it!

Oh and you'll need to give us some money too. Data Mining^W errr, Storage, doesn't come cheap!

Dear Microsoft.

Fuck off

Fuck off and keep fucking off until you reach escape velocity.

Don't stop fucking off for a single moment. Keep fucking off past Mars, the gas giants, then Neptune, Uranus and Pluto.

Stay with the fucking off theme as you leave, first the solar system, then the galactic arm

Fuck off right out of the whole galaxy, then the local cluster.

Keep on going, on and on until you reach the edge of the universe.

Then fuck off right out of our universe and take your tawdry, ad infested start menu with you.

AND DON'T COME BACK

Capiche?

Yours, with an almost indescribable amount of molten lava prejudice, laced with the contents of my septic tank.

While it is a good idea to back-up files, this is just another plug (or advert if you prefer) for OneDrive. Microsoft don't give a shit about people backing up their files. Is there no end to their cash grab?

No

Correct answer!

Anyone here old enough to have used MS DOS may remember the BACKUP and RESTORE utilities provided by MS.

These were fine for backing up files within the same MS DOS version, but woe betide migrating to a different version of MS DOS (even point number increases of version). The utilities were not backward compatible, but they had the same filenames. So if you wanted to move to a new pc with a new OS, take a deep breath. You had to use the new BACKUP/RESTORE on your old computer (or vice versa, assuming the old pc was still bootable).

Not so fast though... when you tried to do that it said you can't do this as it was the incorrect version. You had to fiddle around with a utility called SETVER.

TL;DR This is not a new revelation.

…clicking the X in the corner of the popup (assuming there is one), or pressing Alt-F4, is interpreted as “yes, PLEASE sign me up for this and start slurping my data”?

Can’t let dogmatic adherence to decades-old UI conventions get in the way when there’s cross-brand marketing synergy to be actualized.

Ugh. I just threw up in my mouth a little typing that last sentence.

And even then...when the next Windows update drops Microsoft will just re-enable the backup all my files to OneDrive option.

...OneDrive will start synchronizing their PC, right up until that 5 GB default storage is exhausted.

And it will helpfully prioritize the important files and directories to backup, starting with cache directories, temp directories and Microsoft's OS files. The backup will not be able to save any of your data because you ran out of space...

Didn’t forget the recovery option, the download bandwidth will be throttled so as to encourage people to subscribe to the restore service, which involves MS copying;g your backup to multiple USB devices and mail8ng them to you.

You're making want to not upgrade ...

Congratulations. You're waking up.

Don't worry, you can still take the blue pill.

I don't use OneDrive at all, though I am happy enough to use Windows 10 Pro (carefully) as my user environment. Why would I want Microsoft to have copies of my files, especially confidential work and personal materials? Do you trust them as safekeepers of your private data? For a kid who just plays games and wants to save scores, sure. But for serious work? I don't want to be the product.

Even when you dismiss this festering piece of crap from your screen, it will still be there …taking up disk space and (probably) memory too. Probably a couple of hundred MB at least (a “hello world” program seems to take close that these days - that’s the shitty state of software out there, but I digress). It will sit there lurking. Waiting to be awoken again. It’s probably even consuming clock cycles too with a “check if it should be displayed again” timer. Like a sleeper agent in some post war spy thriller.

Anyway, sleep well

> Probably a couple of hundred MB at least (a “hello world” program seems to take close that these days - ...)

Not so long ago, I tried my hand at coding using the WinUI3 framework, which - supposedly - is Microsoft's recommended framework for Windows 10 & 11 apps (you know - Acrylic Blur, pages, all that good stuff).

Well, apart from the fact that at the time, only 8 months or so ago, there was no sodding visual editor for WinUI3 in Visual Studio , and the recommendation from MS was to build-view-tweak-build-review-tweak-etc until satisfied (!), I do recall that a simple "Hello World" program in a dialog-type window compiled out to something ridiculous like 150MB, and the build process vomited a thousand discrete files into the output directory, all of which were apparently a) vital to the execution of the program, and b) not simply duplicates of existing Windows system library files.

So anyway, I went back to WPF & Winforms. Call me a dinosaur if you wish.

For a long time if you installed ondrive on a mac you could find yourself spending days or weeks trying to figure out why onedrive was failing on a mac. turns out that the macs idea of a valid filenames and onedrives idea of a valid filename weren't the same. Pretty much all the other companies that did backups didn't have these problems, just microsoft. Besides, by default ondrive doesn't do backups, it does an archive by moving data from the computer to the cloud, at least the business defaults done here.

It's not just OneDrive for Mac. It is perfectly possible to have a file stored on a Windows machine and accessed by OneDrive for Windows which has a filename which causes OneDrive for Windows to have palpitations. Guess how I _know_ this for certain.

Best of all, if the organization providing the OneDrive (a prominent local 3try level educational institution, for example) were to have an agreement with MS about certain things ('free' copies of MS Office, with 1 glorious TB of OneDrive storage built-in), then should someone (oh, me, for example) contact MS Support on this matter they don't want to know. I was referred back to school IT support. Exactly what the school's IT people were supposed to do is unclear. I changed the name and the problem went away. Note that all, repeat ALL of the machines involved were running MS software: the desktop assigned to the instructor's podium, Win10 Enterprise; the laptop handed out by the school, Win10Education ; my personal laptop, Win10Pro; the servers the school uses, assorted WinServer 2019/2022 systems, all running ActiveDirectory; whatever the hell MS uses for OneDrive at their end. Note also that DropBox had no problems with the same file using the original name. And putting that file on a Mac also failed to cause problems. Why, it's almost as though MS's left hand doesn't know which bloody county the right hand is in, much less what the right hand is doing.

"What did you learn about at school today, dear?"

"Oh, we learned that Windows is a steaming pile of..."

(I'm sure Joyce Grenfell would intervene at this juncture).

As if we can't remember Steve Sinofski........you know......Windows 8.

Or Julie Larson-Green....you know....."the ribbon".

Windows 98 did it for me.............since then twenty five years with Linux has been......peachy...................

It's not full-screen, but it is large; the same size as the one that keeps popping up for MS Store whether you ask for it or not. This one can be made to away though, by disabling One Drive. As has been noted, it could come back next patch Tuesday though. Sigh.

Often the way I first hear about these things is when one of my customers tries to remote-in to their pc in the office and find that it has been taken over by some mystical entity. Usually the solution is for me to dial-in and see for myself, then explain what to do the next time it arises.

Note to Microsoft:- Not everyone in this world has hours to kill pondering the Shiny New Things you inflict upon us. I know it has been said before, but if MS manufactured cars you would have to have someone on call to do things like "clear the windscreen" or rearrange the seats before you can get in to drive to work. It would be great for people using public transport on the day after Patch Tuesday though... not a car on the road for the first half of the morning. Hmmm, hey Microsoft, why don't you go into the car manufacturing business?

>if MS manufactured cars you would have to have someone on call to do things like "clear the windscreen" ...

You'd be driving along at 60mph, making good time, feeling good about life, when suddenly the entire windscreen would be taken over by a giant advert for Microsoft OneGear, or Radio 365, or an exhortation to use your Microsoft account to unlock & start the car rather than that primitive car-key in your pocket.

I'll stop there because it's like shooting fish in a barrel.