from Hacker News

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

by nameequalsmain on 7/12/21, 2:26 PM with 66 comments

• by 3np on 7/12/21, 3:11 PM

  The other day I was going to add some credit to my Skype account. While doing so I realized it had an old e-mail address registered, so I changed it from within the iOS app.

  You know how Skype accounts got merged with Microsoft accounts way back? Well, that apparently broke the link as my Microsoft account and my Skype account now had separate e-mail addresses, so now silently a new Skype account was created (and I assume a new Microsoft account?)

  The credit got added to the newly created account, so I now have two accounts to manage (one with credit and one with my Skype contacts).

  I went through some similar ordeal twice before, once with Skype when they introduced the link and once with Azure (which rendered the account unusable, luckily I was just evaluating still). Both of those times I spent several hours spread over several days trying to resolve it with support, both times unsuccessfully. Truly Kafkaesque experiences.

  This time I gave up after 30min and now have to juggle two Skype accounts until my credit runs out.

  It's like no one ever considered that there can be exceptions to "the happy path".

• by the-dude on 7/12/21, 3:08 PM

  Windows is like HR : it is not there for you, but for the corporation.

• by farhaven on 7/12/21, 3:47 PM

  To be fair, Teams also doesn't unterstand "I don't want notifications for the next 48 hours". I think "not understanding that there is no 1:1 relation between a person at work at a specific computer" describes Microsoft and their products quite succinctly.

• by jpalomaki on 7/12/21, 4:21 PM

  On Windows one way is to create multiple user accounts and switch between them. With fast user switching you can multiple people logged on and move between them. If you need to share files, you can just setup the access rights to allow it.

  Another convenient way is to user the browser profile. Chrome, Edge and Firefox all support them. For some apps (Slack, Teams) there's not much difference if you are running it inside browser or a the separate client app.

  In general the issue likely exists, not because companies are stupid, but because resources are limited and multi-profile support is not likely top priority for the most important customers (large organizations).

• by Aardwolf on 7/12/21, 3:30 PM

  I don't want an OS to understand anything... I want it to run the things I want, when I tell it to

• by rjmunro on 7/12/21, 4:24 PM

  > It would be easier, one suspects, for Google to implement multi-ID support in Chrome

  They have. I use a work profile and a personal profile all the time. There's also a guest profile. OK, profiles take whole windows rather than individual tabs, but I don't find that a problem.

  The biggest problem is that although I can right click and open a link in another profile, there doesn't seem to be a good way to reopen the page I am already on. I have to copy the URL, select the other profile, press new tab, then paste. Sometimes it would be nice to easily add tabs to a block list so that if I try to open e.g. facebook in work mode, I get a "You can't do that, click here to open in personal mode" screen instead of a facebook login page.

• by AlphaGeekZulu on 7/12/21, 3:14 PM

  "Please pass this long stream of wibble to your system admin. That's me, by the way. I wasn't much help."

  This made my day ;-)

• by blibble on 7/12/21, 3:24 PM

  > And I know of no system that allows different simultaneous workspaces with their own IDs, nor browser that allows the same with tabs.

  firefox supports this with the tab container extension

• by AshamedCaptain on 7/12/21, 4:51 PM

  Teams is the latest example for me of the "all enterprise software is crap" rule. Imposed by management who drinks the koolaid even thought they are most likely not going to use it at all themselves, and almost universally detested by the actual users who will be forced to use it.

• by jensensbutton on 7/12/21, 4:52 PM

  > And besides, I wanted to give Windows 11 a fair chance

  So they went ahead and used pre-release (not even alpha) software that is explicitly not for folks who want stability to give it a "fair chance". Sounds like great judgement from OP.

• by dboreham on 7/12/21, 4:15 PM

  Title is wrong. The article is about MS Teams.

• by novok on 7/12/21, 5:41 PM

  Multi-user, single device support as a use case has gotten worse and worse as the years go by, as more and more people stop sharing devices essentially and get their own, and thus it gets tested less and de-prioritized, since 'users don't use it'. It's not a windows only thing, it's an everyone thing.

• by EricE on 7/12/21, 4:59 PM

  Application virtualization is a godsend for Windows - the only way to escape DLL hell or isolate authentication domains in apps that make bad assumptions.

  Think Docker, but for desktop operating systems and not as complicated as Docker.

  Microsoft bought the granddaddy - SoftGrid - SoftGrid's technology is the underpinnings of App-V, which is a great solution for Windows software deployment for enterprise Microsoft shops.

  There are a few other solutions - one of the more promising is Sandboxie: https://sandboxie-plus.com Well worth looking into if you are having issues like the OP was raising.

  Yes, you probably shouldn't have to resort to solutions like this - but at least there are potential options even if they are sub-optimal!

• by y-c-o-m-b on 7/12/21, 5:12 PM

  I know a lot of people here use Linux or dual-boot with Windows.

  Question: I have some automated testing software I wrote which uses user32.dll to perform mouse clicks, so is there a way to make that work on Linux? It's the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux permanently.

• by villgax on 7/12/21, 4:02 PM

  The 10mins it takes to automatically change your status to 'away' even if you're working on some other application is pathetic.

  I think the alternative for the author could be to just install the android APK for teams for his personal account

• by turtletontine on 7/12/21, 4:43 PM

  FWIW this:

  > In education, Google has no infrastructure – and where it does make an impact via Chromebooks, they are dedicated to the student as a student, not home/life chimeras.

  ... is not true at all in my experience (American University/grad student). The two universities I've been at both use gsuite for everything but video calls, where we use zoom. Emails run by Gmail, docs with Google docs, sharing with Google drive. As a remote TA I've used Jam board for in gsuite as a collaborative whiteboard.

• by tyingq on 7/12/21, 3:06 PM

  Not that you should have to, but I wonder if creating 2 different Windows Sandboxes[1], each with its own MS Teams, would solve this.

  [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pro...

• by paultopia on 7/12/21, 4:44 PM

  This sort of crap isn't just windows 11, it's everything Microsoft. Like: I teach at a university that has drunk the office 365 koolaid, but because my research assistant has a personal Microsoft account, there is no way that we can figure out to have him be able to share a OneDrive folder that I can actually access from my university account. It's just such garbage.

• by dekerta on 7/12/21, 4:58 PM

  > In fairness, simultaneous use of multiple IDs is rarely handled well by modern UI'd desktops and remote services. All systems assume you have one ID, and if you have the temerity to want more, then you must log out and log back in again, an idea unchanged since mainframes stalked the earth.

  Slack handles multiple IDs flawlessly IMO

• by ZebusJesus on 7/12/21, 3:47 PM

  So doing some testing and you will not be able to run android VMs without the Pro version. HAXM will not install no matter what you do and even the registry will fix itself in windows 11. Windows 11 will not let you even control certain settings and it makes it useless for development unless you get pro.

• by beervirus on 7/12/21, 4:02 PM

  Who in the world wants an OS-as-a-service that exists to connect you to the Microsoft cloud? I want an OS that runs locally and without telemetry, handles hardware abstraction, and allows me to run applications. Windows 7 was pretty good at that. Everything since has been a step in the wrong direction.

• by nomrom on 7/12/21, 4:26 PM

  A good old rant about Windows! It feels like 1999 again!

• by warpech on 7/12/21, 4:09 PM

  Maybe Microsoft wants to finally make [current year] the "year of the Linux desktop".

• by th3h4mm3r on 7/13/21, 6:52 AM

  Only my Teams works better in Linux environment than the Windows one? And smoothly...